The failure of Sprig • Hacker News Board

Re: The failure of Sprig

#81

Post by rwmj » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

> we were down to losing just $1/meal ... We got to $0 margins

It doesn't sound like at any point they made a profit on any meal they sold, so in fact they weren't running a business but were just wasting investors' money. (I'm sure they had great plans on paper to turn a profit). I'd go further and say it's good that they failed so they can no longer distort the market for those companies who aren't highly capitalized and can turn a profit. Although unfortunately the competition in this space turned out to be another money losing "business" with even deeper pockets.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#82

Post by elcomet » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

jeffrallen wrote: post #80

fasteddie wrote: post #2

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful. Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find m…

> Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook Solution: Pot noodles Solution: Learn to cook Solution: Granola bars Solution: Walk around the corner to your local taco store Anything but "vc funded disruption of something humans have been successfully managing for thousands of years".

> humans have been successfully managing for thousands of years

That's not really a good reason to not innovate though. People have been harvesting crops manually for thousand of years, but we've improved.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#83

Post by juuular » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

jayparth wrote: post #50

notyourday wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. That is as assumption that has been made time and time again and it always failed. The most important part of a successful kitchen is a near zero dwell time. The smallest dwell time is achieved by having a kitchen be colocated with the customer.

As someone who has never worked in the restaurant industry, I don't understand, at all, what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?

Not them, but I imagine that it's because your fixed costs never stop — you can't just tell your staff to go home and not get paid until the next customer gets in.

Every hour you're open, money goes out. You need to have continuous sales to even have the opportunity to make ends meet. Even if you're losing money each hour but still making a few sales, you have some flexibility with tweaking your formula to reduce the losses or turn it into a net even. If you're just sitting idly, you're just burning money without anything to do about it.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#84

Post by juuular » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

idoh wrote: post #49

ziftface wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that people get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another. It reminds me of how certain religious people have a sense of moral superiority and it makes them incapable of introspection. Not to mention that labelling an entire city as "left leaning" is absurd.

In 2016 only 10% of San Francisco voted for Trump. There was not a single neighborhood that had higher than 30% for Trump. So "left leaning" is apt, if you agree that left / right roughly maps to Democrat / Republican.

Unfortunately, left/right does not map to Democrat/Republican.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#85

Post by DrScump » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #41

fasteddie wrote: post #2

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful. Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find m…

>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash. I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button wou…

If you use Netflix that way, it effectively becomes a push technology.

I hate push technology, clear back to Pointcast.

The other thing that I hate about Netflix is that even when you search for a specific title, and they don't have it, they won't simply tell you that they don't have it. What they will do is bury you in listings of all their shows that have the most vague correlation to the title you actually searched for, even using just parts of random keywords.

Example: I just searched for "Dresden files". It proudly displayed "The Dresden Files" title, followed by mostly unrelated crap. Roswell? Wynonna Earp? The Greatest Events of World War II? Are you kidding me?

Re: The failure of Sprig

#86

Post by notyourday » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

jayparth wrote: post #50

notyourday wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. That is as assumption that has been made time and time again and it always failed. The most important part of a successful kitchen is a near zero dwell time. The smallest dwell time is achieved by having a kitchen be colocated with the customer.

As someone who has never worked in the restaurant industry, I don't understand, at all, what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?

Dwell time is the time between the order is finished and it reaching the customer who gives thumbs up or thumbs down ( order is wrong ).

It seems from the initial glance that dwell time is irrelevant because a kitchen can just go to the next order but that's not actually the case because without yes/no from a customer the kitchen can continue to make the same errors without adjusting. In the world of ghost kitchens dwell time is terrible because in reality the only feedback the kitchen gets is an asynchronous negative review that will be received a day or two later at best. That's the reason why pretty much all ghost kitchen based restaurants rapidly flame out.