Tag Archives: value

Addressing Common Misconceptions about Food Delivery Marketplaces

I spent five and a half years working at Grubhub, from series A to right before IPO. This allowed me to learn about many of the intricacies of the restaurant market and food delivery in general. More people have started to take notice of the market because of a slew of market entrants and Grubhub ($9.1B), Just Eat ($4.8B), and Delivery Hero ($7.2B) being successful on the public markets. With that, more articles in the press. Articles… that are wrong. I am reminded of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, invented by Michael Crichton, when I read these articles. It says:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

As someone who does know, I want to explain some of these misconceptions, so people don’t think wet streets cause rain (even though rain does cause delivery orders).

Misconception #1: Restaurant Margins
One major gripe journalists cite about food delivery marketplaces (more so UberEats than Grubhub due to its higher fees) is that restaurants operate on slim margins. Therefore, if food delivery marketplaces are charging 15-30% for delivery orders, restaurants are not making any money. The issue is understanding the difference between restaurant margins and delivery margins, which are very different.

Most successful marketplaces are built on top of an under-utilized fixed asset. For food delivery marketplaces, this under-utilized fixed asset is not the restaurant, but the kitchen. Restaurants have a fixed capacity they can seat at a restaurant. The kitchen, however, is usually capable of producing much more food on a daily basis than is needed by the patrons that dine in the restaurants. Restaurants are paying for that kitchen capacity regardless of how much they use because one of the highest costs for most restaurants in cities is the cost of rent. That’s why I thought it was so silly when all of these delivery service startups started making their own food. You’re spending a lot of money to build what the incumbent gets for free: excess kitchen capacity to make food. This is why restaurants love catering orders so much. They get big orders that can better leverage their kitchen capacity. After catering, their next favorite is delivery.

Why delivery? It allows them to serve many more customers at a time with their fixed asset, spreading their fixed costs across many more customers. Catering and delivery are pretty much pure margin for restaurants because their only extra cost is a delivery driver (or not, in many cases) who is subsidized by the people ordering the food via tips.

Misconception #2: Paying for Repeat Orders
The second major gripe I hear about food delivery marketplaces is that they charge the same amount for a customer’s first order to a restaurant and repeat orders. Now, a lot of this is drummed up by a competitor who does not drive demand, so it is biased, but I’ll endear it. The misconception here is that all a restaurant has to do is pay an advertising fee to induce trial, and if the food is good, the customer will order again based on that experience. That is now how food delivery works. Food delivery is very fragmented, and while there is differentiation by way of restaurant quality, there are usually quite a few worthy substitutes. Also, the way delivery orderers usually make decisions is method first, restaurant last. The way the average person decides to use Grubhub operates something like this (flowchart):

Restaurant loyalty is one of the least important and last steps in the process of the person ordering food. This means people ordering food do not have loyalty, and you need to compete for every order as if it’s the first. Google Adwords does not charge Apartments.com less if someone who clicked their ad a year ago when searching “apartments” does so again the following year. The reason they don’t is because if Apartments.com wasn’t showing up there, that user would have gladly clicked the ad for ApartmentGuide. Restaurants should absolutely be working to build loyalty, and some do. But expecting that acquisition was the hard work, and restaurants should only pay a SAAS-level fee for retention does not align to the value these marketplaces actually create for restaurants.

Changes That Do Make Sense
Now, there are some elements I would change in regard to repeat orders if I worked at these marketplaces. While Grubhub already charges a much cheaper rate if the order originates from a restaurant’s own website, there are other forms of orders that the restaurant seemingly drives itself without the marketplace’s marketing engine or aggregation. One is if the person ordering food directly types the restaurant’s name into the marketplace. Charging a lower rate for that makes sense as the restaurant is clearly driving the business. I know from the data that this is a small percentage of orders, but this would show good faith to restaurants that marketplaces want to align their revenue model to the value they create.

