Talk about doing things that don’t scale. From Doordash’s YC app in 2013.

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·Nov 3, 2024

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And the four of us came together about 6 months ago to work on software for small business owners, but we didn't have a need at first. So we just went out and talked to all the small business owners we could find. After over a 100 interviews, we came across a really interesting problem with small business restaurants in an area like this, Palo Alto.

Yeah, so it turns out, um, restaurants in Palo Alto don't deliver even though they really want to, but they can't afford it. Um, but their consumers are craving for it. And the places that the consumers love just can't deliver. We also found out about these delivery drivers who had a ton of spare time, and they all want to earn extra cash during that downtime, right?

And so that's when we built an initial product, PAAlodDelivery.com. And how it works is, uh, the customer goes to the website and places an online order that gets automatically, uh, sent to the restaurant. And then we, as dispatchers, with some pretty neat, uh, routing and batching algorithms, we're able to send the drivers efficiently to get the orders to the customers at a really fast time.

Yeah, and the four of us actually started off as delivery drivers, and...

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