Ask HN: what about this idea for a startup?
What if we create a site for restaurant deliveries. Scenario is like this: 1. I am going home from work 2. There is a restaurant X along the way from work to home where it has food that needs to be delivered to customer Y. 3. It seems that customer Y's house is also along my route going home. 4. What if I can be the delivery man for this restaurant and earn $ for delivering it? 5. Benefit: restaurant pays less for a delivery service/labor.
Again, I just came up with this idea a couple hours ago. Some of you will think, what kind of moron I am to come up with ideas like this and such, but I think it seems interesting. There are still loop holes, such as what if I just go and run away with the food. There are ways to solve this, such as verifying so that only "good people" can participate as a delivery man. What do you guys think?
I am going to work on this idea for the Summer. If there are any hackers or UI/UX designer interested in joining me. Shoot me an email. You need to be awesome though!
33 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] threadYou'd need to make sure you had a solid 'independent contractor' deal with the delivery people; I don't know how hard that would be to do.
I don't think you'd be stepping on the taxi people, so I don't see any entrenched party who would want to kill the idea (except maybe pizza places that have already solved the problem, but only for themselves?)
I eat a lot more pizza than I would otherwise, just 'cause it's the only thing that delivers, so if you can figure it out, I think it's a great idea.
1. I am located at LA, have a friend at New York who has something that he needs to give me.
2. A person named Adam is on his way back to New York to LA.
3. Why not let Adam take that something from my friend in New York and bring it back to LA with him?
4. Waiting/paying for USPS, UPS, Fedex, is too long and costly. This is better
On the other hand, whenever you get such a large megacorp involved, there are certain inefficiencies inherent to being a large megacorp... e.g. I remain price competitive with amazon, so I could be wrong.
Really, I think the food idea is great because it's filling a need that isn't being filled at all. As far as I can tell, delivery services are pretty dang good. you can get something light shipped across the country in a day or two for ten or twenty bucks. Seems like a good deal to me. Food on the other hand, other than pizza, where I am, I can't get food delivered until I'm at 'catering scale' (water.com doesn't work for just me and my employee, unless I want to pick up myself, which defeats the point)
The thing is, I'm in the heart of silicon valley. Lots of overpaid nerds who don't want to leave the house (or office) - we'd be glad to pay even taxi per-mile rates to get someone to bring us our take-out.
There are more underpaid kids around here than you'd think, people who would be happy to make food runs for less than taxi per-mile rates.
Figure out how to hook up those two groups, and you have a business model.
-Who are you targeting? People who bike? Teenagers?
-The $ one receives is essentially the tip right, so is that enough to justify the slight inconvenience of picking up package, routing to destination, spending time at destination, then returning back home?
-Would you consider expanding this to businesses outside of restaurants that normally don't have delivery services (e.g. hardware stores, video game stores, etc.)
-How do you verify "good" delivery man? Track record? How do you establish good track record?
I'd be super interested to see how far you can run with this crazy idea lol.
-I am targeting mostly people with cars, maybe bike. As of age group, I am thinking of 18 - 40.
-Yes the $ is the tip..I think it will vary depending on what the restaurant/business is willing to offer. People can either take it or not. The system could give the business a recommendation at what rate people usually take the deal.
- I am actually planning to expand it even further not just beyond businesses, but as a replacement of USPS, Fedex, UPS. Imagine about it, the market of people using this is basically people delivering/shipping things. I bet if shipping was made more social, it would be more effective than USPS. It just needs a system that coordinate all of this and that's what I am trying to do here.
- To verify the delivery man, I was thinking of having the user to put a security deposit first (to cover the lost cost if someone ran away with the item) when initially registering. It will be hold after a user gets X amount of positive feedback and after that it's just reputation from the business/merchant.
One of my inspiration of this idea is based of my experience when going back from school. Almost every time I went back to my apartment from school, I always show this same pizza delivery guy all the time, I know his pizza store is located along my route of school - home. Then I had a thought that I would want to deliver it, won't cost me anything too much, it lies along my usual route, cost me probably 5 minute, and I might be getting $5++ each time. Not bad as an extra money for college kids right.
Unless the restaurant can use this system for a substantial proportion of their deliveries, it will be more hassle than it's worth.
For general package delivery, what happens if the recipient is not in and the package cannot be delivered? The courier will not want to turn round and take the package back to the depot. If they take it home with them, they have a package they don't want taking up space in their home.
How much do individual couriers earn, anyway? How much money are you trying to save for customers?
1. Package not picked up after X amount of days are discarded, unless a communication between the courier and receiver are made
I am trying to save them at least not getting a higher price than the regular USPS but faster delivery time. That is the goal
I mean, I know this is getting away from the "crowdsourcing" idea, but as I said in another post, I know there are many times I'd be glad to pay taxi per-mile rates for someone to pick up my food, especially if you could figure out a way to make sure they are somewhat trustworthy.
I also know there are plenty of people around here who would be willing to work for taxi per-mile rates.
If you do it right, you could even have an 'elastic' system where very heavy days/times paid better/cost more for delivery. I mean, once I ordered a pizza, not realizing it was superbowl Sunday. the pizza got here three hours later.
p2p restaurant deliveries seems like a bad idea because the deliveries are too time sensitive (food gets cold relatively quickly).
Why not partner with UPS/Fedex as a way to reduce some of their costs? So driving home from work, you stop by a local UPS/Fedex pick-up point where you are given a package to deliver to Fred, who lives a mile away from your home. (The local pick-up points can established such that all package have associated drop-off points within a X-mile radius.) Or for deliveries between airpots, people can be compensated (i.e. offered a discounted ticket) if they carry-on a package to be dropped off at their destination airport.
With the rising gas prices, I suspect many people would love to be compensated for going a few minutes out of their way during their regular commutes. Not to mention, the publicity this would generate is immense.