Another scenario is if the person lands directly on the restaurant’s page on the marketplace from somewhere else e.g. Google. If this happens organically (because the marketplace ranks high or because the restaurant does not have its own website), the marketplace should charge a lower rate. The reality is Yelp and Google Local take 90% of this traffic, but again, it would send the right message.

The other example of this is a little harder to parse. These marketplaces also bid on restaurant names on Google. If that drives an online order, what should be the charge? The restaurant drove the demand, but the marketplace spent the advertising dollars to close the order. In this case, I think these marketplaces should evolve to asking if restaurants want this type of marketing, and if so, charge for the advertising as a service. This was not possible for Grubhub when I worked there due to game theory issues with all the competitors, but with a shrinking field of credible players, it may be possible.

Align Revenue to the Value You Create

“We want to create more value than we capture.”*

Tim Kendall, the former President of Pinterest, repeated those words at an all hands to describe our strategy for monetization a few years ago. My role as an advisor to Greylock’s portfolio companies allows me to work with many different types of businesses: consumer social, marketplaces, SaaS, etc. I’ve come to realize this saying describes an optimal strategy for a lot more than just an ad-supported revenue model. It should actually be the guiding light for most subscription software businesses.

Align Revenue To The Value You Create
One of the most common questions I receive from subscription businesses is when to ask for a signup and when to start charging customers. In freemium businesses, the slightly different question is how aggressively you upsell the paid product, and how good you make the free product. If you talk to entrepreneurs, you will get definitive answers from them, but they are frequently the opposite of each other. “You should never give away your product for free!” “You’ll never succeed without a free trial!” “Ask for credit card upfront! People won’t take the product seriously.” “Never ask for a credit card upfront! You’ll shoo too many people away.” The default answer I gave to entrepreneurs after hearing all of this feedback is that it depends on the business and needs to be tested.

As I researched more into the problem, these questions actually seemed to be the wrong questions to be asking. Harkening back to Tim Kendall’s advice, I started asking entrepreneurs, “What is the path to actually creating value from your service for your customers? How long does it take, and what actions need to be accomplished?” In other words, very similar advice to what is a successful onboarding? Once you learn that, you can determine how to capture some of the value you create.

Capture Value For The Business After Value Has Been Created For The Customer
When your product is subscription based, the prime time to ask for a subscription is after a successful onboarding occurs. It frequently is based on usage, not time. Dropbox is a famous example. The product is free up to a certain amount of storage. Once a user hits that amount of storage, they cannot add more files to Dropbox without paying. This storage amount also happens to be around the point where Dropbox becomes a habit, and represents real switching costs to find another way to share files across devices. So their conversion rates to paid are very high without any sort of time-based trial period. They don’t have a free product and a paid product; they have a free introduction to their paid product, and it becomes paid as soon as value has been created for the customer.

Your company may not have a long time to demonstrate value though, which may force your product to change to display (and capture) value more quickly. For startups based on search engine traffic, people reach your page with intent at that moment, and you frequently learn that this initial session is your only chance to convert them. So you push for a signup during that session after showing a preview of the value you can provide.

That is what we implemented at Pinterest, and it worked well, but it definitely created backlash from users for whom we had not yet created enough value. Once Pinterest was relevant on search engines for multiple topics, we saw people come back multiple times, and pulled back the signup walls on first visit. At that point, Pinterest was confident users would come back and thus focused on demonstrating more value before asking for signup.

Don’t Try To Capture Value In A Way That Reduces Value Created
It’s interesting to map the revenue growth of Dropbox to Evernote over the same time period. Evernote allows you to store an unlimited number of files and only makes you pay for advanced features like offline storage, storing large files, and (later) sharing on more than two devices. These features would have actually increased value created and switching costs if they were free, because Evernote’s value prop is about being able to access notes everywhere. If Evernote had instead mined their data and seen that people stick around after, say 50 notes, that would probably have had more effective monetization.

