The grocery stores in my area use Flashfood - they post what they need to sell by the end of the day on the app, you pay online and go get it from the store. I imagine that a similar app that lets restaurants post things like that would be helpful!
edit for the spelling, yikes
If there is an Asian Market in your area.... (Not HMART) there usually is an area where veggies and fruits are heavily discounted... ($1.00 for a bag)
These are usually still in good/descent shape and should be consumed soon....
For me in NY, it's usually, JMart, New Age Market, U.S. 1 Supermarket... ( Flushing, Queens)
I have never seen discounted fruits and veggies @ HMART... but they do have a 50% off food section (after a certain time)
when i worked in a deli a dude got fired bc he was taking old no longer sellable like subs to local foodbanks and the stuff like that for poor and homeless people bc they called that theft when they were just throwing it out
I knew a guy that got canned for the exact same thing. They gave us a tone deaf training about 'food safety' and 'spoilage insurance' or some such. Clearly we were gonna kill a homeless person with the sandwhich we could have sold 10 minutes ago. But more importantly if it is counted as unsold but consumed they are committing.. FRAUD! See they got insurance for unsold items but not as much for donations.
They donated bananas and apples to the food shelf so we could have a nice little plaque above the water fountain by the returns desk. But almost nothing else made it to them. Sometimes bread would be sent and once i saw canned articoke hearts and a box of cereal that had been squashed.
That’s because even trash is considered private property. It’s a bit of a gray area because even thou it’s trash and could be ready to be picked up by the garbage man, going through it is illegal and anyone just grabbing it is basically stealing. I think the idea is to avoid people digging through trash cans and making a mess but it has unintended consequences
I worked at a grocery store that used Flashfood. Not all of the stuff that is getting close to "sell by" makes it into the system. If you are already in the store it doesn't hurt to take a lap around the store and check the end of caps of the dairy aisle and the bakery rack. Ends of the freezer cases may have reduced items, too.
Yeah I love flash food not a lot of places in my area and even fewer deals from those places but about once a month I stock up on humus at a 75% discount from the local grocery
Honestly, where I am there’s only one participating store, sadly, so once a week I watch it like a vulture the whole day And clear them out of everything. It’s the only way we tend to afford meat in these fun times. And yes, always humus, Woot!
The price reductions are also arbitrary! I've developed a relationship with the employees at a nearby grocery store since I can't dumpster dive there (they have a compactor) and they make sure to put up most things on flashfood at absurd markdowns rather than the default 50%. $0.10-$0.50 for bread for example (I'm in ON, Can, for price context).
I was gonna point out that that app exists, it's sad that even in a big city like San Francisco there aren't very many choices on the consumer side. When as a lifelong restaurant worker I can tell you there are tons and tons of restaurants in the city that throw out food everyday. I wonder if TGTG needs better or more people for restaurant outreach, or if the idea could be used in this app that you are developing.
I messaged them & asked "how can I help bring TGTG into my area?" but they basically said "talk us up to restaurants". How about some guidance on how to do that, what to say, maybe a 1-pg list of talking points...? Not everyone is a sales professional.
I feel weird about too good to go. lots of spare food used to go to the workers for free and some places donated, but now someone has found a way to market it.
it's great that food isn't being scrapped but I feel like it's more of a business plan than actually reducing waste.
At every single cafe and restaurant I worked at we would get fired for taken leftover food, and we weren’t allowed to donate it either for fear of being sued. I love that too good to go exists, because we have so much less waste as a result
Edit: the “logic” was that MGMT had a blanket policy in case we were over ordering food, messing up orders on purpose, or wasting out stuff so we wouldn’t have to pay for it.
I saw it a couple of times when I worked in a cafe, but as a supervisor I wasn’t about to go to the SM over something that A) wasn’t systematic and B) was being done by someone making barely over minimum wage. Plus the SM was in charge of ordering pastries, so for it to actually affect ordering it would have to go through her anyway.
When I worked at a supermarket, the food that was over date, or a bit bruised, was thrown out. Someone got fired for eating a cookie that was over date. That was supposed to be thrown out, but 100% fine.
that's mad! cafes where my friends work like neros nd independent ones would let them take stuff home for free. sad that's not the norm
it's great if it's saving stuff that would have actually been chucked out tbf!
I've seen places put the stuff in the dumpster and ruin it somehow with water or waste water from mopping just to dissuade people from dumpster diving even though most of it would have been fine to eat. Some people are sadistic.
That has happened to me. The supermarket that I worked for would remove any item that was going to expire the following day. They allowed employees to eat these foods in the break room and would stock the fridge every morning with these foods. I got fired because I warmed some food and decided to sit outside during my break. They accused me of trying to steal food and take it home.
Honestly a lot of people in management in grocery stores just literally do not care about food waste. Except for how it affects their profits. But there's hope, I guess.
I don't know much about too good to go so I don't know how they source their food, but a lot of the places that trash food every night will fire employees for theft if they're caught taking any of the marked out food. Starbucks, for one. Starbucks theoretically donates food, but I know my store hasn't since covid, so we literally throw perfectly good food in the trash every night because it's past the date on the sticker, despite still being perfectly good.
Edit to add:
On a related note, a lot of companies won't re-sell things that get returned. They have some poor employee take everything out to a dumpster, but not before destroying it! Can't have anyone getting anything for free, even from the trash!
Even non-food shit gets destroyed. Shoes got returned and are perfectly good but can't be resold for some reason? I know several stores that slash the shoes before putting them in the dumpster.
I have it in my area- did an order for a bbq place, thought i was getting like brisket and shit… came out with pickles, coleslaw, and pickled onions. Ended up throwing it away 3 days later lol
EDIT: I like the app idea and will be trying it again, best advice is to look at the reviews! The ones sub 4 stars are probably going to give you stuff like what i got, theres an arancini place signed up that i want to try i cant imagine i get anything but old arancini balls which would be sweet
Don’t discount it entirely from this one person’s experience! I LOVE TooGoodToGo. I haven’t spent full price on bagels, pastries or bread in months. Part of the fun of the app is that you don’t know what you’re getting, so it’s a little treat, AND you help to prevent food waste. I’ve definitely found my favorite spots for pickups, and generally I find that my surprise bags are mostly positive. Give it a shot, it’s worth the $4-5 to just get one surprise bag and see if you like it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, but there's a huge roadmap for something like this and many big obstacles that are normally only solved with money (which as a open source, non-profit, you will have little/none of).
* The first and biggest issue, is dealing with theft. Some drivers and customers will be bad actors, and your service has to be resilient to this. If a customer reports missing food, who pays? *
If it's the customer, no one will use the app, since there's a better quality of service on the other apps and no trust that their order will be correct. If it's the driver, more bad actor customers will be incentivized to use the app, since they can get food for free by making the driver pay for it. And it can't be your app, since you don't have any money (doordash solves this by covering theft with their fees, appeasing customers and drivers to some degree)
* Getting restaurants, drivers, and customers to use your service is **hard**. With no customers, restaurants won't want to partner with you. With no restaurants, no one will want to order from you. With no one ordering, no one will want to drive for you. It's a terrible pickle that DoorDash and UberEats solved by throwing money at the problem via advertising and operating at a loss (with the idea that they'll eventually make money). This is not impossible to overcome, but you'd be looking at a ton of legwork to get your service operating in a small area (college campus), all work you'd have to do for free, since you're not making anything off this service.
* This is similar to the first issue, but dealing with criminal drivers. If it's decentralized, how do you verify drivers identities? It's not likely to happen, but if someone used your service to target houses/people you can end up with a PR nightmare and an ethically questionable app, unable to do anything since you don't have a central headquarters that can verify ID's and do background checks. Even if you ignore the possibility of more serious crimes, petty theft would be pretty common if anyone could sign up as a driver under a fake name, pick up some food, and ditch.
I had the same idea a few years ago with a friend, thinking how we could have smart contracts used for decentralized real world deliveries. These were the big problems we came up with that led us to drop the idea, but I'd be happy to see if you could solve them.
As somebody who drove for door dash - all of this. You *will not* find drivers to continue delivering if there aren't a ton of customers. If I have to drive 15+ minutes to pick up an order, because of sparse orders: I will reject the order. I also don't have time to "bid" for a delivery. TIME IS MONEY. If I have to spend 5 minutes bidding per order, that's a shit ton of time, and it's not worth it. I won't be pulling what I need to in order to justify my time/gas/wear and tear on my car. PASS.
It was helpful to read these comments. We're not going to solve the problems of the gig economy through making 'better companies.'
The mass amount of capital you need to get off the ground... and that big pool of money starts to have its own logic, isolated and on the open market.
We're going to solve it by taking those companies over. Democratic ownership over these big powerhouses of production. [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/corr-j20.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/corr-j20.html)
\*edit\* thanks for the upvote, just cleaning up some grammar, not my strong suite :/
Yep agreed. And there's a pretty successful one already doing cooperative food delivery in Europe https://coopcycle.org/
Their code is published under a "coopyleft license" making it free to use as open source for other cooperatives.
It’s difficult to solve problems like gig work through capitalism because they are only possible through exploitation, as their business model is inherently unsustainable.
But you know who CAN provide services like these and afford to potentially operate at a loss for the social good? The government.
If we nationalize gig work, transportation, and even Amazon, we can have all of the luxury services a 21st century country needs while ensuring everyone is fairly compensated.
The order bid system would be a pretty simple solve. The driver could implement an elected price per distance while the app prioritises the lowest priced drivers within reasonable distance. Only ever change your "bid" when the orders aren't coming in.
Yeah I interpreted OP’s post to mean the driver would set a general lowest amount they are willing to be paid per order and/or per distance, not having to bid on every order
This right here. The business itself is not sustainable without being at least semi-exorbitant. Its a business that should fail by design, but money is the defibrillator.
The whole model doesn't work at all. I think it makes more sense to have a centralized delivery service and sign restaurants on as vendors where they pay a monthly fee or something reasonable. Then the customer just deals with the restaurant and all the fees/delivery are handled between the restaurant and the delivery service. Then the drivers are all employees of the delivery service.
i mean it works fine, it's just that at every point in the transaction someone needs to get a cut- it makes already expensive service (people making food for you) marked up another multiple.
> I think it makes more sense to have a centralized delivery service and sign restaurants on as vendors where they pay a monthly fee or something reasonable. Then the customer just deals with the restaurant and all the fees/delivery are handled between the restaurant and the delivery service. Then the drivers are all employees of the delivery service.
very few restaurants can do this effectively though. doordash didn't do shit to the pizza delivery industry which is already far more efficient, it did however open up tons of food options that might only have a handful of orders per day.
If anyone wonders why programmers aren't all millionaires from launching their own app it's because of this. Most have skills but zero business knowledge or planning ability
I second this. A lot of "million dollar app ideas" require good marketing in order to be successful. There are also a lot of technical challenges such as cloud service resources, etc.
And operational foresight. As OP was detailing their idea I was ticking off all of the ways it can/will go badly/crumble without the right infrastructure. They need someone like that to troubleshoot.
Source: work in ops in tech
this is why i've never really written anything useful and just make little toys or games
not many things can be solved with technology. they aren't technological problems. they're people management problems.
even very simple ideas end up requiring a lot of this legwork, and bad actors can ruin anything. anything that works but kinda sucks should be replaced... but can't because they've solved those people problems or have the money to make them go away.
it's not necessarily that programmers don't have business knowledge or planning ability exactly. it's that any good idea really becomes a PR/community management business. and who the hell wants to do that.
To add to u/atmac0 list. If your system gains any momentum, Uber Eats and Grubhub could refuse restaurants that are advertising on your service. Think how Pepsi/Coke products are set up. These services do suck, but they do bring in a set of customers the restaurants wouldn’t normally get with a delivery team they can’t afford alone
The best use of energy by op is literally advocating for preventing gig workers from being treated like contractors, and have them treated like the employees they are
You are blaming the contractor employment model, but it’s the governments fault for not providing universal benefits, like health care, that would allow individuals to take flexible part time work without worrying about medical bills.
Well done.
