Chaldal (YC S15) Wants to Become the Amazon Fresh of Bangladesh’s Capital
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We have our own warehouses. Our workers are full time.
Actually we believe this can work in all contexts. The immediate value add for the customer is lower prices, better quality, more convenience.
We have also seen a lot of inefficiencies in getting food from farm to consumption. One example is wastage - the more data we have on consumption, the better we can predict wastage, and the better we can redistribute food. So yes, we are hopeful that this will have a net positive impact on society.
YC is a value-add, no matter where you're based out of.
* Given the traffic in Dhaka, you'll forgive me for not believing your one hour delivery promise.
* The only way I can see to get around the traffic problem is to either go hyper-local (i.e. maintain warehouses in every neighborhood), or have delivery people walk/take rickshaws. Either way, this isn't going to scale to the entire city without a TON of startup capital. Which I'm not sure you have.
* How does YC feel about the inevitable "system loss" that's comes with doing business in Bangladesh?
I'm also very interested to hear how YC intends to maintain management accountability in a business halfway around the world.
* We will be maintaining warehouses in every single area. We currently have 2 but plan to have 9 to cover the entire city. That is the only way to ensure 1 hr delivery. We are also offering this service for products which are fast moving (around 1500 SKUS). Slower moving products are sent from the main warehouse.
* We will need a bit of capital, but not as much as most people think, it costs us around $230k to start a warehouse and run it for six months. It is a lot cheaper than starting a departmental store in Dhaka, and you get far more efficiency per sq. ft as you are not optimizing for a "browse experience" for shoppers. Our shoppers are our employees and we can control their movement for maximum output/sq. ft. Theory is departmental stores can survive, so can 7000 sq. ft. warehouses.
* I don't see why accountability and management challenges should be any different in BD than it is in the US. Enough startups have thrived in India and China.
* Bangladesh also has a decent history of foreign investments with companies like Telenor and Microsoft managing local offices. So corporate accountability does exist in the country.
1. Inventory management is very poor in the retail stores around Dhaka. Most (95%) of them are very small (carrying ~500 SKUs), and even the larger ones have difficulty in ensuring supply of all products. We found that people would get annoyed if we couldn't send them all the products they asked for (98% fulfillment rate was not good enough).
2. The prices don't work if you are a layer on top of the existing infrastructure. People are a lot more price sensitive -- in fact, irrationally so. They care about getting a "bargain" rather than the mathematical value of the bargain. SO we couldn't survive by taking a mark up on products like instacart.
3. Part-time work is non existent and we couldn't trust the quality of the workforce in an on demand model. We have to train people to understand the difference between mayonnaise and mustard.
4. Some Indian startups have gotten around the idea of on-demand workforce by just hiring all their deliverymen full-time. Their unit economics should be pretty tough.
5. The warehouses are optimized for picking and dispatch. Real Estate prices are expensive. We should be seeing much better revenue per square feet than regular grocery stores.
And insurance works just fine in Bangladesh once you figure out the claims process.