We're still working hard on finishing up the tech behind this, as well as locking in partnerships with a few more bakeries before we launch with a small group of early customers, but I wanted to post here and gauge interest among the HN folks in SF.
We have about 300 people on our email list so far, and will try to keep our launch small so we can deliver top-notch service, but please sign up if you are interested in this.
The reason we're so excited about this project can be boiled down to logistics. To simplify and streamline logistics, our business is modeled more closely to the milkman than the pizza delivery man. On Sunday, we send out a picture message with one bread choice for each day of the coming week. If you want any of them, you reply via SMS and we bring it to your doorstep.
Since our drivers can make one pickup and then drop off identical products to every customer, delivery becomes far simpler and cheaper.
Lots of smart folks are vying for the one-stop grocery delivery market, and we think it will become a war of logistics for who wins that massive market (personally, I'm pulling for Instacart). We're approaching a different and smaller (but still quite large) market, from a different angle.
Fresh bread is our first product because it's almost universally loved, and it arguably decreases in quality every hour after being baked. Eventually we hope to expand to still-simple, curated line-up of high quality, short shelf-life specialty foods (coffee, cheese, etc.)
Sign up if you're interested, but more importantly, leave us some feedback here. :)
It was common to have your milk delivered every morning until a few decades ago(in the UK at last), with some milk men also doing eggs, butter, orange juice etc.
They have mostly died out. Have you explored why and what you will do to succeed when these people have closed their businesses?
You should list some of the bakers you get bread from on the site/signup and not just in the app. I'm hesitating signing up because I have no real interest in bread delivery unless it's from certain bakeries that I know are worth the extra effort over buying a loaf of Acme bread or whatever at the local Safeway or corner market. Like Josey Baker and Arizmendi, which I see in the screenshots. And even then it's like well... I don't just want bread, I also want like a bunch of their other products (scones, croissants, etc.). Maybe I'm better served by Postmates/Taskrabbit, but more bread products than just loaves of bread would be awesome albeit more complicated.
Also if you could deliver Tartine bread I would be so all over that in an instant! Especially right out of the oven :) Even though I like to bake and I have two loaves' worth of dough proofing in my kitchen right now.
I would be willing to risk $6 one time to test out the service. If the bread wows me, I would not care which bakery the bread came from. If it underwhelms, I have not lost that much.
It's not the $6+ or the service as much as it is my existing bread preferences. Like if all they did was offer Firebrand bread you couldn't pay me to buy that or spend my time even looking at the service, whereas I would pay $15 for a loaf of Tartine delivered within a couple hours in a heartbeat.
Maybe it's because I have such a high standard for bread at my table (my roommate is a foodie too and I can go to Thorough Bread & Pastry, Bi-Rite Market, or Tartine in 10 minutes... or I can bake my own sour sourdough in 30) but knowing where the bread comes from interests me more than what varieties are offered or how convenient the service is.
But I say this as someone that just baked a loaf of beer+cheddar+mustard bread and I smell like pure deliciousness that you can't buy from a delivery service, so maybe the service isn't for me.
We're still working hard on finishing up the tech behind this, as well as locking in partnerships with a few more bakeries before we launch with a small group of early customers, but I wanted to post here and gauge interest among the HN folks in SF.
We have about 300 people on our email list so far, and will try to keep our launch small so we can deliver top-notch service, but please sign up if you are interested in this.
The reason we're so excited about this project can be boiled down to logistics. To simplify and streamline logistics, our business is modeled more closely to the milkman than the pizza delivery man. On Sunday, we send out a picture message with one bread choice for each day of the coming week. If you want any of them, you reply via SMS and we bring it to your doorstep.
Since our drivers can make one pickup and then drop off identical products to every customer, delivery becomes far simpler and cheaper.
Lots of smart folks are vying for the one-stop grocery delivery market, and we think it will become a war of logistics for who wins that massive market (personally, I'm pulling for Instacart). We're approaching a different and smaller (but still quite large) market, from a different angle.
Fresh bread is our first product because it's almost universally loved, and it arguably decreases in quality every hour after being baked. Eventually we hope to expand to still-simple, curated line-up of high quality, short shelf-life specialty foods (coffee, cheese, etc.)
Sign up if you're interested, but more importantly, leave us some feedback here. :)