Gorillas
Gorillas was founded in 2020 in Berlin with a radical promise: grocery delivery in 10 minutes. The most important stress test question was not "does the market exist?" (obviously yes) but "why doesn't a good solution already exist?"
The answer was precise: Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats had optimised for restaurant food delivery — a model where the partner cooks and the courier collects. Grocery requires something completely different: a proprietary dark store, a curated selection of fresh products, a warehouse optimised for picking speed, and last-mile logistics for fragile and temperature-controlled items.
Nobody had built this infrastructure because it required significant upfront investment and far more complex operations. Gorillas identified exactly this barrier — and decided it was the source of its advantage: whoever cleared it first in a city would build a logistical moat hard to replicate.
The stress test also surfaced the unit economics challenge (a critical issue for Gorillas during its scaling phase). But the answer to "why hasn't this been solved" was strong enough to justify the attempt.
"Why hasn't this been solved?" is not a rhetorical question — it is a structural analysis of the barriers you are about to face and which, if cleared, become your moat.