DoorDash's Application Video for YC S13

2m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Hey, I'm Stanley. I'm a Stanford CS major. I did find an engineer at Facebook.

Hey, I'm Andy. I'm also a Stanford CS major, and I did platform engineering at Facebook.

I'm Evan. I was on the founding team of Vivo, the music video service.

And I'm Tony. I was a product editor at Square.

The four of us came together about six 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 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.

But their consumers are craving for it. 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: paloaltodelivery.com.

How it worked is, uh, the customer goes to the website and places an online order that gets automatically sent to the restaurant.

Then we, as the dispatchers, with some pretty neat routing and batching algorithms, were able to send the drivers efficiently to get the orders to the customers in a really fast time.

Yeah, and the four of us actually started off as delivery drivers, and over time, we hired more as we grew.

In our first month of launch, with not much marketing, we got over 150 paying customers in the Palo Alto area, which was really awesome.

From that, we generated over ten thousand dollars in sales.

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