
Rita
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Zomato & Swiggy have created a clear duopoly in the food delivery market But a tiny startup Thrive is on its way to destroy them The best part? Coca-Cola and Domino’s have joined hands to back them Here’s how they are disrupting and making food delivery a profitable business: Thrive is a platform enabling restaurants to make their own online store and sell directly to their customers, without having any other platform like Swiggy or Zomato in between. Zomato and Swiggy are able to charge such high commission from restaurants and restaurants also comply because customers love these platforms and they’ve created a habit that cannot be broken. But Thrive is being (and will be) loved by restaurants for their low commission. Their revenue model is simple — take 3% per order from restaurants as compared to 18-25% that Zomato and Swiggy charge. They also offer a monthly subscription service for their marketing suite which helps these restaurants advertise and distribute better. The restaurant hustles on its own to get customers. Thrive just provides an infrastructure to setup and manage their online store, conduct marketing, and, optionally, avail delivery services from Thrive’s partners like Dunzo, WeFast, Pidge, etc. But doesn’t that make Thrive another SaaS platform? Then how will it disrupt consumer food delivery companies like Zomato and Swiggy? Let’s find out! Thrive got the timing right. Remember during Covid everything was shut and restaurants really struggled? But online food delivery was having the time of its life. Dine-in was forbidden so restaurants started listing on the 2 biggies — Swiggy and Zomato, but because of their huge commission, these restaurants barely made anything. While most of us look at this market as the toughest market to compete in, Thrive spotted a unique opportunity during that time. To understand this we’ll have to go back to the times when food-delivery started in India (and the world). See, food-delivery has an extremely low-barrier to entry — anyone can create an app, pick up orders from restaurants, and deliver to customers. So, when the food delivery thing started in India, a lot of players jumped in. Swiggy, Zomato, UberEats, FoodPanda, and most recently, Amazon Food — but only Swiggy and Zomato were successful in consolidating the market. Then comes a question to mind — when Uber Eats, Food Panda, and even Amazon lost the game, why can Thrive thrive? Because its business model is completely different. See, all the other delivery apps had the same old model which is not sustainable and their execution was even worse than Zomato and Swiggy. But in the process, Zomato and Swiggy have created an ecosystem where no one is actually making any money. 👉🏼 The restaurants that already work on thin margins are stripped off every inch of profit due to the commission they have to pay to these food apps 👉🏼 Even the delivery guys are not able to make ends meet in such demanding jobs. Their avg. income is approx ₹ 16,789 per month. 👉🏼 Zomato and Swiggy are having their own problems with trying to get their unit economics right. 👉🏼 And this trickles down to the end customer who ends up paying more. Thrive saw that the whole ecosystem is somewhat flawed and in their pursuit of making delivery efficient, food delivery industry has left room for a better business model to “thrive” in. One where the main parties involved have net positive income that makes it a viable business for them, and Thrive as a company should also be able to make a good profit. A win-win for everyone! Now, apart from this, Zomato and Swiggy share very little data with the restaurants about their customers, when their own cloud kitchens profit off of it because they know what customers want, where they live, the order frequency, and all that. But Thrive gives restaurants complete ownership of customer and order data. With that, restaurants can build a profitable menu and higher brand loyalty as they’re able to serve the customers much better. Restaurants can also use this data to better optimise their supply side — like ordering and storing ingredients depending on the predicted demand. And manage workload of their staff better as well. This ultimately helps restaurants optimise their costs better. Lastly, Zomato and Swiggy have made us lose the direct touch we had with our local restaurants. For them, we have just become a mere order number. And the restaurants have lost brand loyalty because they have become just a mere listing that gets lost in the numerous big restaurants crowding and dominating the apps. Even though Zomato and Swiggy do give small restaurants a platform to get discovered and make it big, the chances of it happening are mostly rare. Usually, small restaurant ordering is the function of pre-existing offline local loyalty as these platforms mainly focus on the big restaurants which already have a huge market. Most likely, you’ll never see small restaurants in top recommendations, and Zomato and Swiggy tend to bleed out these businesses because their main customer is the user. But Thrive is a restaurant-first platform which allows even small restaurants to gain control of their business and growth. Their goal is to power the restaurant’s online ordering infrastructure rather than trying to convince the restaurants to choose Thrive over others. Because if they win the restaurants, users will follow. And how do they help restaurants take control of how they reach their customers? With the help of their Thrive Marketing Suite (TMS). Some of the TMS features include: 👉🏼 TARGETED & AUTOMATED CAMPAIGNS: Because Thrive gives restaurants complete access to customer data through which they can create direct channels of communication like Email, SMS, or WhatsApp. TMS also has a feature to set up Meta Ad campaigns that they can run on Facebook and Instagram. This will help them with customer acquisition and retention. 👉🏼 OFFERS MODULE: Restaurants can create unique conditional promo-code offers like discounts, free deliveries, free items on a purchase of a minimum value and more. 👉🏼 LOYALTY PROGRAMS: Through TMS, they can also reward customers for their activity with a cash-back or through a tier-based loyalty program which will further help drive customer retention. The recent investment from Coke is going to be a game-changer for Thrive! Most of us forget that Coke’s real moat isn’t its taste, it is the direct distribution network among restaurants. Thrive is going to get access of all of them easily. On the other hand, Coke will be able to distribute its drink and stop Pepsico or any other company to enter the restaurants using Thrive’s service. If you liked this read, do RePost🔄and follow us @FinFloww for more❤️

















