Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery

I'd love to have this service at home, so I'm (selfishly) hoping Instacart becomes hugely successful!<p>That said, I can't help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics. A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90's, and they couldn't make it work. (Kozmo.com ended up raising a quarter billion dollars before shutting down.)[1]<p>The main challenge is that same-day, point-to-point delivery is very expensive -- a complex problem. (Most delivery systems in use today rely on some kind of hub-and-spoke design.) Perhaps the wide adoption of smart phones will make point-to-point delivery economically viable for Instacart -- e.g., by giving the company cost-effective access to underused delivery vehicles as needed to satisfy the ebbs and flows of consumer demand.<p>I'm curious to see if and how Instacart can pull it off.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com#History" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com#History</a>

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out against Amazon's push into same-day delivery. Amazon is setting up local distribution centers of their own. Instacart is using existing distribution centers (i.e. retail stores).<p>Both companies need to figure out how to best deliver items locally. This is a big logistical challenge (but luckily it's well researched). In addition, Amazon needs to predict demand locally and ship items to a local distribution center. Instacart can leverage existing supply chains but has to pay a premium for it. If Instacart is willing to operate at a loss for a while, they might actually have an advantage over Amazon and can fully focus on getting the local delivery part of the equation right.<p>Very exciting stuff and congrats on the launch!<p>Disclaimer: I met Apoorva a few weeks ago and have been happily using the service since. I'm extremely impressed by how he managed to do all of this essentially alone and can't wait to see what's next.<p>Edit: typos

The techcrunch article title is misleading - they don't want to be Amazon; they're not maintaining warehouses (which may prevent them from crashing like Webvan). They're effectively delivery people that you hire to bring you products from local stores, which is a <i>very</i> different market.<p>Regardless, there are a lot of dead companies that litter the path for a product like this. I'd be surprised if Instacart succeeds.

This is the most useful service i discovered i recent months. period. I seriously recommend this to anyone in SF. I dont remember the last time i went shopping for groceries. It already saved me tons of hours and money. no-brainer.<p>disclaimer: my company is in the same YC batch and I know Apoorva personally and was happy to get early access to service.

I love that the website doesn't shoehorn me into a crappy mobile version when I load it, but what happens now is that I get a picture of an iPhone and apparently nothing else—it's not at all intuitive for me to think to scroll horizontally to find the content of the web page, especially with the hidden-by-default scroll bars on the iPhone. To clarify, the horizontal scroll bar that appeared when scrolling vertically while "looking for the rest of the page" was hidden by a thumb for me. I only barely thought to check horizontal scrolling before giving up on the page as somehow broken on my iPhone.<p>Deatil of what I see (on the left) vs what I probably should see (on the right, after zooming manually):<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/1Yjfi.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/1Yjfi.jpg</a>

If they were to do alcohol delivery this could be really big. Even if they charge more for it (say $20) it's going to be extremely popular.

This gets even better and it will save tons of money when I can create a bag, save it, then simply press one button to re-order.

It's a great idea, in theory. But who's the target market? Wealthy professionals have a wife to bring them stuff or have personal assistants (hard to believe in the world of dual income households, but I have friends that do just this). Young, less wealthy professionals just go pick up the items themselves or have friends pick them up for them. College kids aren't going to pay for such a service, they enjoy taking a break from studying to go pick up something. And yes, I know, I'm sure there are stay at home husbands that do errands for their wealthy professional wives, I just don't know of any.

Grocery shopping for the lazy AND impatient? Yes please.

I have been using past few week while it was in Alpha and I got say, its my favorite service for drink runs like sodas/juices/liquors. Def going to become a regular user. Gonna be following with much interest.<p>Also, to add to the conversation.It all about timing, right? Now with Amazon being as big as it is and we see companies like Rewinery, Exec, Postmates smashing into this on-demand local delivery space. The time seems ideal for a company like Instacart. I do miss WebVan though.

Monday I was having a conversation with a coworker about the looming major showdown between Amazon and Walmart. My take was Walmart should offer <i>exactly</i> this, allowing them to leverage their massive supply chain and warehouses in every city with more than 5000 people (aka "The Walmart").<p>Awesome to see a startup rising to the challenge.

Wasn't there a documentary about this somewhere back in the day that came to define the dot-com bubble?

I've been using instacart a lot lately and it's awesome. I really think this is going to big.

How can they make money delivering for $9.99? I guess the item prices are jacked up a little.

Sounds nice. I know some people have been using Exec (YC W12) to do this, but instacart is much cheaper. The only thing that takes all the excitement for me is that it does not have a android version OR a web one....

This looks great. Today I'm sick WFH and could really use some meds delivered. I signed up for an invite... what is the process/wait time like? I may have to try something else if I'll need to wait too long.

Have you looked at the financials of this? 10$ for 1 hr delivery means that either the carrier is paid less than that hourly(and I guess at least 20% less than that) or he is supposed to deliver more than 1 package per hour. Considering transportation costs and idle time, I am not sure this will work smoothly. It will work if there is a list of carriers ready to drop what they are doing to go buy groceries and make some money. Basically, it will work in cities with lots and lots of students...

Doesn't Amazon plan to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery?

This kind of seems like a rip off of Postmates' "Get It Now", no?<p><a href="http://postmates.com/getitnow/" rel="nofollow">http://postmates.com/getitnow/</a>

Kozmo.com of the new era bubble.<p>This will be interesting.

Peapod but faster?

I can barely get a pizza delivered in an hour, and they've been doing that since the 1970s (I guess, I have no idea when pizza delivery started). Do I have to worry about Instacart maniacs driving like banshees on the road?

This feels like a specialized TaskRabbit kind of thing (like what they tried to do with the $10 delivery for In-N-Out anywhere in SF). Could be workable if there's enough customers.

If something is located within an hour of me I could just drive and get it, or use a local delivery service. I use the internet to buy extra weird stuff that I can't get locally.

Groceries+short delivery window... sounds like webvan ;-P <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan</a>

Love the idea.. Possibilities around POS data and Nielsen like services are obvious extensions.. Good luck!!

Better than Peapod and Kozmo, the time for such a service is definitely now in the mobile driven world.

Are you guys limiting the invites? I'd love to check it out but haven't received my invite yet.

Congrats Apoorva! Glad to see us 08 Elecs trying to change the world for the better.

Who delivers? Is this a P2P marketplace (like Taskrabbit, etc?)?

Looking forward to giving this a try. Best of luck!

This is a brilliant idea. Hard, but worth doing.

Milkplease (refused by YC) is more promising and we are trying to be faster<p><a href="http://www.springwise.com/retail/italy-site-lets-users-crowdsource-small-last-minute-grocery-deliveries/" rel="nofollow">http://www.springwise.com/retail/italy-site-lets-users-crowd...</a>