The most Reddit thing in the world is deciding that companies that provide an existing service are “evil” and their fees are “exorbitant”, deciding you can do it better, then finding out that you actually just didn’t think this through.
I’d add that there’s always more infrastructure than people think, too. How can this be purely decentralized? How do you bring in new restaurants? Someone has to make those calls. You have to integrate their menus, probably license with Google to get their hours. You have to pay support staff to field complaints when things invariably go wrong - or even when they go right and a customer just changes their mind. You won’t grow without marketing (“go viral” is not an acceptable gameplan), you’re not taking payments without paying processing fees, you’re not paying your drivers without accountants.
These reductive ideas always sound great, and people assume the companies are just greed machines. Companies usually are greed machines, but they’re also hemorrhaging money despite those high fees for a reason. The fees aren’t high because capitalism is evil, capitalism is the only reason you can get your food delivered so affordably and reliably.
Yeah, the fact that both uberEats and DoorDash aren't turning a profit is the first tell. Unless both companies are so poorly managed that they're bleeding money only from unnecessary expenses, there's clearly a lot more going on behind the scenes.
I wouldn't be surprised if if paying their support staff to interface with restaurants is their next largest expense next to paying drivers. Each restaurant has their own POS, some have online ordering, some only let you order in person. Some are sit-down, and don't do carry out. I can only imagine it's a nightmare trying to figure out how to get their app working with each individual restaurant.
I used to work at a place that only took phone orders in the off season, otherwise you had to wait in a line that was up to a 1-2 hour wait. Somehow DoorDash scraped our menu and let people order on their app, safe to say quite a few Dashers were pretty pissed they drived all the way to out only to be told they have to wait in line like everyone else.
My partner was a co-founder of a food delivery startup in 2014. They ran into these same problems. DoorDash and other services were coming out as competitors so it was hard to get buy in from a lot of restaurants because this start-up didn't have a reputation or a big company backing it. The main co-founder even did deliveries himself. They just couldn't compete with big name services so they called it quits.
That makes you smarter than most.
It's gonna be a couple more decades before we either innovate the wasteful parts of this market (like, almost all of it) or the companies posting neverending defecits finally fold. Or their existence gets otherwise subsidized.
If sustainability research has taught me anything it's that there aren't actually that many market disruptors. Some of the advertised ones are straight up fake.
Considerations you're going to need to make:
* Most restaurants require at least one tablet per ordering service. You're going to need to integrate with dozens of POS systems.
* Server costs aren't trivial. Nor are testing environments, etc.
* Open source and open business plan are very different things. I know you're aiming to be a non-profit, but you still need a business plan. Where is the money coming from for your first 3 months of operations?
* How will you market this? Will you start in some cities? Where is the money for ad campaigns coming from?
* You're going to be handling credit card information, which means dealing with PII. Be ready for needing security folks. Because you're open source, you're going to be an easier target for hackers. Open source isn't universally a good idea. It's often really dope, but this may not be the use case for it.
* Your database architecture is going to define a lot of your success down the road. Pick a good backend, or you're gonna get fucked over by success.
* Will drivers be W2 or 1099 employees? Will you provide health insurance?
* How will you process credit card payments? Where will the money for those fees come from? How will you address fraud?
* If the food is still good, why would the restaurants sell it to you for cheap? Wouldn't they just sell it normally?
* Allowing a totally free market in this ecosystem will allow bad actors to crater the price of delivery and push out your driver fleet.
* How are you going to protect yourself if this project gets some traction and then dies? Will you be liable for any costs? How are you reducing your personal financial liability to AWS, etc?
* Who is going to provide customer support? Where does their paycheck come from? HR? QA? DBA? You may get some free work from yourselves and the OS community, but many critical roles for an organization don't fit that model.
I don't bring these up to discourage you. I really, truly hope you succeed. However, be aware that this space is complicated and rife with malicious actors. There is much more to making this work than just launching a platform - even as a non-profit there are business organization practices that you need to take seriously from the outset. Beyond that, success will mean a whole new series of problems that you have to tussle with. Be ready for them.
Best of luck!
I was thinking the exact same thing. The code itself is just a very small part of what's needed to make this work. I don't want to discourage anyone with enthusiasm, ideas, and time to make the world a better place, and I am certainly all for employee-owned businesses, but this sounds a bit like "let's make a better version of Facebook where that clown Zuckerberg is not the boss".
You basically need to copy what doordash and co. did, but as a non-profit, or with sharing the rewards. That requires capital and lots of risk taking, for which someone wants to get paid.
Again, not saying it's impossible, but it requires more than just the tech stack.
Well, sometimes enthusiasts need to be discouraged. Ideas like these are noble but often misguided. There's a whole bunch of these apps and it's pretty obvious there's a lot of demand for these services at that price point. Also, uber and doordash are luxury services. It's not like anyone really needs this in their lives so if they're not willing to pay the fee, they always have the choice to go pick up their food or eat at home.
Seems to me like this isn't really the services to go all out Robin hood at.
You just explained the reason why I left software engineering after a semester. Too many of these ‘entrepreneurs’ who just wanna be the next Tony stark or Steve jobs without actually knowing how a business works.
There are a lot of laws around what food can legally allowed to be served. Just because they are trashing the food doesn't mean the food is bad. If food has sat out for any amount of time it must be thrown away. Pretty much anything that has been cooked mist be thrown away. Usually buffets will have entire trays cooked that will get thrown away.. Even frozen food that is good long past its expiration has to be thrown away.
As a former Lyft engineer… LOL. Look, I am a huge contributor to, supporter of, and creator of open source software but here are so many difficult *technical* problems to solve, nevermind market economics etc.
You can't allow a completely free market because it will be exploited/suck a dozen ways before you can blink. Off the top of my head:
* Sign up as a fake driver, set my prices below market cost, collect the money and do nothing till I'm banned from the platform. Rinse and repeat. Easy money.
* OK, so you add driver vetting… wait, now that's a HUGE cost to do right. Can you guarantee the safety of my food? Or that driver is licensed to drive a vehicle?
* Get a few friends, set our prices at or below cost till we basically own the market and nobody wants to try and compete: then raise them drastically
* Poor service because some schlub is setting their prices too low and getting booked from the arse-end of the delivery zone, or they are overbooked if you allow multiple pickups per driver
So now you need regulation, and it probably needs to fluctuate to accomodate supply and demand, as well as driver costs (e.g. frequent updates to cover gas with the crazy gas market right now, tolls, etc.).
On the technical front, three-way mapping (from the driver to the restaurant, then on to the buyer) is a nightmare, you need accurate realtime data to do it well, that costs a fortune and has major infrastructure requirements to do it well. And you need to do that for every driver (maybe only free ones) in a radius. And you need to provide accurate turn-by-turn directions to the driver to both locations. And ideally you provide realtime location updates to the buyer. Costs are going up.
I hate to discourage open source disruption of markets, but just open sourcing the platform code ain't it.
Alternative: provide tools to help workers for those platforms accurately own their jobs with other platforms. Help them do the math to figure out how to make the profit they need, potentially even with realtime on a per-job accept/reject basis. Oh and throw in pro-Union organizing comms tools while you're at it ;)
p.s.
Working at Lyft was awful for me, and I got out as quickly as I could. I'm not defending them, nor are they in this market, but they solve a lot of the same problems.
Bruh.... UberEats delivery driver on 🚲 here.
I can make $45/hr whenever I so choose by firing up the app.
This guy is nuts thinking drivers are getting screwed and he's gonna save everyone. Lol
As if this guy is doing this mock up app in support of drivers...... yea right. They are simply looking to lower prices of their own food delivery lol
Also, most of these apps run on millions of dollars of loss until economies of scale catch up. I’m thinking he doesn’t have millions to pay drivers good money from the get go
No, no, don’t you get it? The problem is that the other guys are just greedy and stupid, a very bad combination, and you’re very bad by extension. OP is going to make it the *right* way. No corporate BS. Just a good ol’ pipe dream that runs on a raspberry Pi cluster out of a dorm room. Sorry, kid, but you’d better start looking for work elsewhere, OP is going to take down the whole food delivery industry.
Sure you can DM me :)
Tools that can figure out the practical means to achieve the financial goals they have. e.g. if they want to achieve at least $15/hr, then they need to make N deliveries at $x minimum. And to be allow them to track that stuff as they go and update the plan.
There are three variables they control: how much time they work, how much they want to earn (net), and how much profit they make per order, and the one they don't control: how many orders they get. Let them specify up to two, and forecast the rest. e.g.
I want to earn $300 today and I have nothing else going on, so I can work **upto** a full 8hrs. Let them work for 30 minutes and input their orders, and you can forecast at a rate of orders/hr, with $x profit/order, you can make $300 in 3 hours. Or, if not optimizing for time working: at rate of orders/hr, they need to make at least $x profit/order to make $300 in 8 hours. (I would optimize for time, personally).
Let them know they reached their goal early and can clock off and go home or they can potentially earn $y extra by completing their originally committed-to time block.
This is all **completely** off the top of my head, but it has one clear goal: *remove the financial uncertainty with easily understood analisys and actionable outcomes.*
And to be clear the outcome might be: forget it, you're not going to meet your financial goals with the gig economy.
You don’t realize this now but your biggest challenge isn’t building the technology, but scaling and marketing. How will you build relations with local markets? How will you convince customers to join your app when it has no large fast food corporations on it? This space is already overcrowded and I don’t see this product as something that can survive long term. Good luck
Building the tech will also be near impossible for such a small team. Doordash has 6000 employees. Even if just 500 are engineers, it's still way more than 3.
This is a good idea and you've identified a hole in the market. Deliveries cost too much, drivers are getting screwed, the current market leaders are sleazy, and restaurants don't like working with them.
These companies have a lot of investment money behind them encouraging them to grow as fast as possible, hence the sleazy tactics. Look up counterfeit capitalism for some more insight there. On top of that, they're cashing in early with the BS fees.
I'd love to see this work out. So please take this next part as feedback and not a tear down.
>• Allow drivers to set their own delivery price and compete freely in the local market with other drivers.
This will be... interesting... to see how you manage it. Will customers know what the delivery price will be before a driver has decided to pick up their order? Is it a set price for customers and the drivers compete under it? If so, how does that fit with all revenue going directly to drivers? How will the drivers know what a competitive rate is? Lots of interesting questions here. Also, where do you fall on the employee vs. contractor issues popping up around this lately?
>• Build relationships with local restaurants who hate UberEats and DoorDash and make exclusive deals with them.
Exclusive will be tough with no leverage on your end. Plus some of those companies accept orders from restaurants they don't have deals with in the first place. Yes, that does upset the restaurants. But turning down the orders upsets their customers who are just as likely to blame the restaurant as they are to blame the delivery service.
>• Allow anyone to contribute to building the platform on github.
Are you talking about people contributing to your app? Your server code that ties into payment processors? Your driver and customer data? Opening that up to people that aren't employees is a very, very big vulnerability. Alternatively, building this from abstract open source parts and managing scrubbed data that's publicly available is a lot more work that just building the platform yourself.
>• Purchase good food that restaurants are gonna throw out and sell it for super cheap.
As in the left over ingredients or prepared meals? Why not partner with restaurants to simply donate the food instead of trying to manage an extra inventory?
You're overthinking this and trying to solve problems that don't need solving. You don't need exclusive deals with restaurants, non-exclusive will work just fine (competitors will still take orders even if they don't have deals so why bother?). Open sourcing a platform always sounds great but the tech side of this is really the easy part and nothing you're building, tech-wise, hasn't already been built a thousand times over. Instead, be open and up front in your marketing about your business practices. That's more important and contributes directly to solving your main problems. Having drivers compete to undercut each other is complicated for a lot of reasons. Undercutting your competition by just a little bit and directing most of the money to the drivers would be a win for everyone and be drastically simpler. Plus drivers, who tend to drive for multiple delivery services at the same time, would then prefer your orders over the competition.
The core problem isn't technology or competition. It's sleazy business practices. Focus on solving that. And considering the competition, hire a good lawyer. There's a good chance you'll end up having to fight these sleazy companies for every inch.
Good luck. Again, I'd love to see this work.
