What does DTK need?

[danbrotherston]

People will use the app where the restaurants are. It’s why some of the sleazier apps lie about which restaurants they service.

And getting restaurants on board would be utterly trivial “we aren’t beholden to VCs and won’t fuck you in the ass with a rake”. Literally every restaurant would join in a second.

I'm assuming you meant to quote my post replying to SF22, so I'm replying under that assumption.

Yes, 100% the companies would immediately sign up to a public/co-op alternative. But I don't think that means they would drop support for other apps. The reason I think this is that I disagree with your statement that "people will use the app where the restaurants are"; a significant number of people will order from the restaurants that are on the app(s) they have, not the other way around.

You can look at many existing restaurants to see that this is true too

1. They aren't all exclusively on the one app that offers them the lowest fees, they are on many apps to maximize their exposure
   
2. Many self host online ordering (and sometimes even delivery) to avoid the app fees, but they still use the apps to maximize their exposure (often with higher prices on the apps to cover the fees)
   

Yes, that was my intention to reply, but I hit the reply button but I did so on my phone so something weird happened.

1. I don't think that any of the apps offer particularly appealing terms. Some might be better, but all are bad.

2. Self hosting is different, the value of collective hosting is that you only need one app for all the restaurants, and you can browse them. There is strong incentive for the user to have only a single app. That value is lost to the user when every restaurant has it's own (necessarily low budget/clunky) order system.

The thing about restaurant ordering is that it is highly localized. The region could build a high quality app that works well, and they only have to compete in this local market. They COULD try to exclude the other apps by offering only exclusive deals, but I suspect if their benefit was large enough they'd really just win by default with restaurants. As for users, I think if they could offer a comparable user experience, and everything is 10-20% cheaper, I think they'd win pretty quickly.

But it only works because it isn't a VC startup that is expecting huge ROI.

And they might even get away with it. It might be a small enough market to pass unnoticed to the big tech companies. If Toronto tried something like this, the VC funded companies would simply spend money for a few months and essentially pay people to use their apps, killing the competition.

The "tech" industry is a joke right now (and I put it in quotes because I don't actually think any of these companies are tech companies).