7 ms·

Postmates Secures $141M in a ‘Super, Super Difficult’ Fundraising Effort

72 points by scapecast 10y ago

gumby 10y ago
Really hard to see the defensible "moat" in the business models of these delivery companies. As the article says, Uber uses its balance sheet as its weapon, but the flip side of that is it will be hard for any new investor to get much of a return in any future round -- its hard to see its defence against a disrupting competitor. Even Lyft, which looks weaker, easily scoops up the same drivers as Uber. All of which means it's not clear if this is a difficult fundraising market or not. It certainly is for these undifferentiated delivery companies, but for tech startups? Not seeing it yet.
- x0x0 10y ago
  I think the thing to watch for Uber et al is Austin. If a good local alternative is created that is content to make $100m/year with no real ambitions of growing, then they will have to continue to fight city by city.
  - vosper 10y ago
    I was in Austin just after Uber and Lyft had left. There was a company called Fasten which had promo codes on seemingly every lamppost in the city. It worked just like Uber, and I believe it pays the drivers better. I don't know if they're still around and still have the market to themselves, but if they do I imagine they could become entrenched there.
  - dopamean 10y ago
    I live in Austin and I'd be shocked if all the new ride share companies (Fare, Fasten, GetMe, RideShare Austin, etc) did 100mm a year in revenue combined. I think RideShare Austin has the best chance of sticking around here. They're set up to be a non-profit. So their intent is to follow local regulations carefully and stick around for the long haul. We'll see what happens.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      fyi uber's revenue was leaked in 2014 and it generated $18m in sf in whatever month got out http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-and-fares-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-an... That's a $212m run rate; with moderate growth a $350m+ run rate seems entirely reasonable. sf is about the size of Austin. If Uber keeps 25%, that's an $87.5m business. Some extra growth on top of that (run a local delivery service; do some transit deals for elderly/kids/handicapped; etc) and you've built yourself a nice $100m business.
      - dopamean 10y ago
        I don't doubt that Uber could do it. I think the current players in the market here cannot.
        x0x0 10y ago
        I misunderstood; thanks for clarifying! I would be happy to see a worker owned co-op emerge in a city like Austin. It would probably be better for the city and for the drivers.
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
  The difference is that all these food delivery companies need to acquire both customers and drivers. Uber already has the drivers and the infrastructure for delivery. That makes it much easier for Uber to compete against companies like Postmates. I honestly don't think Postmates, Caviar, et al. have much of a chance over the long haul.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    Actually, they need to hire customers, drivers AND partner restaurants. Makes it quite difficult having to 'manage' three individual parties.
  - gumby 10y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply Uber as a competitor to Postmates-etc/DoorDash-etc/dry-cleaning-delivery etc. I just meant Uber as also being in a class which has only moderate barriers to entry. I agree with you that these delivery companies have little competitive advantage or particularly good business models. I don't really see what advantage Uber has over Lyft, Didi etc except the balance sheet and using it in the hope of doing the largest, fastest land grab possible. To draw a tenuous analogy, it's hard to say that the 17th-19th century European land grabs worked out that well in the long term.
- lgieron 10y ago
  > Really hard to see the defensible "moat" in the business models of these delivery companies. Couldn't the same be said about a lot of the "unicorns"? For example Dropbox or AirB'n'B don't have significant network effects and anyone with some cash can copy their software and directly compete with them (the same way Lyft is competing with Uber). The likes of Facebook and Twitter are an exception.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Dropbox has a mild network effect, as soon as people use it to share files with their friends and colleagues. Once Dropbox gets established inside a business (often because it's easier to use than internal IT), they're probably quite secure.
    - chrischen 10y ago
      I'd say quite mild, since if Dropbox prevented me from sharing files to anyone over the web, half its utility is gone.
  - majani 10y ago
    That's why they're avoiding the public markets. Their valuations will take a pounding once they're put up for everyone to scrutinize
  - lmm 10y ago
    I would think AirBnB has a pretty big network effect, in the same way as e.g. eBay.
    - gumby 10y ago
      I don't see it, since people could list themselves on competing listing sites just as the same drivers list themselves on both Uber and Lyft. Then again you could say the same for eBay, yet Amazon couldn't get a competitor off the ground. One small moat (eBay has vs Airbnb model) is that you can automate the sale on eBay (so you'd have a hard time listing the same item on two sites -- you might sell it twice) while Airbnb still has manual intervention.
HalfwayToDice 10y ago
"It has said it intends to be profitable, without tax-related expenses, by the end of next year." That's a bizarre interpretation of "profitable".
