DoorDash bought Deliveroo. A guy in Thessaloniki is building the opposite.

Hi, it's Sharan.

In the last three weeks I've taken calls with founders in Thessaloniki, a small town in Serbia, Lebanon, Jordan, Riyadh, Exuma in the Bahamas and a town in north central Sri Lanka. Seven founders, seven places, and when I put the notes side by side they are all building the same thing. One city. Their own restaurants. No commission or a low one, at least to start.

Two of them have already bought. The rest are reviewing demos and arguing with their co-founders.

Now look at what the big platforms did in the same window. DoorDash finished its £2.9 billion takeover of Deliveroo. Uber agreed to pay $2.3 billion for ezCater, which handles catering orders for more than 140,000 US restaurants. Earlier this year DoorDash shut Deliveroo down in Qatar, Singapore and two other markets because they were not worth keeping.

The easy take is that this is the end of the small operator. Two or three companies will own delivery everywhere and anyone else is wasting their money.

I don't think that's what the calls are telling me. I think the mergers are the reason these founders are calling.

The founder in Thessaloniki told me restaurants there pay eFood and Wolt around 30 percent commission plus another 10 to 12 percent in delivery fees. He is not trying to beat Wolt in Greece. He wants Thessaloniki, he has personal relationships with the restaurants, and he is pitching them on a city app that puts part of its income back into local festivals. The founder in Riyadh watched one platform go bankrupt three months ago and another offer free delivery for a year, and his read was that the giants are fighting each other so hard that nobody is talking to the restaurant down the road. He is going to.

A £2.9 billion takeover has to be paid for, and the people who pay it are the restaurants and the customers in every city that platform touches. Every acquisition makes the platform bigger and makes your city smaller to it. The towns that don't pencil out get closed, which is what happened in Qatar, and the ones that do get a higher take rate.

That is the opening. A city of 300,000 with 400 restaurants is too small for DoorDash to care about and plenty big for one founder who knows the owners by name.

So what does this mean for you if you run a restaurant or you're the person thinking about building this?

If you're the restaurant, your city probably has someone like the seven I spoke to, or will soon. When they show up, the question is not whether their app is as polished as Wolt's. It won't be. The question is who owns your orders and your customer list, you or the platform. Ask them. Ask Wolt too.

If you're the founder, the honest part. Most of the seven will not launch. The ones who do will win on logistics, delivery time and the relationships they already have, and not on features. Menus, modifiers, dispatch, dispute handling, live tracking, every platform has those now, including the one I sell. If you're building for a city where you don't know the restaurants, don't do it.

Where Enatega fits is the boring part. The two who bought didn't build an app, they bought the full source code once, put their own brand on it, and they'll be live in two or three weeks on their own servers. The code, the data and the customer list stay with them. The part that makes or breaks them, the restaurants and the riders, was never something I could sell them anyway.

If you're looking at your own city and wondering whether this is sane, I put the questions these seven asked me into six short videos. Why it's a one time purchase and not a SaaS, how to price your platform, how one client got to 60,000 users in a year, and what happens on the call if you book one. About fifteen minutes in total. Watch those first, and if your city still looks like a good idea afterwards, there's a button on the same page to pick a time with me. Sometimes the answer is no, and I'd rather say that on a call than after you've paid.

Talk soon, Sharan