What does DTK need?

[taylortbb]

But how amazing would it be if we had a Region-operated alternative? Something that is designed to benefit local restaurants and local residents, and puts money back into the region instead of sending it off to Silicon Valley. Instead of being profit-driven for the app, it could offer lower fees to the restaurants and pay their drivers a reasonable wage. You could have shared drivers, but each driver assists 3-6 restaurants within a close range, so they can park their car once and grab bags from Crafty Ramen and La Cucina and Cafe Pyrus in a single shot before heading out to deliver. You could follow the Region App on IG and they could share photos and videos of featured restaurants to help you discover something new. Just because we have UberEats right now doesn't mean we can't imagine something better.

The problem with all of that is that it's actually really hard to build a good app. Yes, anyone with a laptop and a little skill can build "an app", but if look at what Uber pays their engineers, and the number of that work on Uber Eats, they've spent literally billions of dollars on making that app such a smooth experience for both customer and restaurants. Even basic things like delivery time estimates are actually really difficult when working with pooled drivers. The only way to recoup that kind of cost is to scale, and serve cities all over the world. At that point you've just re-invented Uber.

I think expecting our small region to support an app that's remotely competitive with the major delivery services is just fantasy.

There could exist a lower-cost lower-quality app, with the main selling point being that it's local. But 90% of people aren't going to care about that, and are just going to use the better app that gives them accurate delivery estimates, and has the scale to offer delivery at 2am.