tabdon

There is a video still on that page. You just have to scroll down. It's on the second image.

That sounds really cool. I'd like to check it out.

Now that you've been through it, would you do it again? Or stick to a more traditional architecture?

It would've been nice if the article covered the successes and failures of the Chinese corp's international operations. If you look at Alibaba, they have been very active in acquiring international companies to compliment their homegrown international offerings. Aliexpress & Alipay are both international offerings. They bought Lazada to cover Southeast Asia ecommerce. And they are trying to buy a large US remittance company in MoneyGram. I'm sure there are many others.

My point is, yes, they enjoy large advantage in mainland that could possibly make it hard for them overseas. But has it actually? Are they failing or succeeding?

Do the economics of food delivery change drastically when 1) there is no driver, 2) the car runs on electricity? Maybe this is their way to establish a food delivery brand ahead of what they to believe to be the inevitable driverless vehicle era.

It just makes sense that eventually we will create systems that do the work that is currently manual. That has been human history (printing press, manufacturing, etc). The good thing is that we are crafty buggers and will always find a new job to do even when we've just replaced the manual labor that was oh so painful to perform before.

I like the other posts. Another thing you could do is break the market down even further. Find a niche that the other companies aren't serving. Serve that customer better than anyone. Then when you "win" the majority market share for that niche you can expand (a la crossing the chasm).

You might also go all out lean on these mo fos and put up a landing page, then start reaching out to customers and have one on one conversations to see if anyone will even buy your product. There's nothing like a real life customer willing to buy your product to get you back in the right mindset.