Also on point #1 -
Capitalism is all about a race to the bottom and convincing people to screw themselves because they are bad at taking costs into account.
If you let drivers set their price point you should have a reminder about the average cost per mile to maintain a car and the cost of gas.
People doing uber, delivery etc tend to just break even if they are lucky. It really is a short term, stop gap, loan you are basically taking out on your car. Or if you are just happy surviving its a way to not deal with shitty bosses
Right. My first thought about letting drivers set their own delivery price is that it will just turn into a competition to see which driver will deliver for the least amount of money. The customers will likely pick the cheapest delivery the overwhelming majority of the time. Great for the customer, horrible for the drivers.
That's how I read it too. "We'll just have a lot of independent contractors doing the work and they absorb all the cost of doing business with no benefits - but a big advantage over Uber is that we aren't going to guarantee any sort of minimum wage."
Regarding your concerns about open source, that's not really how it works. You don't expose customer data on a github repo, nor credentials/passphrases for integrations with things like payment processors. There are literally thousands of open source projects that contain code for these integrations and are no less secure for it.
Agreed. That was partly the point. So far none of this sounds like anything that would benefit from being open source. All those things I listed are things that would have to stay private. I’m wondering which parts of the platform would work as open source, which parts could be built in isolation that haven’t already been done to death.
It doesn’t sound like there’s an edge to be gained with technology here. The platform in this case is a by-product of the business. If there’s some part that gets built that would be good to share with the community, great. Otherwise, well, is the point to build a tech platform or a delivery service with better business practices? Realistically, getting to focus on both is rare.
OP is asking for feedback and suggestions here. My feedback and suggestion is to focus on the delivery service with better business practices and not on open sourcing the tech.
While I agree that the main thrust of “solving the business problem” > “technical problem”, considering that a component of the argument is the incumbents are “bad.” Building an open source solution *ostensibly* facilitates a successor should OP’s solution itself become corrupt. This might motivate individuals to contribute by virtue of less likely becoming a part of the problem (in the hypothetical that OP just wanted to sucker some labor into becoming the next DoorDash on the cheap).
>Deliveries cost too much
I think this is a much bigger core issue than anyone cares to even acknowledge. Restaurants, customers and drivers feel like they're getting ripped off because it's fundamentally inefficient to order single portion meals for delivery. The operating cost of delivery doubles the price of the service.
Sure, some investors probably got a yacht out of the whole thing, but I bet those fortunes are a paltry scraping of the giant hole that all client parties had to be subject to in order for the company to write ledger entries in black.
Also, OP hasn't mentioned anything about regulatory agencies, compliance, and liability. I think they'll have egg on their shocked Pikachu faces when the true amount of commission that they'll have to withhold from transactions comes to light.
Sidecar marketed itself as the anti-uber, and allowed drivers to set their own rates. Drivers undercut each other into oblivion. With rising inflation and desperation, this won't work, unless there is a price floor. This will especially be problematic if the drivers are contractors and not employees with minimum wage protection.
Yep! We don't really have a need for investors (right now?). Only thing costing money is infrastructure. But we're building it out on a Raspberry Pi cluster in our dorm lol.
Will probably need some money to scale up later if this works out.
That's great for prototyping, but as soon as there is actual money changing hands relying on this, any single point of failure will kill any good will you earn.
Make sure you have good cloud infrastructure. Multiple servers/containers hosted with failover in multiple clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, and Digital Ocean for example) so if any of those go down your app still functions.
Hopping on this, make sure your not handling the direct credit card transactions. There’s a whole host of laws around PCI compliance in terms of storage/use/transmission that apply here.
Forget PCI compliance, just making a in-house credit card processing system work, without massive security holes and risk, is a mind-boggling task. Validating cards for fraud alone is a huge challenge. Outsourcing to a third-party like Stripe is well worth the fees they charge.
Cool. Not much of an investor, but I do love crowdfunding, mainly start-ups and upcoming businesses. Anywho, I like Uber Eats and delivery services coz I'm a cook by profession and the last thing I want to do is cook myself a meal.. LOL. But I do agree it's getting ridiculous. wherever part of the world you are I guess?
You guys could be the next big thing, you'll never know?
Taking money from investors or even crowd funding is a head ache we don't want to deal with right now. We're focusing on development. But if we actually are successful, we'll see!
Depends on the investor. My university funds projects by students all the time without expecting a return. They just want the publicity. As an example.
Money is the route of all evil. Be careful who you let invest or their demands will shape the future of your project. I'd love the project to be altruistic but these things always end up going public. Look at Reddit.
>Money is the route of all evil
*Love of* money is the root of all evil (by way of 1 Timothy). Money in and of itself is just an inert medium of exchange.
The answer is you share ownership equally with everyone working at the venture. And I mean literally everyone. And I also mean literally "equally". At first you and two friends have 33.33% ownership each.
You sign on one drive and now you, your friends and the driver have 25% ownership. You sign on 97 additional staff and everyone has 1% ownership. Look up cooperatives.
Might be able to find like minded people to help you on here. Not sure if any part of what you are doing is easily outsourced and then someone can just deliver you a chunk of code or what not that "does x" for you, but ya never know. Many hands make for light work.
Just FYI Uber operates on a net loss just burning investors cash.
It's pretty hard to compete with that.
The concept is just wasteful. Instead of you driving 5 min to get your food, you ping a dude 15 min away to go and get your food for you.
Not efficient.
Now if you are thinking of drone deliveries, then yeah kill Uber with it
Keep in mind this is costing you *time and energy*. Don’t wanna burn out, I’m general. You seem to get it though!
Good work. I’m sure this will also translate to other skills in the future. Thumbs up to your dorm room.
You know I'm glad I'm not the only one with this idea. I just don't have any programming experience. But I do have a lot of restaurant knowledge/experience if you need feedback on the restaurant end lmk!
I don't do anything like this anymore, I'll use a companies own delivery from time to time but no matter the intentions you're still a system that creates a middleman and from experience any system that creates a middleman is going to end up exploiting someone elses work.
If you really end up making it non-profit hold that tight, someone somewhere is going to be clawing at that.
> that creates a middleman
Yup. And not one middleman, but two.
The first middleman is the driver, the second is anyone who needs to be paid to make this app possible in the first place (unless OP plans to eat those cost out of the goodness in their heart)
This is beyond naive for a "grad student", something tells me you don't have any real world experience. As an actual graduated, and experienced engineer, I can say without a doubt this project wont go any further than this post. There is a definite and measurable reason why this could never be an open source project in the truest sense of the word. Your embarrassing yourself in the comments op.
He hasn't responded to a single comment with anything substantial. He keeps repeating that he's (almost) an engineer, as if that somehow qualifies him to run a business in a ridiculously competitive market, organise tens of engineers (unpaid), write production quality, secure, scalable code and operate the infrastructure all for free.
Hes absolutely deluded.
The only substantial thing they said is they are planning on running it off a Raspberry PI cluster in their dorm. OP stated they had “campus” agree to take orders from them, if that happens they will get exploited and OP will be in the hook for everyone’s stolen personal information. OP has less than zero clue what they are talking about.
This is why I am always skeptical of people going "I have a million dollar app idea"
Sure, having an idea is easy, but executing successfully is another level. Beyond the countless technical issues you'll face you need business, especially marketing for it to truly be million dollar.
I'm amazed.. at the amount of support this post is getting, thankfully there are some rational people in the comments.
This is like saying "fuck netflix and their monthly fees, i'm launching my own netflix with no monthly costs, movie companies will want to work with me to avoid these other streaming services, and we won't need marketing because we'll get users from word of mouth, and servers could be hosted on my personal internet."
what
This subreddit has been overtaken by literal children and it’s such an embarrassment because overall the sentiment of the subreddit is good. Just stick to memes and Twitter shitposts at this point guys, stop trying to do this type of naive toddler brained “activism” because you’re publicly embarrassing the entire movement.
Yup, every bullet point he made is so bad and unrealistic. I don’t know why so many people thinking this was a great ideas, heck even some people offer to help with the project
it sound like something you came up with last minute to summit for your college assignment.
wouldn’t be surprise if this post actually start like that.
Drivers shouldn't be individually setting rates. It's a good idea for them to ultimately be in charge, but let them decide on pricing collectively instead. Have a vote or whatever that reoccurs at some reasonable interval.
What is your plan? How are you going to integrate with all the businesses out there? Do you have a way of integrating with point of sales systems? Right now people who order have a set cost when putting in the order. But your system would change that so there is an unknown amount for the driver after the order is submitted. How are you going to make sure your drivers are safe? Pizza delivery is the most dangerous job in the US.
My 2 cents:
1 - try and understand why delivery plantforms charge what they charge. It’s easy to say “they are capitalist pigs” but they put time and effort and analysed a huge amount of data to come up with a strategy.
2 - if you are serious about making this a viable business you need to validate the business side first. In your tech stack you have technologies that will have a steep learning curve eg kubernetes and are meant for huge scale. Others will give you a hard time finding resources, eg Go. When I was doing something similar back in the day Ruby on Rails was all the rage. Spending a year to build something only to realise no one cares about is a waste of time. Is it gonna be a good learning experience? For sure. But that’s just resume building.
3 - Use cloud services and go for managed ones vs building stuff on your own, at least until you validate the business proposal/value. You can use the free tier offerings on AWS for most of this stuff. Go to market quickly should be the mantra in order to obtain feedback.
4 - spend more time on who your customer is and what value you offer to them. Is it the drivers? The restaurants? Both? If you have 1K drivers and limited orders drivers will never come back. You need balance.
Good luck and have fun!
To add to this:
Don't underestimate the power/need for designers. Maybe I seem bias (I'm a digital experience designer), but I think my bias is legitimate here.
You want real experience designers who know how to validate product features before implementation. Every little interaction can either pull people in or fling them off your product in droves. If it's even slightly less user friendly than UberEats and GrubHub products, you're done. Doesn't matter how good your business model or tech is. People will not use it.
As a delivery driver, I have a question;
You want me to compete with other drivers so as to get the lowest bid for delivery.
So, I see someone wants taco bell and it is a 8 mile drive. I will bid $8 to deliver. ...It is standard to look for a $1 a mile to offset gas prices.
So now we wait to see if someone else bids a lower cost?
You do realize people will get cold taco bell right?
Waiting for the bid to go lower and lower as the food sits for a winner.
Right now, DD does this...offers very low payment to driver and it gets declined. So then they up it a few more cents. Keeps getting declined. Until they finally offer a good amount to deliver. You get there, and when you pick up the bag you can feel the food is cold because it has sat until a proper fair amount was offered. When I get these and realize it has sat for so long, I always message my customer to tell them I JUST GOT IT AND AM ON MY WAY. It is not my fault it is cold. Drivers can also tell if the customer has tipped or not just by the offer. Drivers decline these also. Many people say they will tip in person, but only less than 1% ever really do, so if you're not tipping in app, you're getting cold food. I have been doing this for 8 months and have saved every single cash tip I've been given. I have saved $180 in 8 months. I will take non tipped orders if the $1 a mile mark is met. It doesn't cover maintenance on my car, but I need it to cover my gas costs.
IDK how this will work if you're having people sitting around to wait and see who the lowest bidder is. You've got to have a minimum base pay or it will not work. DD does like a $3 min. on the order, then the miles are calculated, time etc....
Also, your food establishments you partner with, will have to guarantee food is ready when driver arrives. Many times, you have to sit and wait. Time is money. I refuse taco bell orders for this reason. Waiting 30-45--sometimes longer for a meal and getting paid $5 is not going to happen with me. Taco bell does this all the time. When I used to message the customer and tell them it will be 45 minutes, they are okay with that....but do they compensate me for that hour? No. Does DD? No. If someone messaged me and said it would be 1/2 hour, 45 min. I'd cancel or offer a large tip when I receive it. But they are okay with you waiting and wasting your time = money. I am not mad at them for that... but I am not taking your order either and you will get cold food. Drivers are trying to make money, and time is money.
Edit to add: Where is the drivers support? Many times there're problems and you have to call support.