- digikata 10y ago
  I think that it's the articles colloquial expansion of EBIT. EBIT (Earnings Before Interest & Taxes) is a somewhat common financial metric. I think it is useful to look at if you have a concern that a business has tax/interest portions of their balance sheet that might be skewing the other measures of profitability.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- qwrusz 10y ago
  I agree, very bizarre way to claim profitable. As for the other comments mentioning EBITDA. The Tax in EBITDA is income tax. You cannot be taxed out of being profitable. The tax rate is not >100% so if you are profitable before taxes you are profitable after taxes. Just less so. I have no idea what postmates means here by "profitable, w/o tax-related expenses". Maybe something like sales tax they collected that must be remitted? (that's not technically an expense either but they don't seem to know what they are doing or saying at the moment).
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    > The tax rate is not >100% Lol welcome to New York. Even ignoring the cost of preparing reams and reams of paperwork, a flat $4 tax on, say, bagels could very well flip margins negative.
    - jdavis703 10y ago
noahmbarr 10y ago
Overcoming less-than-favorable unit economics when a business is at scale is never fun. That said, I appreciate this startup's continued hustle.
gaukes 10y ago
Here in Berkeley, we're getting indefinite free delivery from Uber Eats. The war of attrition has definitely started.
- CN7R 10y ago
  Wait hold on.. where is this deal? I'm too lazy to walk to get cheese board.
- taigeair 10y ago
  Why free delivery?
  - CN7R 10y ago
    Pretty sure it's like the Lyft coupon they're handing out around here -- free for a certain amount to incentivize you to keep using their service.
    - rishabhparikh 10y ago
      No it's free indefinitely. There's just no delivery charge whatsoever. Some items on menus are more expensive than they are at the actual restaurants though.
- rkho 10y ago
  In SF, UberEATS has a rolling $5 off per delivery for the month of November. Last I checked, deliveries were a flat $5 so this counteracts it. It's been that way for ~2/3 weeks now.
  - ehnto 10y ago
    All orders were $20 off including free delivery for the last week here. Still free delivery now that it's over. Previous to that were free uber rides, free uber helicopter rides and all while still paying the drivers the same amount. It is a shame to me, because we are a small city in a relatively remote location that had been incubating it's own smaller scale food delivery services. Some really cool platforms that could compete with Uber in all metrics but one: the ability to spend big to create incredible brand presence. Everyone is now super excited about UberEats because it is cheaper and makes us feel like we're just like the cool kids in San Fran. Meanwhile these smaller companies will likely fizzle out, as our city just doesn't have the capital to invest and compete.
rjvir 10y ago
> Postmates raised $141 million in a financing round led by Founders Fund. The San Francisco VC firm, co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel So much for the Silicon Valley boycott of Peter Thiel. I wonder if they would have raised from Thiel if they were in a position of strength, and had other options.
- Naritai 10y ago
  I'm reminded of an old Hollywood quote, "I'll never work with <actor X> again, unless he's right for the part". Business is business.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Which, if one is honest, is what makes America work. I disagree with Thiel. Sixty percent of Americans see similarly [1]. But guess what: democracy depends on tolerating--and reconciling--different views. In Evelyn Beatrice Hall words, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" [2]. The same fraction of Americans who disagree with Trump agreed with interracial marriage as recently as the 1990s [3]. Democracy is messy. If you like overruling others with force, don't pretend to like our system. You're lazy, trading liberty for security, and in turn deserve neither. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/14/sixty-percent-of-americans-dont-think-donald-trump-is-qualified-to-be-president/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/14/si... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall [3] https://mechanicalbrain.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/interracial-marriage.gif https://mechanicalbrain.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/interrac...
    - foobarian 10y ago
      TIL I've been misattributing that quote to Voltaire this whole time. Thank you!
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    I'm all for "business is business" but it just gets irritating when these startups pretend to have an ethical approach but then that approach goes out the window when money is involved. Not sure how they expect us to swallow it.
danm07 10y ago
It's going to be interesting to see where they allocate the money. They're in a very tough market: competing with Uber for drivers and Amazon for drone deliveries. Literally, the most inauspicious position to be in, second to competing with Google or Elon Musk. It's funny that selling the company was their priority, and that they had to hire an investment bank to look for funders.
- danvayn 10y ago
  It'd probably more accurate to say Postmates is competing with Prime Now, not Amazon Air lol
