Postmates founder here. I am subscriber to Internal Tech Emails and I couldn't help but smile reading these emails this morning. It was in 2017, around April 12th when we launched Postmates Unlimited - the subscription program that inspired all this. Now, we all know Postmates didn't win the space but some product decisions outlast a company and this was one one of them. I still remember the meeting when we decided to launch the subscription. No one had ever done it, the board thought it was nuts. It became the industry standard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regardless of outcome, it must feel pretty good to know you and your company ended up being a keystone in corporate tech history. Very few people get to say they were at the meeting when these subscription models became the future. Historians 30 years down the road would love you if you wrote a book about your perspective on it.
>Very few people get to say they were at the meeting when these subscription models became the future.
Yeah, it's like being at the meeting where planned obsolelense was first invented, or when a telco devised the "jump through hoops to to cancel your service" concept...
WAT? Adobe launched "Creative Cloud" (which at the time was basically desktop-software-as-a-service) on July 17, 2013; if I recall correctly they had been trialing that for about 1year in Australia before deciding it's a good idea and doing the global launch. Not sure if Adobe was first, but they definitely preceded you by half a decade!
SaaS was mainstream but e.g. Creative Cloud was not really SaaS - it was "we give you desktop products and you pay an yearly fee instead of the one-time cost". Adobe tried very hard to add Saas features but especially initially, the appeal was purely in the payment model (and I know a lot of individuals didn't like it! But a lot of companies did).
Arguably, Netflix started this trend even earlier - with their exclusively-subscription model for renting DVDs (something that one used to at least be able to pay-per-rental).
I looked up Uber Eats Pass; it’s not an all you can eat subscription. It waives delivery fees and gives a percentage discount to orders. It’s more like a loyalty program you pay for, like Prime.
Sorry, all you can eat was a bad choice of words. I meant in terms if the fees that Uber Eats collects.
I'd say prime is similar because you get free shipping but clearly Amazon.com makes money on each sale so the more they sell the more they earn.
On the other hand, movie pass is a fixed price. You pay the same regardless of whether you watch one movie or a hundred. What makes Netflix work with all you can eat but not movie pass? Is there a way to know ahead of time what works with all you can eat?
Forgive my confusion, but wasn't Amazon Prime started a good 10 years before that? It seems like that'd the precedent. I'm guessing I'm missing some major detail.
May be I am too naive but even if you want to limit to apps/companies providing similar kind of services, I don't think this to be something Uber/Lyft wouldn't have tried to do eventually anyway? May be others just had bigger fish to fry?
I was at your presentation to Super Mondays at the end of the Difference Engine accelerator, when you demo'd Curatedby, many years ago. It's fantastic to see what you and the team you've built have achieved since then. :)
Many brands are part of a holding. Like "Just Eat Takeaway.com" Which also owns Grubhub and SkipTheDishes in North America. Mostly active in Europe though.
Depending on how bullish you are on the market it's either DoorDash or no one. Because DD is the frontrunner by a pretty solid margin but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term.
Yeah, it’s very region-specific. Uber basically doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia. Here, Grab is king. A while back, Uber sold their SEA operations to Grab for a stake in Grab, and then I think they were trying to sell their stake to Alibaba.
> but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term
Narrator: "it won't. As the whole American startup scene nowadays is based on the idea of losing unlimited investor money for years and decades with literally zero plans to change that"
Fraud from Uber or fraud from the deliveries? I uninstalled Uber eats and rather drive to pick or use any other service than touch Uber. Uber eats was one of the nastiest apps with the absolute worst UX I have tried. Germany had a website pizza.de a decade earlier and they would send faxes in the backend and even that was better.
Even plain Uber keeps trial to sell me on their subscription every single ride.
Could you say more about the fraud problem? I've used Ubereats a few times a week for a couple of years and I don't think I've had a problem, though only ever in a tier 1 city.
Cities have tiers? Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)
Not a fraud issue but in Miami over the break I ordered food from Uber eats, I got 5 different drivers who all got assigned then dropped the order.
> Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)
Oh wow, that sucks. Not sure how I never experienced that, though when I was in SF I used it a bit less often than I do now (NY). If anything, I would've thought it would be way worse in NY: systems/platforms seem creakier here in general.
anecdotally i saw a huge dip in consistency across both ubereats and doordash in the back half of 2021. like orders taking 1+ hours greater than expected delivery. that being said, i've never had the problems you're citing with either on food delivery.
as for tiering, i think it's a rough estimate of the population density. getting delivery/drivers in suburbs is plain harder given their physical sparseness
Seems to work just like their car service then. Driver accepts the ride, sits there for 10 minutes, and then texts you asking you to cancel (they think I don't know it hurts their stats if they're the one to cancel).
Perhaps it won't hurt their statistics if you cancel their trip, since the driver has been waiting for you for ten minutes and he can do it with confidence. I already had a bad experience with a taxi when I was still ordering transportation services on https://www.bostonexecutivelimoservice.com/new-york-city-to-... . Then I was fifteen minutes late and notified the driver in advance, but my trip was canceled due to the fact that the workload of orders was oveloaded and every car was on the bill. Apparently they had the right to do this and simply canceled my trip, since the fault was on my part and the situation was not changed by the fact that I warned the driver that I would be late. Most likely you have a similar situation and there is nothing to worry about, just order another taxi.
I had a problem once but it turned out to be the restaurant's fault (they accepted my pick-up order, marked it as picked up and closed for the day before I got my food - all of this in the span of ~10 mins). I submitted a complaint via the app and Uber refunded me no questions asked. </shrug>
I read </shrug> as a self closing tag <shrug /> as human language is not necessarily valid XML. It is amazing how we "autocorrect" things as we read that we have to consciously stop and think what we did.
Kind of a toss up. Doordash has more market share in US but UberEats has wider international presence and is a leader in some markets. But yes, Uber acquired Postmates at one point and is now rolling out a subscription program called UberOne that encompasses rides, eats and its nascent grocery/pharmacy offering from the cornershop acquisition.
Also depends on the metro. I think NYC is actually primarily GrubHub, Seattle and central TX are primarily UEats, but for the most part DD is a safe bet. North TX is definitely DD territory.
They had the first food delivery subscription service among the food delivery services, such as Uber Eats, DoorDash etc, is what I believe they mean to say, not that they literally invented subscriptions.
Aside, the sibling comments are quite uncharitable, I don't see why anyone would reasonably believe that the founder invented subscriptions. If one thinks for even a second, they know this isn't true, so why not think for another second about what they really mean? I don't see the need to complain and hem and haw about how the "world's gone crazy."
I have observed over the years the IT/Tech tends to attract a lot of incredibly literal, grumpy people who do not like it when people take liberties with language.
It is also a difference in culture, americans tends to praise themselfs for every small things as a big achievement. In other countries one would not even consider this as an achievement, just a standard iteration to explore.
For me as well the first content is strange, that "I've invented subscription".
It is basically just applying an existing pattern from not-so-much-different other field?
indeed amazon prime is the same, gym subscription is the same etc etc. Not sure what justifies the "no one ever done it"
It is an easy, lazy response that doesn't require much thought, and gets internet points anyway. I'm just glad HN offers a way to collapse threads because so many comments result in massive flame wars about trivial matters like syntax and word choice.
It also stems from a laziness to consider where a person is coming from, other than literal reading of text. Brains become callused, or worse slightly autistic, where only precision matters.
You just have to ask yourself who is responsible when lack of precision leads to bad outcomes. If it isn't you, then meeting the other person halfway by increasing your level of precision helps.
The emotional labor of having to be fully responsible for precision is under-appreciated. That burden is where the grumpiness comes from.
It's pretty clear from the original thread and the reply that the implication is that Postmates was the first to offer subscriptions through iOS without going through IAP, therefore bypassing Apple's 30% cut, not that they "invented subscriptions."
"no one has ever done it" - it definitely sounded to me like they implied to transform something that used to be a "pay per consumption" into a "service". Which is definitely untrue, Creative Cloud preceded them by half a decade, Amazon Prime was before that, and arguably Netflix inspired everyone.
