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Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

yourmorningcoffee.herokuapp.com

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Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#41

Post by silentscope »

You could:

1. bundle your offer with a subscription to a newspaper. Possibly with a large subscription purchase, you'd save enough money that your customers would get a deal for coffee AND the paper while you up the revenue.

2. add breakfast! smoothies? Breakfast burritos? Those take time, are usually pretty healthy, and are highly portable.

3. send them a morning playlist??? like a new jazz/downtempo CD of their genre preference to get ready with while they wait? If I'm busy, which is what I'm going to have to be to use your service, I probably don't spend a lot of time getting new music.

4. have really really good looking delivery people. Nothings gonna make someone get ready faster and better in the morning than that. Hire college sororities/intramural soccer teams?

5. market yourself to startups that want their folks to come in before just getting free lunch--like a jumpstarter for their day. Maybe they'd pay a bit to see if you can get their engineers in by 9:30-10. 15-20 bucks for an extra hour or two of work sounds like a stellar rate for a top flight hacker...

Honestly though man, I'd use this as a vehicle to learn about starting up and not as the roadmap. Take all the gravity out of the situation. This should be a fun experiment to learn how you and your team operates, how you adapt when you're not getting traction, nothing more.

I respect the hustle, but this most likely will not work out. If I have time to wait for you to deliver coffee, I have time to make myself some.

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#42

Post by patio11 »

This seems like a curious choice of potential business when no US-based store will deliver a $3.50 product on a regular basis despite having access to large pools of labor at arbitrarily low costs, while if you're capable of typing in "git push" to get that website up your presumed opportunity cost is rather high. Consider carefully whether you are likely to have a competitive advantage in delivery operations over an entire nation of savvy chains and independent operators with high tolerance for jobs that suck. It strikes me as unlikely.

If you really, really have a burning urge to do this, be ZeroCater for coffee and sell any three startups on doing an office-wide coffee run every morning for only 15% the cost of a new engineering hire. (P.S. Note how I do not anchor costs around the price of coffee.)

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#43

Post by georgemcbay »

benblodgett wrote: post #34

I think this app would be most effective in suburbs and not city centers. There are coffee shops everywhere (especially in NY) - it would actually waste time to wait for coffee then it would to walk down the block.

It doesn't work well in either place. It fails in the city for the reason you mentioned and fails in the suburbs because people live too far away from each other for them to attain any kind of useful economies of scale.

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#44

Post by derrida »

cdcarter wrote: post #33
richbradshaw wrote: post #20

The nearest Starbucks to me is 44km away, which makes me think that if you were able to deliver, it would likely be cold. Also, I can't say that Starbucks coffee is nice - seems more like coffee flavoured milk than an actual drink. You can also make perfectly awesome coffee at home, for cheaper than your delivery cost, and you get to use your own cup. For that reason, I'm out. Nice looking iPhone app though.

Strange, the criticisms I usually hear of Starbucks coffee is that their roasts are too dark, giving incredibly (sometimes almost seemingly unnatural) bold flavors without a lot of depth. I don't know a single person who'd characterize even their lighter blends as "coffee flavoured milk." That being said, you're probably well outside the target market for having your coffee delivered to you. If you had time to make i…

Ask any Australian what Starbucks tastes like and they will say "Coffee Flavoured Milk" or "Watery Shit", perhaps why Starbucks failed hard in Australia.

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#46

Post by Kluny »

arkitaip wrote: post #27
michael_fine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, this really is just introductory pricing for the MVP. We really need to work out what a sustainable pricing model is, but we decided that we should first work on the MVP. Do you have any suggestions?

This is a tricky problem. Will individuals think that getting Starbucks coffee delivered to the comfort of their home is worth the additional fee? Also, the product is fairly price sensitive and delivery has to be done on a tight schedule. Some suggestions: * target businesses. Your orders will be larger, evenly scheduled and the customers are less price sensitive. Expect tough competition, though, unless ... * Broad…

A good vehicle to use would be a T-truck, such as this: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4045/5137002465_84fe8b3806_z.j...

They get insanely high gas mileage.

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#47

Post by kylemaxwell »

If I want coffee at home, I make it at home.

If I want to get coffee someplace (and in my area, for better or worse Starbucks is nearly the only option), then I'll go somewhere because I want to see something besides the same four walls and my lovely family.

Paying coffeehouse prices plus a convenience fee just to sit at home and save myself the few minutes it would take to make coffee seems like it will have a very small target market, at best.

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#48

Post by [deleted] »

michael_fine wrote: post #6
arkitaip wrote: post #4

I can't really see how this mvp can scale beyond a few dozen customers if manual delivery is going to be used (how many minutes do you have before the coffee gets cold? This sets all kinds of limitations on your business). $15 per customer/month isn't much if you're going to pay for (gas), salaries, etc. Unless, of course, this is Starbucks' MVP and they are figuring out the parameters of coffee delivery. Now that wo…

You're right, this really is just introductory pricing for the MVP. We really need to work out what a sustainable pricing model is, but we decided that we should first work on the MVP. Do you have any suggestions?

[deleted]

Re: Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

#50

Post by corin_ »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #47

If I want coffee at home, I make it at home. If I want to get coffee someplace (and in my area, for better or worse Starbucks is nearly the only option), then I'll go somewhere because I want to see something besides the same four walls and my lovely family. Paying coffeehouse prices plus a convenience fee just to sit at home and save myself the few minutes it would take to make coffee seems like it will have a very…

It's different for different people. Every day somebody from my office (it varies who) will drive a mile and back to pick up a few cups of coffee from Costa (a chain insanely similar to Starbucks, if you don't know it - started in the UK, very, very big chain).

Some people pay the extra to drink it somewhere else, some pay for the convenience of "I don't have to bother making it", and some pay because they prefer it to what they make at home.

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