I’ve been very happy with my project’s progress over the last week, so I was totally shocked to hear that a similar project just launched in Germany and appears to be pretty competitive.

It’s called pizza.de and is doing pretty much the same thing we were hoping to do. Providing a platform for online food delivery for a whole country.
So, the first design meeting today started with something along the lines of "Why didn’t I know".
The research on competitors we did is now almost 3 or 4 months old, and apparently pizza.de launched 3 months ago, slipping through.

They are providing a pretty good platform for online food delivery and service, are using some AJAX to spice up the user experience while providing great branding support for corporations (like PizzaHut, Subway etc… Everything looks pretty solid and it’s pretty clear they are working on a far bigger budget than my team currently.

So I had some doubts if we’d carry on our project pizza.at, mainly because pizza.de is almost exactly what we thought we’d have to deliver and we were hoping to be able to expand to Germany in the future.

So, because we can’t compete with pizza.de in Germany, we brought up another issue: i18n. Austria is far too small to be the only place where we want pizza.at to be available, so after the initial Austria launch we will be looking into expanding to the east and south.

Now, because of our tight schedule (that just got tighter) hopes are high we’ll be launching at the end of march so we’ll be first to hit the Austrian market with our site.