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Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

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Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#131

Post by ballard »

jwheeler79 wrote: post #17
dangrossman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical there's any profit selling $5 loaves in SF. How many can one driver really deliver per hour, 3-4 trips? $20 per hour in gross revenue is barely enough to employ the driver and his fuel, let alone the bread, bakers, managers, facilities, taxes, health licenses, marketing, customer service, payment processing, etc. unless people tip very generously.

solution looking for a problem

Yup. Gotta find a problem and a solution and make money at it. Otherwise, it's not survivable.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#132

Post by ballard »

enterthemist wrote: post #94
ChuckMcM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you achieved your goal right? Historically bakeries are very 'spikey' in their demand, a friend of mine runs one and they spend 3AM to 6AM making donuts and bagels which they sell out of between 6AM and 7:15AM, and then sell maybe a handful or two for the rest of the day. Given the complexities of bread, it would interesting to hear a post mortem about ways you might both account for spikes without compromising de…

There is a donut place in Berkeley that works very similar to that. The reason for them is that there are a lot of large-scale orders that want the donuts for breakfast (e.g. the school dining facilities).

150 tiny orders is like cutting down a forest with a herring. Catering events is where the real cash is at. Large universities like Stanford operate like cities with 100s of autonomous departments free to choose whichever vendor/s they like.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#133

Post by ballard »

kalleboo wrote: post #101
001sky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves" Most delivery places require $10/min tickets. A 20 min delivery is a 40 min round-trip. @$9/hour for the delivery guy, that is $6 in costs. In other-words, -$1. This is before you've paid for the actual product. That doesn't even get to the question of "cross-town" traffic in SF. Without some sort of multi-point distribution getting accross town in 20 min would be "inte…

In Sweden there's a popular food delivery service that simply ties together restaurants and taxi drivers. This eliminates the need for round trips, since the taxi driver can just find some other fare for the return. This works fine in Sweden which has a deregulated taxi market (=no shortage of available taxi drivers), but it wouldn't work in SF which has such an artificially constrained supply.

I like that. That's clever.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#134

Post by ballard »

dangrossman wrote: post #7

Strange business, if that's what it's going to be. I've never had a sudden craving for a loaf of bread and wished I could order just that online. Not that I can't already; the local grocery store has a delivery service, and they bake their own bread every morning. I'm sure there's at least one bakery that delivers in the city, and there's a half dozen restaurants on GrubHub in my area that offer some kind of bread de…

Yeah, it's closer to a necessity product but not usually an impulse buy (unless say if a woman were pregnant). This makes it less necessary to have it delivered within X minutes.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#135

Post by ballard »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #130
ballard wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what net profit % was. Businesses that lose money on every sale are not survivable. They need to track all of their costs and see if it's going to be remotely profitable.

Actually in the modern business world, as long as you're growing, you're survivable. Cash influxes (loans, investment) can support a business for years - Amazon did it. You just need to convince investors that you have a story.

That's an anecdotal example. Amazon is different in that Bezos has enough room to dial back reinvestment and generate more cash or turn up reinvestment to reduce apparent profit.

Profit doesn't just magically appear, costs and pricing have to eventually face reality. Sooner, the better.

Spending more money does not necessarily make a business any better. That's like these noob business people that buy stock before they sell any of it... An example of a horrible waste of cash.

Without profit, it's not a business, it's an idea-guy dream.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#136

Post by pappyo »

I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app?

If you read the homepage, you'll see their tag line is "Fresh bread, snacks and coffee beans. Delivered in 18 minutes." Now, let's remove the baked goods accoutrement for a second and focus on the "delivered in 18 minutes or less". Isn't this the very real problem Amazon is trying to solve for themselves? Isn't there tremendous value to dynamic delivery logistics?

To be clear, I don't know these people, nor do I know if delivery logistics is their endgame. If they're bakers, then all the previous critique is warranted.

But if I lived in SF, I would sign up to see what they're up to.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#137

Post by larrys »

fiatjaf wrote: post #121
larrys wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazingly the restaurant I am referring to is on grubhub. So the questions is, why didn't I know that? Back when we were selling (in the early 90's) advertising to restaurants and shops we provided them with window decals and things for placement at the register to alert customers. This isn't happening here. Also the other place isn't on grubhub. Nor have I seen others just checked a few. Grubhub looks good. But I wa…

I've been thinking about this for various weeks and thinking about implementing something like (no, not like, it is exactly what you described) this, but everybody I ask to comment on the idea tells me about Grubhub and similar services, and they just don't understand why there would be other kind of service. The great thing about automatically building webapps for delivery restaurants is that this can work even if y…

"but everybody I ask to comment on the idea tells me about Grubhub and similar services, and they just don't understand why there would be other kind of service."

Who is everyone?

Is "everyone" the target customer?

Are is "everyone" startup people, programmers, hackers, VC's etc?

The fact that there are already sushi restaurants doesn't prevent new ones from opening everyday and doing business and making money.

"The great thing about automatically building webapps for delivery restaurants is that this can work"

Exactly. Not everything needs to be a home run.

"probably because of the fees"

Right. And this is especially a big problem with the mentality of the small business owner. Not wanting to cannibalize existing customers.

Building the app and charging a fixed monthly fee is the way to go at least to start. And make it easy for the restaurant to make menu changes etc. In the beginning you would have to perhaps input all the items yourself because the small business won't want to take the time. And have to prototype at no charge to prove it actually has benefit.

Let me know if you end up doing this.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#138

Post by mbesto »

Pacabel wrote: post #110
wpietri wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I got "I don't understand" from: "I guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely 'hacker'-ish about this." The overall tone of contempt is what I got "this is dumb" from. If this is just a very, very slight twist on a business that has existed for decades you might ask yourself why it's only happening now. It could be that it's not workable. It could be that nobody ever thought of it. Or it could…

He clearly understands the concept. What isn't understandable is why it's here at HN, why it's within the top 10 front page submissions, and why some people claim to think this idea is innovative or special. It's really nothing more than pizza delivery. I don't think he thinks it's a "dumb" idea, either. Clearly it's at least somewhat viable, given that pizza delivery is well and alive, with many establishments being…

> What isn't understandable is why it's here at HN, why it's within the top 10 front page submissions

It's not your sole place to decide this. That's why there is a community here.

PS - I know how you feel, I've had the same reactions before and the best thing to do is flag it and move on.

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#139

Post by elwell »

sheetjs wrote: post #37

Just picked it up (two people in a black Prius :) They seemed swamped (they were 10 minutes late and were visibly frazzled) but upbeat. Bread was decent. I suspect that if you go into pastries, you probably can command a higher margin (I really dislike keeping desserts in the apartment, and "dessert on demand" definitely would be appealing)

Does that mean I shouldn't press upvote?

Re: Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes

#140

Post by evli »

smacktoward wrote: post #36

I guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely "hacker"-ish about this. It's a bakery that delivers. That's great, I guess, but there's nothing particularly technical about it. They're not using tech in some unusual or interesting way to cut down on delivery costs, or make bread in a different way, or anything. It's just... a bakery, that delivers. There's a Web form to order your bread through, but in 2014 t…

If the bread is good Its enough to be disruptive. The quality of bread in the US is very poor (if you have had the opportunity to eat at a local bakery in pretty much anywhere else in the world you know what I am talking about).
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