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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

$15 a month, seems very cheap, is it even possible to run this profitably? Who delivers them? How are they paid?

So, currently my cofounder and I will be delivering them, but probably will ramp up hiring with increased volume. If we serve 300 people day one, $150 dollars is enough for the gas money and a little profit. But we're still working on pricing, so if you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them.

300 people on day one. They are all going to want their coffee at about 8am.

Also they will probably be fairly randomly geographically dispersed.

If this is the case, then delivering the coffee hot is going to present another challenge, it might not be a case of 'pick up 300 coffees and deliver them to 300 addresses'.

I fail to see how this is at all possible.

If you serve 300 people on day one, people will get angry that their drinks are becoming room temperature. You'll have to battle the Starbucks line, and in doing so end up doing larger batches of purchases, and finally the drinks will be cooling/warming too much before they are delivered.

Unless you're Santa Claus, delivering 300 orders of coffee in a day is flat out impossible.

- First, everyone is going to want them within a two or three hour time period.

- Second, you're going to have to go to Starbucks after every order or every other order or else the coffee will get cold by the time it's delivered.

I think you can reasonably deliver 4 per hour, maybe 8 if you get really good at clustering them together. So I think more than 25 per person per day is going to be unreasonable, and realistically probably more like 15.

It might be a good idea to put something on the website saying where the service will be first. That would certainly encourage me to hand over my e-mail address.

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