Silicon Valley fresh electricity dealer Grubmarket New play

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We are in the Silicon Valley to cover your cutting-edge trends

Author Yang Birch An

Do you have the experience and habit of buying vegetables online? I haven't, but I've noticed something recently.

A few weeks ago, my engineer friend in Silicon Valley wanted to make a birthday dinner for my girlfriend. Suffering from too much work and no time to buy food, he ordered the ingredients through grubmarket.com and finished cooking within 2 hours. Dishes include: grilled fresh salmon, fried scallops, sour beans minced meat, onion fat cows, fried greens and potted cakes.

According to him, from ordering ingredients to door-to-door, the whole process does not exceed 24 hours, and the total cost of food is at least 1/3 cheaper than in supermarkets.

Another freshness angle, because of curiosity, I also registered with Grub harsh, found that the site for free to registered users of three pounds of vegetables, than usual I in the Bay Area Whole Foods, Juno Joe's and Safeway several food retailers to buy fresh.

It seems to be a start-up that wants to challenge Amazon in the vertical. Fresh service Amazon Fresh is now the global push of the company's business, in addition to May this year a big 20 million dollars to hit Shanghai Delicious 77 for their small shareholders to enter China, they also do a lot of marketing in the United States.

But despite the financial advantage, Amazon is facing the problem is: first, the current growth rate of mobile operators is the overall electricity market growth rate of three times times (this year's two quarterly data), this gives a lot of new entrants a chance; second, the mobile electric Company This kind of real-time and the kind of vertical business model, it is easy to destroy the old comprehensive electric dealer long established brand (because do not know how to choose) , quickly establish "mental position" in the user's heart.

And third, it's important, at present, Silicon Valley is taking place in a number of new trends covering the whole industry, so that start-ups from the starting point that can be more flexible to build and deploy resources, such as Grub harsh, the core concept of its logistics is used to use urban idle labor to build services "Lyft" mode, and large data applications.

Large data to calculate the shortest delivery path

Grub Harsh was online early this year, mainly to connect producers and consumers of localized agricultural food. From the business model, it has no novelty, every single business, charge the seller a 15%-25% transaction fee, but if carefully look at the team's staffing, a little meaning.

Typically, an e-business model involves three of links, one platform, two warehousing, three logistics, the U.S. electric business two models EBay and Amazon in these three links to deal with different ways, of which the main ebay service C, the platform is the focus, almost not involved in the supply chain, and Amazon is known for its supply chain, it has warehousing and strong logistics.

From upstream vendors, Grub Harsh is more like Amazon, which serves small B, a small farmer, such as a cooperative winter fruit farm, a small business on a family farm in the Bay Area;

But the midrange, Grub harsh is also the eBay route, it avoids warehousing, no inventory, sellers directly with the next single user docking, and to the downstream, it returned to the Amazon, but a very "strange" Amazon.

According to the founder of Grub Harsh, former EBay employee Xu Mingyi, the company currently has 12 people, including 5 technology, delivering 2. In other words, the technical staff accounted for the total number of 1/2, and logistics personnel is less than 1/6.

This is because, it 5 people technical team mainly work is to use large data to integrate GPS maps and data. This is a trend that has been evident in Silicon Valley, where investment in the field of foreign sales has been very hot, but the whole background or concept promotion behind the takeaway logistics is a big data application.

In fact, all the industries involved in the logistics sector, Silicon Valley rookie are in the big data to reshape the old concept. By analyzing the user data, the logistics can predict which area and what time user orders will be, in order to adjust the capacity in advance and shorten the user wait time.

Here also includes the route optimization of the transportation. The core of all this is the ability to collect and process and analyse data on urban transport and logistics.

But Grub harsh distribution personnel, accounting for only 1/6 of the total number of companies, in addition to data optimization, there is another important part of the logistics link, which is "the last Mile."

The last Mile question

Remember WebVan? Silicon releases have reported the largest internet bubble in American history, possibly the largest internet bubble in human history. It's been a terrible story since 1999, when it came to a brilliant IPO and became America's most sensational bankrupt company by 2001.

First of all, WebVan to solve is a primitive human desire, that is, do not go out to eat immediately to eat fresh things. But its practice can be called crazy, it wants to let the user order on the net soya-bean milk, in the bad before send to the user hand, WebVan even promise: can 30 minutes door-to-door.

At the end of last century, U.S. venture capitalists and Wall Street frantically injected more than 800 million dollars into their investments, including Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Capital, Goldman Sachs and Yahoo., and they came in to encourage Webvan to quickly build up its infrastructure.

The so-called infrastructure means that, in order to facilitate transportation, Webvan a large amount of money at the beginning of the establishment, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and other place to build an expensive transportation center.

Here's a background: a lot of food needs to be kept in a special temperature and quickly passed, otherwise it is very easy to rot. To do this, however, means that companies must have a large inventory and transportation tool. In this sense, WebVan is right to build its own warehousing and transportation center.

But Webvan must know that it faces a food industry with a narrow profit margin. Faced with the direct competition of traditional retailers, Webvan must attract consumers with a very close foundation of traditional supermarket commodity prices.

Despite its blind expansion, it has made its sales account for 46% of the US total market share, but analysts estimate that Webvan had to absorb the extra cost of 10 to 15 dollars per dollar to deliver the goods to the user. This also makes its profit impossible.

In fact, in the collection of products and consumer issues, the traditional supermarket system is a very good way, because in this way, the marketing and logistics links in the crucial "the last Mile" is the consumer experience (consumers walk or drive to the supermarket), rather than corporate products in the experience, which means that can save a lot of costs.

Distribution is replaced by idle Labor

So if consumers just want to sit at home, how do You solve the "last mile" problem? Grub Harsh found a solution that uses urban idle labor.

Xu Mingyi points out that Grub harsh will later use large data to integrate the idle labor time in the same area, allowing them to sideline the delivery of food. In other words, if we have a little spare time for the interview, we can also apply for an application to act as a delivery staff, and earn some pocket money.

Grub harsh may be the first start-up to apply this idea to mobile fresh electricity companies, but it is another trend that Silicon Valley generally presents at many industries. Other industries involved include takeaway companies and car-rental services, such as Uber, Lyft, America's biggest competitor.

The core differences between Lyft and Uber at the driver level are: Uber passenger drivers are mainly professional drivers, but Lyft the beginning is to the city idle private owners mainly, such as one day when you call a Lyft, carrying you is probably I have other professional non-professional drivers, so when you ride Lyft and Uber will obviously feel cultural differences.

I have seen a Quora on the website of the United States, to the effect of distinguishing the characteristics of drivers in two companies, Lyft is described as more talkative, socially, and the passenger sits next to him in the front seat, compared to the Uber driver, who tends to be quiet and always sits back upright to allow more room in the back seat.

Finally, Grub Harsh is able to make it cheaper and fresher because it takes a direct marketing approach, where upstream suppliers strip out many retail chains, thus saving the profit/wait time for each segment, but there are already a lot of direct agricultural outlets in China, which is no longer discussed here.

According to Xu Mingyi, the Grub harsh platform currently has 165 sellers, 1500 types of food, the number of users in 5000, to Silicon Valley software companies mainly employees, such as Google and Facebook, 60% of which are Chinese.

Grub harsh goal is to be able to deliver the day, but it is still in a very early stage, many ideas are still conceptual level, many innovations may face the challenges of organizational form.