Why do you need 10 mins delivery? Do you need it always? Isn't 10 mins delivery during emergencies sufficient? These were some of the questions I had when we at Grofers decided to make 10 mins delivery possible.
A similar set of questions we could have thought of couple of years ago was
Why do we need MBs of songs on our device? Why do we need to always carry our music with us? If we can carry only when we are traveling, is it not sufficient? But today we no more ask these questions. All of these questions were valid back then too. But somebody believed that all of these were necessary to change the consumer behavior. And it did. Consumers always prefer convenience. Even if they may not know it themselves explicitly.
Initially the cost of this convenience may be high and it might even seem foolish to incur that additional cost which the customer may not expect or explicitly ask for. But as more companies start doing it, as the industry itself matures, as the cost of the underlying infrastructure comes down with economies of scale, the cost to convenience ratios goes down drastically and then the conversation moves from cost to convenience. When the costs are low, we know that everybody will prefer convenience.
Wasn't similar questions raised for e-commerce in India too? But see where we are today? Efficiencies lies in future, technology gets better, systems mature, synergies will arise and M&As will happen. But those who deliver convenience and value to customers consistently over a long period of time will eventually win over the customers and be profitable.
Instand Commerce is a statement that these companies are making to the customers saying that "We value your convenience and time over short term challenges" we might need to face. In fact many of the startups are trying to identify this class of consumers who believe this to be a fact. They are the class of customers they want to target first before they reach out to others.
CRED is a classic example of this. They are targeting the high trust customers so that they can provide high value services to them at a small charge. With high trust the risk reduces too. It is a flywheel. These companies just need to make sure that they have enough runway to make their dreams come true. That is why Build your runway becomes an important strategy. But considering the way investors are throwing money at Startups (In 2021) , I don't this is something that the startups should worry about.
I was wrong about this. I have bought this domain http://10minute.delivery/ will redirect it to whoever is doing the best work in 10 minute delivery domain.
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