What is JOKR's counterargument to the bearish view that on-demand groceries face a high customer acquisition cost and low switching cost?

In comparison to many other businesses, I think the benefit that we have is that we have stable retention rates. After a couple of months, you reach stable retention rates, and that's why, similar to the food delivery marketplaces such as DoorDash, Delivery Hero or Rappi, or a few others -- we were the team that was co-running Delivery Hero and built the foodpanda business in Asia -- you have almost an indefinite customer lifetime value.

Your active customers keep on coming back. You're always losing those that have tried out the platform and then decide to not get engaged because of all kinds of different reasons. But your active customers have a stable retention rate; they don't churn out. Having an indefinite customer lifetime value for your active customers allows you to engage more on the marketing side in a profitable way than for businesses that churn out 100% of their customer base after a few months. I've seen a lot of businesses on the offline side and on the online side where, after three, six or twelve months, you're churning out your entire customer base. But here you have a behavior that is similar to a subscription behavior, even though it’s not a subscription.

Again, coming back to some of the misconceptions in the market, as long as you have stable retention rates, you have dynamics that behave subscription-like, and you can count on a five or ten-year customer lifetime or even more, then you can make a conscious decision on your marketing investment. You can say your marketing investment per customer is 20% or 10% of a ten-year lifetime. You can always decide after which period of time you want to pay back on your marketing investment, but you have a lot of room to play. 

You can control your marketing investment and be more conscious about the decisions that you take on marketing investment -- much more so than companies that are not in control of their data or than offline companies that never know who comes back to their store and who doesn’t. That's why we believe that online platforms such as JOKR will be significantly more profitable than any of the offline models, even taking into account marketing investments, and regardless of whether you accelerate or increase marketing investments or not.