I don't think they're failing because of a lack of competitive advantage. People just don't really like the service. My group of friends used the term "Blue Apron Anxiety" to describe the feeling you get when a new BA box was sitting on your doorstep and you still haven't cooked any of the meals from the last batch. If they did, competitive advantage could've been established (e.g. economies of scale). Besides, companies sometimes succeed with products that don't really afford themselves to competitive advantages (e.g. Facebook or Spotify) until they're big enough to be deeply entrenched.

Not to mention the anxiety you feel when you open up the packaging and there was just so much waste. Every time I opened up a meal delivery service meal I just felt like I was killing the environment. One time I had a large cardboard box specifically solely to package 10 almonds which were also wrapped in plastic and surrounded in bubble wrap.

> Every time I opened up a meal delivery service meal I just felt like I was killing the environment.

As you well should.

How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types? These ass backwards Silicon Valley 'products' should be taken behind an alley and burned to the ground.

Coral reefs are dying, mass exctinction is underway, our oceans are deadened and acidic, the little life that remains is full of microplastics and metals, glaciers are receding, entire fucking nations are sinking, fires are blazing larger than ever, antibiotics are no longer effective, heck, even drinkable water is getting scarcer, but fuck it, what we need is yet more asinine packaging to let the fat, overfed, heavily consuming American have yet another morsel of convenience because god forbid he have to get off his electric wheelchair to exercise his muscles and bike to a grocery store to buy some fucking Brocolli.

Fuck it all.

> How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types?

Most meal kits (definitely Blue Apron) still have you chopping up vegetables; they are taking care of portioning and grouping (shopping and household inventory management), not prepping. So your complaint here is a bit of a non-sequitur.

Not related to Blue Apron: Where I live, you can buy peeled and chopped onions. Have to be put in the fridge and are packed in a plastic bag.

Related to yours: the other day my wife told me she saw mandarin oranges peeled and individually wrapped in plastic. Mandarin oranges come with their own goddamn natural packaging. Why on Earth would you replace it with plastic?

The obvious answer is "to accommodate people with arthritis or other manual dexterity limiting condition."

That's not obvious, as presumably you don't need much more effort to peel the skin off a mandarin orange than you'd need to peel off the plastic wrapper.

I had some "Easy Peeler" mandarins yesterday and, without any arthritis, they were much more effort than removing a plastic wrapper would have been.

I can't even begin to imagine how hard it would be if I had crippling arthritis in my hands.

I wonder how many people buying this do actually have athritis.

I don't know but there were a lot of disabled people praising Whole Foods for their peeled oranges back in 2016 when that whole backlash happened.

Seems unlikely to me. And of course we don't have to presume, but can look at what people with those issues say, and they've been vocal about it whenever there's been a too-successful campaign against these things.

Careful with unintended consequences. Convenient fruits may displace some greener inconvenient fruits, but may also displace some order-of-magnitude worse food items, such as cheeseburgers.

Fruits are incredibly convenient by themselves without extra wrapping, the reason some people prefer cheeseburgers over fruits is not convenience, but because cheeseburgers taste better.

I live in New Jersey, and work in New York City. I leave my desk at 4, get home 5:15-5:30, and I like to cook dinner when I can.

I also have a 3-year-old, and keeping on a routine is something I feel that is important, so dinner on the table by 6 is my gold standard that I really really want to have happen as much as I can (allows bedtime routine at 7:30).

I often buy pre-chopped veggies, as long as I trust the chopper (there is a little farm market down the street from me and I see them chopping in the back room). The time it saves is great, easy 5 minutes closer to dinner time than I'd be otherwise, not counting the extra cleanup.

I don't think pre-chopped veggies is the problem, if you are getting them from a farm market presumably you can bring your own reusable containers? It makes complete sense to outsource the parts of the process that can be :)

I've said it here before, but these services are a lifesaver for some.

It might seem lazy to someone in full health, but sometimes those small things make all the difference.

There are ways of catering to people with special needs without enabling everyone to collectively destroy the environment.

But without there being a general audience for those things the cost is generally too high.

The example which springs to mind is the pre-peeled fruit a number of years ago which was similarly dismissed for having a harmful environmental impact, but if you've lost motor function in your hands it means you can eat a wider variety of foods.

Just because you don't see the need for something doesn't mean the need isn't there.

There’s so much money available that product market fit is not that important anymore. That’s at least what Steve Blank says (1). I don’t buy it, because I think it’s just a matter of time until you’ll find out that it doesn’t work and I don’t believe sheer money can create sustainable demand. But, it’s probably a great time to try stupid/crazy things or just give free stuff to consumers.

(1) https://steveblank.com/2018/09/05/is-the-lean-startup-dead/

> Funny thing is that whenever we learned about entrepreneurship, the three phrase was always SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

Yup.

Shameful to admit, but I only this month finally got around to read "Lean Startup". I'm in a process of copying notes and writing down some thoughts, so I have this fresh in front of me: the book frequently talks about the goal of a startup being to "discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision" (emphasis mine).

But then, it shows to build unsustainable growth and keeps portraying companies that got sold as examples of success. Such is the double standard, and the only way I can reconcile those two views is by concluding that the goal is for you to make money via the discovery, and for someone else to use that discovery to build an actually sustainable business. But if it is so, then there's no surprise people skip the "sustainable business" part, as you can make even more money in an unsustainable way.

