How Doordash got their first 1000 customers | Hacker News Reader

How Doordash got their first 1000 customers

first1000.substack.com

30 pointsabouelatta44 comments

> They named their website PaloAltoDelivery.com in hopes that this would prompt the google engine to display their webpage favorably when people search for "Palo Alto Delivery." It worked. Half an hour of launching their page, they got their first phone call for a Thai Food order.

I don't know much about Doordash (I don't live in the US), but I find this sentence hard to believe. Launching a fresh new website with some keywords as the domain name, will not get you immediately ranked highly on Google, and certainly not within 30 minutes of 'launching the page'.

You couldn't do it today, but possibly it would work 7 years ago.

This is exactly what I came here to say... there's just no way, right?

definitely on your side. If I recall correctly, they posted flyers around Palo Alto, and that's how they get their first users to show up on their site.

They likely ordered from themselves to create the origin story.

If you clicked the link expecting to read about the "How" part, you're not going to get anything useful.

I think there's a larger gap here, in that the audience of HN (largely being engineers or "makers" or some sort) generally use "How" as "a piece of advice that is repeatable", ie, we can get the same result if we implement the same steps.

So searching for eg: "how do I crop a video using ffmpeg" will produce a nice set of results on the internet that will give you a replicable set of steps that lead to a pretty clear outcome.

"How do I get my first 1000 customers" isn't the same, and it's a disservice to publish clickbait headlines like that.

As someone who works in Growth this is what I hate about most of my industry.

A lot of growth hackers sell this BS of "simple tips & fast hacks" whereas the awesome professionals I know have "boring" methods and experiments.

So the market gets crowded with clickbait stupid drivel while the real science is lost.

Can you share some legitimate resources for those who are looking to improve their skills? Perhaps for the different stages, first 10 customers, first 100, etc.

It seems like the work would be different for each stage (finding product/market fit, finding a niche, scaling that niche, finding another niche, etc etc).

Second this, any sources for genuinely good, more widely actionable advice that you could recommend?

I thought HN had code to automatically remove clickbait words like "How" from titles. (Not sure why they aren't simply banned)

It does, but there are a lot of exceptions and this one fell in one of those buckets.

Stripping all leading Hows turns out to produce too much collateral damage. For example, consider a title like "How Paper Is Made".

Edit: this one worked nicely though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597937

1. Launch MVP

2. Perform basic SEO

3. Founders made initial deliveries themselves

4. Market to a nearby, reachable customer base via email

5. Pass out fliers

6. Capitalize on their email list to encourage repeat customers

Do you have any recommended resources for SEO. Something along the lines of SEO for hackers... Thanks!

Hey all, wanted to tell you about Plater (https://platerapp.app.link/ZJQoea4Ew7), a browser plugin i'm building. We're currently journeying for our first 1000 users.

Plater (https://plater.com) is a browser plugin that saves you money on restaurant delivery and helps local restaurants.

Plater finds you the cheapest price by automatically compare pricing across different delivery apps. On average, we find users savings of 20% per order. Our search is integrated with * Postmates * Grubhub * Seamless * Uber Eats * DoorDash * Caviar

Additionally, Plater helps local restaurants by linking to their direct ordering websites. Direct orders can make a big impact on our local restaurants by reducing their fees from 30% --> 0%! We're already linking to ~400 local restaurants in NYC and Fort Worth, Texas.

We're in public beta in NYC, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth, with over 60k restaurants for price comparisons. We're looking for feedback so if you're in one of these cities we'd love for you to download (https://platerapp.app.link/ZJQoea4Ew7) and share feedback. If you're in a different city and want to use Plater, lmk and I will get it up and running in a few hours.

Thanks!

Are you able to share anything about your revenue model? From other comments I've seen on HN and elsewhere, people in the niches I frequent (myself included) are increasingly interested in actually helping local restaurants by ordering directly and ignoring 3rd parties who are attempting to set up toll gates between us. What makes you different from the six services you mentioned?

We won't become like the services mentioned above because we have no intent of fulfilling deliveries. I think there may be an opportunity in building software for local restaurants that would make ordering as convenient as it is (for the consumer) with the DoorDashes of the world. However, people willing to change their ordering habits for better prices and to help local restaurants is still a hypothesis that needs to be proven...

Can you share some of the niches you frequent? I'm really looking to connect with people who are passionate about this problem.

Thank you!

Not sure about that last part, but I will say that I do think sincere efforts to empower small businesses by offering them truly better software with fairly priced SLAs is the right way to go here. If that's what you're doing, I hope you go far. I may have to take a closer look later.

I’m in Chicago and would love that service!

awesome, i'll start setting up Chicago now :) if you download and create an account I can send you a message when it's ready.

I know it's early so you're building for the largest initial audience, but a Firefox extension would be great. I would be even more happy if there was just a website I could use.

working on it :)

Wasn't Doordash one of the companies that was lowering payments if tips were added? Eg, if they were going to pay $10 for a delivery, and someone left a $2 tip, they would reduce what they paid to $8. The driver gets $10, rather than the $12 you'd imagine.

I have a hard time reading anything charitably about the company. If you exploit your workers, I don't care how scrappy and clever you were in bootstrapping.