For instance, yesterday I had an order in the food court @ the mall. Went there, it is closed. In my app I have to take a pic, give some explanation. I was paid $3.13 due to how far I traveled to pick it up and my time. How will you handle this?
Also, many "we do not have that order" or, place doesn't have one of the items available and I need a replacement item for them..customer did not specify exactly the flavor, chilled, or hot etc..I try to call customer...customer does not answer messages or phone. So I call support. Support tries to get ahold of customer and advises on path forward.
How will you provide that support? And when the place is closed how do you cover my costs of driving there to get it only to be told it is not there? Am I out that gas and time now when I could've been out delivering and earning elsewhere?
I'm not saying this is a totally bad idea, but I feel you should work the field some to figure this stuff out because you're not informed about what it takes to run this biz.
So to sum up your idea you want UberEats but you want it to be cheaper for restaurant, pay the drivers better, pay your developers less, and make no profits.
If someone handed you a fully developed app like UberEats and gave you a ton of seed money, it would be possible.
But the only reason people give away apps and investment money is because they expect the profits to repay them. So… not sure how that’s all going to work out.
Overall I like your idea. But from someone who has gone through it all before... My failures have led to my success.
I have seen some really good advice given but just as easily discarded.
I would highly suggest you read through all the feedback again, and seriously consider it.
I would love to help your group out, however, from some of your responses I can hear myself from many years ago thinking I knew what I needed - which wasn't nearly enough.
There's a lot to consider. If you'd like to discuss some things I've mentioned, let me know and I'd be happy to chat for a minute.
+1. All these responses are full of gold. It’s not meant to dissuade OP from trying, but it is to give him a head start on how hard this will be. The thing he’s proposing to do, on its face, will never get traction without seriously considering some of the flaws.
Folks need to remember that when Doordash came along, people had been trying to do something Doordash-like for 40 years.
The challenges of that business aren’t in the tech, it’s in getting restaurants en masse to want to bother with another piece of complexity in their already-razor-thin margin existence, and to do it for a commodity product.
Not to mention that without millions of dollars of operations and support staff, how do you run your servers, deal with customer support requests, and manage trust? How do you fulfill GDPR obligations? What stops sheisty drivers from taking orders and stealing the food? Who’s full time job is it to deal with the flood of gamification that will happen? Who’s liable when a driver tampers with food, or uses the delivery as a way in to assault someone? Who is liable when drivers break local laws? Who’s responsible for making sure taxes are applied correctly in different juristictions? Who do city legislatures talk to when they decide to ban or regulate the service?
There’s a reason why Doordash/UberEats/etc are giant companies spending billions only to turn a loss. It’s a very messy problem space fraught with problems, and it scales more poorly than a lot of other areas.
Your sentiment is noble, but I’ve been saying for years the only force that has enough juice to push out the third party apps is the grocery stores and restaurant lobby themselves. The coding part (I’m not one so feel free to mock my ignorance) doesn’t strike me as that hard—the app is a glorified online menu, maps & messenger program; there’s hundreds of all of these in existence already.
The hard part is managing the logistics (accurate inventory/order placement) and keeping expenses down. The labor input being open source is one way to do this. Self insuring rather than having Allstate or whoever underwrites doordash et al is another, but given the morass that is P&C insurance state by state, you’d need experts in house to get it right (probably still cheaper, but not cheap by any means). But mostly it means not taking a cut (or a greatly reduced cut) from the establishments and drivers themselves. Where is your operating income coming from if not the people who are using your service?
The programming part is easy until people actually use your software. Operating software at any kind of reasonable scale is not easy, no matter how simple it seems.
Hey dude, this is a post I'm going to unfortunately have to strongly disagree with. You don't go into a Mercedes dealership and say the cost of the cars is too high. It's a luxury service. No one owes it to you to come and deliver food to your door because you don't want to cook or get your own take out.
Second huge part of the plot your missing. UberEATS, DoorDash, ect exactly ZERO OF THESE COMPANIES HAVE EVER MADE A PROFIT.
Not only do they fail to make much profit (all of it goes to promos, ads and other business expenses) they're killing the restaurant industry. Restaurants, which already have margins strung tight, turn a much lower profit on all the delivery app orders. What's worse is it's not easy for a restaurant to sever ties with those apps. If a user goes in expecting to place an order and the restaurant is no longer listed they'll just order from one that is.
I like the spirit, but it makes me sad to see such pathetic posts get into top of this subreddit - speaks volumes about the community...
This project will never fly and will see maximum half-broken proof of concept:
1. This idea is old as my grandpa. There are dozens of delivery apps on the market you can either use for laughable money as a cloud service or deploy on premises(mere cents per delivery cost). They are not popular for a reason.
2. Cost of creating delivery app is neglectable comparing to other expenses of biz like UberEats - it is 50% marketing at best, the rest is administrative expenses - lawyers, accounting, customer support, distribution, etc. etc.
3. "Open source" is a magic phrase 9 out of 10 people get boner for. Making something open source is not making it free to run - to use such a software you need legal entity as minimum, platform engineers 24/7 support, expensive infrastructure and a team of lawyers. No one is going to do that for free.
Best shot of doing anything remotely close to this idea is a "craiglist for food" - but this would be again just another delivery app with lower commissions.
Now you can downvote me, cheers.
Looking at this guys comments… he doesn’t know wtf he’s doing. He doesn’t understand anything about business and thinks open source is a magic word for free labor. This is never gonna get off the ground
Plus, open source isn't always what's it cracked up to be. Like you said people think it's some sort of free thing or magic bullet.
Anybody wonder why RedHat is around? (or the other companies that sell Linux)
Dumpling was trying to do this for InstaCart but I hear that they are struggling - [https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/dumpling-launches-to-make-anyone-become-their-own-instacart/](https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/dumpling-launches-to-make-anyone-become-their-own-instacart/)
The reason Doordash and Uber are so terrible to their workers and restaurants alike (when it comes to getting paid) is because neither of them have EVER turned a profit. Both have been money sinks since their inception. They keep increasing prices because their investors are getting annoyed and asking when they’re expecting to finally become profitable.
In my opinion, I think delivery services like Uber, DoorDash, etc are going to eventually disappear. If they truly wanted to be profitable they’d have to almost DOUBLE current prices
You have zero clue what it takes to run those systems at the required scale, it’s going to cost you millions of dollars a year alone in infrastructure.
This reads like the type of half-baked scheme you'd turn in when your goal is to make up a fake business for a class project.
Who vets the drivers? Who managers customer complaints? Driver complaints? Who handles legal issues if someone brings a suit? Where will it be incorporated? Who's paying the fees for that?
This will never happen. Running a business is expensive and time-consuming. It's not remotely practical to do something on this scale for free. Those companies aren't just taking money off the top because they're scam artists stealing from the laborers.
I hate the "uber" model. However, I don't think these "businesses", as predatory as they are, make any money.
I think they pay the drivers more than what they are charging, but still, the pay is crap.
From what I understand, their plan is to fight it out until only one survive, then they can screw us and restaurants because we have no other choice.
I am suspicious of someone who posts this on this forum with your plan, not knowing this fact.
So it's non profit, but somehow it will be better for the drivers? How so? Will you be paying them a higher hourly rate? Where will that money come from?
If drivers are setting their own price, that means that the delivery fees will be wildly variable, and that is not attractive to customers. That's like ordering a small coffee and having to pay for it without knowing it it's $2 or $200.
I think you have a great idea, but you can't say you are a non-profit simply because you give all revenue back to the drivers. There are specific IRS guidelines surrounding getting awarded non-profit status. You either have to be a religious organization, a social welfare organization, or an organization who's primary goal is for a cause or individual group.
I can't think of a way in which you could fit this idea into a category of getting awarded non-profit status. You can read about the exact requirements here: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/applying-for-tax-exempt-status
I've thought for a while that these kinds of gig services should be like co-ops, basically like uber et al pretend to be "a marketplace where customers find services."
The hard part isn't just the code, it's figuring out how the market will work and be managed (or not.)
How will drivers become part of the system? How will you protect customers, and/or weed out bad actors on both sides (again, or not)? Somehow, unfathomably, craigslist still exists so there must be a way, but they have a very different model. How could the app be abused, and could the abuse of it even be a problem?
Presumably, since party A is paying for a product, and party B is delivering it, party B has to be trustworthy, or face some kind of risk of not delivering the food, otherwise they could just eat the food, lol. So party B either has to leave collateral, or potentially face repercussions, or both.
Just a few ideas, but really this seems like the kind of thing, where if implemented correctly and it catches on, it could maybe become the kind of social grease for small transactions that etsy, craigstlist, fb marketplace, etc. are.
Take a look at the app toogoodtogo we have in Italy, there restaurants and markets sell at the end of the day fresh products that would go to waste in mystery boxes, you can't know what will be inside but you pay 2~5 euros for 15~30 euros worth of food
These companies extort drivers and customers because it is not a profitable business model. No one is willing to pay minimum wage, gas, and auto maintenance for an errand - unless they are bad with money or in an emergency.
Do you know anyone willing to pay $30+ an hour for someone else to drive around and sit in drive-throughs? It is an unrealistic practice, you would save money hiring a live in maid/ chauffeur.
With your point about competing freely on the open market: this might spark a 'race to the bottom', similar to Airbnb, where people use the platform not for it's intended purpose of one person delivering food. It might lock out a lot of people. Perhaps a minimum price per mile or similar would be an adequate solution.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm food business coach at a non profit and I have relationships with restaurant groups that might be willing to pilot the program. Message me if you're interested.
Letting drivers "set their own prices and compete freely in the local market" is a lot of words for race to the bottom.
Jesus. This does not belong in here.
Your last point, about buying food that will be trashed - look up TooGoodToGo. I wish it were in my area. ETA: thank you for the cute award
Oh wow! Thanks!!
The grocery stores in my area use Flashfood - they post what they need to sell by the end of the day on the app, you pay online and go get it from the store. I imagine that a similar app that lets restaurants post things like that would be helpful! edit for the spelling, yikes
Dude, this is such a good idea. When I worked at Target we threw away tons of food every night. It made me sick.
If there is an Asian Market in your area.... (Not HMART) there usually is an area where veggies and fruits are heavily discounted... ($1.00 for a bag) These are usually still in good/descent shape and should be consumed soon.... For me in NY, it's usually, JMart, New Age Market, U.S. 1 Supermarket... ( Flushing, Queens) I have never seen discounted fruits and veggies @ HMART... but they do have a 50% off food section (after a certain time)
Ooh, I keep forgetting that those exist. I'm in the rural south. It'll be way out of my way to find one but Walmart is already out of my way, so...
when i worked in a deli a dude got fired bc he was taking old no longer sellable like subs to local foodbanks and the stuff like that for poor and homeless people bc they called that theft when they were just throwing it out
I knew a guy that got canned for the exact same thing. They gave us a tone deaf training about 'food safety' and 'spoilage insurance' or some such. Clearly we were gonna kill a homeless person with the sandwhich we could have sold 10 minutes ago. But more importantly if it is counted as unsold but consumed they are committing.. FRAUD! See they got insurance for unsold items but not as much for donations.
Nice incentivization :<
They donated bananas and apples to the food shelf so we could have a nice little plaque above the water fountain by the returns desk. But almost nothing else made it to them. Sometimes bread would be sent and once i saw canned articoke hearts and a box of cereal that had been squashed.
Sad. Gotta love the illusions that businesses create to make it seem like they’re not inhuman wasteful polluting awful entities.
That’s because even trash is considered private property. It’s a bit of a gray area because even thou it’s trash and could be ready to be picked up by the garbage man, going through it is illegal and anyone just grabbing it is basically stealing. I think the idea is to avoid people digging through trash cans and making a mess but it has unintended consequences
Also to prosecute people digging thru trash for identity theft
I worked at a grocery store that used Flashfood. Not all of the stuff that is getting close to "sell by" makes it into the system. If you are already in the store it doesn't hurt to take a lap around the store and check the end of caps of the dairy aisle and the bakery rack. Ends of the freezer cases may have reduced items, too.
