Instacart is a lesson of how to do it right. Here's a lesson of how to do it wrong:
A partner and I started a grocery delivery business at about the same time as Instacart must have been formulating their plans, based on most of the same principles (same-day delivery using multiple local stores as inventory). Within months we had the inventory pictures (including cheaper stealth access to Trader Joes and the like), the pricing, the app and web code, the analysis of east-coast success stories, the shopper tools, the the payment model that would scale even among non-wealthy communities and provide good paying jobs and cheaper groceries to the customer (whereas instacart went with higher prices).
What we DID NOT have was the experience of delivering even a single item to a single paying customer, because we weren't going to ship until we had all our ducks in a perfect little row. And so we never shipped. D'oh!
A partner and I started a grocery delivery business at about the same time as Instacart must have been formulating their plans, based on most of the same principles (same-day delivery using multiple local stores as inventory). Within months we had the inventory pictures (including cheaper stealth access to Trader Joes and the like), the pricing, the app and web code, the analysis of east-coast success stories, the shopper tools, the the payment model that would scale even among non-wealthy communities and provide good paying jobs and cheaper groceries to the customer (whereas instacart went with higher prices).
What we DID NOT have was the experience of delivering even a single item to a single paying customer, because we weren't going to ship until we had all our ducks in a perfect little row. And so we never shipped. D'oh!