Another ‘Uber Of X’ Pivots To Avoid Dying

If at first you don’t succeed … do something else entirely?

That seems to be the unofficial mantra of more and more startups that set out to be the “Uber of [fill-in-the-blank]” only to see those goals fail to materialize, then pivot in an entirely new direction.

The latest to join the ranks of those abrupt direction-changers is India-based PepperTap, which TechCrunch reports is shutting down its grocery delivery business — the company’s original reason for being — and moving into eCommerce logistics.

The outlet attests that three key factors contributed to PepperTap having to exit the food delivery space: the difficulty of integrating its mobile app with retail partners’ inventory management systems; substantial discounts that were offered in an attempt to build customer loyalty; and maintaining its promise of two-hour deliveries (and the related logistics costs) regardless of order volume.

Wrote PepperTap Founder and CEO Navneet Singh in a company blog post: “Compounded with the necessity for discounts, [meeting the two-hour delivery guarantee] meant that the cash we were burning on every single order was increasing rather quickly with no immediate end in sight.”

In the same blog post, Singh attests that the technology PepperTap developed for its own delivery purposes makes the shift to handling eCommerce logistics for other companies in India a logical move for the startup.

“We began to test some of these ideas at Nuvo earlier this year, and the results were exciting enough for us to pitch to our existing investors as an alternative way to use the capital we have already raised,” wrote Singh.