EP309 - Instacart IPO Filing 

Warning: Given the complexity and breadth of topics, this is a longer than usual episode with a runtime of 90 minutes (if we had more time, we'd produce a shorter podcast).

Update: In this episode Jason mentioned that he didn't think Instacart accepted SNAP payments. It turns out that Instacart did start accepting SNAP earlier this month.

On Friday, August 25th 2023 Instacart filled its S-1 IPO form with the SEC, in advance of its intention to make an initial public offering. The complete filing is almost 400 pages. In this episode we summarize all the key points, including a number of surprises, in the filing.

If you want to follow along with the actual S-1, you can download it here. Scot suggests you focus on pages 101-124.

Topics Covered:

1. Cover Page and Entry Level Items
2. Overall Growth Trends 25:50
3. Unit economics 42:90
4. Cohort Analysis 48:10
5. Instacart Ads 56:30
6. The Big Risk/Concern 1:00:11
7. Other observations (Instacart+, Carrot Services, Generative AI) 1:22:50

Other episodes mentioned: Episode 255 - Instacart Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire and Episode 224 Customer Cohort Analysis and CLV with Dr. Daniel McCarthy.

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Episode 309 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 29, 2023.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Jason:
[0:23 ] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 309 being recorded on Tuesday August 29th I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:38 ] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners.
We are going to jump into the talk tonight because one of our most popular shows as you know Jason the format is a deep dive and we have got a great Deep dive for you guys this episode.
Last Friday August 25th there was a very big event not only in our favorite world's grocery which is Jason's favorite world and my favorite world of e-commerce and then Jason's favorite world of.
But also in my favorite world of startups so this is this is a pretty big event and we wanted to dedicate a complete episode to it.
I mean it is the filing of the S14 instacart.

[1:24 ] And just to set it up the you know in my world of start-up land it has been very hard to get an IPO done so there's been a couple post coated and like late 2020.
And then summon 21 and then there's been a dry spell there's been something called a dese back so you have this spec which is this.

[1:44 ] Special-purpose acquisition thing and you can kind of go public through this kind of complicated convoluted thing.
Tends not to go very well so there's been some of that like in My World Mobility there is one called get around and there's been a couple others and those typically have not.
Gone so well they're down like 95% bird the scooter company did this as well.
So it's been a very dry IPO market for startups and thus of interior backed investors.
So there has been a lot of anticipation around when is that a PO when they're going to open who's going to be brave enough to kind of stick their foot out there first.
And you know a lot of people have been rooming that instacart would be out there there's a couple other companies in this kind of unicorn Stratosphere stripe is another one that we cover a lot on the show from the payments world.
There's also the others you can think of Jason there's this one.
There's a software one that is just doing really well in AI that's been mentioned a lot not not open AI it'll come to me in a minute.
So you know so this is kind of the real.
Bang the Big Bang of here's a company that is being brave enough they're gonna go first and we're going to see what happens so it's going to be really interesting and we thought because it hits this Venn diagram of all of our favorite things that we would spend a fair amount of time on.

[3:10 ] So first of all this is a 400 page document so our value add to the listeners is we have distilled it down into what we think are the most interesting little tidbits and some of the things we've learned from instacart it is nice because there's been a lot of rumors about how instacart Economics work and Jason has been tracking their ad piece which is you know cpgs have really seen some really nice results from that so we know that's been active and the areas we picked apart we thought we would cover tonight is I wanted to kind of give you a quick and dirty Scott's guide to reading an s-1 and we'll start at the cover page that's there's actually a lot that happens on the cover page so I want to spend a little time there and kind of give you a little I haven't taken a company poet behind the scenes of what's going on on there and then we're going to talk about some of the overall growth things that just kind of help you understand.

[4:07 ] How to think about instacart how they're growing and what they do and what role they play and then unit economics <span title="4:14 -