A web, iOS, Android, and IOT product that delivered healthy meals to people in 10 minutes.
Demand Food was a healthy food-tech startup I helped co-found with Chad Whitaker (AngelList Ventures), Julia Mann (Expedia), and Angelina Detmers (RN).
The idea was initially conceived in 2013 when it became clear to us that choosing what and where to eat three times a day was losing us more precious time than it should. It was the most reoccurring problem in our lives.
The Problem: Each year, we were getting busier and as a result, spending less time on making food. Consequently, we ended up eating out a lot which we learned wasn't designed to everyday use.
The Solution: What if there was an app that delivered us healthy meals three times per day? What if this food was healthier than a restaurant, faster than any delivery company, and as affordable as going to the grocery store and cooking it ourselves?
It was ambitious but we were dedicated to solving this problem. Our journey began by exploring these fundamental questions:
After our team identified the customer segments, market size, and business models, we quickly dived into designing our brand and building a minimal viable product (MVP) to validate/invalidate our assumptions.
Our goal with branding was to be thoughtful and practical, but assume that once we reached a large enough milestone, we'd re-invest more resources into a second brand overhaul (similar to Uber & AirBnB).
Design goals:
Measuring success:
We gave ourselves two weeks to complete our initial MVP and it was important we used our time efficiently by making the right tradeoffs. While the food/delivery operations were barely strung together, we needed the consumer-facing experience to feel as close to the vision as possible.
Design goals:
Measuring success:
After shipping the MVP, we continued to learn, iterate, and move closer to validating/invalidating our core assumptions.
We began each day by identifying two dinner meals at the Whole Foods hot bar and then uploaded the meal photos to our website. Once 4pm rolled around we'd send an email of the dinner options to our beta customers. As the orders would come in, we’d quickly plate the meals from the hot bar and deliver them immediately. We’d then return to Whole Foods as quickly possible to repeat the process.
To end users, the experience felt frictionless and amazing. To us, it felt like everything was barely held together. However, we knew we were on the right track because our success metrics were being hit and our assumptions were being validated.
After achieving more than +$20,000 in revenue, +66% in monthly repurchases, and a ~14 minute delivery average, we were ready to begin fundraising to in order to accomplish our next big milestones. I personally led this fundraising effort while the team continued with product development and daily operations.
Goals:
Measuring success:
Fundraising was a difficult, yet rewarding experience. We accomplished our first goal of getting into Texas' most prestige startup accelerator (Capital Factory) and then began pitching our company to investors.
Over and over we kept hearing "No", but I knew that if we could just get one investor to experience the product first-hand, they'd see the immense opportunity.
Finally, one of them did. He tried the product, fell in love the experience and led our entire seed round.
Mission accomplished. Our second goal of securing $400k was a success and we were ready to move onto the next chapter of our startup.
Our next milestone involved designing, building, and shipping a world-class mobile app. To ensure our engineering time was used most effectively, we needed to prototype as many iterations as possible before touching code.
Goals:
Measuring success:
After testing with interactive prototypes with a large number of new and existing users, we hit our success metrics and felt very comfortable with the entire UX. It wasn't easy and we learned a lot through this experience.
One thing we were wrong about revolved around scheduling meals. We assumed most users would order their meals on-demand (whenever they got hungry), but instead learned that a meaningful number of users wanted to schedule their meals in advanced. These lessons guided us and resulted in a world-class UX.
Our engineering resources were limited, so we needed a cross-platform framework—like Ionic—to build and deploy our iOS & Android apps (note: React Native wasn't a thing yet). Speed to market was one of our most important priorities and we felt this was the right tradeoff for us.
Goals:
Measuring success:
One of the many challenges we ran into was embedding our realtime meal tracking service into the app. We underestimated how much effort was required, so our team decided it was best to delay the feature and continue using our old SMS tracking feature. Luckily, users didn't seem to mind so we felt good about this tradeoff.
After successfully building and shipping our first release, our team continued learning from users and releasing updates on a weekly basis.
While we hit most of our success metrics, one of our proudest accomplishments was our daily conversion rate for viewing the menu to purchasing a meal. We achieved a whopping 25% average — blowing all of our team's expectations.
Now that our mobile apps were working smoothly, our attention moved to our homepage. Due to our limited resources, we couldn't support both mobile and web platforms. We decided the homepage would now serve the purpose of getting users to download the app as quickly as possible.
Goals:
Measuring success:
It was in our team's DNA to continue find more innovative ways to accomplish our vision. Our challenge was: how do we leverage people's pre-existing routines/habits to make ordering even easier?
Our insights led us to an innovative solution: a smart kitchen device that users would stick on their fridge like a magnet, and then, every time they would approach their fridge, the device would detect their motion and illuminate the two meal options we were serving at that very moment. All users would need to do is tap and hold the meal option they wanted, and just like magic, the meal was on its way.
Goals:
Measuring success:
We hit our success metrics and proved a device like this could scale. The real-life experience felt even more magical than we imaged; we couldn't wait for users to try this.
Since each unit cost was less than $20, this was something we'd offer our users once their lifetime value (LTV) had reached a profitable enough point to cover the unit's cost.
As one of our head Chefs used to say, users "eat with their eyes". For this reason, we invested a lot of focus into to making our media, print, and photography appealing and appetizing. Below is a small sample of some of our work.
One of our last milestones was to achieve profitability and prove the unit economics of a business like this could scale. We tried nearly everything to accomplish this including: automating kitchen processes, switching from ready-to-eat meals to microwavable meals, offering scheduled-only deliveries, and much more.
Ultimately though, after years of blood, sweat, and tears, we concluded the business model wouldn’t scale and made the difficult decision to shut down and return the remaining capital to investors. We assumed that competitors offering a similar service were also operating at a loss (this was proven to us years later) and that a business like ours couldn't scale until new technology breakthroughs would reduce operational expenses in a meaningful way (e.g, autonomous vehicles becoming ubiquitous).
The hardest part of the entire experience was letting go of our wonderful employees. We invested time and energy to ensure our team transitioned into new companies as smoothly as possible. Many of us still remain very close and support each other throughout the next chapter of our lives.
View my other work:
Thank you,