You only want to hide features from free users if they do not create habits or virality. Hiding sharing functionality before payment never makes sense because it introduces more people to the product for free. Hiding functionality that helps create retention also doesn’t make sense because you can always upsell retained users, but you can never upsell users who did not see the value and therefore don’t come back.

Decreasing Churn Is Long Term More Important Than Maximizing Conversion
Many people will decry that this strategy actually reduces revenue. In the short term, this sentiment is likely to be true. Decreasing churn might have a lower conversion rate upfront, but it aligns to long term successful retention. Churn rate is usually one of the biggest barriers to long term growth, so it’s worth thinking about this type of strategy even if it has a short-term decrease in revenue. It can be much harder to re-acquire someone after they have canceled, than charge someone for the first time who has been receiving regular value because you charged them for value you didn’t create.

What usually happens when a company captures more value than they create is they will have high revenue growth for a period of time (with a lot of investor enthusiasm), followed by a flattening of growth and then a steep revenue decline. This happens because revenue growth is a lagging indicator. Usage growth is the leading indicator. When usage lags revenue, this predicts churn. As you churn more and more users, it becomes harder and harder (and eventually impossible) to replace those churned users with new users to keep revenue metrics flat. Look at Blue Apron’s valuation to see this playing out currently as subscribers start to decrease for the first time year over year.

You Want Your Revenue Model To Align As Closely As Possible To The Value You Create
Lastly, as you start charging customers to capture value you create, you want your business model to align to the value that is being created. Email marketing tools have mastered this. Email marketing tools’ value is based on reaching customers with messages. Most email marketing tools charge on a CPM (i.e. a price for every thousand emails you send via their platform). As your email volume increases, they continue to drop the CPM. This make these companies more money because customers are sending a lot more email over time. But it actually becomes more valuable to the customer as well, because email is now cheaper on a per unit basis to send.

Compare this to Mixpanel, a product analytics tool. Mixpanel charges per event, and their value is delivering insights based on data from events being logged on your website or mobile app. The more events that are tracked in Mixpanel, the more insights the customer can receive, and the stickier the product. Since Mixpanel is charging per event though, a weird calculus emerges for the customer. The customer has to ask if tracking this event is worth the cost because not all events are created equal. Meaning the customer has to decide which data is important before they use the product. So, Mixpanel’s revenue model actually hurts its product value.

— 

It’s easy for subscription businesses to get attracted to the allure of short term revenue. The goal of your business is first to create value. The creation of that value and the understanding of how it’s created allow for more optimal and sustainable revenue generation opportunities. Don’t pursue short term revenue opportunities that prevent the customer from understanding the value your company creates. When you are generating revenue, you want to align that revenue model to how value is created for your customer. If you’re not sure, err on the side of creating more value than you capture rather than the opposite. This leads to long term retention and the maximization of revenue.

Naomi Ionita, General Partner at Menlo Ventures and former growth leader at Invoice2go and Evernote, and I talk more about this and other subscription growth problems in the Greymatter podcast.

*This quote I believe originally stems from Brian Erwin.

Currently listening to Shape the Future by Nightmares on Wax.

Why Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy

When people talk about growth, they usually assume the discussion is about getting more people to your product. When we really dig into growth problems, we often see that enough people are actually coming to the products. The real growth problems start when people land… and leave. They don’t stick. This is an onboarding problem, and it’s often the biggest weakness for startups. It can also take the longest to make meaningful improvements when compared to other parts of the growth funnel.

In my role as Growth Advisor-in-Residence at Greylock, I talk to startups in the portfolio about getting new users to stick around. Through many failed experiments and long conversations poring over data and research, I have learned some fundamental truths about onboarding. I hope this can function as a guide for anyone tackling this problem at their company.

