Keep moving: why standing is only a special tactic
The most popular advice to beginners: “find a hotspot and stand next to it”. Let's check that advice against how platforms actually assign orders: does standing really maximize your chances?
Standing is a bet on a single horse
Standing at restaurant X makes you a candidate only for X's orders. If X is firing right now — great, the bet paid off. If not, you stand there burning time while a spot 500 metres away is buzzing. Standing isn't a mistake; it's a specialized tactic with high concentration and high risk: you need to know well that this particular restaurant will pay off right now.
Moving — being a candidate everywhere
A moving courier is always moving away from something and toward something. Every metre of road automatically enters you into two kinds of candidate lists:
- spots you're moving away from — the “bird in the hand” effect: you become the “held” courier the platform prefers over an undefined approaching competitor;
- spots you're approaching — you become a “promise” whose arrival time the platform can predict.
One move puts you on the radar of dozens of restaurants in different proportions. A standing courier “sees” only one.
Not “where to stand” but “how to move” — the right question for a courier working a real city with dozens of active spots at once.
How to move smartly
- choose directions with several active spots on each side — every metre “works” for many candidacies;
- avoid long empty stretches — moving through a “desert” makes you a candidate for nothing;
- at the start of the peak, head for the biggest concentration; near the end, drift toward the places riders return to after deliveries.
Where the apps come in
A human can hold five spots in their head; Assistant holds every active spot on both platforms together with your direction and historical patterns: it sees when offers conflict (pulling you in opposite directions) and when they correlate (e.g., on your way back from a delivery the other platform has something in the right direction). And Logger shows which of your directions historically turned into the best €/hour.