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but the blasé and pedantic tone to this comment is probably why you're getting downvoted.
    - dopamean 10y ago
      It's funny how the "lol" can change anything. I didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with the tone until I reached the very end.
      - tkxxx7 10y ago
        Even then it sounds more like "lol this is ridiculous" and not "lol you're a lil incorrect"
      - danm07 10y ago
        haha great observation... I didn't notice this before.
- scapecast 10y ago
  It's not uncommon for start-ups at the more mature stage to work with an investment bank to pull together a round of financing (let's say post Series B), particularly when you get into the triple-$M range. For example, Box used JP Morgan in their later rounds. Bankers have a much wider network of potential investors than founders, and they can also run the process much more efficiently. Raising $141M is different from raising $14.1M, it gets way more complex. And at that amount / valuation, what can be a financing can quickly turn into an acquisition, think what happened to Cruise Automation. Frequently the bankers do a principal investment in the same round they are raising for the company, to show that they have skin in the game, but also to position themselves for a potential IPO or M&A transaction (which is the lucrative part, you get 2-3% of the total consideration). Qatalyst is well known in the Valley, another firm is Allen & Co. Both companies do principal investments, and so do the bulge bracket firms like GS, JPM and MS. GS put money into Uber. So it's probably not "had to hire" but "decided to hire", and a perfectly common practice.
sargun 10y ago
I find Postmates competing primarily on food delivery quite odd. When I originally started using Postmates, it was for pretty much for everything but food. When I ordered food from it, it was for the likes of food trucks, where I just needed to dispatch a courier and make a free form order. Unfortunately, Postmates discontinued support for these features. The kinds of things I ordered before the modernization of Postmates were USB-to-Ethernet adapters, Macs, soldering irons, and more. These were typically high priced goods that I needed in a short period of time to keep up some service.
- perryh2 10y ago
  My team of ~5 people orders from Postmates every weekday for lunch and our order is missing items about a third of the time. It's not uncommon for one of us to reorder via Caviar's Fastbite service, where the food is on-hand and delivered within 5 mins in SoMa. When we tried Caviar's non-Fastbite service, we noticed the same problem with missing items. Does this happen to anyone else? We've been having this problem for months and I'd think that one of these companies have got it figured out by now.
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    Never had missing items via Caviar. I order dinner about once a week from them, the only mistake I've had was a restaurant confusing pepperoncinis for pepperonis (I'm vegetarian so that's kind of a big deal to me), which I can totally see happening in a busy kitchen by mistake.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    I find it bizarre that you're consistently using a service which is bad 33% of the time. I feel like I'd have given up after a couple of weeks - because honestly convenience is what you're paying for and only getting some of what you order is the opposite of convenient.
    - perryh2 10y ago
      It only happens to 1/5 of us 1/3 of the time. :) Plus Postmates at least reimburses us for the missing items.
nodesocket 10y ago
Honestly, I am shocked they were able to raise at all. I've used Postmates and Cavier a few times, but as soon as Uber Eats released, I haven't used either since. I exclusively use Uber Eats now and use it more frequently than I ever used Postmates or Cavier. I have to guess the investors (Founders Fund - Thiel) know something I don't, because seems like a lost battle from my porch.
orthoganol 10y ago
I can't conceive of mainstream success for Postmates outside of bubbles like SF and NYC - because it's just too expensive: Delivery fee (with very frequent 'surge pricing'), service fee, and prompts for tip. I've never placed an order under $30 for a meal just for me. And that's fine if you make 6 figures and don't cook very often, why not be a regular Postmates person, but I just don't see how that works outside of certain neighborhoods in certain cities.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  Loads of people use alternatives here in Sydney and Melbourne (including Uber Eats). Doesn't hurt that Uber Eats doesn't charge a delivery fee and has no minimum (for now). Not really sure if we count as 'the bubble', but people have shifted from calling restaurants (or Dominos) directly to using these services to 'upscale' and discover more restaurants.
  - ojm 10y ago
    Uber Eats are charging $5 per delivery now in Melbourne. Be interesting to see how this impacts them. Source: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/272512 https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/272512
  - product50 10y ago
    Who are these people who have shifted? Are you living in a bubble yourself? I certainly haven't seen this shift happening among my group of friends. I feel this is more of a he said she said kind of argument. Would love to see some data here (in terms of whether these deliveries are net additions vs. replacements of existing chains that deliver) but unfortunately, Postmates hasn't published anything yet.
majani 10y ago
This is all following an eerily similar script to kozmo.