What is Successful Onboarding?
Before you can fix your onboarding efforts, you need to define what successful onboarding is to you. What does it mean to have someone habitually using your product? Only then can you measure how successful you are at onboarding them. To do so, you need to answer two questions:

  • What is your frequency target? (How often should we expect the user to receive value?)
  • What is your key action? (The action signifies the user is receiving enough value to remain engaged)

To benchmark frequency, look at offline analogs. At Grubhub, we determined how often people ordered delivery by calling restaurants. The answer was once or twice a month, so we used a “once a month” as a benchmark for normal frequency for Grubhub. At Pinterest, the analog was a little harder to determine, but using Pinterest was most like browsing a magazine, which people read weekly or monthly. So we started with monthly, and now they look at weekly metrics.

Identifying the key action can be easy or hard — it depends on your business. At Grubhub, it was pretty easy to determine. You only received value if you ordered food, so we looked at if you placed a second order. At Pinterest, this was a little harder to determine. People derive value from Pinterest in different ways, from browsing lots of images to saving images to clicking through to the source of content. Eventually, we settled on saving (pinning an image to your board), because, while people can get value from browsing or clicking through on something, we weren’t sure if it was satisfying. You only save things if you like them.

Once you know your key action and your frequency target, you have to track that target over time. You should be able to draw a line of all users who sign up during a specific period, and measure if they do the key action within the frequency target after signup. For products with product/market fit, the line flattens as a percentage of the users complete the key action every period:

If the line flattens rather quickly, your successful activation metric is people who are still doing [key action] at [set interval] at [this period after signup]. So, for Pinterest, that was weekly savers four weeks after signup. If your cohort takes a longer time to flatten, you measure a leading indicator. At Grubhub, the leading indicator was a second order within thirty days of first order.

How should you research onboarding?
You can break down cohort curve above into two sections. The part above where the curve flattens are people who “churn”, — or did not receive enough value to make the product a habit. The people below where the curve flattens have been successfully onboarded.

To research onboarding, talk to both groups of people to get their thoughts. I like to do a mix of surveys, phone calls, and qualitative research using the product. I usually start with phone calls to see what I can learn from churners and activators. Our partner Josh Elman talks about best practices to speaking with churners, or bouncebacks. If I am able to glean themes from those conversations, I can survey the broader group of churners and activators to quantify the reasons for success and failure to see which are most common. (Sidenote: You’ll need to incentivize both groups to share their thoughts with you. For those that didn’t successfully activate, give them something of value for their time, like an Amazon gift card or money. For those that did, you may be able to give them something free in your product.)

But it is not enough to just talk to people who already have activated or churned. You also want to watch the process as it’s happening to understand it deeper. In this case, at Pinterest, we brought in users and watched them sign up for the product and go through the initial experience. When we needed to learn about this internationally, we flew out to Brazil, France, Germany and other countries to watch people try to sign up for the product there. This was the most illuminating part of the research, because you see the struggle or success in real time and can probe it with questions. Seeing the friction of international users first hand allowed us to understand it deeper and focus our product efforts on removing that friction.

The principles of successful onboarding
#1: Get to product value as fast as possible — but not faster
A lot of companies have a “cold start problem” — that is, they start the user in an empty state where the product doesn’t work until the user does something. This frequently leaves users confused as to what to do. If we know a successful onboarding experience leads to the key action adopted at the target frequency, we can focus on best practices to maximize the number of people who reach that point.

The first principle we learned at Pinterest is that we should get people to the core product as fast as possible — but not faster. What that means is that you should only ask the user for the minimum amount of information you need to get them to the valuable experience. Grubhub needs to know your address. Pinterest needs to know what topics you care about so they can show you a full feed of ideas.

You should also reinforce this value outside the product. When we first started sending emails to new users at Pinterest, we sent them education on the features of Pinterest. When Trevor Pels took a deeper look at this area, he changed the emails to deliver on the value we promised in the first experience, instead of telling users what we thought was important about the product. This shift increased activation rates. And once the core value is reinforced, you can actually introduce more friction to deepen the value created. When web signups clicked on this content on their mobile devices, we asked them to get the app, and because they were now confident in the value, they did get the app. Conversely, sending an email asking users to get the app alone led to more unsubscribes than app downloads.
Many people will use this principle as a way to refute any attempts to add extra steps into the signup or onboarding process. This can be a mistake. If you make it clear to the user why you are asking them for a piece of information and why it will be valuable to them, you can actually increase activation rate because it increases confidence in the value to be delivered, and more actual value is delivered later on.

