Grocery shopping for the lazy AND impatient? Yes please.
Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
51–60 of 106 posts
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#52This kind of seems like a rip off of Postmates' "Get It Now", no?
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#53[deleted]
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#54This looks great. Today I'm sick WFH and could really use some meds delivered. I signed up for an invite... what is the process/wait time like? I may have to try something else if I'll need to wait too long.
You can get your pharmacy orders picked up in SF by Exec (http://iamexec.com). In California your assistant only needs your name, address and phone number to get your prescribed medications.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#55I'd love to have this service at home, so I'm (selfishly) hoping Instacart becomes hugely successful! That said, I can't help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics. A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90's, and they couldn't make it work. (Kozmo.…
I'm hoping service succeeds also - its an awesome value proposition for consumers. However, I've built a few real-time delivery businesses, and I'm pessimistic.
Real-time operations are costly to manage even though the software has become easier to build. Not being Amazon and not being able to control inventory, and access to that inventory, hurts. However, probably a bigger issue is establishing consumer habit - triggering that need to order at the moment the user wants it. This comes down to establishing a brand (expensive) and also evolving consumer behavior (more expensive). And, these consumers will have to be in the You could say Uber is a counter example of succeeding in this space. I would argue that they replaced an existing consumer habit with a better one. I don't see that in the same-day delivery space - thus the need for education.
There have been a few generations of these services (Webvan / Kozmo; Licketyship; Ecourier / Shutl; Postmates). Eventually, the cost of tapping into consumer habit vs the small margins of brokering a delivery will create an amazing opportunity. In the meantime, the cost of educating and acquiring users is a big deterrent and if you can build the kind of company innovative enough to solve this problem, its likely you have a prohibitively high opportunity cost.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#56It's a great idea, in theory. But who's the target market? Wealthy professionals have a wife to bring them stuff or have personal assistants (hard to believe in the world of dual income households, but I have friends that do just this). Young, less wealthy professionals just go pick up the items themselves or have friends pick them up for them. College kids aren't going to pay for such a service, they enjoy taking a break from studying to go pick up something. And yes, I know, I'm sure there are stay at home husbands that do errands for their wealthy professional wives, I just don't know of any.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#57Sounds nice. I know some people have been using Exec (YC W12) to do this, but instacart is much cheaper. The only thing that takes all the excitement for me is that it does not have a android version OR a web one....
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#58I'd love to have this service at home, so I'm (selfishly) hoping Instacart becomes hugely successful! That said, I can't help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics. A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90's, and they couldn't make it work. (Kozmo.…
While I agree that a lot of smart people have tried this before (Kozmo.com, WebVan, etc), I believe that there are significant differences in the approach that we are taking. Specifically, Kozmo.com was founded in an era where you could IPO without having profits. Having that mentality from day one allowed them to make huge concessions to users such as give them free delivery on everything, and not have a minimum ord…
It seems like by having a delivery fee is a non-starter.
"I can get it in 2 days free with amazon, or $4 today... is that worth it?" People will spend huge amounts of time and effort to not pay delivery charges, even when the total price ends up being the same!
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#59I love that the website doesn't shoehorn me into a crappy mobile version when I load it, but what happens now is that I get a picture of an iPhone and apparently nothing else—it's not at all intuitive for me to think to scroll horizontally to find the content of the web page, especially with the hidden-by-default scroll bars on the iPhone. To clarify, the horizontal scroll bar that appeared when scrolling vertically while "looking for the rest of the page" was hidden by a thumb for me. I only barely thought to check horizontal scrolling before giving up on the page as somehow broken on my iPhone.
Deatil of what I see (on the left) vs what I probably should see (on the right, after zooming manually):
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#60If something is located within an hour of me I could just drive and get it, or use a local delivery service. I use the internet to buy extra weird stuff that I can't get locally.