While global platforms such as Uber Eats, Wolt, Deliveroo, Delivery Hero, DoorDash, Glovo, and the like provide great experiences for consumers, local business communities have mixed feelings about partnering with those giants. From all over the world we hear concerned voices of
restaurant owners afraid to be turned into commodity and replaced by dark kitchens run by platforms. We hear couriers who have to
fight to be treated differently. Amid these public discussions and debates that take place in the media (and sometimes in the court!), many businesses wonder how they might move the confrontation to the market. How could they join efforts and create alternative platforms that would be owned and operated by local players according to their own rules?
In our meetings, we talk about how to get started with this alternative platform. Tech companies make the business look relatively easy – click a button and in 20 minutes your food magically arrives. In reality, this type of operation is very complex.
On-demand logistics are hard enough, to begin with, even if you only do the deliveries part. Restaurant food cannot really wait, so the challenge is to assign an order to the right courier so that they will be able to make it to both the restaurant and the consumer in a timely manner. Not easy! When you pair this with a consumer-facing component (and this is what you need to do to become like Uber, Wolt, etc) it becomes at least twice as challenging. Now you suddenly have to worry not only about getting the food and goods to people but about getting the people to get the food and goods from your app. As simple as it may sound – it is a real challenge.
Challenging is not undoable, however, especially when you have no other choice but succeed. So, for those who are just getting started, we compiled our bite-sized checklist of how to begin this process.
The list is actually only three items long:
1. Team
2. Technology
3. Community
As trivial as it may sound, if we look at these items through the prism of the type of business that we need to start, things become very interesting.