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Interesting anecdata but not directly relevant to our operation. You assume a high cost for choice. We explicitly selected our culinary category and business mo

Interesting anecdata but not directly relevant to our operation. You assume a high cost for choice. We explicitly selected our culinary category and business model and have developed our technology to support broad choice at low cost. We are not inventing new dishes and hoping for "the next instant hit street food" (a fickle venture as you rightly point out) but instead offering existing dishes and allowing consumers to make and potentially share their own changes.

baybal2 8y ago
>You assume a high cost for choice. We explicitly selected our culinary category and business model and have developed our technology to support broad choice at low cost. That's not so much about cost as such, but about cost of making a good impression. I hope you don't underestimate how much of a foodie an average Chinese person is. Even the demographic of middle age bachelor labourers is quite choosy and will vote with their wallets. Earning not even bad but just "so so" rep for a restaurant... I believe, for most it is easier to close and start anew than to rehabilitate a brand. That's why I personally believe that going with the best dish you can make, and one with strongest popular appeal is the safest bet to get strong initial impression. That is easy to see in action when you go to any "food street" in any Asian city. Among many stalls, try to find some with "generic fried noodles," and compare the lineup in front of them with ones with fancy decor and more original dishes.
- contingencies 8y ago
  I agree, offering one product that sucked would not be a great strategy. That's why we offer many established recipes in high demand that customers can personalize, so they can work toward exactly the recipe they want. There is a ton of demand for this, not in the least because Chinese food is so regional and often it's very hard or impossible to get a good rendition of a regional classic elsewhere (and not for wont of ingredients).
  - krapp 8y ago
    >That's why we offer many established recipes in high demand that customers can personalize, so they can work toward exactly the recipe they want. Do you? Or do you plan to? Careful with the present tense, there, it can be misleading. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be the typical HN middlebrow dismissal guy, and I know you're trying to hustle, but this subthread began with you asking for "expert(s) on Japan (or other non-Chinese Asian nations') noodle typologies and preparation." Your team page lists lawyers and programmers, but no one who apparently knows anything about Asian cuisine. To me, this doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that you can break into which might be an already ruthless market. Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet.
    - contingencies 8y ago
      We are confident in the feature set we're bringing to market and our capacity to execute. Unlike some of our tangential competition, we don't need a celebrity chef to get people to justify trying our food, because it's actually good food that people are familiar with. Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet. We've thought about it too and have a huge competitive intelligence database. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt something this aggressive in terms of automated food preparation and retail globally. Most less ambitious, tangentially related ventures fail due to high cost of iteration, poor choice of initial market, poor product, insufficient uniqueness versus established competition, insufficient staying power to negotiate regulatory hurdles, no commitment to total automation, or some combination of the above. I've actively sought out the counsel of founders of such ventures, and had long and interesting telephone calls to obtain the benefit of their experiences. Have a look at the following businesses, then compare them to ours (we are preparing to manufacture after 2 years with a fully automated solution requiring 2m2 of footprint). 8 years and 25M USD finally got Momentum Machines / Creator a loss-leading semi-automated restaurant. 7 years and 4M EUR has almost got Ekim.fr one 45m2 restaurant with a plan to re-sell at 0.5M EUR/site, likely a small portion of which is profit owing to largely outsourced hardware. 5 years and 3.8M USD got Spyce a semi-automated restaurant with no clear scaling strategy. One observation would be that none of these businesses are particularly scalable because they are not fully automated. Another would be that none of them are in markets this large, and none of them can iterate as cheaply or as quickly on hardware as we can, because we are based in China. In addition, numerous central kitchen model based reheating vending machines lack choice, freshness and personalization and suffer from reduced storage and supply-chain bandwidth due to the prepackaged model. So why isn't there more competition? Perhaps because it's an area dismissed readily for hand-wavey reasons. Maybe because it requires nontrivial amounts of capital and technical knowledge across multiple disciplines? Perhaps a combination of the above? The attention of the masses is, after all, rather fickle.

baybal2 8y ago

>You assume a high cost for choice. We explicitly selected our culinary category and business model and have developed our technology to support broad choice at low cost. That's not so much about cost as such, but about cost of making a good impression. I hope you don't underestimate how much of a foodie an average Chinese person is. Even the demographic of middle age bachelor labourers is quite choosy and will vote with their wallets. Earning not even bad but just "so so" rep for a restaurant... I believe, for most it is easier to close and start anew than to rehabilitate a brand. That's why I personally believe that going with the best dish you can make, and one with strongest popular appeal is the safest bet to get strong initial impression. That is easy to see in action when you go to any "food street" in any Asian city. Among many stalls, try to find some with "generic fried noodles," and compare the lineup in front of them with ones with fancy decor and more original dishes.

contingencies 8y ago
I agree, offering one product that sucked would not be a great strategy. That's why we offer many established recipes in high demand that customers can personalize, so they can work toward exactly the recipe they want. There is a ton of demand for this, not in the least because Chinese food is so regional and often it's very hard or impossible to get a good rendition of a regional classic elsewhere (and not for wont of ingredients).
- krapp 8y ago
  >That's why we offer many established recipes in high demand that customers can personalize, so they can work toward exactly the recipe they want. Do you? Or do you plan to? Careful with the present tense, there, it can be misleading. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be the typical HN middlebrow dismissal guy, and I know you're trying to hustle, but this subthread began with you asking for "expert(s) on Japan (or other non-Chinese Asian nations') noodle typologies and preparation." Your team page lists lawyers and programmers, but no one who apparently knows anything about Asian cuisine. To me, this doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that you can break into which might be an already ruthless market. Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet.
  - contingencies 8y ago
    We are confident in the feature set we're bringing to market and our capacity to execute. Unlike some of our tangential competition, we don't need a celebrity chef to get people to justify trying our food, because it's actually good food that people are familiar with. Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet. We've thought about it too and have a huge competitive intelligence database. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt something this aggressive in terms of automated food preparation and retail globally. Most less ambitious, tangentially related ventures fail due to high cost of iteration, poor choice of initial market, poor product, insufficient uniqueness versus established competition, insufficient staying power to negotiate regulatory hurdles, no commitment to total automation, or some combination of the above. I've actively sought out the counsel of founders of such ventures, and had long and interesting telephone calls to obtain the benefit of their experiences. Have a look at the following businesses, then compare them to ours (we are preparing to manufacture after 2 years with a fully automated solution requiring 2m2 of footprint). 8 years and 25M USD finally got Momentum Machines / Creator a loss-leading semi-automated restaurant. 7 years and 4M EUR has almost got Ekim.fr one 45m2 restaurant with a plan to re-sell at 0.5M EUR/site, likely a small portion of which is profit owing to largely outsourced hardware. 5 years and 3.8M USD got Spyce a semi-automated restaurant with no clear scaling strategy. One observation would be that none of these businesses are particularly scalable because they are not fully automated. Another would be that none of them are in markets this large, and none of them can iterate as cheaply or as quickly on hardware as we can, because we are based in China. In addition, numerous central kitchen model based reheating vending machines lack choice, freshness and personalization and suffer from reduced storage and supply-chain bandwidth due to the prepackaged model. So why isn't there more competition? Perhaps because it's an area dismissed readily for hand-wavey reasons. Maybe because it requires nontrivial amounts of capital and technical knowledge across multiple disciplines? Perhaps a combination of the above? The attention of the masses is, after all, rather fickle.