17 years ago a friend was trying to get me to start a restaurant delivery service with him in Houston. He explained most around the country were mom-and-pop businesses utilizing little technology but be had visited 2 millionaires in Phoenix and LA whose delivery businesses served hundreds of restaurants. He found the guy who supplied Windows software to some of these businesses that handled all the specific bookkeeping and proximity calculations for changing fees based on distance, etc. I was amazed they took a 30% cut from the restaurants but he explained that the restaurants were increasing their capacity beyond the seating they had on-site. I don’t really know how all those restaurant customers felt about that, though. Maybe they were grateful to be able to build new customer relationships, but we never got going since the investors fell through.
Recently after reading about restaurants teaming up to share delivery people, I wondered if providing restaurants with generic back-office apps that allowed them to easily partner with other businesses to make small delivery operations (maybe a half dozen or dozen sharing drivers) would blow the giant VC-backed ones out of the water. Basically some lightweight SaaS solution for a few bucks a month, easy to integrate with their website, etc. Customers should be able to get used to the idea that they can just go to the restaurant’s homepage and look for the Delivery button instead of perusing VC-backed indexes of restaurants.
Recently after reading about restaurants teaming up to share delivery people, I wondered if providing restaurants with generic back-office apps that allowed them to easily partner with other businesses to make small delivery operations (maybe a half dozen or dozen sharing drivers) would blow the giant VC-backed ones out of the water. Basically some lightweight SaaS solution for a few bucks a month, easy to integrate with their website, etc. Customers should be able to get used to the idea that they can just go to the restaurant’s homepage and look for the Delivery button instead of perusing VC-backed indexes of restaurants.