KA's Profile

I love Blue Apron!! The waste thing is so real — as someone who really struggles to cook consistently, usually grocery store quantities are not really that conducive to a more rare cooking schedule. The only concern I’ve had with them is around their food preference options (i.e. vegetarians, pescatarians, no pork, etc). I was not able to find an option for people with nut allergies like myself, so some of the recipes I received I was unable to eat. I wonder how they will be thinking about broadening these options long-term: It seems more efficient (like Benihana) to only offer a very limited set of options / variability but I wonder how much food preference customization they could handle before disrupting the efficiency of their model?

This post was really interesting! And I think Khanh hit the nail right on the head. This weekend I was watching Shark Tank and LovePop (founded by HBS grads: https://www.lovepopcards.com/) was featured. One of the investors was making that exact point that for special occasions like weddings, consumers are much less price-sensitive. This is why I agree that it was very smart for PP to move into the print market — while their consumer base may be smaller, they’ll be able to capture that much more value from those consumers. In terms of creating even more value & leveraging their core competencies, I wonder if they could provide a full end-to-end wedding invite experience online + offline? For example, it could be interesting if they decided to move into a space to compete with Wedding Wire or The Knot, specifically helping with wedding website management.

Thanks for this interesting post! One thing that I’d be further interested in learning about is how this operating model lent itself to mobilizing so many volunteers for these elections. I don’t follow politics very much at all, but an unprecedented amount of people in my immediate circle actually got involved in Obama’s campaigns, beyond simply voting. From myself personally going out & knocking on doors to my best friend working as a Field Organizer for Obama full-time to another college friend actually taking a semester off to work on the campaign, it seems that a huge part of the success of his campaigns hinged on its ability to mobilize deep grassroots support. How did they think about strategically involving the most enthusiastic “Obama evangelists” to further spread their message?