72 points by scapecast 10y ago

gumby 10y ago

Really hard to see the defensible "moat" in the business models of these delivery companies. As the article says, Uber uses its balance sheet as its weapon, but the flip side of that is it will be hard for any new investor to get much of a return in any future round -- its hard to see its defence against a disrupting competitor. Even Lyft, which looks weaker, easily scoops up the same drivers as Uber. All of which means it's not clear if this is a difficult fundraising market or not. It certainly is for these undifferentiated delivery companies, but for tech startups? Not seeing it yet.

x0x0 10y ago
I think the thing to watch for Uber et al is Austin. If a good local alternative is created that is content to make $100m/year with no real ambitions of growing, then they will have to continue to fight city by city.
- vosper 10y ago
  I was in Austin just after Uber and Lyft had left. There was a company called Fasten which had promo codes on seemingly every lamppost in the city. It worked just like Uber, and I believe it pays the drivers better. I don't know if they're still around and still have the market to themselves, but if they do I imagine they could become entrenched there.
- dopamean 10y ago
  I live in Austin and I'd be shocked if all the new ride share companies (Fare, Fasten, GetMe, RideShare Austin, etc) did 100mm a year in revenue combined. I think RideShare Austin has the best chance of sticking around here. They're set up to be a non-profit. So their intent is to follow local regulations carefully and stick around for the long haul. We'll see what happens.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    fyi uber's revenue was leaked in 2014 and it generated $18m in sf in whatever month got out http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-and-fares-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-an... That's a $212m run rate; with moderate growth a $350m+ run rate seems entirely reasonable. sf is about the size of Austin. If Uber keeps 25%, that's an $87.5m business. Some extra growth on top of that (run a local delivery service; do some transit deals for elderly/kids/handicapped; etc) and you've built yourself a nice $100m business.
    - dopamean 10y ago
      I don't doubt that Uber could do it. I think the current players in the market here cannot.
      - x0x0 10y ago
        I misunderstood; thanks for clarifying! I would be happy to see a worker owned co-op emerge in a city like Austin. It would probably be better for the city and for the drivers.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
The difference is that all these food delivery companies need to acquire both customers and drivers. Uber already has the drivers and the infrastructure for delivery. That makes it much easier for Uber to compete against companies like Postmates. I honestly don't think Postmates, Caviar, et al. have much of a chance over the long haul.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  Actually, they need to hire customers, drivers AND partner restaurants. Makes it quite difficult having to 'manage' three individual parties.
- gumby 10y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to imply Uber as a competitor to Postmates-etc/DoorDash-etc/dry-cleaning-delivery etc. I just meant Uber as also being in a class which has only moderate barriers to entry. I agree with you that these delivery companies have little competitive advantage or particularly good business models. I don't really see what advantage Uber has over Lyft, Didi etc except the balance sheet and using it in the hope of doing the largest, fastest land grab possible. To draw a tenuous analogy, it's hard to say that the 17th-19th century European land grabs worked out that well in the long term.
lgieron 10y ago
> Really hard to see the defensible "moat" in the business models of these delivery companies. Couldn't the same be said about a lot of the "unicorns"? For example Dropbox or AirB'n'B don't have significant network effects and anyone with some cash can copy their software and directly compete with them (the same way Lyft is competing with Uber). The likes of Facebook and Twitter are an exception.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Dropbox has a mild network effect, as soon as people use it to share files with their friends and colleagues. Once Dropbox gets established inside a business (often because it's easier to use than internal IT), they're probably quite secure.
  - chrischen 10y ago
    I'd say quite mild, since if Dropbox prevented me from sharing files to anyone over the web, half its utility is gone.
- majani 10y ago
  That's why they're avoiding the public markets. Their valuations will take a pounding once they're put up for everyone to scrutinize
- lmm 10y ago
  I would think AirBnB has a pretty big network effect, in the same way as e.g. eBay.
  - gumby 10y ago
    I don't see it, since people could list themselves on competing listing sites just as the same drivers list themselves on both Uber and Lyft. Then again you could say the same for eBay, yet Amazon couldn't get a competitor off the ground. One small moat (eBay has vs Airbnb model) is that you can automate the sale on eBay (so you'd have a hard time listing the same item on two sites -- you might sell it twice) while Airbnb still has manual intervention.

