Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
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Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
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Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#2Just two months ago, they announced expansion of delivery to Manhattan's downtown area: http://blog.goodeggs.com/post/120709577938/good-eggs-is-comi...
I'm guessing the logistical and financial troubles described in the OP were pretty clear 2 months ago...was expanding service to Manhattan a Hail Mary to attract additional investment?
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#3It takes a lot more than good code, talented engineers and passionate customers to scale food tech startups that deal with getting perishable food from local farms to people’s doorsteps.
It feels like some kind of tech-myopia that anyone should think code was the key to a successful food company. The old "when you're holding a hammer..."
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#4"The single biggest mistake we made was growing too quickly, to multiple cities, before fully figuring out the challenges of building an entirely new food supply chain."
This is a repeat of Webvan. Webvan had a good idea, but tried to "scale" fast. They had about 3% market share in 30 cities, and needed 30% market share in 3 cities.
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#5The first time around it was called "The New Economy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_economy
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#6It takes a lot more than good code, talented engineers and passionate customers to scale food tech startups that deal with getting perishable food from local farms to people’s doorsteps. It feels like some kind of tech-myopia that anyone should think code was the key to a successful food company. The old "when you're holding a hammer..."
If they had used Haskell I think things would have gone differently.
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#7Sometimes "do things that don't scale" is bad advice. It's great advice when starting out (because you should be focused on building an appealing product before you worry about scaling it), but you need to be using your scale-up to test ways of breaking out of doing the "things that don't scale". The idea is to turn it into a forcing function for the company: if you can't find a better way to scale, you're done.
Disruptive innovation is about ripping out the assumptions that incumbents made and operating under a new set of assumptions that may not have been possible when the incumbents started. But sometimes, the incumbents' assumptions/constraints are still valid, and new entrants don't have as much of an advantage (or the new entrants' advantage is easily copied).
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#8It's a little ironic that goodeggs is considered a food technology firm, when it has nothing to do with technology, and in fact has a rejectionist approach to technology in the first place.
Monsanto and Cargill are food technology firms. Advances in food technology are what allow us to feed 9 billion people with a fixed resource (arable land). There are serious innovations in food production and distribution that have saved millions of lives in the last half century (Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution).
An online seller of local produce is not "food tech". It is simply using the web to sell food. Add to that their dislike of synthetic pesticide/fertilizer and other real advances in food technology (advances that in the developing world mean a real reduction in deadly diseases that spread through the use of animal manure [natural fertilizer]), and it makes them just another anti-tech firm that happens to peddle goods on the Internet.
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#9Wait, you're telling me a perishable luxury product is a tough market?
Re: Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs
#10When I first heard of this company I thought it was some kind of joke. Turns out I should really learn how to bamboozle investors into handing me $53M for shitty ideas that don't make even basic logic sense.