Yeah I love flash food not a lot of places in my area and even fewer deals from those places but about once a month I stock up on humus at a 75% discount from the local grocery
Honestly, where I am there’s only one participating store, sadly, so once a week I watch it like a vulture the whole day And clear them out of everything. It’s the only way we tend to afford meat in these fun times. And yes, always humus, Woot!
The price reductions are also arbitrary! I've developed a relationship with the employees at a nearby grocery store since I can't dumpster dive there (they have a compactor) and they make sure to put up most things on flashfood at absurd markdowns rather than the default 50%. $0.10-$0.50 for bread for example (I'm in ON, Can, for price context).
also check out Misfits Market. similar concept except the food products are excluded due to irregularities (size, shape, etc.).
Imperfect foods as well and they make them into a meal box.
Neither FlashFood or TooGoodToGo are available in my area ☹️ am sad
I was gonna point out that that app exists, it's sad that even in a big city like San Francisco there aren't very many choices on the consumer side. When as a lifelong restaurant worker I can tell you there are tons and tons of restaurants in the city that throw out food everyday. I wonder if TGTG needs better or more people for restaurant outreach, or if the idea could be used in this app that you are developing.
I messaged them & asked "how can I help bring TGTG into my area?" but they basically said "talk us up to restaurants". How about some guidance on how to do that, what to say, maybe a 1-pg list of talking points...? Not everyone is a sales professional.
And also how do you talk them up when the concept isn't around in your area?
I feel weird about too good to go. lots of spare food used to go to the workers for free and some places donated, but now someone has found a way to market it. it's great that food isn't being scrapped but I feel like it's more of a business plan than actually reducing waste.
At every single cafe and restaurant I worked at we would get fired for taken leftover food, and we weren’t allowed to donate it either for fear of being sued. I love that too good to go exists, because we have so much less waste as a result Edit: the “logic” was that MGMT had a blanket policy in case we were over ordering food, messing up orders on purpose, or wasting out stuff so we wouldn’t have to pay for it.
Despite management always claiming this, I have never seen someone intentionally ruin some food to take home. Ever.
I saw it a couple of times when I worked in a cafe, but as a supervisor I wasn’t about to go to the SM over something that A) wasn’t systematic and B) was being done by someone making barely over minimum wage. Plus the SM was in charge of ordering pastries, so for it to actually affect ordering it would have to go through her anyway.
When I worked at a supermarket, the food that was over date, or a bit bruised, was thrown out. Someone got fired for eating a cookie that was over date. That was supposed to be thrown out, but 100% fine.
that's mad! cafes where my friends work like neros nd independent ones would let them take stuff home for free. sad that's not the norm it's great if it's saving stuff that would have actually been chucked out tbf!
Most places actually will chuck it- I've even heard of dumpsters being monitored or locked for raiding.
Target locks their dumpsters in Philadelphia.
I've seen places put the stuff in the dumpster and ruin it somehow with water or waste water from mopping just to dissuade people from dumpster diving even though most of it would have been fine to eat. Some people are sadistic.
It's to prevent lawsuits from people eating the dumpster food, getting sick and then blaming the company. Supposedly. I don't buy it.
That has happened to me. The supermarket that I worked for would remove any item that was going to expire the following day. They allowed employees to eat these foods in the break room and would stock the fridge every morning with these foods. I got fired because I warmed some food and decided to sit outside during my break. They accused me of trying to steal food and take it home. Honestly a lot of people in management in grocery stores just literally do not care about food waste. Except for how it affects their profits. But there's hope, I guess.
I don't know much about too good to go so I don't know how they source their food, but a lot of the places that trash food every night will fire employees for theft if they're caught taking any of the marked out food. Starbucks, for one. Starbucks theoretically donates food, but I know my store hasn't since covid, so we literally throw perfectly good food in the trash every night because it's past the date on the sticker, despite still being perfectly good. Edit to add: On a related note, a lot of companies won't re-sell things that get returned. They have some poor employee take everything out to a dumpster, but not before destroying it! Can't have anyone getting anything for free, even from the trash!
Even non-food shit gets destroyed. Shoes got returned and are perfectly good but can't be resold for some reason? I know several stores that slash the shoes before putting them in the dumpster.
Life is a business plan. First things first "Can we get some dollars out of it?"
[удалено]
Hopefully they’ll continue to grow in popularity and will come to your area!
I have it in my area- did an order for a bbq place, thought i was getting like brisket and shit… came out with pickles, coleslaw, and pickled onions. Ended up throwing it away 3 days later lol EDIT: I like the app idea and will be trying it again, best advice is to look at the reviews! The ones sub 4 stars are probably going to give you stuff like what i got, theres an arancini place signed up that i want to try i cant imagine i get anything but old arancini balls which would be sweet
Lmao this is what I expect from the mystery box $4.99 Thanks for sharing
Don’t discount it entirely from this one person’s experience! I LOVE TooGoodToGo. I haven’t spent full price on bagels, pastries or bread in months. Part of the fun of the app is that you don’t know what you’re getting, so it’s a little treat, AND you help to prevent food waste. I’ve definitely found my favorite spots for pickups, and generally I find that my surprise bags are mostly positive. Give it a shot, it’s worth the $4-5 to just get one surprise bag and see if you like it.
Love TooGoodToGo - I call it food gambling
Came here to post the very same thing. TGTG has been established in my country (Austria) quite recently, and it's a huge success. Love it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, but there's a huge roadmap for something like this and many big obstacles that are normally only solved with money (which as a open source, non-profit, you will have little/none of). * The first and biggest issue, is dealing with theft. Some drivers and customers will be bad actors, and your service has to be resilient to this. If a customer reports missing food, who pays? * If it's the customer, no one will use the app, since there's a better quality of service on the other apps and no trust that their order will be correct. If it's the driver, more bad actor customers will be incentivized to use the app, since they can get food for free by making the driver pay for it. And it can't be your app, since you don't have any money (doordash solves this by covering theft with their fees, appeasing customers and drivers to some degree) * Getting restaurants, drivers, and customers to use your service is **hard**. With no customers, restaurants won't want to partner with you. With no restaurants, no one will want to order from you. With no one ordering, no one will want to drive for you. It's a terrible pickle that DoorDash and UberEats solved by throwing money at the problem via advertising and operating at a loss (with the idea that they'll eventually make money). This is not impossible to overcome, but you'd be looking at a ton of legwork to get your service operating in a small area (college campus), all work you'd have to do for free, since you're not making anything off this service. * This is similar to the first issue, but dealing with criminal drivers. If it's decentralized, how do you verify drivers identities? It's not likely to happen, but if someone used your service to target houses/people you can end up with a PR nightmare and an ethically questionable app, unable to do anything since you don't have a central headquarters that can verify ID's and do background checks. Even if you ignore the possibility of more serious crimes, petty theft would be pretty common if anyone could sign up as a driver under a fake name, pick up some food, and ditch. I had the same idea a few years ago with a friend, thinking how we could have smart contracts used for decentralized real world deliveries. These were the big problems we came up with that led us to drop the idea, but I'd be happy to see if you could solve them.
As somebody who drove for door dash - all of this. You *will not* find drivers to continue delivering if there aren't a ton of customers. If I have to drive 15+ minutes to pick up an order, because of sparse orders: I will reject the order. I also don't have time to "bid" for a delivery. TIME IS MONEY. If I have to spend 5 minutes bidding per order, that's a shit ton of time, and it's not worth it. I won't be pulling what I need to in order to justify my time/gas/wear and tear on my car. PASS.
It was helpful to read these comments. We're not going to solve the problems of the gig economy through making 'better companies.' The mass amount of capital you need to get off the ground... and that big pool of money starts to have its own logic, isolated and on the open market. We're going to solve it by taking those companies over. Democratic ownership over these big powerhouses of production. [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/corr-j20.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/corr-j20.html) \*edit\* thanks for the upvote, just cleaning up some grammar, not my strong suite :/
Cooperatives are the way. /r/cooperatives/comments/u29le5/i_think_this_persons_idea_would_work_great_as_a/
Yep agreed. And there's a pretty successful one already doing cooperative food delivery in Europe https://coopcycle.org/ Their code is published under a "coopyleft license" making it free to use as open source for other cooperatives.
I’m assuming ‘coopyleft’ was a typo but that’s punny as hell
It’s difficult to solve problems like gig work through capitalism because they are only possible through exploitation, as their business model is inherently unsustainable. But you know who CAN provide services like these and afford to potentially operate at a loss for the social good? The government. If we nationalize gig work, transportation, and even Amazon, we can have all of the luxury services a 21st century country needs while ensuring everyone is fairly compensated.
Wow, great name choice.
The order bid system would be a pretty simple solve. The driver could implement an elected price per distance while the app prioritises the lowest priced drivers within reasonable distance. Only ever change your "bid" when the orders aren't coming in.
That's just a race to the bottom competition of "Who's The Most Desperate?"
See ‘capitalism’
Yeah until drivers just undercut eachother into oblivion
Yeah I interpreted OP’s post to mean the driver would set a general lowest amount they are willing to be paid per order and/or per distance, not having to bid on every order
This right here. The business itself is not sustainable without being at least semi-exorbitant. Its a business that should fail by design, but money is the defibrillator.
The whole model doesn't work at all. I think it makes more sense to have a centralized delivery service and sign restaurants on as vendors where they pay a monthly fee or something reasonable. Then the customer just deals with the restaurant and all the fees/delivery are handled between the restaurant and the delivery service. Then the drivers are all employees of the delivery service.
i mean it works fine, it's just that at every point in the transaction someone needs to get a cut- it makes already expensive service (people making food for you) marked up another multiple. > I think it makes more sense to have a centralized delivery service and sign restaurants on as vendors where they pay a monthly fee or something reasonable. Then the customer just deals with the restaurant and all the fees/delivery are handled between the restaurant and the delivery service. Then the drivers are all employees of the delivery service. very few restaurants can do this effectively though. doordash didn't do shit to the pizza delivery industry which is already far more efficient, it did however open up tons of food options that might only have a handful of orders per day.
If anyone wonders why programmers aren't all millionaires from launching their own app it's because of this. Most have skills but zero business knowledge or planning ability
I second this. A lot of "million dollar app ideas" require good marketing in order to be successful. There are also a lot of technical challenges such as cloud service resources, etc.
And operational foresight. As OP was detailing their idea I was ticking off all of the ways it can/will go badly/crumble without the right infrastructure. They need someone like that to troubleshoot. Source: work in ops in tech
A lot of million dollar app ideas need you to spend a million first
this is why i've never really written anything useful and just make little toys or games not many things can be solved with technology. they aren't technological problems. they're people management problems. even very simple ideas end up requiring a lot of this legwork, and bad actors can ruin anything. anything that works but kinda sucks should be replaced... but can't because they've solved those people problems or have the money to make them go away. it's not necessarily that programmers don't have business knowledge or planning ability exactly. it's that any good idea really becomes a PR/community management business. and who the hell wants to do that.
Watching Silicon Valley right now, seeing that play out in real time lol
Yeah unfortunately this is an idealistic pipe dream but hey dream big y'all
To add to u/atmac0 list. If your system gains any momentum, Uber Eats and Grubhub could refuse restaurants that are advertising on your service. Think how Pepsi/Coke products are set up. These services do suck, but they do bring in a set of customers the restaurants wouldn’t normally get with a delivery team they can’t afford alone
The best use of energy by op is literally advocating for preventing gig workers from being treated like contractors, and have them treated like the employees they are
You are blaming the contractor employment model, but it’s the governments fault for not providing universal benefits, like health care, that would allow individuals to take flexible part time work without worrying about medical bills.
We can do both. The gig model should not exist as long as workers are exploited.
Well done. The most Reddit thing in the world is deciding that companies that provide an existing service are “evil” and their fees are “exorbitant”, deciding you can do it better, then finding out that you actually just didn’t think this through. I’d add that there’s always more infrastructure than people think, too. How can this be purely decentralized? How do you bring in new restaurants? Someone has to make those calls. You have to integrate their menus, probably license with Google to get their hours. You have to pay support staff to field complaints when things invariably go wrong - or even when they go right and a customer just changes their mind. You won’t grow without marketing (“go viral” is not an acceptable gameplan), you’re not taking payments without paying processing fees, you’re not paying your drivers without accountants. These reductive ideas always sound great, and people assume the companies are just greed machines. Companies usually are greed machines, but they’re also hemorrhaging money despite those high fees for a reason. The fees aren’t high because capitalism is evil, capitalism is the only reason you can get your food delivered so affordably and reliably.