HalfwayToDice 10y ago

"It has said it intends to be profitable, without tax-related expenses, by the end of next year." That's a bizarre interpretation of "profitable".

digikata 10y ago
I think that it's the articles colloquial expansion of EBIT. EBIT (Earnings Before Interest & Taxes) is a somewhat common financial metric. I think it is useful to look at if you have a concern that a business has tax/interest portions of their balance sheet that might be skewing the other measures of profitability.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
qwrusz 10y ago
I agree, very bizarre way to claim profitable. As for the other comments mentioning EBITDA. The Tax in EBITDA is income tax. You cannot be taxed out of being profitable. The tax rate is not >100% so if you are profitable before taxes you are profitable after taxes. Just less so. I have no idea what postmates means here by "profitable, w/o tax-related expenses". Maybe something like sales tax they collected that must be remitted? (that's not technically an expense either but they don't seem to know what they are doing or saying at the moment).
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > The tax rate is not >100% Lol welcome to New York. Even ignoring the cost of preparing reams and reams of paperwork, a flat $4 tax on, say, bagels could very well flip margins negative.
  - jdavis703 10y ago

noahmbarr 10y ago

Overcoming less-than-favorable unit economics when a business is at scale is never fun. That said, I appreciate this startup's continued hustle.

gaukes 10y ago

Here in Berkeley, we're getting indefinite free delivery from Uber Eats. The war of attrition has definitely started.

CN7R 10y ago
Wait hold on.. where is this deal? I'm too lazy to walk to get cheese board.
taigeair 10y ago
Why free delivery?
- CN7R 10y ago
  Pretty sure it's like the Lyft coupon they're handing out around here -- free for a certain amount to incentivize you to keep using their service.
  - rishabhparikh 10y ago
    No it's free indefinitely. There's just no delivery charge whatsoever. Some items on menus are more expensive than they are at the actual restaurants though.
rkho 10y ago
In SF, UberEATS has a rolling $5 off per delivery for the month of November. Last I checked, deliveries were a flat $5 so this counteracts it. It's been that way for ~2/3 weeks now.
- ehnto 10y ago
  All orders were $20 off including free delivery for the last week here. Still free delivery now that it's over. Previous to that were free uber rides, free uber helicopter rides and all while still paying the drivers the same amount. It is a shame to me, because we are a small city in a relatively remote location that had been incubating it's own smaller scale food delivery services. Some really cool platforms that could compete with Uber in all metrics but one: the ability to spend big to create incredible brand presence. Everyone is now super excited about UberEats because it is cheaper and makes us feel like we're just like the cool kids in San Fran. Meanwhile these smaller companies will likely fizzle out, as our city just doesn't have the capital to invest and compete.

rjvir 10y ago

> Postmates raised $141 million in a financing round led by Founders Fund. The San Francisco VC firm, co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel So much for the Silicon Valley boycott of Peter Thiel. I wonder if they would have raised from Thiel if they were in a position of strength, and had other options.

Naritai 10y ago
I'm reminded of an old Hollywood quote, "I'll never work with <actor X> again, unless he's right for the part". Business is business.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Which, if one is honest, is what makes America work. I disagree with Thiel. Sixty percent of Americans see similarly [1]. But guess what: democracy depends on tolerating--and reconciling--different views. In Evelyn Beatrice Hall words, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" [2]. The same fraction of Americans who disagree with Trump agreed with interracial marriage as recently as the 1990s [3]. Democracy is messy. If you like overruling others with force, don't pretend to like our system. You're lazy, trading liberty for security, and in turn deserve neither. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/14/sixty-percent-of-americans-dont-think-donald-trump-is-qualified-to-be-president/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/14/si... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall [3] https://mechanicalbrain.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/interracial-marriage.gif https://mechanicalbrain.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/interrac...
  - foobarian 10y ago
    TIL I've been misattributing that quote to Voltaire this whole time. Thank you!
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  I'm all for "business is business" but it just gets irritating when these startups pretend to have an ethical approach but then that approach goes out the window when money is involved. Not sure how they expect us to swallow it.

danm07 10y ago

It's going to be interesting to see where they allocate the money. They're in a very tough market: competing with Uber for drivers and Amazon for drone deliveries. Literally, the most inauspicious position to be in, second to competing with Google or Elon Musk. It's funny that selling the company was their priority, and that they had to hire an investment bank to look for funders.