Most early VCs get preferred stock and sales early. That's what happened with Blue Apron's IPO. The VCs benefitted greatly as it was their stock being sold to the public, first.

Finance vaguely plausible but essentially bullshit idea - IPO - sell most of your stock just after the IPO peak - move on.

Bullshit idea crashes, trashing the livelihoods of the developers and later investors, but you and your money are long gone.

This can look suspiciously like the slower and more professional version of a pump 'n dump stock scheme - although historically it's sometimes written off as "irrational exuberance".

If by some miracle the bullshit idea actually flies, your remaining stock gives you a slice.

I don’t think it’s anything like pump n dump. Anyone who bought into a food prep delivery service should have known better, all they had to do was try it for themselves. In any case, if you’re not wary of the risks in food service businesses, you probably need to do better research.

>trashing the livelihoods of the developers and later investors

If you don't like it then go write software for bigco and shove your money in an index fund. Nobody is forcing developers to work for trendy startups or forcing investors to invest in freshly IPO'd startups.

It's honestly a good idea, but it's not a VC idea. It's a slow burn, 10% annual growth market - like a well-liked restaurant.

When thinking about "why VCs...", keep in mind they have to invest in something. If they don't invest, they lose (lose LPs, lose the fund). So simple answer is - they invested in this company because it was the least worse idea pitched to them over a certain period.

Home Chef was acquired by Kroger.

For $200 million: https://thespoon.tech/kroger-buys-home-chef-for-200m-as-meal...

How do you feel about Uber? They arguably don't have a sustainable competitive advantage either.

Yet they're somehow looking at a $120B IPO next year.

Uber is a transportation marketplace. If they’re successful in cornering the market all transportation is arranged through them but they employ zero drivers, and therefore would be wildly profitable. That’s why they’re all about market share at any cost.

If Uber disappeared tomorrow, everyone would download another app and do the same journey in the same car with the same driver and the day after tomorrow would forget that Uber ever existed.

But today they have the biggest network of drivers, and until they do disappear (or get disrupted by something like self-driving cars), network effect ensures that they'll remain the default option.

Same can be said for Instagram or Twitter?

Yes and no. There’s no ongoing relationship between people on Uber, drivers don’t have passengers as “followers” or “friends” or vice versa. There’s no network effect really. And many users and many drivers have multiple apps anyway. The stickiness of Uber is incredibly low.

Yeah, and Uber's founder's name is Travis Kalanick. How does spitting out random facts about Uber at all address his comment that Uber doesn't have a sustainable competitive advantage.

Their sustainable advantage is in dominance. If they offer the most transportation options people check them first, and drivers flock to where the people are.

That's not how it actually works. Customers flip back and forth between Uber and competing services based on cost and availability. There's literally zero switching cost and no customer loyalty.

It's called a network effect

I don't think there is a network effect present in either Uber's or Blue Apron's business model.

<snip snip> A network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the positive effect described in economics and business that an additional user of a good or service has on the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Blue Apron, not really. Uber certainly has a network effect. While many switched to Lyft given bad press, plenty more still got Uber originally (both sides of the market) and just use that. As they add more transit capabilities to their app (bikes, scooters etc) they will raise their moat as people just go there for all their transit needs.

There's not much thinking. It's hype and portfolio theory, and mostly hoping for a quick acquisition by a bigger company.

There's plenty of thinking. The VCs know what they are doing. For those that have plenty of cash, the game is to invest in anything and everything that has a good public facing brand.

Pump it with cash, then dump it on the public market with an ipo to all the less sophisticated investors that aren't reading the financials.

Sure, every once in a while, you'll come across a Facebook type business that ends up being profitable, but in the meantime you can still make money on the losers when you cash out.

> less sophisticated investors that aren't reading the financials

Do these actually exist? My understanding is that retail investors aren't significant and I don't believe that institutional investors don't look at financials.

In most IPOs, the vast majority of shares are allocated to institutional investors plus high net worth individuals who are favored customers of brokerages. Some of those buyers then flip their shares to retail investors just after the IPO for a quick low-risk profit.

Definitely. My aunt liked the service and put $100k into APRN around $5. It adds up.

> I don't believe that institutional investors don't look at financials.

Many don't, like indexed funds. They just try and keep their shares ratios inline with the market and rely on it always going up overall.

Do index funds drive the price at all though? I would expect them to be net neutral. If the stock goes down they sell, if it goes up, they buy.

Yes they're mostly neutral. But when the stock goes down that's still real people losing real money from their pension funds to what are essentially con artists. The saving grace here is as nradov said, they won't buy into IPO's.

Very few index funds purchase IPO shares. Companies that just IPO'd aren't listed in indexes; it takes a while for them to be added. Then the index funds buy on the secondary market.

Snap comes to mind.

Maybe we have different definitions of thought but there's definitely not a lot of in-depth analysis and due diligence in most deals, as that's how portfolio theory and sufficient deal flow is attained.

What you're talking about with IPOs is not quick or easy, and definitely not guaranteed in any way. Taking a company public essentially counts as an exit for most funds, and if it was that easy to just sell up everything then the entire VC field would look different. That process is more for private equity and banking firms who maneuver through financial engineering rather than early and mid-stage VCs.

This strategy requires a chain of greater fools. It’s only possible in a bull market because dumb money runs away quickly. If you collect a salary anyway far better to chase FB, Stripe, Airbnb than even think about flipping some company for more than it’s worth.

So... The Index Bubble?

Is it possible that brand recognition is sustainable?

FOMO