When we started Caviar
in 2012, my co-founders and I were admittedly hungry. We had just
decided to change direction with our previous startup which offered
deals to local restaurants. We thought the idea would be a success, but
we learned quickly that deals weren’t the best way to help a business
grow their sales – nor were they an efficient way for us to grow our own
business. We decided to explore a new path, by providing restaurants
with a delivery network. We had just $10 in our bank account.
In the tech world, it can seem that the only way to grow a successful company is to raise a lot of money quickly. We waited nearly a year to do so - here’s what we learned along the way.
Add Real Value
We had always loved the restaurant space and were avid foodies. We knew we wanted to add real value to the businesses we cared about, while also satisfying something for consumers like ourselves. While working on our previous startup we realized that daily deals may have been helpful for customers, but they weren’t helping restaurant’s bottom line. We also noticed that many of the restaurants that we loved and partnered with weren’t able to deliver meals to us while we worked day and night in our office.
Why was it that the best restaurants—the ones that people stand in line for and crave week after week—never seemed to offer delivery? It seems like a simple enough problem, but once we talked to our favorite spots about why they didn’t deliver, we learned what a logistical challenge it was. For an independent restaurant, offering delivery can be expensive, complicated, time-consuming, and unreliable. Nor could a restaurant know their meal would make it to the customer with the same care as if the chef had delivered it herself. We realized we could add real value–for popular restaurants and their customers–by creating a reliable delivery network that would help restaurants grow their sales without needing to add new staff or space or compromising quality.
Restaurants got it, so we were able to quickly sign up several amazing places in San Francisco -- like San Francisco favorites R&G Lounge, Little Star Pizza and Nick’s Crispy Tacos -- and get things moving.
Save Money, Get Your Hands Dirty
Signing up restaurants was perhaps the easiest part of getting started. Once we had set up up a few great local spots, we still couldn’t afford a staff, so our early founding team of five handled everything ourselves. We were the sales team, web developers, designers, dispatchers and even customer support reps. What we lacked in subject-matter expertise, we made up for in commitment to the job and willingness to do whatever we could to keep the business going.
While I had no previous dispatching experience, for the first 9 months of our business I was our head of dispatch. That meant I was on-call to fulfill every single order and make sure we had someone ready to deliver it on time and on the right route. Caviar’s official customer support line – the one listed on our website – was my own cell phone number. One thing I quickly learned was that there’s no better way to learn the plight of your partners and customers than to handle your own customer support – knowing the ins and outs of what our restaurants and customers deal with helped us to build a better experience and more efficient systems.
For example, when we signed up our first corporate customer, a San Francisco-based gaming company with over 100 employees, every day I would email the company to ask for their lunch orders. That meant that over 100 people would email me their individual lunch request – not just the item they wanted, but dietary restrictions and notes to hold the mayo or add pickles. Obviously this wasn’t an efficient system and it certainly wasn’t scalable. We quickly decided to engineer a shared cart feature – an easy way for groups of all sizes to place customized orders within one cart and one bill. Anyone can send a link around to their office to place orders – so whether you’re gluten-free, hate olives or are allergic to peanuts, you can order your item exactly as you wish. This became a killer feature that would have taken us so much longer to discover if we hadn’t been handling large orders manually (and personally) in the early days.
Milestones as Stepping Stones
When you’re building a company, there is always something that seems way out on the horizon that you’re trying to reach. When you get there, it’s important to celebrate the victory – but you need to quickly adjust your sights. When we started Caviar, our first mission was to sign up restaurants - we were so excited when we committed our earliest restaurant partners Nick’s Crispy Tacos and Ike’s - but it seemed so far off to imagine having a dozen. By having one amazing restaurant, it helped us to welcome other great restaurants. We quickly grew our service, letting each small victory stack onto the next. We went from one delivery market to 15, and from a dozen restaurant partners to over 1,000. We celebrate each milestone, but don’t spend too much time looking backwards.
The same goes for fundraising. Once we raised our first round of outside funding, there was certainly a sigh of relief knowing that paying the bills was one less thing to worry about. But a funding round is an injection of momentum to propel you forward, not a sign that the tough work is done. With thanks to our investors, we were able to hire and train more incredible staff and begin our expansion. And with this milestone came many new and exciting challenges and opportunities to stretch ourselves and our business, pushing us to work harder and go further.
Our team joined Square in 2014, and in time we have scaled the business tremendously. With the support of Square, the pace of our development has accelerated at an incredible rate. We went from being a web-only service to launching mobile apps for both Android and iOS and even introducing an app to our restaurant partners to make operations more efficient. We’re now in 15 markets across the U.S. and delivered more orders by mid-April of this year than we did in all of 2014. While we’ve come a long way in a fairly short amount of time, we’re as committed as ever to our restaurant partners and customers with the same principles we had when we started. We’ll continue to bring the best food to more people in more markets because it’s what we love to do. And I even still field an occasional customer support question from time to time.