danvayn 10y ago
It'd probably more accurate to say Postmates is competing with Prime Now, not Amazon Air lol
- jdavis703 10y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but the blasé and pedantic tone to this comment is probably why you're getting downvoted.
  - dopamean 10y ago
    It's funny how the "lol" can change anything. I didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with the tone until I reached the very end.
    - tkxxx7 10y ago
      Even then it sounds more like "lol this is ridiculous" and not "lol you're a lil incorrect"
    - danm07 10y ago
      haha great observation... I didn't notice this before.
scapecast 10y ago
It's not uncommon for start-ups at the more mature stage to work with an investment bank to pull together a round of financing (let's say post Series B), particularly when you get into the triple-$M range. For example, Box used JP Morgan in their later rounds. Bankers have a much wider network of potential investors than founders, and they can also run the process much more efficiently. Raising $141M is different from raising $14.1M, it gets way more complex. And at that amount / valuation, what can be a financing can quickly turn into an acquisition, think what happened to Cruise Automation. Frequently the bankers do a principal investment in the same round they are raising for the company, to show that they have skin in the game, but also to position themselves for a potential IPO or M&A transaction (which is the lucrative part, you get 2-3% of the total consideration). Qatalyst is well known in the Valley, another firm is Allen & Co. Both companies do principal investments, and so do the bulge bracket firms like GS, JPM and MS. GS put money into Uber. So it's probably not "had to hire" but "decided to hire", and a perfectly common practice.

sargun 10y ago

I find Postmates competing primarily on food delivery quite odd. When I originally started using Postmates, it was for pretty much for everything but food. When I ordered food from it, it was for the likes of food trucks, where I just needed to dispatch a courier and make a free form order. Unfortunately, Postmates discontinued support for these features. The kinds of things I ordered before the modernization of Postmates were USB-to-Ethernet adapters, Macs, soldering irons, and more. These were typically high priced goods that I needed in a short period of time to keep up some service.

perryh2 10y ago
My team of ~5 people orders from Postmates every weekday for lunch and our order is missing items about a third of the time. It's not uncommon for one of us to reorder via Caviar's Fastbite service, where the food is on-hand and delivered within 5 mins in SoMa. When we tried Caviar's non-Fastbite service, we noticed the same problem with missing items. Does this happen to anyone else? We've been having this problem for months and I'd think that one of these companies have got it figured out by now.
- jdavis703 10y ago
  Never had missing items via Caviar. I order dinner about once a week from them, the only mistake I've had was a restaurant confusing pepperoncinis for pepperonis (I'm vegetarian so that's kind of a big deal to me), which I can totally see happening in a busy kitchen by mistake.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  I find it bizarre that you're consistently using a service which is bad 33% of the time. I feel like I'd have given up after a couple of weeks - because honestly convenience is what you're paying for and only getting some of what you order is the opposite of convenient.
  - perryh2 10y ago
    It only happens to 1/5 of us 1/3 of the time. :) Plus Postmates at least reimburses us for the missing items.

nodesocket 10y ago

Honestly, I am shocked they were able to raise at all. I've used Postmates and Cavier a few times, but as soon as Uber Eats released, I haven't used either since. I exclusively use Uber Eats now and use it more frequently than I ever used Postmates or Cavier. I have to guess the investors (Founders Fund - Thiel) know something I don't, because seems like a lost battle from my porch.

orthoganol 10y ago

I can't conceive of mainstream success for Postmates outside of bubbles like SF and NYC - because it's just too expensive: Delivery fee (with very frequent 'surge pricing'), service fee, and prompts for tip. I've never placed an order under $30 for a meal just for me. And that's fine if you make 6 figures and don't cook very often, why not be a regular Postmates person, but I just don't see how that works outside of certain neighborhoods in certain cities.

madeofpalk 10y ago
Loads of people use alternatives here in Sydney and Melbourne (including Uber Eats). Doesn't hurt that Uber Eats doesn't charge a delivery fee and has no minimum (for now). Not really sure if we count as 'the bubble', but people have shifted from calling restaurants (or Dominos) directly to using these services to 'upscale' and discover more restaurants.
- ojm 10y ago
  Uber Eats are charging $5 per delivery now in Melbourne. Be interesting to see how this impacts them. Source: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/272512 https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/272512
- product50 10y ago
  Who are these people who have shifted? Are you living in a bubble yourself? I certainly haven't seen this shift happening among my group of friends. I feel this is more of a he said she said kind of argument. Would love to see some data here (in terms of whether these deliveries are net additions vs. replacements of existing chains that deliver) but unfortunately, Postmates hasn't published anything yet.

majani 10y ago

This is all following an eerily similar script to kozmo.