Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

1. Make it $10 or $11. It's the most a lazy and cheap person will pay and it's a lot more than $7. You're still way cheaper than most other options. Use most of the money on delivering great food.

2. Cleanliness! Make sure you put in serious effort to ensuring the things you're delivering were prepared properly and cleanly. That they arrive nicely (tape soup lids well!). One round of office food poisoning...

3. Target individuals and teams. Get groups of people in companies to start "Lunch Pooling" (thelunchpool.com available :D). Make a minimum subscriber count of 3 or even more, so it's worth your while and people are forced to spread the word. Or even use the PayPal/Dropbox technique, people inviting others could get a free lunch. If enough employees do it on their own some companies will decide to just do it for the whole company. The Apple approach to "enterprise" sales.

4. Come to Santa Monica, CA.

1. We've though about it, but we really want to support the scrappy little seed-stage startups who can't afford $11 lunches, but want to eat lunch as a team.

2. No problems with that so far, but thanks for the tip!

3. That's a good idea! We've been suggesting to really small startups (<5 people) that they order lunch along with other companies in their building.

4. You got it!

Shouldn't the scrappy seed stage startup be hitting up Safeway and buying bread and cold cuts, pb&j, or...ramen, if it wants to be "scrappy"?

That's definitely the traditional idea. Here are two reasons that I think $7 is worth their money:

1. Foods like pb&j and ramen aren't exactly going to keep your brain in tip-top condition all day. Unbalanced meals can make you feel very tired.

2. Many of these scrappy startups can't make the time to even order groceries online. (source: I lived in a hacker house for a year)

I think the $7-$8 price point is ideal. It is affordable enough for most companies to be able to justify it. Over $10/meal starts seeming a little extravagant to me.

Source: Startup founder who is about to sign up with the service to give it a try because I've been looking for something like this.

Fwiw, SpoonRocket is $6 a meal, and I love the concept but the food just isn't good enough for me to order regularly. I do think it's a great deal for $6 though.

Maybe if they had another $3 per meal they could make more food I'd want to eat.

Sounds like Chefler: http://chefler.com

It's $10/meal if you commit to 4 meals per week.

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