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Thanks for reading it, and raising some very good questions. I tried to keep the blog post short, as my side of this story is how I helped this business build the MVP, not the business itself. Here are some answers: - The market was definitely not USA - He made some kind of an arrangement with his employer, where he helped them during the transition period after merger (something he really didn't want to do, given he was being fired right after) and they didn't come after him for entering the same market as a much smaller player. - Initially he handled all the issues you raised (and ones you did not) manually. At scale, you cannot handle courier demand manually, that's why you need software in this business. But he didn't start at scale, he just started. Did things that didn't scale. After we launched, he didn't sit back and watch money pile in. He was there all day, refreshing my non-autorefreshable application and being on the phone with couriers and restaurants and sometimes end customers, making sure it all didn't fall apart. - The outcome: as I said, this was not a US-based business and the money he made was not the US money (both in terms of currency and scale). He built a business of a local importance in a small market. To me, there's nothing wrong with having a small bootstrapped business. In fact, that's one of my goals in life. When the pandemic hit, food delivery became really hot and 3 startups of global scale have entered his market. His former employer didn't survive, even though they had nearly 100% of market share at some point. So he had to pivot as well. Instead of running a delivery business, he is now running a SaaS business - offering only the software to restaurants who want to handle online orders themselves (with in-house delivery) to avoid paying 30% marketplace fees. This allowed him to focus his attention elsewhere, while running this SaaS on the side, with nearly 0 involvement and exactly 0 employees. |