The world is rapidly becoming "on-demand"

Immediately three fresh news indicate the same trend. First, in Barcelona, ​​Uber started delivering food : the already existing system is now also used for the “launch the app, choose something from the assortment of partner restaurants, and the Uber driver will bring it to you in 10 minutes.” Secondly, Amazon now offers Manhattan residents the delivery of certain goods within one hour. Thirdly, the Washio startup, which provides “washing to order” in several American cities (people come to the customer, pick up their dirty clothes, and later return it clean and ironed), introduced Washio Now accelerated mode: previously it was necessary to record in advance for a specific time, and now you can press the "come" button and the car will arrive within an hour.

All of this speaks of the following: the “I want it here and now” model, previously used for taxis and pizza, is rapidly spreading to other areas. Business Insider , having defined the on-demand economy last year as “the economic activity of technology companies that respond to consumer inquiries with the immediate provision of goods and services,” promised her a great future - and his forecast is coming true.

The examples given are far from the only thing in the world that you can quickly get to your front door. There is a substitute for massive and predictable things ( Instacart suggests not going after the products yourself, who will buy everything for you and bring them), but there is much more unexpected: Glamsquad offers to immediately call the stylist to the house (if someone needs to prettify with a solemn evening and there is no time go to a beauty salon, it can be a salvation). Not all such services work for an hour ( Zeel offers a home-based massage therapist “on the day of the order”, and Handy - “husbands for an hour” the next day), but everyone wants to reduce the time.
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Finally, the most indicative is the Bringg service , designed to provide any “delivery business” with the appropriate tools (allowing, for example, to show the customer on the map the movement of the order performer). This most clearly shows that it is not about individual successful projects, but a new industry.

Now the coverage area of ​​most of these services is usually limited to several American cities - first of all, San Francisco, where Valley start-ups create such projects, and they themselves use them willingly. Does this mean that the entire market is limited to a narrow layer of “techies”, and the mass consumer is not interested in this? No, rather, it means that the story is just beginning: its main representative, Uber, was also first popular in the Valley, and now it works in 53 countries for very different audiences.

Relevance

Why did all this arise only now, if the “products with delivery” could make people happy decades ago? This has both technological and social reasons.

Mobile devices have taught the user to the fact that he is no longer tied to a home computer or working hours, the virtual has become available anytime and anywhere. And when various services operating with the real world brought applications for the same devices, the user wanted to receive from them the same speed, simplicity and versatility.

Smartphones allowed a person to easily communicate their location - and with the help of services like Foursquare they taught him to do so for any reason. Telling the world exactly where you are is a common thing - and in this case it becomes easier to report the same to any service.

Smartphones also allowed such services instead of their own staff of performers to easily use the services of freelancers who simply open the application and see the orders of users (thanks to this, Uber took off, which I recently wrote on Megamind). Since the performers in such services are constantly moving around the city, the previously existing computer counterparts did not suit them.

Finally, due to logistics, the technological part here is much more complicated than it might seem at first glance: this is a situation when points of orders on a map flash in arbitrary locations at arbitrary times, and you need to instantly react to a constantly changing situation. It took the company half a year to develop algorithmic routing, which allowed Washio to reduce the lead time to an hour. The experience of UPS, which appeared long before the on-demand-boom, but faced with the same problem of route optimization, is also indicative: their Orion program chooses the best options from the number with 198 zeros.

Perspectives

Although some warn about the “bubble”, as always happens in such cases, the future here looks very optimistic: a sharp increase in popularity is supported by the corresponding profitability. If other start-ups with a huge audience can not imagine how to monetize it, then the representatives of the on-demand economy will have a lively cash flow with the first user (although low margins are possible here due to high competition).

The next question is more complicated: what does all this mean for Russia, is there a waiting for the on-demand economy wave for us, and is it worth it for Russian startups to urgently make such services? And here there are concerns: for example, cash payments are much more common in Russia, and services with freelancers can pay from the card (so that all transactions go through the service, so that the contractor cannot deceive him with the consumer).

But for Russian startups there are also advantages. While Instagram is one for the whole world, Russian users are willing to sit in it, and they do not need a separate “Russian Instagram”, in the case of on-demand everything is different. Since such services cannot start all over the world right away, they connect the regions one by one, and Russia’s turn will not come soon — so now you can manage to make an analogue of the already successful US service and conquer the Russian market before a competitor arrives.

And besides, there are already more and more individual examples of on-demand or similar phenomena in Russia. Uber was launched in Moscow with St. Petersburg and was in demand. Recently , YouDo , offering customers and implementers of household assignments to find each other, has recently been added with Yandex.Master . A network of hypermarkets "Okay" has recently launched an online store - obviously, having come to the conclusion that a sufficient number of Russian buyers have matured to abandon the traditional model of the grocery shopping and want to choose them on the screen. All this suggests that there are prerequisites for on-demand boomers among us.