Ask HN: (Your) Request for Startups?
Like what YC partners do at https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs but for the community. What's your personal request for startups, or solutions you'd like to see and you'd pay for?
One for last mile. Maybe something like Blue Apron, but healthier. The stuff you can make without butter. Cleaned fish, ready to cook. Cut costs by cutting down on the expensive packaging, target market four servings and above.
Another startup for the distribution layer here, from the farms. This is basically your AWS. The farm to restaurant flow already exists, it just needs to be retrofitted.
The reason is it's a lot of work to create recipes that work every day, take photos, build up some fancy chef profile. Heck just prepping food saves enough work to charge 30% more.
There's probably room for a Heroku style layer as well. The user facing one takes orders, this layer handles distribution.
The margins today are already inefficient. These companies should be able to grow quickly.
Firstly, this is a pretty expensive approach to cooking, so you're already in a narrow space (people with money). There are a lot of products in this space already, from restaurants to (high quality) frozen meals etc.
(Aside - meals for 4 implies kids, and people with kids tend to have financial boundaries.)
Second you want health food. So again, more niche inside your niche. My instinct (since I've done no actual market research) is that people who are into health food aren't great candidates for subscriptions. They're into provenance, minimizing waste, and so on.
Thirdly, you're asking people to cook the meal. (Which I applaud, cooking meals is a good thing.) But cooking is easy. Once you've learned 10 dishes it's easy to learn another one. And you tweak to suit your taste. At which point your "service" is little more than grocery delivery.
Prepping food actually takes minimal time (in the real world). To a novice getting an onion peeled or chopped might be a time saver, but in reality it takes seconds to do it manually. Honestly the time spent ordering etc would dwarf savings here.
Lastly, there's little incentive for people to remain on this service long-term. Maybe it's useful in the learning phase. But it's a quick cut as skills develop. So short term, high turnover customer base.
Obviously it could be done. In a rich neighborhood you might even get enough customers to keep a delivery guy busy. But outside of SF I don't see it catching on.
But don't worry about what I think, I've been wrong many times. All I suggest is lots of market research first (perhaps outside California. )
Here there's some cultural pressure on people to cook for their families. Especially Asian moms. Someone feeding their kids McDonald's and frozen meals is going to be judged, but what's a parent who works 996 supposed to do? Though back when I was in uni, we'd take turns preparing dinner; I can see it working for students as well.
Cooking is also always cheaper than buying it off the shelf. We buy the frozen spinach despite it being 3x the cost of fresh spinach because we don't want to wash the sand out of spinach and then wash the sand out of the sink.
My problem is we have a bunch of stuff in the fridge. Prep is less about time, more about energy. I'm hungry, I don't want to peel carrots. We buy large batches of fish over the weekend and clean them up and prepare them, but they're in the sink 4 days a week and 2 of those days we just end up eating outside.
I think everyone wants healthy food as a core meal. We're talking something other than pasta with butter - the health ministry suggests dishes of 1/4 carbs, 1/4 protein and 1/2 veggies. But what choices do you have here? Nobody wants to retrofit their usual dishes to have less carbs and more veggies, lol. Cutting down on protein also cuts cost. Tim Ferris says eat the same thing every other day but most people don't do this, especially not kids. There are plenty of healthy options. Grilled veggies do taste great and so are things like minestrone. Burgers can pass the health food bar too.
But these are the things you need to consider first when choosing an area to work in for developing a product and ultimately a business:
1. What do you know really well? These are things that come from your personal experiences. Note: this is generally not about software or coding skills--it's about everything else in the world.
2. What are the problems or valuable opportunities in the areas you know well? Where there are serious problems, there are opportunities for valuable solutions.
3. Timing. What's happening in the world and how do the changes open doors for new solutions?
4. Market and Value. How many people suffer with the problems you are trying to solve? How well do you understand them? How much money will they spend for a solution? How many of these people have you spoken with: 25, 50, 100?
5. Who is competing in your market? What can you learn from them? How does your solution compare?
It's best to consider several problems and conceptual solutions before settling on one. Talk with people, build small prototypes, figure out if you truly understand the requirements.
If you do all of these things, you will have a much better shot at bringing forward a viable product and business idea.
There are some really good books out there on this whole process. Good luck.