The Rules of Creativity as a Founder's Handbook. Food Delivery case.

Recently I have started a series of articles comparing the tricks from the art world and business approaches. The first article was about the?Founder’s Journey?where I decomposed a story about launching a startup by the?hero’s journey?template.

Today's story is about how dramatic situations and rules of creativity can help startups in disrupting the market.

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There are 36 dramatic situations or classic plots that all stories come down to in one way or another. What does this story tell us? It's all stolen before us.

The rules of creativity, as playwrights and screenwriters have explained to me, boil down to this. You (aka the author) take a classic plot and swap the villain and the protagonist, move the story to a different historical period, or change the gender of the characters, etc.?

Founders act in a similar way when they reimagine an entire industry. Even product owners do similar things when they test hypotheses. Consider one of the classic examples of startups in the last decade years: food delivery.?

Setup

Once upon a time there were people in this world and they waited 1.5 hours for a delivery from a restaurant. Because every restaurant had one delivery guy on a motorcycle and he couldn't get everywhere fast enough. It was expensive for the restaurant owner to hire a second delivery guy and buy a second motorcycle because he still had to spend time and resources on other tasks.?

Cast: Customers (they eat), Restaurants (they cook), and Couriers (they deliver).?

Plot One: Salvation

Everyone is sick and tired of this situation. Customers are always yelling at poor delivery guys. Couriers can easily get kicked out of work, they only get paid for their orders, and orders can wait all day (downtime is long). It's hard for a restaurant owner to manage couriers, they're always running off with orders or being late.?

A Startup A comes along, makes a handy website, pours a lot of dough into marketing, runs to customers, and sells them the delivery service. A Startup A's superpower is the ability to reach its target segment and communicate the value proposition in a language that this segment understands.?

A Startup A helps everyone, it would seem. Restaurants don't have to engage in a delivery process. Couriers have one employer who provides them with all-day orders. Customers have convenient choices and standardized service. But miracles don't happen and the guys have to make money somehow. So Startup A is cranking out commissions for restaurants and imposing a strict SLA for couriers.?Now our startup A is a tyrant. Everyone hates it, but everyone uses it.?The CVP is made for the customers.?

The best example of a Startup A is waiter.com. Founded by two guys from Stanford GSB Craig Cohen and Michael Adelberg in 1995. waiter.com is a grandfather of food delivery service in the world. Now they are focusing on providing meals for businesses and teams.

Plot Two: Revolt

A conspirator shows up to overthrow the tyrant.?

At some point, a Startup A fires a product owner who has heard the pain points of everyone involved in the process. A Startup B is created. It has a handy app as well, the process is the same, but there are much more restaurants! Even a neighborhood kebab can now be ordered.?

Startup A's superpower is the ability to negotiate with restaurants and make the service convenient for them. Typically, a flexible dynamic system is created where restaurants get a subsidy for the first time. Then restaurants can raise their status in a kind of a loyalty program and reduce the commission depending on the number of orders and the quality of service (low error rate in the order, etc.).?

The customer is satisfied, a large selection and even the prices can be lower. Couriers are satisfied, the number of orders from the startup B is more and earnings are higher. But miracles don't happen, so the burden of earnings shifted to the client (paid delivery) and the courier (conditions have tightened up for them).?The CVP is made for the restaurants.?

Startups of type B are the fathers of food delivery that made an industry booming.?DoorDash,?GrubHub, and?Uber Eats?are the unicorns.?These companies have reached more than 80% of the market in the USA.

Plot Three: Daring enterprise.

A brave hero shows up and makes an attempt to defeat two enemies. He transforms the delivery market into a commodity in the end.

The customers and the Restaurants are happy with the situation, but the deliverymen become their hostages. So riots and strikes begin for the couriers, and they complain about the poor working conditions.?

A Startup C is born! This company has the superpower of taking care of couriers! A Startup C makes a transparent payment system for them and monitors working conditions. The restaurants in this service are not super exclusive, but the Courier always arrives quickly. The work with clients focuses on this. Plus they can touch on the humanitarian aspect of the service.?Startup C starts sucking resources from startups A and B, and they suffer. Later Startup C is sold to someone from the first two.?The CVP is made for the couriers.?

Check out the stories of Postmates (acquisted by Uber Eats) and Caviar?(acquisted by of DoorDash)

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There are always some stakeholders who suffer more than others from the status quo. A segment that suffers from all whose pain points are not covered. The successful startup, like a hero, solves the problem of that segment, defeats the tyrant monopolist, and takes a meaningful market share. Profit.