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Comment by odonnellryan | Hacker News Reader

I have Blue Apron and largely they're really good. It's surprising to see they aren't doing well, apparently?

They're hitting the same problems that Groupon hit. Their margins are extremely low, the cost of acquiring and retaining customers is high, and there's no barrier to entry for competitors.

For example, during the last 12 months at Blue Apron they spent $178 million on marketing, and acquired 387,000 customers (these figures are from their IPO). That's $460 per customer. Getting hold of customers is not cheap, and many of these customers are not loyal or are stopping the service after only a few deliveries.

Well, a company can provide a good service but be a terrible business. See TWTR or SNAP as examples. Uber would be another. They're mostly burning cash without a clear path to profitability. Given their recent scandals, an IPO seems to be extremely far away.

"Non-profits generating consumer excess attempting to shift the financial burden to public markets"

They don't have a great moat (all recipes are available for free online for instance) and the meal kit market has gotten very, very crowded since they invented it 5 years ago.

Agreed. I also saw a talk by a PM from Blue Apron a while back, and it seems that another problem is that people subscribe with the hopes of cooking more but then discover that having the meal kit still involves enough time and friction to limit them from doing it. I think that many people love the idea of cooking more often but still wish it were more convenient. To Blue Apron's credit, they have made it fairly streamlined!

It takes me about half the time to make a Gobble meal as a Blue Apron meal. Blue Apron is streamlined relative to doing it completely from scratch, but it's still more work than I have time for.

I think that addresses it then lol. They aren't even delivering on their core promise, and competition has outperformed on a key product metric like effort and prep time!

They certainly haven't invented it: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-meal-subscription-delivery-...

Guess I shouldn't have assumed. They were certainly early on at any case.

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