[romero-jk]

So we “scaled down” all the way to B2B. Turns out, more than a few restaurants in town would gladly handle the sales and marketing themselves and keep 100% of the order value minus fixed delivery fees.

What value does this MVP offered, bookkeeping orders? Couldn't the restaurants just contact the courier directly too? Looks like the restaurants were already doing it.

I'm assuming the burden of filling up the web form would be the same as contacting the courier. In many places couriers will use their own cash to pay for the order, so the restaurant gets the payment immediately.

[paxys]

The problem is the same as what all of the delivery apps solve. There are many restaurants, many customers and many delivery drivers. Someone needs to match all of them together.

[romero-jk]

I'm sure you sound very smart saying that but in this case, there were no restaurant listings nor customer portals.

[necovek]

Restaurants with no delivery service were taking orders via Facebook, email, phone... and then forwarding those to this app for delivery.

Basically, this was food delivery as a service for restaurants.

[skeeks]

> The app would assign the order to a free courier, triggering an email. Their Gmail was our mobile app!

I guess, the MVP tracked which couriers are free and also would automatically assign a courier to a new order, depending on who was free.

If you have to send out an e-mail, you have to pick a recipient, therefore you have to know by yourself / look up manually which ones are free...

[romero-jk]

If finding couriers is the bottleneck for the restaurants then sure. I can see that as the sales pitch.

[franciscop]

Reading the article it seemed to me like courier management was the deal here; multiple couriers, some which might be free and some which weren't, marking them as busy when the email is sent and as available when they said so.

[ehutch79]

I'm pretty sure in this case the app was for the courier. The drivers were his employees.

[romero-jk]

Why would the restaurant want to pay a cut from their menu prices and use this service then?

[necovek]

I assume you produce your own electricity.

If not (or not all of it), why do you want to pay a cut of your salary/income to the utilities company?

Restaurants can focus on doing what they do best: prepare food. Delivery is offloaded for a fixed fee (if you read the article even).

[ehutch79]

Otherwise they'd be paying a delivery driver themselves?