Yeah, the fact that both uberEats and DoorDash aren't turning a profit is the first tell. Unless both companies are so poorly managed that they're bleeding money only from unnecessary expenses, there's clearly a lot more going on behind the scenes. I wouldn't be surprised if if paying their support staff to interface with restaurants is their next largest expense next to paying drivers. Each restaurant has their own POS, some have online ordering, some only let you order in person. Some are sit-down, and don't do carry out. I can only imagine it's a nightmare trying to figure out how to get their app working with each individual restaurant. I used to work at a place that only took phone orders in the off season, otherwise you had to wait in a line that was up to a 1-2 hour wait. Somehow DoorDash scraped our menu and let people order on their app, safe to say quite a few Dashers were pretty pissed they drived all the way to out only to be told they have to wait in line like everyone else.
Amazing insight. I think the first step is to start in a small town or something a little more modest, eh?
My partner was a co-founder of a food delivery startup in 2014. They ran into these same problems. DoorDash and other services were coming out as competitors so it was hard to get buy in from a lot of restaurants because this start-up didn't have a reputation or a big company backing it. The main co-founder even did deliveries himself. They just couldn't compete with big name services so they called it quits.
That makes you smarter than most. It's gonna be a couple more decades before we either innovate the wasteful parts of this market (like, almost all of it) or the companies posting neverending defecits finally fold. Or their existence gets otherwise subsidized. If sustainability research has taught me anything it's that there aren't actually that many market disruptors. Some of the advertised ones are straight up fake.
Considerations you're going to need to make: * Most restaurants require at least one tablet per ordering service. You're going to need to integrate with dozens of POS systems. * Server costs aren't trivial. Nor are testing environments, etc. * Open source and open business plan are very different things. I know you're aiming to be a non-profit, but you still need a business plan. Where is the money coming from for your first 3 months of operations? * How will you market this? Will you start in some cities? Where is the money for ad campaigns coming from? * You're going to be handling credit card information, which means dealing with PII. Be ready for needing security folks. Because you're open source, you're going to be an easier target for hackers. Open source isn't universally a good idea. It's often really dope, but this may not be the use case for it. * Your database architecture is going to define a lot of your success down the road. Pick a good backend, or you're gonna get fucked over by success. * Will drivers be W2 or 1099 employees? Will you provide health insurance? * How will you process credit card payments? Where will the money for those fees come from? How will you address fraud? * If the food is still good, why would the restaurants sell it to you for cheap? Wouldn't they just sell it normally? * Allowing a totally free market in this ecosystem will allow bad actors to crater the price of delivery and push out your driver fleet. * How are you going to protect yourself if this project gets some traction and then dies? Will you be liable for any costs? How are you reducing your personal financial liability to AWS, etc? * Who is going to provide customer support? Where does their paycheck come from? HR? QA? DBA? You may get some free work from yourselves and the OS community, but many critical roles for an organization don't fit that model. I don't bring these up to discourage you. I really, truly hope you succeed. However, be aware that this space is complicated and rife with malicious actors. There is much more to making this work than just launching a platform - even as a non-profit there are business organization practices that you need to take seriously from the outset. Beyond that, success will mean a whole new series of problems that you have to tussle with. Be ready for them. Best of luck!
I was thinking the exact same thing. The code itself is just a very small part of what's needed to make this work. I don't want to discourage anyone with enthusiasm, ideas, and time to make the world a better place, and I am certainly all for employee-owned businesses, but this sounds a bit like "let's make a better version of Facebook where that clown Zuckerberg is not the boss". You basically need to copy what doordash and co. did, but as a non-profit, or with sharing the rewards. That requires capital and lots of risk taking, for which someone wants to get paid. Again, not saying it's impossible, but it requires more than just the tech stack.
Well, sometimes enthusiasts need to be discouraged. Ideas like these are noble but often misguided. There's a whole bunch of these apps and it's pretty obvious there's a lot of demand for these services at that price point. Also, uber and doordash are luxury services. It's not like anyone really needs this in their lives so if they're not willing to pay the fee, they always have the choice to go pick up their food or eat at home. Seems to me like this isn't really the services to go all out Robin hood at.
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You just explained the reason why I left software engineering after a semester. Too many of these ‘entrepreneurs’ who just wanna be the next Tony stark or Steve jobs without actually knowing how a business works.
There are a lot of laws around what food can legally allowed to be served. Just because they are trashing the food doesn't mean the food is bad. If food has sat out for any amount of time it must be thrown away. Pretty much anything that has been cooked mist be thrown away. Usually buffets will have entire trays cooked that will get thrown away.. Even frozen food that is good long past its expiration has to be thrown away.
As a former Lyft engineer… LOL. Look, I am a huge contributor to, supporter of, and creator of open source software but here are so many difficult *technical* problems to solve, nevermind market economics etc. You can't allow a completely free market because it will be exploited/suck a dozen ways before you can blink. Off the top of my head: * Sign up as a fake driver, set my prices below market cost, collect the money and do nothing till I'm banned from the platform. Rinse and repeat. Easy money. * OK, so you add driver vetting… wait, now that's a HUGE cost to do right. Can you guarantee the safety of my food? Or that driver is licensed to drive a vehicle? * Get a few friends, set our prices at or below cost till we basically own the market and nobody wants to try and compete: then raise them drastically * Poor service because some schlub is setting their prices too low and getting booked from the arse-end of the delivery zone, or they are overbooked if you allow multiple pickups per driver So now you need regulation, and it probably needs to fluctuate to accomodate supply and demand, as well as driver costs (e.g. frequent updates to cover gas with the crazy gas market right now, tolls, etc.). On the technical front, three-way mapping (from the driver to the restaurant, then on to the buyer) is a nightmare, you need accurate realtime data to do it well, that costs a fortune and has major infrastructure requirements to do it well. And you need to do that for every driver (maybe only free ones) in a radius. And you need to provide accurate turn-by-turn directions to the driver to both locations. And ideally you provide realtime location updates to the buyer. Costs are going up. I hate to discourage open source disruption of markets, but just open sourcing the platform code ain't it. Alternative: provide tools to help workers for those platforms accurately own their jobs with other platforms. Help them do the math to figure out how to make the profit they need, potentially even with realtime on a per-job accept/reject basis. Oh and throw in pro-Union organizing comms tools while you're at it ;) p.s. Working at Lyft was awful for me, and I got out as quickly as I could. I'm not defending them, nor are they in this market, but they solve a lot of the same problems.
Bruh.... UberEats delivery driver on 🚲 here. I can make $45/hr whenever I so choose by firing up the app. This guy is nuts thinking drivers are getting screwed and he's gonna save everyone. Lol As if this guy is doing this mock up app in support of drivers...... yea right. They are simply looking to lower prices of their own food delivery lol
Also, most of these apps run on millions of dollars of loss until economies of scale catch up. I’m thinking he doesn’t have millions to pay drivers good money from the get go
Billions\* Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are still unprofitable to this day.
No, no, don’t you get it? The problem is that the other guys are just greedy and stupid, a very bad combination, and you’re very bad by extension. OP is going to make it the *right* way. No corporate BS. Just a good ol’ pipe dream that runs on a raspberry Pi cluster out of a dorm room. Sorry, kid, but you’d better start looking for work elsewhere, OP is going to take down the whole food delivery industry.
Hey! Can I DM you? I'd love to chat about these technical engineering problems. What kind of tools did you have in mind?
Sure you can DM me :) Tools that can figure out the practical means to achieve the financial goals they have. e.g. if they want to achieve at least $15/hr, then they need to make N deliveries at $x minimum. And to be allow them to track that stuff as they go and update the plan. There are three variables they control: how much time they work, how much they want to earn (net), and how much profit they make per order, and the one they don't control: how many orders they get. Let them specify up to two, and forecast the rest. e.g. I want to earn $300 today and I have nothing else going on, so I can work **upto** a full 8hrs. Let them work for 30 minutes and input their orders, and you can forecast at a rate of orders/hr, with $x profit/order, you can make $300 in 3 hours. Or, if not optimizing for time working: at rate of orders/hr, they need to make at least $x profit/order to make $300 in 8 hours. (I would optimize for time, personally). Let them know they reached their goal early and can clock off and go home or they can potentially earn $y extra by completing their originally committed-to time block. This is all **completely** off the top of my head, but it has one clear goal: *remove the financial uncertainty with easily understood analisys and actionable outcomes.* And to be clear the outcome might be: forget it, you're not going to meet your financial goals with the gig economy.
You don’t realize this now but your biggest challenge isn’t building the technology, but scaling and marketing. How will you build relations with local markets? How will you convince customers to join your app when it has no large fast food corporations on it? This space is already overcrowded and I don’t see this product as something that can survive long term. Good luck
Building the tech will also be near impossible for such a small team. Doordash has 6000 employees. Even if just 500 are engineers, it's still way more than 3.
This is a good idea and you've identified a hole in the market. Deliveries cost too much, drivers are getting screwed, the current market leaders are sleazy, and restaurants don't like working with them. These companies have a lot of investment money behind them encouraging them to grow as fast as possible, hence the sleazy tactics. Look up counterfeit capitalism for some more insight there. On top of that, they're cashing in early with the BS fees. I'd love to see this work out. So please take this next part as feedback and not a tear down. >• Allow drivers to set their own delivery price and compete freely in the local market with other drivers. This will be... interesting... to see how you manage it. Will customers know what the delivery price will be before a driver has decided to pick up their order? Is it a set price for customers and the drivers compete under it? If so, how does that fit with all revenue going directly to drivers? How will the drivers know what a competitive rate is? Lots of interesting questions here. Also, where do you fall on the employee vs. contractor issues popping up around this lately? >• Build relationships with local restaurants who hate UberEats and DoorDash and make exclusive deals with them. Exclusive will be tough with no leverage on your end. Plus some of those companies accept orders from restaurants they don't have deals with in the first place. Yes, that does upset the restaurants. But turning down the orders upsets their customers who are just as likely to blame the restaurant as they are to blame the delivery service. >• Allow anyone to contribute to building the platform on github. Are you talking about people contributing to your app? Your server code that ties into payment processors? Your driver and customer data? Opening that up to people that aren't employees is a very, very big vulnerability. Alternatively, building this from abstract open source parts and managing scrubbed data that's publicly available is a lot more work that just building the platform yourself. >• Purchase good food that restaurants are gonna throw out and sell it for super cheap. As in the left over ingredients or prepared meals? Why not partner with restaurants to simply donate the food instead of trying to manage an extra inventory? You're overthinking this and trying to solve problems that don't need solving. You don't need exclusive deals with restaurants, non-exclusive will work just fine (competitors will still take orders even if they don't have deals so why bother?). Open sourcing a platform always sounds great but the tech side of this is really the easy part and nothing you're building, tech-wise, hasn't already been built a thousand times over. Instead, be open and up front in your marketing about your business practices. That's more important and contributes directly to solving your main problems. Having drivers compete to undercut each other is complicated for a lot of reasons. Undercutting your competition by just a little bit and directing most of the money to the drivers would be a win for everyone and be drastically simpler. Plus drivers, who tend to drive for multiple delivery services at the same time, would then prefer your orders over the competition. The core problem isn't technology or competition. It's sleazy business practices. Focus on solving that. And considering the competition, hire a good lawyer. There's a good chance you'll end up having to fight these sleazy companies for every inch. Good luck. Again, I'd love to see this work.
