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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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FOOD DELIVERY |
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Free home delivery takes on a pleasant new twist
Prachi Sibal
Bengaluru
IF YOU ARE a foodie and the quaint sort who likes to mix up cuisines, you’d be wishing you were in Chennai right now.
Why you ask? Simply because, you could have a crisp Ghee roast dosa from your favourite dosa shop (that doesn’t have a mode for home-delivery), a steaming cup of cappuccino, sushi for your starters and a bowlful of darsans for dessert from your nearest outlet of Mainland China home delivered to you, all at once. If this sounds like stuff that dreams are made of, Yo! Potato is here to make all your impossible looking food dreams come true.
They call themselves the ‘Mama of all home deliveries’, and they are hardly being conceited here. This new home delivery service in Chennai is redefining delivery services and how! Already a rage in Chennai, Yo! Potato offers to deliver food from anywhere at any time of the day with no extra charge.
Gone are the days when minimum charges, delivery range and other such criteria defined what you ate. Chennaiites can sit back on their couches, put a finger on their cravings and let Yo! Potato do the rest.
The website is fun and does most of the explaining including their views about how they presume this was an easier way to save the human race.
The sense of humour is evident even when they are trying to tell you what the service really does. Krishna Chidambaresh, Showkath Jamal and Pavan Kumar are the brains behind this simple idea which they admit turns out to be quite a complicated business one.
First-time entrepreneurs, they have been an engineer, a lawyer and a former media employee respectively. Much like most big business ideas, this one too was born out of sheer personal experience. “Showkath, our partner, is a foodie and a carnivore at that and his wife is vegetarian. Whenever they’d order food from outside they would always have to reach a compromise to order from the same place for the purpose of minimum order charges and other such things. One would always end up sacrificing for the other. I could easily say that the idea was born out of simple observation of this continual problem,” says Krishna Chidambaresh, CEO, Yo! Potato
Their only aim for the moment is to bring in a change in the delivery market, be known as the mama of all deliveries and reach every metro city in a year or two.
“The food delivery market in the country is not quite organised except the pizza delivery sector,” says Krishna. While they are already doing roughly 600 deliveries a month and increasing at the rate of 50 percent each month, Krishna admits they are far from making cutting even.
“We are burning a lot of money at the moment. We believe in following the user, monetisation will happen later. We identify with the initial strategies of players like Google and Facebook,” he tells us.
The concept for now is simple, orders can be placed on their landline number with specifications of what needs to be picked up from where. Yo! Potato delivers in most areas of Chennai with an average delivery time of 45 minutes to one hour.
There are no extra charges for the number of restaurants and no specifications as to where they can be picked up from. “We are probably the only such delivery place that doesn’t specify a list of restaurants where we can deliver from. We want to learn from the customer,” says Krishna who admits that delivery calls have sometimes taken them to restaurants and eateries in town that they had never heard of before. The perks easily come from the fun they are having while at it, the challenges aren’t too few. “The greatest challenge is to keep the complexity to ourselves and to make it as simple as we can for the customers. We are also finding it hard to keep up with the demand and are constantly in the process of creating new structure. Restaurants are calling us for partnerships and we are already working with a few,” he adds.
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‘Except for pizzas, the food delivery market in India is still not organised’ |
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Even though this is their first actual foray into entrepreneurship, they have made a near attempt in the past, something that helped name this one. “We (Showkath and I) once planned to start an online DVD rental place called ‘Lazy Genie’. The idea was dropped much before the actual launch but we decide to stick with the name for the delivery service. It was Showkath’s wife who suggested we incorporate the idea of a couch potato in the name as that would be our primary target audience. She came up with Yo! Potato and we all loved it,” says Krishna.
Their experiments with entrepreneurship have been fun, they tell us, but explain that it is hardly about taking that big step, when the idea comes there is hardly a choice. “Entrepreneurship is a bit like falling in love. It just happens”, says Krishna.
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