Next Step

The cheapest useful test needs no app at all. Pick one dense residential pocket — an apartment complex, a university residence, a tight suburban block — and run it as a group chat for two or three weeks. Two or three hosts stock a short list of maybe six items. Orders come in by message. Delivery is someone walking down the corridor.

What that measures: whether orders actually arrive at night, what people will pay against the local convenience-store price, and whether hosts stay interested once the novelty fades. The second question is the important one — host retention, not buyer demand, is most likely where this dies.

A useful secondary check is a pricing walk: record real shelf prices for the same handful of items at a warehouse club, a full supermarket, a metro-format supermarket and a late-night convenience store. That tells you how much margin genuinely exists to split, rather than how much you assume exists.