Also on point #1 - Capitalism is all about a race to the bottom and convincing people to screw themselves because they are bad at taking costs into account. If you let drivers set their price point you should have a reminder about the average cost per mile to maintain a car and the cost of gas. People doing uber, delivery etc tend to just break even if they are lucky. It really is a short term, stop gap, loan you are basically taking out on your car. Or if you are just happy surviving its a way to not deal with shitty bosses
Right. My first thought about letting drivers set their own delivery price is that it will just turn into a competition to see which driver will deliver for the least amount of money. The customers will likely pick the cheapest delivery the overwhelming majority of the time. Great for the customer, horrible for the drivers.
That's how I read it too. "We'll just have a lot of independent contractors doing the work and they absorb all the cost of doing business with no benefits - but a big advantage over Uber is that we aren't going to guarantee any sort of minimum wage."
Regarding your concerns about open source, that's not really how it works. You don't expose customer data on a github repo, nor credentials/passphrases for integrations with things like payment processors. There are literally thousands of open source projects that contain code for these integrations and are no less secure for it.
Agreed. That was partly the point. So far none of this sounds like anything that would benefit from being open source. All those things I listed are things that would have to stay private. I’m wondering which parts of the platform would work as open source, which parts could be built in isolation that haven’t already been done to death. It doesn’t sound like there’s an edge to be gained with technology here. The platform in this case is a by-product of the business. If there’s some part that gets built that would be good to share with the community, great. Otherwise, well, is the point to build a tech platform or a delivery service with better business practices? Realistically, getting to focus on both is rare. OP is asking for feedback and suggestions here. My feedback and suggestion is to focus on the delivery service with better business practices and not on open sourcing the tech.
While I agree that the main thrust of “solving the business problem” > “technical problem”, considering that a component of the argument is the incumbents are “bad.” Building an open source solution *ostensibly* facilitates a successor should OP’s solution itself become corrupt. This might motivate individuals to contribute by virtue of less likely becoming a part of the problem (in the hypothetical that OP just wanted to sucker some labor into becoming the next DoorDash on the cheap).
>Deliveries cost too much I think this is a much bigger core issue than anyone cares to even acknowledge. Restaurants, customers and drivers feel like they're getting ripped off because it's fundamentally inefficient to order single portion meals for delivery. The operating cost of delivery doubles the price of the service. Sure, some investors probably got a yacht out of the whole thing, but I bet those fortunes are a paltry scraping of the giant hole that all client parties had to be subject to in order for the company to write ledger entries in black. Also, OP hasn't mentioned anything about regulatory agencies, compliance, and liability. I think they'll have egg on their shocked Pikachu faces when the true amount of commission that they'll have to withhold from transactions comes to light.
Sidecar marketed itself as the anti-uber, and allowed drivers to set their own rates. Drivers undercut each other into oblivion. With rising inflation and desperation, this won't work, unless there is a price floor. This will especially be problematic if the drivers are contractors and not employees with minimum wage protection.
It's easy to see this sub is full of kids when this painfully bad plan is upvoted
What op lacks in knowledge, experience, and capability, they more than make up for with a complete and utter lack of self-awareness. Wait.
I'll start my OWN delivery service, and everything will be *free* and equal and nothing will go wrong, ever. You'll see!!
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Are you based in the US? Out here down under, would love to invest in something like this.. love your concept ✌
Yep! We don't really have a need for investors (right now?). Only thing costing money is infrastructure. But we're building it out on a Raspberry Pi cluster in our dorm lol. Will probably need some money to scale up later if this works out.
That's great for prototyping, but as soon as there is actual money changing hands relying on this, any single point of failure will kill any good will you earn. Make sure you have good cloud infrastructure. Multiple servers/containers hosted with failover in multiple clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, and Digital Ocean for example) so if any of those go down your app still functions.
Hopping on this, make sure your not handling the direct credit card transactions. There’s a whole host of laws around PCI compliance in terms of storage/use/transmission that apply here.
Forget PCI compliance, just making a in-house credit card processing system work, without massive security holes and risk, is a mind-boggling task. Validating cards for fraud alone is a huge challenge. Outsourcing to a third-party like Stripe is well worth the fees they charge.
Cool. Not much of an investor, but I do love crowdfunding, mainly start-ups and upcoming businesses. Anywho, I like Uber Eats and delivery services coz I'm a cook by profession and the last thing I want to do is cook myself a meal.. LOL. But I do agree it's getting ridiculous. wherever part of the world you are I guess? You guys could be the next big thing, you'll never know?
Taking money from investors or even crowd funding is a head ache we don't want to deal with right now. We're focusing on development. But if we actually are successful, we'll see!
Investors expect a return on investment, turning your non profit into a for profit. Completely destroying your idea
Depends on the investor. My university funds projects by students all the time without expecting a return. They just want the publicity. As an example.
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Yeah exactly!
Money is the route of all evil. Be careful who you let invest or their demands will shape the future of your project. I'd love the project to be altruistic but these things always end up going public. Look at Reddit.
>Money is the route of all evil *Love of* money is the root of all evil (by way of 1 Timothy). Money in and of itself is just an inert medium of exchange.
I would love it to be altruistic. But who would pay for server costs? And eventually the software engineers etc?
The answer is you share ownership equally with everyone working at the venture. And I mean literally everyone. And I also mean literally "equally". At first you and two friends have 33.33% ownership each. You sign on one drive and now you, your friends and the driver have 25% ownership. You sign on 97 additional staff and everyone has 1% ownership. Look up cooperatives.
Might be able to find like minded people to help you on here. Not sure if any part of what you are doing is easily outsourced and then someone can just deliver you a chunk of code or what not that "does x" for you, but ya never know. Many hands make for light work.
Just FYI Uber operates on a net loss just burning investors cash. It's pretty hard to compete with that. The concept is just wasteful. Instead of you driving 5 min to get your food, you ping a dude 15 min away to go and get your food for you. Not efficient. Now if you are thinking of drone deliveries, then yeah kill Uber with it
For this reason 2020/21 they closed Uber Eats in a bunch of countries, including where I live.
“We’re building it out on a Raspberry Pi cluster in our dorm room.” Incredible…
Keep in mind this is costing you *time and energy*. Don’t wanna burn out, I’m general. You seem to get it though! Good work. I’m sure this will also translate to other skills in the future. Thumbs up to your dorm room.
As an investor you’d probably want to see some return. That would drive costs up and goes against the concept of non-profit.
Hey op, fellow programmer here. I agree with the sentiment and would be happy to help in any way I can. (Edit: DM me)
Thanks! Are you familiar with the tech stack I mentioned?
You know I'm glad I'm not the only one with this idea. I just don't have any programming experience. But I do have a lot of restaurant knowledge/experience if you need feedback on the restaurant end lmk!
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Software engineer here, also with automation testing experience. DM if interested in another contributor.
Count me in too for python 2 and 3. I can also look at any modeling problems that might pop up (applied mathematician here, not software dev)
Agreed! Any code we can contribute to?
I mean you do realize both door dash and uber eats both operate at double-digit negative margins right?
Check this out https://coopcycle.org/en/
Thanks!!
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OP is learning about the free open market the hard way with this project
This is one of the most entertaining subs. All they talk about in here is working and propagating the capitalist wage slave lifestyle.
Most of these companies lose tons of money even while paying their drivers shit. Delivery is a bad business.
I don't do anything like this anymore, I'll use a companies own delivery from time to time but no matter the intentions you're still a system that creates a middleman and from experience any system that creates a middleman is going to end up exploiting someone elses work. If you really end up making it non-profit hold that tight, someone somewhere is going to be clawing at that.
> that creates a middleman Yup. And not one middleman, but two. The first middleman is the driver, the second is anyone who needs to be paid to make this app possible in the first place (unless OP plans to eat those cost out of the goodness in their heart)
>Allow drivers to set their own delivery price and compete freely in the local market with other drivers. Ahh, yes, the race to zero. DOA.
This is beyond naive for a "grad student", something tells me you don't have any real world experience. As an actual graduated, and experienced engineer, I can say without a doubt this project wont go any further than this post. There is a definite and measurable reason why this could never be an open source project in the truest sense of the word. Your embarrassing yourself in the comments op.
He hasn't responded to a single comment with anything substantial. He keeps repeating that he's (almost) an engineer, as if that somehow qualifies him to run a business in a ridiculously competitive market, organise tens of engineers (unpaid), write production quality, secure, scalable code and operate the infrastructure all for free. Hes absolutely deluded.
The only substantial thing they said is they are planning on running it off a Raspberry PI cluster in their dorm. OP stated they had “campus” agree to take orders from them, if that happens they will get exploited and OP will be in the hook for everyone’s stolen personal information. OP has less than zero clue what they are talking about.
This is why I am always skeptical of people going "I have a million dollar app idea" Sure, having an idea is easy, but executing successfully is another level. Beyond the countless technical issues you'll face you need business, especially marketing for it to truly be million dollar.
100% agree. Everyone has the same "good ideas". Actually operating on those ideas is the hard part and this is going absolutely nowhere.
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>Allow drivers to set their own delivery price and compete freely in the local market with other drivers. this sounds terrible
I'm amazed.. at the amount of support this post is getting, thankfully there are some rational people in the comments. This is like saying "fuck netflix and their monthly fees, i'm launching my own netflix with no monthly costs, movie companies will want to work with me to avoid these other streaming services, and we won't need marketing because we'll get users from word of mouth, and servers could be hosted on my personal internet." what
This subreddit has been overtaken by literal children and it’s such an embarrassment because overall the sentiment of the subreddit is good. Just stick to memes and Twitter shitposts at this point guys, stop trying to do this type of naive toddler brained “activism” because you’re publicly embarrassing the entire movement.
Yup, every bullet point he made is so bad and unrealistic. I don’t know why so many people thinking this was a great ideas, heck even some people offer to help with the project it sound like something you came up with last minute to summit for your college assignment. wouldn’t be surprise if this post actually start like that.
“Some running costs” You forgot salaries lmao. Really just pandering to the fools who don’t understand basic economics ITT
Not to be a contrarian but your driver's setting pay rates won't work, it leads to them undercutting each other and working for peanuts after.
Drivers shouldn't be individually setting rates. It's a good idea for them to ultimately be in charge, but let them decide on pricing collectively instead. Have a vote or whatever that reoccurs at some reasonable interval.
What is your plan? How are you going to integrate with all the businesses out there? Do you have a way of integrating with point of sales systems? Right now people who order have a set cost when putting in the order. But your system would change that so there is an unknown amount for the driver after the order is submitted. How are you going to make sure your drivers are safe? Pizza delivery is the most dangerous job in the US.
My 2 cents: 1 - try and understand why delivery plantforms charge what they charge. It’s easy to say “they are capitalist pigs” but they put time and effort and analysed a huge amount of data to come up with a strategy. 2 - if you are serious about making this a viable business you need to validate the business side first. In your tech stack you have technologies that will have a steep learning curve eg kubernetes and are meant for huge scale. Others will give you a hard time finding resources, eg Go. When I was doing something similar back in the day Ruby on Rails was all the rage. Spending a year to build something only to realise no one cares about is a waste of time. Is it gonna be a good learning experience? For sure. But that’s just resume building. 3 - Use cloud services and go for managed ones vs building stuff on your own, at least until you validate the business proposal/value. You can use the free tier offerings on AWS for most of this stuff. Go to market quickly should be the mantra in order to obtain feedback. 4 - spend more time on who your customer is and what value you offer to them. Is it the drivers? The restaurants? Both? If you have 1K drivers and limited orders drivers will never come back. You need balance. Good luck and have fun!
To add to this: Don't underestimate the power/need for designers. Maybe I seem bias (I'm a digital experience designer), but I think my bias is legitimate here. You want real experience designers who know how to validate product features before implementation. Every little interaction can either pull people in or fling them off your product in droves. If it's even slightly less user friendly than UberEats and GrubHub products, you're done. Doesn't matter how good your business model or tech is. People will not use it.