Principle #2: Remove all friction that distracts the user from experiencing product value
Retention is driven by a maniacal focus on the core product experience. That is more likely to mean reducing friction in the product than adding features to it. New users are not like existing users. They are trying to understand the basics of how to use a product and what to do next. You have built features for existing users that already understand the basics and now want more value. New users not only don’t need those yet; including them makes it harder to understand the basics. So, a key element of successful onboarding is removing everything but the basics of the product until those basics are understood. At Pinterest, this meant removing descriptions underneath Pins as well as who Pinned the item, because the core product value had to do with finding images you liked, and removing descriptions and social attribution allowed news users to see more images in the feed.

Principle #3: Don’t be afraid to educate contextually
There’s a quote popular in Silicon Valley that says if your design requires education, it’s a bad design. It sounds smart, but its actually dangerous. Product education frequently helps users understand how to get value out of a product and create long term engagement. While you should always be striving for a design that doesn’t need explanation, you should not be afraid to educate if it helps in this way.

There are right and wrong ways to educate users. The wrong way: show five or six screens when users open the app to explain how to do everything — or even worse, show a video. This is generally not very effective. The right way: contextually explain to the user what they could do next on the current screen. At Pinterest, when people landed on the home feed for the first time, we told them they could scroll to see more content. When they stopped, we told them they could click on content for a closer look. When they clicked on a piece of content, we told them they could save it or click through to the source of the content. All of it was only surfaced when it was contextually relevant.

Onboarding is both the most difficult and ultimately most rewarding part of the funnel to improve to increase a company’s growth. And it’s where most companies fall short. By focusing on your onboarding, you can delight users more often and be more confident exposing your product to more people. For more advice on onboarding, please read Scott Belsky’s excellent article on the first mile of product.

Currently listening to Easy Pieces by Latedeuster.

Branding Gives Your Company the Benefit of the Doubt

People tend to assume the worst, especially about companies. So, when companies screw up, and they inevitably will, consumers (and partially as a result, the press) are ready to pounce on you and your vile type of corporate evil. Every company has this moment, and some companies are more prepared for it than others. Yes, being prepared does mean having a crisis PR strategy and all that tactical jazz, but what’s more important is to have a brand people know. I’ll explain a bit why.

The brand of a company tells the consumer what it stands for, what it promises, and what it can deliver. Most companies invest handsomely in their brand and for good reason. Brand building can increase loyalty and command higher prices. But a crucial piece of brand building is that since consumers know what you stand for, and many of them have already identified with that, they give you more leeway in how you do business and when you make mistakes. Another word for this is trust. In really great brand building examples, a consumer will say, “That can’t possibly be right. I want to hear what they have to say about it.” In absence of this work, a brand is just identified as the product experience, which means when the product has issues, the brand has issues. Companies should try to elevate their brands to mean something beyond the product experience, and bad things happen when they don’t.

Brand building also crystallizes what you stand for inside a company, making your company less likely to make a strategic mistake against what you stand for. In absence of a strong brand, different departments optimize for different things, typically creating both a Frankenstein experience for the consumer, but also distrust among departments. When a core engineering team sees a new signup flow that seems particularly aggressive, they might be inclined to curse the growth team instead of saying, “I know what that team is about. Let me go talk talk to them to see why things seem amiss here.”

