Monday, July 10, 2006

Gomobo = Kozmo 2.0?


Here it is again, short messaging giving you... food. As if it were hard to get food in Manhattan, you can now text your order via Gomobo and they'll charge your credit card and place the order for you.

1 comment:

Noah N. Glass said...

Dear Paul,

Thanks for your post about gomobo.com (or Mobo) from awhile back.

I wanted to reply and see if I could better explain our business model and how it differs from Kozmo.

In short, Mobo is a mobile service, not a courier service.
We allow customers to order from restaurants, process these transactions at no cost to the consumer, and then pass them on the restaurant to fulfill.
We do not deliver delivery orders. The order comes to us via text message and our system interprets the order, passes it along to the appropriate restaurant, gets a time-estimate message back from the restaurant, and notifies/bills the customer.

Kozmo suffered from the burden of huge fixed costs to have a massive delivery team on call at all times.
Mobo has a staff of 9 people covering all development, sales, marketing, operations, and customer support.

We estimate that we'll reach profitability with just under 100 restaurants.

The Mobo value proposition is that a user can place an order in advance either online or via text message, know exactly when the order will be ready, and collect his food at a separate pickup area at the restaurant without the normal wait.

I know that our website doesn't do a sufficient job or articulating these points. We're working on that. We've been so busy launching new restaurants that we haven't paid adequate attention to this.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Thanks again for taking an interest in what we're doing.
I hope you'll try it out.

Best,

Noah

Noah N. Glass
Mobo Founder & CEO