How a Local Food Delivery Company Runs with the Venture Capital Bulls 🔥

July 7, 2018 (6y ago)
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My name is Parker Rex, and I'm the VP of Product at Delivery Dudes. We deliver food better than anyone in the country. We care about our customers more than anyone in the space. Our training is on point, our culture is built on one-on-one relationships with restaurants, and every Dude or Dudette you talk to knows the local food scene.

This article is for the hustlers fighting the good fight against VC-subsidized giants. It's for those who need to go out and crush it every day.

The VC Giants We Compete With

Venture capital funding in food delivery peaked in 2015 but continues to climb. SoftBank is making moves, and M&A deals are everywhere as big firms buy market share.

The competition has deep pockets and teams 10x to 100x our size. VC-backed companies can afford to half-ass products that may never launch. We cannot. Every single day counts, and that makes the journey epic.

The VC-Funded Behemoths:

Uber Eats
DoorDash
Postmates
GrubHub (the grandpa of the bunch)

In just the last year, our team of six launched 11 new products from scratch. Yes, eleven. It wasn't easy, but we made it happen. When you're a small, scrappy team, you need to use every ounce of energy to compete.

Every. Single. Day. Counts.

How to Run with the Bulls and Watch the Competition Burn Their VC Cash

1. Ask These Questions Every Day

Is this the biggest customer problem we can solve?
Do customers actually want this?
Is this technically feasible?
What outcome do we expect from this feature/product/fix?
If we launch this… how will we know it's a success?

2. Work on the Team. It's the Most Important Thing.

Your team is everything. If you don't take time to refine how you work together, workflow goes stale, morale drops, and results suffer.

Encourage open discussions—whether in one-on-ones or team meetings. Give everyone a voice. Let ideas and opinions fly. Find what works and double down on it. Find what doesn't work and throw it away.

"When you hand good people possibility, they do great things." — Biz Stone

3. Spend More Time on the Problem

A common pitfall:

Someone identifies a problem.
A quick solution comes to mind.
22 minutes later, the team gets to work.
The designer rushes out high-fidelity mockups.
Usability testing is skipped to save time.
Designs are thrown over the fence to engineers to just build it.

What happens next?

Engineers realize halfway through that the product needs to do X too.
The team scrambles to adjust.
Someone asks, "Do we even need this?"

Lesson: Slow down. Scope properly. Don't waste effort on half-baked ideas.

4. Commit and Complete

Being in a constant state of "Work in Progress" slows everything down.

The designer finishes and throws the "pixel-perfect" work over to the dev team.
The engineer catches it and starts building.
The cycle repeats.
Sprint after sprint, the project drags on.

Not okay. Define the scope. Set a deadline. Stick to it. Don't move the target—adjust the effort.

Basecamp explains this philosophy well: Set fixed deadlines, but keep scope flexible.

In Closing

Running with VC-backed bulls is tough. They can afford things you can't. They can give away their service all day just to gain market share.

So pay attention to what you're building and why.

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