You can absolutely be successful without building a strong brand outside of the core product experience, but it is harder, and you’ll have more bumps along the road. I’ll give one example that comes to mind. The first is Netflix. Netflix is undoubtedly one of the most well known brands in the U.S. It is also a brand that has grown entirely through its product experience and direct response advertising. All of its marketing is tied to signing up for Netflix. Its TV ads, display ads, pop unders, etc. eschew brand building to attract direct signups. This worked very well to grow Netflix into a powerhouse, but when they inevitably made some major and minor mistakes, consumers, the press, and the public markets went after them. In 2011, Netflix announced a price increase and then after that a split of their DVD and streaming business, including a new name. Netflix is an amazingly valuable service at an incredibly affordable prices, especially compared to cable. But, because they lacked a strong brand, consumers associated a lot of their brand with the price. Furthermore, separating the two businesses was clearly a case of not having a strong understanding of their brand internally. The result: 800,000 subscribers lost in one quarter and a 77% drop in stock price.

Now, Netflix recovered from this, but it took years and a pretty radical change in strategy toward original content. While this provides Netflix more of a brand than “cheap access to tons of movies and TV shows” and pushes that branding more so to “quality content that I sometimes can’t get anywhere else”, it still associates the brand entirely with the product experience. If they go a few seasons without a hit show, or need to raise prices again, they may be in the same situation in the future.

Currently listening to Panda Bear Vs. The Grim Reaper by Panda Bear.

Value Trade Offs in Online Food Delivery

If you’ve been following the online food delivery space, now is a pretty exciting time. Multiple services are starting up, competing on different value propositions, and many corporations are theoretically launching businesses here as well. There is one clear giant, and it is unclear if any of the upstarts will challenge them. But what is so interesting is how large companies entering the space and new startups alike are confronting the different value trade offs in online food delivery. I’ll first describe the different types of services, their different components, and then their trade offs.

Types of Services

Marketplaces
Services: GrubHub, Seamless, Eat24
Marketplaces aggregates delivery restaurants and allow diners to search for restaurants that deliver to them. The restaurants do their own delivery.

Delivery Services
Services: Postmates, DoorDash, Caviar, Uber Eats
Delivery services offer delivery from restaurants that don’t do their own delivery and deliver the food themselves.

Delivery Only Restaurants
Services: Sprig, Spoonrocket, Maple
Delivery only restaurants have no storefront. They just make food that is available for delivery and deliver the food themselves.

Delivery Only Restaurants that Require Prep
Services: Munchery, Gobble
These restaurant services require some prep work ranging from microwave to stove or oven, but usually it’s only a few minutes of prep required.

Delivery of Ingredients/Recipe Only
Services: Blue Apron, Plated
These services deliver the ingredients and the recipe required to make a meal, but the diner has to cook it themselves.

Delivery of Groceries
Services: Instacart, Fresh Direct
These services deliver whatever items you want from a grocery store.

I won’t go into corporate focused services in this post.

Value Propositions

Variety
People rarely agree on what food they like, let alone on which food they want to eat at a specific time. While GrubHub is currently unmatched in its variety nationally with over 35,000 restaurants, different companies are tackling variety on both sides of the spectrum. Postmates will theoretically offer the most variety as it will pick up food from any establishment. Online food companies like Sprig, Munchery, and Spoonrocket limit options considerably each day. Doordash, Uber Eats and Caviar have the most confusing approach here, as their ability to use their own delivery network does not restrict them to restaurants who already offer delivery, but they curate the list to provide supposedly only great options. GrubHub works with every restaurant that does delivery already, and has expanded the market by convincing many restaurants to start delivery because they see how well other restaurants do by offering that option with GrubHub.

Prep
Convenience has two components: how much work you have to do to eat (prep), and how quickly the food arrives (time). Marketplaces, delivery only restaurants and delivery services deliver ready-to-eat food. Then, there are some that require a little prep, some that require full cooking, and some that require figuring out what to cook and cooking it.

Time
The other convenience layer is time. Delivery only restaurants target 10 minute delivery times by pre-pepping meals and loading them into the cars of their drivers, whereas GrubHub and Eat24 are closer to 45 minutes to an hour depending on the restaurant’s location and type of food. Delivery services tend to take over an hour as they require extra coordination with restaurants. I believe Uber Eats is attempting a hybrid of the delivery service model and the delivery only restaurant model, but I can’t confirm. None of the other services deliver food ready to eat, but they range on how much work is required. The some prep restaurants are more like 10 minutes to heat, and ingredient/recipe services require typically cook time of over 30 minutes to an hour.

