Released on 9th May 2023 You can find the podcast here.
About Fidji Simo
Fidji Simo is the CEO of Instacart, a San Francisco-based grocery delivery company. Prior to this, she was leading the Facebook app.
1) Instacart built intense cost-consciousness into its cultural fabric
Simo: Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review, and there was a team that had managed to save $0.01 per delivery through a set of optimization. And as soon as they announced that, the whole room erupted in applause. And I remember thinking, oh, we celebrate cents here.
And at Facebook, let's just say, we weren't focused specifically on the cents. And I actually think that, that culture of sweating the details, sweating literally every penny is what has made Instacart successful and has put us in a position where our unit economics are really strong in a market where there's been a lot of attempts at doing what we do and attempts that have been unsuccessful.
Our take: What gets celebrated is what is valued. If saving paises matters to your business, celebrate that, but if sales wins are what matters most, then celebrate that.
2) Playbook for building great consumer ProductsSimo: At Facebook…the playbook was really understanding what users were already doing with a product that wasn't necessarily built for that use case as a sign that there was
something there that you could productize and do something bigger with.
And at Instacart, it translates into they're trying to figure out what their meals for the weeks are, as they're trying to actually come up with new recipes to diversify their diet. And every time we see something like that, we'd just build a product experience around it to help users with the things that they're fundamentally already trying to do.
Our Take: Keeping track of how customers are using the product can help find new use cases of an existing product and productise the same into something bigger.
3) How Instacart leverages AI
Simo: We've already released a plug-in for ChatGPT, which allows you to go and basically start talking about anything you want to do. I'm organizing a birthday party, and I need snacks for 15 kids, what do you recommend? Boom, you get an answer, and you can order it in one tap on Instacart. That's pretty magical. Same thing for entire meal plans, which I find amazing. The use cases are actually very magical when you go from natural language to a set of ingredients to these ingredients showing up at your door. On meal planning, specifically, the ability to say, this is my budget, these are my food restrictions. That's really, really magical. I think going forward, there are somethings that are really incredible where you can take a picture of your fridge, and you can get an immediate answer on well what's left in your fridge. This is the recipe that we would suggest. Or hey, you took a picture of your fridge at the beginning of the week and now this is the difference, we can reorder all of these items. That would be pretty cool.
And then I think there's a lot of applications in health, wellness and nutrition where you could imagine having nutritionists being able to make a lot of recommendations in the automated way. And right now, if you are someone who wants diet advice, going and seeing a nutritionist is a very luxury experience that's not affordable for most people. If all of that knowledge is captured by an AI assistant, you can make nutritional advice completely democratized, which could be totally game-changing for the type of problems we have in the country where how it fundamentally starts in the kitchen.
So I'm really excited about that as well and really reach the promise of having a diet that is completely medically tailored through your exact needs and all of these ingredients showing up at your house.
Our Take: Since AI helps process natural language, it has diverse use-cases including assisting in meal planning keeping in mind various parameters such as availability of ingredients, budget and dietary restrictions. AI has the capability to make access to a nutritionist affordable.