The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
It’s been a while since I last wrote about food delivery, and new ideas keep popping up here. Gobble, the startup of the day, shows an example of fine differentiation for finding one’s niche.
Blue Apron operates on the American market, it delivers its customers a recipe and a set of ingredients for a restaurant-class dinner. Family dinners become delicious and diverse, but it requires some time at the stove. Its alternative, Freshly, sells ready meals, you only need to heat them – it’s more convenient for a bachelor, but it comes with all the setbacks of a heated meal. Finally, the simplest variant is Grubhub, it’s a mere delivery from restaurants, it doesn’t even require you to use the microwave, you can just eat, but the regular price of a meal is higher.
It would seem that all the opportunities are taken, there’s nothing new to do here, only straightforward competition or do something completely different, but Gobble’s founders found a way. They copy Blue Apron’s model and the prices but with a single nuance – their recipes suggest simple cooking, within 15 minutes’ time, as opposed to 30-40 minutes that the original suggests. Naturally, such a limitation renders some masterpieces impossible and the images on the website look more down to earth, but the advantage is also apparent – part of the audience values speed over high aesthetics. Still, the magic of a local monopoly works – the market is small, but it’s home. It’s clear what one should advertise and to whom, there is no direct competition or damping.
The idea of the startup took shape in 2015, but it was complicated to put together the unit economy – the niche is small after all, the operational part of a business is complicated. Today they boast about how successfully they did it, the recent round of USD 15M will be spent on scaling.
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This is a rerun from 2018. The startup is alive but didn’t rocket, and even the pandemic didn’t boost its leap. The latest round’s investors definitely shouldn’t have dealt with it, and it’s difficult to say how happy the founder is.
Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