Price
Price varies for all of these services. Delivery only restaurants target less than $15 everything included. While that is possible in some cities with marketplaces, it is not in others. Ingredient/recipe delivery services have plans that are under $10 per person. Delivery services tend to charge a fee for delivery or mark up restaurant prices, so they are typically more at $20 and above per person. This incentivizes group order to spread the delivery cost around to multiple people. This is why most delivery services end up focusing on corporate catering instead of consumers over time. Prep delivery only restaurants have different plans to entice regular ordering.

Quality
In marketplaces, the quality options are set by the market, and the diner chooses how good they want their food to be. Delivery services have the same option with perhaps a higher end than marketplaces as the very best restaurants tend not to deliver. The delivery only restaurants tend to be cheap and low quality so far. Whether you had a hand in making it yourself can also be considered a quality parameter, as some people to tend to prefer things they cook themselves.

Planning
With food delivery, one typically does not need to plan in advance to use it, but with new grocery delivery and ingredient/recipe prep services, diners need to plan ahead of time to use the service.

Trade Offs

As you start playing with these value propositions, you recognize some additional constraints. I don’t need to lecture you in price vs. quality. That’s pretty obvious. But what may not be obvious is the trade off between time and quality. Even if you are delivering food from an amazing restaurant, if it takes a long time to get to a diner, it’s typically not very amazing by the time it gets there due to the food being cold. The other interesting trade off is quality vs. variety. At GrubHub, our stance was akin to the saying “quantity is a quality all its own.” In that, if you organized all of the supply, even if you had many amazing restaurants and many not so good ones, the good ones quickly emerged to the top due to ratings and reviews and overall quality of the service improved. So, all GrubHub worried about was variety and convenience, with convenience mostly limited to the ordering and customer service experience. Price and quality were set by the market, but presumably, variety solved quality, with a cap on the high end.

What these new services are doing is taking constants in the marketplace equation and making them variables: prep, time, price, and quality. It is way too early to tell if changing the equation is valuable to the broader market as GrubHub does way more orders in a day than the rest of these services combined. But it will be interesting to watch.

Planning for Positive Externalities

In the past decade, two trends have picked up steam with the press relating to new business models. The first was “going green”, in that consumers wanted environmentally friendly products and were willing to pay a premium for it. As a result, a new crop of companies catered to this need. The second trend was that of the “sharing economy”, in which younger generations, instead of owning and controlling things like real estate, cars, household tools, etc. were sharing them with others and making some money in the process. This sharing was attributed to more of a yearning for community among younger generations.

These descriptions sound nice, but the reality of the situation is much different. Successful eco-friendly products like the Nest Thermostat and the Toyota Prius and successful sharing startups like Airbnb and Zipcar are actually successful not because of these trends, but in spite of them. Companies that relied on eco-friendliness or community/sharing alone have not thrived. So, what’s the difference between those that are succeeding despite these elements and those that have failed?

The answer is of course more simple than the rhetoric in the press behind these companies. It’s about value. The Nest Thermostat is successful because it saves you money on your electric bill and is easy to use. The fact that it is eco-friendly is a “bonus”. The Toyota Prius saves you money on gas as prices for gas continue to rise. The fact that it doesn’t pollute the air as much is a bonus. Airbnb is cheaper than a hotel for a guest, and a way to earn extra money as rents skyrocket for hosts, many of whom are not making the wages they were five years ago. The fact that you can meet interesting people is a bonus. Zipcar is cheaper than owning a car because you don’t have to worry about maintenance, and you only pay for when you need a car. The fact that it reduces emissions due to people no longer using cars for every travel activity and searching for parking is a bonus. Some may argue that we are more selfish in the way we spend our money on than ever.

