81–90 of 157 posts
I clicked through to read about how they plan on running it long term. They will carry a very limited number of products, and every delivery person has all the products stocked in their van. They then route the nearest delivery person to you when you order, so it's kind of like a mobile coffee shop. I don't know if it is possible to make it profitable, but it is definitely a service I would use. It is a pain keeping…
...in French speaking regions.
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…
"It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too." I think there is something here actually. For example it's a constant annoyance to me that when I get chinese food or sushi from the same places on a regular basis I actually have to make a phone call and talk to someone. At one place where they know me they actually make me give them my phone number which allows them to pull me up in their system. Just having to r…
The thing that makes it so easy is that it operates on fax. It seems antiquated, but that means any restaurant with a phone line can offer all the modern conveniences without even having a computer on-site. Small business owners are super busy and constantly being pitched to buy services they don't have time to set up, but this takes no setup -- sign this contract giving us $x for any new orders we send your way, tell us your delivery radius, put a fax machine in your store, and you're now online. GrubHub can do the hard work of putting their menu online and running the website.
When a new order comes in, the restaurant gets a fax (and fax machines confirm receipt, so GrubHub knows it got there). You, as the customer, now get online ordering, re-ordering of previous orders with just a few clicks or taps, prepay with a credit card (or not), etc.
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…
The use of tech here is in the ordering, inventory management, and delivery. In particular, the instant gratification. Before the mobile web, this would have been expensive and difficult. You'd need paper catalogs, phone center operators, dispatchers, trained drivers, and a lot of stock-keeping magic. Plus some very smart supply chain management. Now you need some software and off-the-shelf smartphones and you can cheaply test a whole product idea.
Now they're apparently betting that the cost per delivery can be kept low enough that they can bring you fancy bread and baked goods at a decent margin. On it's own, I'd call it a mildly interesting proposition.
The question for me is what they're planning next. Amazon started as just books, Netflix as mail-order DVDs, Square as a weird dongle that plugged into your phone's audio jack. All began with something basic, something many people laughed at. But they were all playing bigger games.
I could see this being economical with quad copter (drone) delivery. But, home delivery from a car? Man, the gas expenses (among other car related expenses) would eat the profits to a bare minimum. Especially driving around SF.
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…
They're doing something that doesn't scale in order to learn more about their potential customers. It doesn't have to make sense as a long-term business in order for them to get good data out of it.
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…
There's a high end bakery in the mission called Tartine where people queue up every day to buy $13 loaves of bread. I could never justify the expense but from the line outside I'd say there are definitely a lot of people in SF who can. You might have a hard time scaling this outside of really posh areas, but I'd bet that if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves in SF that you could do it for cheaper with the sam…
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 "interesting". Mission + SOMA of course NBD.
Of course the improbability drives the PR value. Somewhere between "too good to be true" and "will it break, in an interesting way?".
Hi everyone! Thank you all so much for your interest in this! The spike in interest from HN has been totally overwhelming, so while we are thrilled with the validation of this concept, we are running out of stock and falling behind on delivery schedule. I'll be sure to reach out individually to everyone who submitted an order. We can't wait to launch this service in a way that can handle demand spikes like this -- th…
I wouldn't consider this validation of the idea. It is just a bunch of people in SF that don't care about five bucks. We eat a lot of bread in my house. I would love a few loafs delivered every other day for a reasonable rate like how they deliver my newspaper.