Peter Niehaus's Profile

Jon, glad you appreciated my shameless promotion, felt like too good of an opportunity.

This is a great question around turnaround time that I have yet to fully understand. I think their turnaround time has kept improving as their sales have risen because they don’t keep much inventory. With larger and more frequenty orders, they can make multiple cuts of the same pattern and size, thus getting every customer their shirts back faster. When there were fewer customers, my guess is they would wait until more orders came in with a similar pattern / size before they produced multiple in order to improve efficiency. This overall, just kept the average lead time much longer.

This a great concept, and definitely something I want to check out. From an operating model perspective, having guests pay for tickets in advance takes on the discussion we began in marketing a few weeks back about the future of paying for reservations, and the increased revenue visibility it gives to restaurants. Secondly, I think cooking in front of the guests captures one of the same value drivers that Benihana discovered – by bringing the cooking itself to the forefront of the restaurant, you eliminate space that is normally dedicated to back of the house and maximize profit per square footage. From a business model perspective, this is genius in that it not only creates a food variety that keeps patrons coming back night after night, but it also creates economies of scale and efficiency by serving everyone the same thing. Serving everyone the same thing also creates a social atmosphere to the restaurant where patrons both during the meal and after compare notes on what they liked and didn’t like.

Love that you did Tough Mudder Cam. While I’ve never done one, several friends have and it has always been on my bucket list. The founders did a great job of capturing the competitive spirit of those amongst us who miss team competition and pushing ourselves. This takes the drive that many of us have to run a marathon, and channels it into a team environment and makes it more fun and less monotonous. I had never considered the revenue predictability this business model provides them. While Tough Mudder was the first mover in this industry, other competitors like Spartan are emerging. Will Tough Mudder attempt to compete against others to win the hearts of the young professional competitors out there, or will they try and expand the entire market by reaching into other demographics and offering less competitive / extreme races?

What sort of products has Zocdoc focused on cross-selling to consumers down the line? How much of their current revenue do they make in advertising versus doctor subscriptions?