These bonuses are what economists call externalities, and they are very important. They are side effects of transactions that have a positive or negative impact on others not even involved in those transactions, and not the reason those transactions took place. This trend of companies becoming successful due to value creation, but creating positive externalities for everyone is a pattern that should not be overlooked. In fact, I would argue it presents a playbook for those that want to change negative elements of our economy. Instead of expecting people to care more about certain causes that will help shape our world so that they donate money or refuse to transact with perpetrators of the opposite of what you want in the world, a better way may be to create something of value that has the side effect of a positive change in this world. Even if you don’t necessarily care about these issues as a business owner, solving them indirectly creates huge opportunities for branding and PR that, even selfishly, may make sense for you.

Perhaps the greatest example of all is Tesla. Electric cars are better for the environment, but no one cared enough to stop buying gas-powered cars. So Tesla created one of the most luxurious cars on the road, and made people desire it because it’s luxurious (see part VI. B.). The fact that it’s electric and better for the environment is a bonus. By associating electric power with luxury, Tesla may do more to drive a more eco-friendly future In the automotive industry than Toyota, who focused solely on value.

So, the next time you want to change something bad about the world, think about if there’s a way to attack the problem indirectly, whether by starting a business, aligning yourself with a corporation’s needs, etc. It may be the most successful way to accomplish your goals. If you’re starting a business, think about the problems you can solve indirectly by how you choose to build what you build. The opportunity is there, and companies are only starting to scratch the surface on how to apply them.

Don’t Coupon What You Can Get For Free, or the Economics of Value

I seem to be pretty unique in my attribution of value of products. I pretty much have an internal dollar amount in my head for every good I’d like to buy in terms of what much I would spend on it. This is the value that product provides for me. This value is in no way related to market value. Most consumers don’t necessarily have this quality. Consumers tend to abide by market value for products. So, for example, let’s say a leather jacket originally cost $500. It now costs $250, so it is discounted by 50% from market value. Person A might say this is a deal and buy the jacket. But let’s say my personal value for the jacket is only $100. This is still not a deal for me, so I would stay away. The jacket is bought by Person A, and Person A is now a customer of the store or brand of the jacket.

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With the economy still struggling, people are trying to save money, but instead of sticking to personal value, people are responding to discounts on market value. Just look at how coupon sites like Groupon and CouponCabin are doing (Congrats by the way on your success. Fantastic work). These sites have built value by providing consumers great deals, and providing businesses great exposure. Seeing the success of these businesses, I’m sure many other businesses are seeing what they can do to discount their products. Don’t be so quick to jump to this method.

Any business you create should revolve around a core value. For Groupon and Coupon Cabin, coupons are their core value. But if the service you provide is not coupons and you are just discounting your service in the form of a coupon, you may doing your business a disservice. Discounts are an extremely powerful motivator in consumer behavior, and that is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that consumers really respond to them. Perceived, not necessarily real, discounts are a strong motivator, even if the consumer did not value the product at all at regular price. Discounts are primarily used as a marketing tool to entice purchases for things that don’t normally have value to users. This is the basis of high-low pricing in retail stores, and Wal-Mart’s antitheses, always low pricing. Sites like Groupon are using coupons to provide a large amount of exposure to local businesses that would otherwise have no way of getting that exposure. These are both valid uses of discounting.

But if you are now following the high-low pricing paradigm and you already have built awareness, the curse is that if you offer a discount, the value of your business before you offered a discount is replaced by that discount. Let’s say the core value at GrubHub.com to consumers is online ordering for delivery. If we offer a 10% off discount, our core value to consumers becomes “10% off delivery”. So, when we remove that discount, the consumer associates no value to our business. So, to entice repeat use, we have to offer that discount again.

As a business, you should focus on building a core value and have that value be something people are willing to pay for. If they are willing to pay for it, it has value. You can then elevate how much you can get users to pay by providing more value. Using a discount to market to your current consumers is just paying for what you would get for free by reinforcing your core value.