Some businesses just don’t have the value

I’ve come up with a handful of business ideas over the years that just didn’t have the right math behind them. These are things like products that provide $20 worth of value but would cost $100 to produce. It’s just a losing bet. I’ve had a few app ideas like that, a crazy idea with an HDMI dongle, and a few others. They were cool ideas, but the math just didn’t work. Any solid business needs to provide value that it far ahead of the cost, and successful ones do a great job of that ( like trash services).

It’d be like if I offered a service to come over to your house every morning, grab your car keys, and start the car for you so it’d be warmed up. Nice service, but what’s it worth? $5, maybe? For me to drive over and go through that effort it would at least need to cost $25 or so, so the math just doesn’t work. I’m not going to do all of that for $5, but you’re not going to pay someone $25 just to start your car.

Food Delivery

That was kind of a silly example, but I think we’re seeing the math slowly unravel on food delivery services. With services like Grubhub and Uber Eats there are two main problems:

• Factoring in the delivery cost (plus tips) makes the food much more expensive than it “should” be.
• Delivery drivers aren’t making enough money to be worth their…