bastian

I think this is a misunderstanding. I was referring to the first paragraph in my own comment. When it comes to your original comment: Yes, we should have just refunded you. I can look into this if you like.

Postmates co-founder here. That is a sentiment and an observation i totally agree with. We're working hard to get this done and we're seeing some first positive signs. It will likely take us a good part of Q2 to get where we want to be though. It is a challenging aspect to our business but i'm 100% confident that we will succeed in making our CS interactions more meaningful and rewarding.

I should point out that we're really talking about two types of customer service experiences here. When it comes to our Plus merchants, we're facing way less challenges simply because we're interacting with them via tablets or electronic ordering. Where we don't succeed yet, is the customer service part of our Anywhere product. Here we don't have integrations with all merchants and the error rates are higher and so is the level of complexity when something goes wrong.

I can guarantee you that we will be relentless in improving dispatch, ordering and customer service. Recent changes dropped our average delivery times. In April we will switch to an auto-accept mode for all deliveries and we will also aggressively target faster pick-up times. Sorry we've let you down pbarnes.

I 100% agree. We faced some pretty crazy challenges in scaling our support team. Placing orders from over 50K merchants (per month) is not a simple task BUT i'm not trying to find excuses here. We're doing the right things and they will hopefully move the needle. If you order from our Plus merchants, the order is placed electronically and this reduces the error rate drastically. Email me at: bastian@postmates.com and i will mark your account with a free subscription so you can try it out.

Postmates Co-founder here:

1. We will bring this down over time, give us a few weeks. ;)

2. We have over 3,000 Plus merchants across the markets we're operating in. I can't think of a direct competitor who has more and we're adding many, many every week.

3. Our customer service has been suffering lately - this is a totally valid point. At some point we didn't catch up well enough with our growth. I'm personally working with the team and we're doing many things to improve this. I hope we can move the needle here soon.

Maybe he just wants to engage in the conversation. I don't think it deserves to be called out like this.

Made my day!

I don't think Instacart is, or ever wanted to be an infrastructure. At least not as a transportation infrastructure. There is an argument to be made that it is becoming an infrastructure "within" a supermarket, mainly because of their pick & pack infrastructure (this is probably what Aaron is referring to) and understanding of inventory. Compare that to what we're doing at Postmates. We're in the process of creating a transportation layer by combining tens of thousands of people with cars and bikes or on foot into a "programmable layer" that can be accessed through our API and utilized by third parties. Both have huge potential.

Figuring out if this statement is true or not, is very interesting indeed.

I can only talk about our (Postmates) experience but having multiple pickup and drop-off locations increases the efficiency of a fleet dramatically. In larger cities like New York, LA, etc. multiple warehouses are a huge advantage. Off course i'm mostly referring to on-demand or same day deliveries here.

Maybe i should add some more color here. If you think in terms of traditional delivery, one warehouse is enough. But i'm not sure that this paradigm (one van drives to a warehouse, collects a bunch of stuff and delivers it), is what works best for on-demand, 2-hour or same day deliveries. Multiple, fast and easy to reach pickup locations are an advantage at scale. Especially for deliveries where minutes matter.

Ultimately, we will probably see a combination of both.

I'm pretty sure that Amazon will use the best positioned stores as forward stocking locations. They experimented with a similar concept at WebVan i believe. I also think they now realize that what Postmates and Instacart are doing today (using the city as a warehouse) is actually working and can be attractive to customers.

Good idea. We will fix asap.

I guess i'm thinking about the idea in general. We believe it's fun and wanted to show it.

Postmates is not a YC company but we like HN and would love your feedback! We're partnering with Kitchit in NYC and SF to make this happen. Enjoy!

Woz was probably ahead of it's time. I was just thinking about that today in the light of newer companies trying to create / conquer this space.

I believe that the ubiquity of smartphones with GPS capability is an important driver. However at Postmates (I'm a Co-founder), we spent a lot of our time working on our dispatch algorithm, with the goal to constantly improve the way we match the current demand to the available supply.

Our challenges are slightly different than the ones Kozmo faced. One huge difference is that our deliveries are much more distributed since we don't deliver from just one or two warehouses but from locations all over the city. This model brings some advantages but also holds some very interesting challenges at the same time. ;) On a typical day, our couriers operate in the most efficient way during our peak demand times - during breakfast, lunch and dinner that is.

As far as i can tell, Kozmo.com is now registered by Yummy Foods LLC which operates Yummy.com, a chain of mini supermarkets in the Los Angeles area.

I believe that they are either doing a PR stunt, or that they are planning to offer deliveries under this brand name instead of Yummy.

Funny enough, when we launched Postmates we toyed with the idea to create a Kozmo themed teaser page but ultimately decided against it.

Find one or two strong leads to commit to your round. Make sure these are experienced angel investors. Make sure they love what you do. Make sure you love working with them. Fill the rest of the round with people committing to smaller amounts. In my experience, it is hard to set a limit here. Do what feels right. If someone offers you money along the way, do take it. You can care about your valuation later and the way bigger risk of your business is running out of money. Spent 80% of your investor time with your leads. Limit the money you take from VC's in your angel rounds. Just my two cents.

Thanks for cloning Get It Now after using it. ;)

Again, i have no idea where this is coming from. Our Postmates actually earn way more than other couriers. Ryan is just talking about his additional tip!

I should start by pointing out that the article does not make it very clear that all Postmates also receive a commission for every delivery they are doing. Currently this commission is between 60%-80% of the delivery fee.

To answer your question about what would prevent Postmates from taking on too many jobs i would need to explain our dispatch in all details but the answer lies in great software.

Finally, the tip is not required on our platform and all Postmates get compensated very, very fair, even without any tip.

Since we call in most of the orders there is very limited wait time. Ryan got extremely unlucky. Our dynamic pricing however, models the costs and the fee to be paid by the customer, by keeping all these things in mind.

The answer is technology and a very clever dispatch Jules ;)

Hristov,

the only thing we didn't disclose is how much commission Ryan would receive per job - but if you look around a little you will see that our Postmates receive between 60%-80% of the delivery fee as commission. A Postmate makes money even if a customer does not tip. The tipping is just a bonus.

It's a typo. What TC describes is our commission of the delivery fee. ;) Otherwise i would agree with you that this would make very little sense!

I think the idea of letting the courier add notes is amazing. And yes, there are a few things we can do better in regards to the actual status of the delivery. I personally don't like the pickup in 0 minutes either. Give us a few days :)

I like to think of it as Kozmo with a business model but then again, i'm also one of the founders and i guess we all know to well that being overly optimistic about your own startup is one the biggest weaknesses (strengths) of founders. But seriously, we do charge for deliveries, we worked hard on an algorithm that helps us determine the costs of a delivery based on historic data and most of us are engineers who are in love with the idea of solving big problems. ;)

Finally, somebody talks about this! ;) We're fixing many of these problems for local deliveries with: www.postmates.com

We're obsessed with our product and customer service, we have a beautiful iPhone app, great advisors and amazing hackers in our team. Now we like to get to know you, so that we can grow together. ;)