4 ms·

Capital. Two-sided markets take a lot of capital to get off the ground.

• Nasrudith 7y ago
  I wonder where most of the capital goes in launching these ventures given. The why would give some major insights. Technically a far more barebones app could be used for instance. Unlike mobile games there aren't any small budget cheap knockoffs. Is it getting it to have enough people at once that it isn't "Nobody uses it because it is empty?" Since apparently even with high fees relative to the product and poorly paid workers it still loses a lot of money. A lot of those two-way market companies appear to have "waiting for drones to reduce the effective labor cost" as their implicit business model.
  • k__ 7y ago
    Don't know. But in Germany there is one big player in the long distance bus market and they operate their busses with self-employed contractors too. At least such companies would have to rely on humans for delivery in the forseeable future. Some companies in the delivery space even got bought out by bigger players in the last 12 months here. One only offered a website/app for purchases and no own delivery people, the restaurants had to own their stuff, but somehow this didn't work out. Maybe a cooperative between all the restaurants could have saved this.
  • heavyset_go 7y ago
    When new cab-hailing apps pop up in my city, they are very quickly bought out by larger companies and stop operating under their previous moniker.
• conanbatt 7y ago
  Thats not an obstacle to form a cooperative, just like any farm cooperative pools farm resources, the workers that have the capital of a car can pool their cars.