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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 personal

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.

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.