Wait, why do you think that "The market is big"? When you did customer validation it failed because the city wasn't big enough. And when you looked at bigger cities you found have better options than this idea. That sounds like the market is actually not that big.

Even the premise seems a bit fuzzy: Can we deliver a pizza in 10-15 min instead of 1-2 hours? Is the problem that it takes to long to deliver or that the delivery is so varied? Maybe people cared much more about the time it is delivered than the speed? If I am told the pizza will be here at 8pm and it arrives at 8:20 I am annoyed, but if I was told it would be here at 8:20 I might be perfectly happy. The question to determine is are they losing sales because of speed or because of the accuracy of the last time they had a delivery?

But above the question based upon your existing research why not open a joint in the bay that sells high quality pizza delivered and $1 pizza if you walk in as that is clearly what the market is validating?

Admittedly, I've glossed over the market aspects for this thread.

To gauge the size, we used a standard report from the pizza industry that a seed stage VC friend helped me find, which gave us:

- $36.7B U.S. pizza sales in 2012

- 75-77% of 18-44 year olds are pizza customers

- 410 million pizzas picked up or delivered per year

In Cincinnati, we think it's not the size of the city, but that the population is distributed in pockets that are too far apart from each other (i.e., to be simultaneously served by one pizza truck quickly).

Our consumer validation showed that what most people value in delivery is: speed (~50%), cost (~30%), and quality (~20%).

We would like to work on food tech in the future, and mostly likely in the bay, but the three of us weren't ready to leave Cincinnati yet :).

Isn't 10-15 min close to the average already? I live 12+ miles from the only pizza place that will deliver out here and it rarely takes more than 30 minutes to get here. I don't remember how long it took in the 'burbs, but it wasn't any longer than that.

In that case, you're lucky. It varies a lot.

While there's no extensive data source with that info for every city, we called each pizza place around downtown Cincinnati in the evenings while we worked. We were quoted 30-90 minutes with an average wait of 43-49 minutes and a median wait of 45 minutes. Some of these were even ≤ 10-minute walk from our coworking space. One interesting observation is that chains often beat indie place quoted times by 5 minutes.

We also collected more anecdotal non-pizza data from my personal experience in the bay in 2014: I was so excited to try Caviar for the first time... and every restaurant I attempted gave a wait of 60-120 minutes or more until eventually I gave up and just walked to food.

Funny enough, this concept was on the Comedy Central show "Nathan For You" -- pizza delivery guaranteed in 7 minutes or you get a free pizza. The delivery was always late.

(The free pizza was a 1" mini pizza and the rest of the order was still full price)

At one time Domino's offered a similar guarantee: "30 minutes or it's free", but canceled it due to increased driver accidents.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-12-22/news/931222003...