We’re F*cked, It’s Over. Or Is It? | Hacker News Reader

We’re F*cked, It’s Over. Or Is It?

medium.com

43 pointsgvasilei30 comments

Let me save you some time:

In the end they ditched their "sharing" economy model of food production and delivery, rented a kitchen and hired staff, and became a delivery service with a teeny tiny menu.

It may be successful; the model is as old as civilization and the market allows for new entrants. But it's not easy.

And their conclusion that "cooking is dying" is a huge stretch. It might be more believable if they had a huge menu of truly authentic items, but that would eat into their business model.

Similarily, claiming that "fast food is dying" is because they haven't realized what most fast food engineers have discovered through many years of iteration: at scale, the masses prefer salty, greasy food with habit forming taste characteristics.

Still, I wish them luck in their current business.

Or particularly news-worthy.

> The plan was simple yet ambitious:

> One month to set up a new business (rent a kitchen, hire a chef, hire motorbike drivers, create the menu, design logo, website, build mobile app for drivers, build first version of the routing algorithm plus complete all the legal and admin paperwork).

So... they opened a delivery restaurant with its own app?

Oh god, as I read through it I kind of just started laughing to myself. They opened a chain restaurant -- surely VC-money worthy.

Surely a chain restaurant with its own routing algorithm is worthy a bazillion dollars?

"We placed ants in a scale model of the entire city. Placed food at the delivery points and recorded their steps. In the end it's the first swarming, multi-node, organic-learning food delivery algorithm."

Now you only have to figure out how to make the ants not take short-cuts (eg. walk over houses)

"We soon realized that ants took unexpected short-cuts. To solve this we switched to a drone based delivery model, cutting out the middle-man. In our second-generation organic-learning model we also switched to bees. We call this algorithm, buzzfeed."

You need to stop thinking inside the box, my friend. My new company Delivr will equip all of our delivery drives with stilts so they can step right over backyards, houses, etc. We're also testing out a new paramotor that will allow them to literally leap over property in their way.

But they pivoted their business model to a different space. Surely those buzzwords alone are worth a couple hundred million dollars.

Now add a deep learning routing algorithm with a reactive architecture running in containers in the cloud and we're talking about a billion dollar exit. Easy.

This is just like the time I created a startup where a group of friends in separate locations could select custom drinks and alcoholic beverages using our app which would then be automatically delivered to a location equidistant from each friend in the group.

But then we pivoted and just opened a bar.

I don't understand. It sounds like they ditched the "Uber for home-cooked meals" model and started... a restaurant that offers delivery via app? That doesn't really seem like "the first truly scalable food tech company"; it seems like they are trying to compete with e.g. Seamless by vertically integrating. Which sounds... less scalable probably?

But kudos to them for the clever marketing - they got me to read about them, which I guess is the only point.

So the whole "what is my mother no longer doing for me?" thing has spread beyond SF?

https://twitter.com/azizshamim/status/595285234880491521

I'm starting to wonder if most "sharing economy" models wouldn't be better served through some form of co-op. Basically the business equivalent of open-source. Sure, that won't produce a golden egg goose but it might actually serve the users better.

I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of Global Climate change, and instead this is a long-winded blog post about what appears to be a failed recipe app.

How disappointing.

Oh please, it's not a "failed recipe app", it's Uber For® cooking!

'Cooking is dying'

ugh.

Once you get into it its a great article on finding out what really matters to your customers. I also love the name Forky. The title is not really meaningful.

It's weird: all of the images are blurry beyond recognition.

Please change the title to something else.

I agree. The title isn't useful at all. Neither was the first paragraph, had no idea what the article was about.

Neither are the next several. It takes awhile to get down to the meat of it: "having your neighbor cook for you doesn't work for shit as a business, so we're just going to open a restaurant."

Agreed. This title tells nothing of the article, and I don't inherently fault OP for maintaining title integrity.

You know, in the real world, the dreaded F-Word is used by just about anyone who's not deeply religious.. and even they might sometimes fail to censor themselves before saying it.

The title gives no indication what the article is about, that's the real problem.

How do you know I didn't interpret his message correctly?

CTRL + F

"revenue"

0 results

backspace x7

"margin"

0 results

backspace x6

"profit"

0 results

backspace x6

"cost"

0 results

give up on meaningful data x1

Good content marketing though.

Psst, ctrl+backspace is a thing.

Woah.

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