In hindsight, every business is competing with convenience, and consequently, there’s a convenience spectrum, the companies on a more convenient end are going to take up customers, traction, and $$ from the non-convenient ones. To be more convenient, a business needs to have a blend of software and network. Let’s see how things are playing out in the US!
Food & Grocery delivery
You must be familiar with food delivery, it takes up somewhere around half an hour to an hour for the food to be on your table!
What about groceries? A year back, you had to wait for your groceries too for that much time, so you got to your nearby grocery store to get the stuff you needed. What if startups also happen to deliver groceries in less time than it takes to get from your nearest store? This is what the next wave of food delivery looks like Ultrafast!
How does this get done?
Existing startups in the space, Jokr, Gorillas, etc do this by setting up mini-warehouses in each locality or neighborhood aka Dark stores. These warehouses are smaller in size thus the real-estate needs to be optimized! Startups do this by keeping only the inventory the customer wants which they happen to know by their algo. I
n simple words, limited inventory. If you add some tech/robotics to this equation, your and my stuff will get packed and shipped within minutes.
Concept
As these dark stores are located near each household, it takes less than 10 minutes to deliver anything to your house. The more robust the network, the faster the delivery, the more convenient the service is to the end-user! This is how these fledgling quick delivery startups are planning to crack the nut.
Biggies enter the picture
Now, until a week back, the quick delivery puzzle was being solved by a few new-age companies (Jokr) but a good market with potential attracts competition sooner than later, and with that Doordash entered the New York market this week! Instacart, a $40 Bn giant also will follow suit in another couple of months.
Distribution is the moat
If your food delivery app is used the most by people, you already have an advantage over all others. Simply nudging the users to make a certain purchase will kickstart the flow of orders. On top of it, a stronger network of dark stores, good machine learning algorithms to know what the customer wants will be a cherry on top! This looks incredibly different from original food delivery but it’s a race to be more convenient and we’re up for it. What do you think?