Pages and Pages of Delivery Orders
Tang: It was my junior year at Stanford. I sat down with Chloe, the owner of a macaron store in Palo Alto. She took out this really thick booklet and showed me pages and pages of delivery orders — a lot of which she had to turn down because she had no drivers. She was the one personally delivering all these orders.
Over the next few weeks, we talked to another 150-200 small business owners. When we brought up the idea of delivery, they kept agreeing.
Pages of delivery orders she couldn't fill. No drivers. She was delivering them herself.
PaloAltoDelivery.com
Tang: We spent about an afternoon putting together a quick landing page. I went on the internet, found some PDF menus of restaurants in Palo Alto, stuck them up there. We had a phone number at the bottom — our personal cell phone number. We called it PaloAltoDelivery.com.
We weren't expecting anything. We launched it and all we wanted to see was — would we get phone calls? We put it up there, we're driving back home, and all of a sudden we got a phone call. Someone wanted to order Thai food. We're like — this is a real order. We have to do something. So we swung by, picked up some pad thai, and tried to learn how delivery works.
PDF menus. Our cell phone number. PaloAltoDelivery.com. Someone called and ordered Thai food.
Launched in an Hour. No Backend. No Algorithms.
Tang: We launched this in about an hour. We didn't have any drivers. Didn't have any algorithms. Didn't have a backend. Didn't spend 6 months building a fancy dispatch system. At the beginning, none of that is necessary.
We were the delivery drivers. We were customer support. We used Square to charge customers. Google Docs to keep track of orders. Apple Find My Friends to track where our drivers were. Doing things that don't scale also allows you to become an expert in your business — driving helped us understand the whole delivery process.
No drivers, no algorithms, no backend. Square, Google Docs, Find My Friends. Launched in an hour.