They also pulled other shitties, like offering deliveries from restaurants, which never agreed to this in the first place.

It's one of those companies, which give tech a bad name.

They were subsidizing tips to guarantee a minimum payout if customers tipped too low. But customers wanted to undertip while still having workers get laid more, and then blamed doordash instead of their own unwillingness to pay.

Those are some serious mental gymnastics, and as far as I'm aware they didn't say that anywhere up front.

Nice story, but there isn't anything in there about getting 1000 customers. And having a good domain = the phone ringing within a couple hours? I highly doubt it.

> the phone ringing within a couple hours? I highly doubt it.

The article says they did everything themselves, probably including calling that number and ordering food :-)

> Just in case you live on another universe.

Or any country that isn't the US?

Yeah lol, hesitant to say this but murica leaks here.

Many diners love DoorDash for its fast, easy delivery from hundreds of local restaurants. However, some of those restaurants claim they never gave DoorDash permission to post their menus — and problems with the unauthorized deliveries are reflecting badly on their businesses.
Business is good at NYPD Pizza, a family-owned pizza place, but owner Kevin Leidecker fears his reputation for great food and fast delivery has taken a hit ever since DoorDash started taking orders for his restaurant.
"Customers call us back upset because they didn't get what they thought they were getting," he said.
At first, he had no idea why.
What he discovered was that DoorDash had started handling orders for him without asking his permission.
"They took our menu, posted it on DoorDash, and the customer is oblivious to the fact we have no relationship with Door Dash at all," he said.
He put up a Facebook post urging his customers not to order with DoorDash for his restaurant.

"DoorDash makes money by 'reselling' our food at higher prices," he wrote. "They also charge more for delivery. Between the mistakes on the DoorDash listing for our business and trying to take the order over the phone from someone halfway around the world who doesn't understand our product...we simply can't guarantee a DoorDash order to be correct."

https://www.wral.com/doordash-delivery-accused-of-taking-ord...

In addition to adding them to the platform without their consent, they also charge restaurants massive fees, which increase the total bill and eat into restaurant revenues.

shameless plug That is why I'm building Plater (https://platerapp.app.link/ZJQoea4Ew7). It automatically compares your order across DoorDash,UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates etc.. and gets you the cheapest price. Additionally, it highlights direct ordering links for restaurants that do their own delivery.

I would really love any feedback I can get on this -> we're currently live in NYC, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth. If you want to use the app and you're based in a different city lmk and I can get it up and running in a few hours.

Get the app here: https://platerapp.app.link/ZJQoea4Ew7 Learn more here: https://plater.com

Are you just comparing the delivery fees and other app added fees? Or are you comparing the menu prices as well? Your intention seems to be to save the user money and also help the restaurant, but if you are actually just showing the lowest price, isn't that actually the opposite of helping the restaurant?

Highest prices != Increased restaurant revenue

It depends on the deals negotiated with the delivery services. For example, the same restaurant can negotiate a 33% commission with Postmates per delivery and a 18% commission with Grubhub. In this case they will need to increase pricing to break even on the delivery order, but overall they can still make less revenue.

We're comparing the order total which, including menu pricing, tipping, delivery fee etc. for anyone who wants to help the restaurant the most, the best solution is usually ordering directly because this removes a third party from the transaction as mentioned in the comment below. Currently, we're surfacing direct order links for restaurants who can handle delivery and we're working on making direct orders even more convenient.

Isn't it illegal to resell non-shelf-stable food without a foodservice license?

NPR How I Built this Interviewed Tony and covered the same questions: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/09/666295686/doordash-tony-xu

"Moreover, some more prominent corporations seemingly have been going around it well as Dominos and FedEx that each delivers over millions of orders every month. Tony signed up to be a driver for these platforms.."

So Tony, one of the Cofounders of DoorDash signed up to be a Dominos pizza delivery driver to learn how they did it. I love it

Thank you for sharing this article

Not sure why you need to sign up for a job to learn how to do labor that anyone with a driving license is already trained on.

How many of the first 1000 delivery drivers still "work" for Dordash?

My question is, how come Doordash still spams me?

I never signed up or even knew of them until the emails started arriving.

Context:

Begin forwarded message:

Subject: Re: Customers in FAIRFIELD are looking for you Date: March 8, 2020 at 8:29:03 PM EDT To: Jeremy O'Connor <jeremy.oconnor@doordash.com>

Fuck off!

On Mar 8, 2020, at 8:27 PM, Jeremy O'Connor <jeremy.oconnor@doordash.com> wrote:

Hey again,

I am following up on my past emails, we continue to get requests for your food and it's important that we connect. New customers are signing into DoorDash daily, and I want to make sure we get you in front of these customers!

When is a good time for a quick chat?

All the best, Jeremy

<X8_vG66jH_4x-rR4fy_bomUVNOlqeyj0uv2FzCb-aGA.png> Jeremy O'Connor

Strategic Account Executive

480.470.4942

901 Market St #600

San Francisco, CA

DoorDash.com

If you'd like me to stop sending you emails, please click here

> and it's important that we connect.

Gotta love the unquestioning entitled hubris of this kind of set-up.

Does your business advertise?

No.

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