In the tech world, it can seem that the only way to grow a successful company is to raise a lot of money quickly. We waited nearly a year to do so - here’s what we learned along the way.
Add Real Value
We had always loved the restaurant space and were avid foodies. We knew we wanted to add real value to the businesses we cared about, while also satisfying something for consumers like ourselves. While working on our previous startup we realized that daily deals may have been helpful for customers, but they weren’t helping restaurant’s bottom line. We also noticed that many of the restaurants that we loved and partnered with weren’t able to deliver meals to us while we worked day and night in our office.
Why was it that the best restaurants—the ones that people stand in line for and crave week after week—never seemed to offer delivery? It seems like a simple enough problem, but once we talked to our favorite spots about why they didn’t deliver, we learned what a logistical challenge it was. For an independent restaurant, offering delivery can be expensive, complicated, time-consuming, and unreliable. Nor could a restaurant know their meal would make it to the customer with the same care as if the chef had delivered it herself. We realized we could add real value–for popular restaurants and their customers–by creating a reliable delivery network that would help restaurants grow their sales without needing to add new staff or space or compromising quality.
Restaurants got it, so we were able to quickly sign up several amazing places in San Francisco -- like San Francisco favorites R&G Lounge, Little Star Pizza and Nick’s Crispy Tacos -- and get things moving.
Save Money, Get Your Hands Dirty
Signing up restaurants was perhaps the easiest part of getting started. Once we had set up up a few great local spots, we still couldn’t afford a staff, so our early founding team of five handled everything ourselves. We were the sales team, web developers, designers, dispatchers and even customer support reps. What we lacked in subject-matter expertise, we made up for in commitment to the job and willingness to do whatever we could to keep the business going.
While I had no previous dispatching experience, for the first 9 months of our business I was our head of dispatch. That meant I was on-call to fulfill every single order and make sure we had someone ready to deliver it on time and on the right route. Caviar’s official customer support line – the one listed on our website – was my own cell phone number. One thing I quickly learned was that there’s no better way to learn the plight of your partners and customers than to handle your own customer support – knowing the ins and outs of what our restaurants and customers deal with helped us to build a better experience and more efficient systems.
For example, when we signed up our first corporate customer, a San Francisco-based gaming company with over 100 employees, every day I would email the company to ask for their lunch orders. That meant that over 100 people would email me their individual lunch request – not just the item they wanted, but dietary restrictions and notes to hold the mayo or add pickles. Obviously this wasn’t an efficient system and it certainly wasn’t scalable. We quickly decided to engineer a shared cart feature – an easy way for groups of all sizes to place customized orders within one cart and one bill. Anyone can send a link around to their office to place orders – so whether you’re gluten-free, hate olives or are allergic to peanuts, you can order your item exactly as you wish. This became a killer feature that would have taken us so much longer to discover if we hadn’t been handling large orders manually (and personally) in the early days.
Milestones as Stepping Stones
When you’re building a company, there is always something that seems way out on the horizon that you’re trying to reach. When you get there, it’s important to celebrate the victory – but you need to quickly adjust your sights. When we started Caviar, our first mission was to sign up restaurants - we were so excited when we committed our earliest restaurant partners Nick’s Crispy Tacos and Ike’s - but it seemed so far off to imagine having a dozen. By having one amazing restaurant, it helped us to welcome other great restaurants. We quickly grew our service, letting each small victory stack onto the next. We went from one delivery market to 15, and from a dozen restaurant partners to over 1,000. We celebrate each milestone, but don’t spend too much time looking backwards.
The same goes for fundraising. Once we raised our first round of outside funding, there was certainly a sigh of relief knowing that paying the bills was one less thing to worry about. But a funding round is an injection of momentum to propel you forward, not a sign that the tough work is done. With thanks to our investors, we were able to hire and train more incredible staff and begin our expansion. And with this milestone came many new and exciting challenges and opportunities to stretch ourselves and our business, pushing us to work harder and go further.
Our team joined Square in 2014, and in time we have scaled the business tremendously. With the support of Square, the pace of our development has accelerated at an incredible rate. We went from being a web-only service to launching mobile apps for both Android and iOS and even introducing an app to our restaurant partners to make operations more efficient. We’re now in 15 markets across the U.S. and delivered more orders by mid-April of this year than we did in all of 2014. While we’ve come a long way in a fairly short amount of time, we’re as committed as ever to our restaurant partners and customers with the same principles we had when we started. We’ll continue to bring the best food to more people in more markets because it’s what we love to do. And I even still field an occasional customer support question from time to time.
No comments:
Post a Comment