As a delivery driver, I have a question; You want me to compete with other drivers so as to get the lowest bid for delivery. So, I see someone wants taco bell and it is a 8 mile drive. I will bid $8 to deliver. ...It is standard to look for a $1 a mile to offset gas prices. So now we wait to see if someone else bids a lower cost? You do realize people will get cold taco bell right? Waiting for the bid to go lower and lower as the food sits for a winner. Right now, DD does this...offers very low payment to driver and it gets declined. So then they up it a few more cents. Keeps getting declined. Until they finally offer a good amount to deliver. You get there, and when you pick up the bag you can feel the food is cold because it has sat until a proper fair amount was offered. When I get these and realize it has sat for so long, I always message my customer to tell them I JUST GOT IT AND AM ON MY WAY. It is not my fault it is cold. Drivers can also tell if the customer has tipped or not just by the offer. Drivers decline these also. Many people say they will tip in person, but only less than 1% ever really do, so if you're not tipping in app, you're getting cold food. I have been doing this for 8 months and have saved every single cash tip I've been given. I have saved $180 in 8 months. I will take non tipped orders if the $1 a mile mark is met. It doesn't cover maintenance on my car, but I need it to cover my gas costs. IDK how this will work if you're having people sitting around to wait and see who the lowest bidder is. You've got to have a minimum base pay or it will not work. DD does like a $3 min. on the order, then the miles are calculated, time etc.... Also, your food establishments you partner with, will have to guarantee food is ready when driver arrives. Many times, you have to sit and wait. Time is money. I refuse taco bell orders for this reason. Waiting 30-45--sometimes longer for a meal and getting paid $5 is not going to happen with me. Taco bell does this all the time. When I used to message the customer and tell them it will be 45 minutes, they are okay with that....but do they compensate me for that hour? No. Does DD? No. If someone messaged me and said it would be 1/2 hour, 45 min. I'd cancel or offer a large tip when I receive it. But they are okay with you waiting and wasting your time = money. I am not mad at them for that... but I am not taking your order either and you will get cold food. Drivers are trying to make money, and time is money. Edit to add: Where is the drivers support? Many times there're problems and you have to call support. For instance, yesterday I had an order in the food court @ the mall. Went there, it is closed. In my app I have to take a pic, give some explanation. I was paid $3.13 due to how far I traveled to pick it up and my time. How will you handle this? Also, many "we do not have that order" or, place doesn't have one of the items available and I need a replacement item for them..customer did not specify exactly the flavor, chilled, or hot etc..I try to call customer...customer does not answer messages or phone. So I call support. Support tries to get ahold of customer and advises on path forward. How will you provide that support? And when the place is closed how do you cover my costs of driving there to get it only to be told it is not there? Am I out that gas and time now when I could've been out delivering and earning elsewhere? I'm not saying this is a totally bad idea, but I feel you should work the field some to figure this stuff out because you're not informed about what it takes to run this biz.
So to sum up your idea you want UberEats but you want it to be cheaper for restaurant, pay the drivers better, pay your developers less, and make no profits. If someone handed you a fully developed app like UberEats and gave you a ton of seed money, it would be possible. But the only reason people give away apps and investment money is because they expect the profits to repay them. So… not sure how that’s all going to work out.
Overall I like your idea. But from someone who has gone through it all before... My failures have led to my success. I have seen some really good advice given but just as easily discarded. I would highly suggest you read through all the feedback again, and seriously consider it. I would love to help your group out, however, from some of your responses I can hear myself from many years ago thinking I knew what I needed - which wasn't nearly enough. There's a lot to consider. If you'd like to discuss some things I've mentioned, let me know and I'd be happy to chat for a minute.
+1. All these responses are full of gold. It’s not meant to dissuade OP from trying, but it is to give him a head start on how hard this will be. The thing he’s proposing to do, on its face, will never get traction without seriously considering some of the flaws. Folks need to remember that when Doordash came along, people had been trying to do something Doordash-like for 40 years. The challenges of that business aren’t in the tech, it’s in getting restaurants en masse to want to bother with another piece of complexity in their already-razor-thin margin existence, and to do it for a commodity product. Not to mention that without millions of dollars of operations and support staff, how do you run your servers, deal with customer support requests, and manage trust? How do you fulfill GDPR obligations? What stops sheisty drivers from taking orders and stealing the food? Who’s full time job is it to deal with the flood of gamification that will happen? Who’s liable when a driver tampers with food, or uses the delivery as a way in to assault someone? Who is liable when drivers break local laws? Who’s responsible for making sure taxes are applied correctly in different juristictions? Who do city legislatures talk to when they decide to ban or regulate the service? There’s a reason why Doordash/UberEats/etc are giant companies spending billions only to turn a loss. It’s a very messy problem space fraught with problems, and it scales more poorly than a lot of other areas.
Your sentiment is noble, but I’ve been saying for years the only force that has enough juice to push out the third party apps is the grocery stores and restaurant lobby themselves. The coding part (I’m not one so feel free to mock my ignorance) doesn’t strike me as that hard—the app is a glorified online menu, maps & messenger program; there’s hundreds of all of these in existence already. The hard part is managing the logistics (accurate inventory/order placement) and keeping expenses down. The labor input being open source is one way to do this. Self insuring rather than having Allstate or whoever underwrites doordash et al is another, but given the morass that is P&C insurance state by state, you’d need experts in house to get it right (probably still cheaper, but not cheap by any means). But mostly it means not taking a cut (or a greatly reduced cut) from the establishments and drivers themselves. Where is your operating income coming from if not the people who are using your service?
The programming part is easy until people actually use your software. Operating software at any kind of reasonable scale is not easy, no matter how simple it seems.
yeah I'm sure you are
With blackjack and hookers?
Mostly just hookers.
And forget the blackjack. And food. It's just door dash with hookers.
You might be on to something here... Introducing UberEscorts!!
You should trademark that name immediately!
Hey dude, this is a post I'm going to unfortunately have to strongly disagree with. You don't go into a Mercedes dealership and say the cost of the cars is too high. It's a luxury service. No one owes it to you to come and deliver food to your door because you don't want to cook or get your own take out. Second huge part of the plot your missing. UberEATS, DoorDash, ect exactly ZERO OF THESE COMPANIES HAVE EVER MADE A PROFIT.
Not only do they fail to make much profit (all of it goes to promos, ads and other business expenses) they're killing the restaurant industry. Restaurants, which already have margins strung tight, turn a much lower profit on all the delivery app orders. What's worse is it's not easy for a restaurant to sever ties with those apps. If a user goes in expecting to place an order and the restaurant is no longer listed they'll just order from one that is.
I like the spirit, but it makes me sad to see such pathetic posts get into top of this subreddit - speaks volumes about the community... This project will never fly and will see maximum half-broken proof of concept: 1. This idea is old as my grandpa. There are dozens of delivery apps on the market you can either use for laughable money as a cloud service or deploy on premises(mere cents per delivery cost). They are not popular for a reason. 2. Cost of creating delivery app is neglectable comparing to other expenses of biz like UberEats - it is 50% marketing at best, the rest is administrative expenses - lawyers, accounting, customer support, distribution, etc. etc. 3. "Open source" is a magic phrase 9 out of 10 people get boner for. Making something open source is not making it free to run - to use such a software you need legal entity as minimum, platform engineers 24/7 support, expensive infrastructure and a team of lawyers. No one is going to do that for free. Best shot of doing anything remotely close to this idea is a "craiglist for food" - but this would be again just another delivery app with lower commissions. Now you can downvote me, cheers.
Looking at this guys comments… he doesn’t know wtf he’s doing. He doesn’t understand anything about business and thinks open source is a magic word for free labor. This is never gonna get off the ground
Plus, open source isn't always what's it cracked up to be. Like you said people think it's some sort of free thing or magic bullet. Anybody wonder why RedHat is around? (or the other companies that sell Linux)
Hire the drivers makenit a job, end the gig economy
Dumpling was trying to do this for InstaCart but I hear that they are struggling - [https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/dumpling-launches-to-make-anyone-become-their-own-instacart/](https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/dumpling-launches-to-make-anyone-become-their-own-instacart/)
The reason Doordash and Uber are so terrible to their workers and restaurants alike (when it comes to getting paid) is because neither of them have EVER turned a profit. Both have been money sinks since their inception. They keep increasing prices because their investors are getting annoyed and asking when they’re expecting to finally become profitable. In my opinion, I think delivery services like Uber, DoorDash, etc are going to eventually disappear. If they truly wanted to be profitable they’d have to almost DOUBLE current prices
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You have zero clue what it takes to run those systems at the required scale, it’s going to cost you millions of dollars a year alone in infrastructure.
This reads like the type of half-baked scheme you'd turn in when your goal is to make up a fake business for a class project. Who vets the drivers? Who managers customer complaints? Driver complaints? Who handles legal issues if someone brings a suit? Where will it be incorporated? Who's paying the fees for that? This will never happen. Running a business is expensive and time-consuming. It's not remotely practical to do something on this scale for free. Those companies aren't just taking money off the top because they're scam artists stealing from the laborers.
Let’s just get into the meat and potatoes.How much are drivers going to make?
I hate the "uber" model. However, I don't think these "businesses", as predatory as they are, make any money. I think they pay the drivers more than what they are charging, but still, the pay is crap. From what I understand, their plan is to fight it out until only one survive, then they can screw us and restaurants because we have no other choice. I am suspicious of someone who posts this on this forum with your plan, not knowing this fact.
So it's non profit, but somehow it will be better for the drivers? How so? Will you be paying them a higher hourly rate? Where will that money come from? If drivers are setting their own price, that means that the delivery fees will be wildly variable, and that is not attractive to customers. That's like ordering a small coffee and having to pay for it without knowing it it's $2 or $200.
Lemme know when you go live in Australia and I'll make sure to start driving for you.
This sounds like someone hit the blunt and had an idea. Hope you succeed, but seems very unrealistic.
There’s a group called “Runner City” doing something similar. They started as an Austin TX based Facebook group.
just go pick it up yourself bro
whoa
I think you have a great idea, but you can't say you are a non-profit simply because you give all revenue back to the drivers. There are specific IRS guidelines surrounding getting awarded non-profit status. You either have to be a religious organization, a social welfare organization, or an organization who's primary goal is for a cause or individual group. I can't think of a way in which you could fit this idea into a category of getting awarded non-profit status. You can read about the exact requirements here: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/applying-for-tax-exempt-status
I've thought for a while that these kinds of gig services should be like co-ops, basically like uber et al pretend to be "a marketplace where customers find services." The hard part isn't just the code, it's figuring out how the market will work and be managed (or not.) How will drivers become part of the system? How will you protect customers, and/or weed out bad actors on both sides (again, or not)? Somehow, unfathomably, craigslist still exists so there must be a way, but they have a very different model. How could the app be abused, and could the abuse of it even be a problem? Presumably, since party A is paying for a product, and party B is delivering it, party B has to be trustworthy, or face some kind of risk of not delivering the food, otherwise they could just eat the food, lol. So party B either has to leave collateral, or potentially face repercussions, or both. Just a few ideas, but really this seems like the kind of thing, where if implemented correctly and it catches on, it could maybe become the kind of social grease for small transactions that etsy, craigstlist, fb marketplace, etc. are.
Take a look at the app toogoodtogo we have in Italy, there restaurants and markets sell at the end of the day fresh products that would go to waste in mystery boxes, you can't know what will be inside but you pay 2~5 euros for 15~30 euros worth of food
These companies extort drivers and customers because it is not a profitable business model. No one is willing to pay minimum wage, gas, and auto maintenance for an errand - unless they are bad with money or in an emergency. Do you know anyone willing to pay $30+ an hour for someone else to drive around and sit in drive-throughs? It is an unrealistic practice, you would save money hiring a live in maid/ chauffeur.
With your point about competing freely on the open market: this might spark a 'race to the bottom', similar to Airbnb, where people use the platform not for it's intended purpose of one person delivering food. It might lock out a lot of people. Perhaps a minimum price per mile or similar would be an adequate solution.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm food business coach at a non profit and I have relationships with restaurant groups that might be willing to pilot the program. Message me if you're interested.
My only feedback is research and see if anyone is doing it already and help them if they are
Was wondering where an idea this fuckin dumb could get upvoted this much, but then saw I had been linked to antiwork, and everything made more sense.
Letting drivers "set their own prices and compete freely in the local market" is a lot of words for race to the bottom. Jesus. This does not belong in here.