I think there is a difference between chasing profits and requiring them. Postmates is a market place and platform, for us to be successful we have to drive value to everyone that participates. That means driving value to our Postmates, customers and merchant partners. This also includes us, Postmates, as a participant of the platform.
Maintaining strong unit economics ensures that we are building the right products and operating the platform effectively. It is easy to subsidize if you have the capital but beyond just being expensive you also lose an important signal to running your platform.
Our requirement for strong unit economics has made our work harder but I do believe that it has made us make better decisions and force us to innovate instead of spend.
EDIT: This comment was made before it was edited. I would like to follow up to the edits. Specifically the Bezos mention on about margins.
There is a difference between seeking strong unit economics and profits and having them. Postmates has always had them by choice. We can choose do whatever we wish with those margins. We have regularly reduced our pricing because we have made our platform more efficient. If you were subsidizing your growth you wouldn't have the motivation or signals to identify the efficiencies.
If you are subsidizing your unit economics and your competition drops prices they are forcing you to lose more money. We prefer seek efficiencies and pass those savings on instead of just spending more money.
No shift in focus, we have always supported more than restaurants. Our goal is to make everything in your city available on-demand. You are correct though, food has been a huge catalyst for our early growth.
Postmates runs one of the largest real-time delivery fleets in the country. Building a software platform that is reliable, scales and stays agile under demanding product needs is a serious technical challenge. Postmates isn’t just another ad platform or mobile app for delivering static user generated content: We have real customers paying real money for a real service, all under an hour.
We are currently hiring for multiple roles on our software engineering team. Checkout our openings and follow the link to get a detailed job description and information on how to apply.
You could implement your own using the shapefiles from http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/. They have derived the shape files from fip10s data which itself is derived from VMAP0 data.
We created a rough implementation similar to this at postmates using this information but didn't find it worthy of open sourcing.
I see diversity in the chart not fragmentation. It's a good thing that users are able to consume and interact with avc.com using the browser/os of their choice. I think Jeffery Zeldman and other web standards wonks would look at that chart and be proud.
Maintaining strong unit economics ensures that we are building the right products and operating the platform effectively. It is easy to subsidize if you have the capital but beyond just being expensive you also lose an important signal to running your platform.
Our requirement for strong unit economics has made our work harder but I do believe that it has made us make better decisions and force us to innovate instead of spend.
EDIT: This comment was made before it was edited. I would like to follow up to the edits. Specifically the Bezos mention on about margins.
There is a difference between seeking strong unit economics and profits and having them. Postmates has always had them by choice. We can choose do whatever we wish with those margins. We have regularly reduced our pricing because we have made our platform more efficient. If you were subsidizing your growth you wouldn't have the motivation or signals to identify the efficiencies.
If you are subsidizing your unit economics and your competition drops prices they are forcing you to lose more money. We prefer seek efficiencies and pass those savings on instead of just spending more money.