1. Make it $10 or $11. It's the most a lazy and cheap person will pay and it's a lot more than $7. You're still way cheaper than most other options. Use most of the money on delivering great food.
2. Cleanliness! Make sure you put in serious effort to ensuring the things you're delivering were prepared properly and cleanly. That they arrive nicely (tape soup lids well!). One round of office food poisoning...
3. Target individuals and teams. Get groups of people in companies to start "Lunch Pooling" (thelunchpool.com available :D). Make a minimum subscriber count of 3 or even more, so it's worth your while and people are forced to spread the word. Or even use the PayPal/Dropbox technique, people inviting others could get a free lunch. If enough employees do it on their own some companies will decide to just do it for the whole company. The Apple approach to "enterprise" sales.
1. We've though about it, but we really want to support the scrappy little seed-stage startups who can't afford $11 lunches, but want to eat lunch as a team.
2. No problems with that so far, but thanks for the tip!
3. That's a good idea! We've been suggesting to really small startups (<5 people) that they order lunch along with other companies in their building.
I think the $7-$8 price point is ideal. It is affordable enough for most companies to be able to justify it. Over $10/meal starts seeming a little extravagant to me.
Source: Startup founder who is about to sign up with the service to give it a try because I've been looking for something like this.
Fwiw, SpoonRocket is $6 a meal, and I love the concept but the food just isn't good enough for me to order regularly. I do think it's a great deal for $6 though.
Maybe if they had another $3 per meal they could make more food I'd want to eat.
- Do you have a minimum/maximum order size?
- What sort of commitment do you require (the FAQ mentions a commitment but doesn't give details)?
- Can you accommodate my low carb/dairy-free/gluten-free/MOKO* lifestyle?
- Are there any feedback mechanisms so I can let you know what I thought about the food?
- Is there any choice in what I get, or is it all chosen for me?
- Do you guarantee my food will arrive when I want it and not two hours late?
Minimum order size: 2. We didn't really set a maximum, but so far, nobody has asked for more than we can handle.
All of our current customers have a repeating weekly order. If they want to change it, they have to tell us by Friday the week before. That's really all a 'commitment' means.
Right now, only 1 meat meal and 1 vegan meal a day. We're thinking about adding a GF option.
I was supposed to add a feedback button today, but now my email inbox is overflowing :)
All chosen for you. Current customers love the 'surprise factor' and haven't had any complaints about food choices yet.
Yes. We did have our delivery schedule run 15 mins behind one day and apologized with a 5% discount for our customers.
> Right now, only 1 meat meal and 1 vegan meal a day. We're thinking about adding a GF option.
One emphatic suggestion: make sure your vegetarian/vegan meals have as many calories as the meat meals. This is something that so many caterers get wrong.
Low-carb and MOKO strike me as not something you should take into consideration but options to avoid dairy and gluten make sense for when you expand your menu, as those can be serious allergies for some people. I would add nut allergies to the list, as they're quite common.
Totally agree here. Pictures of food would help a ton.
Also think you could do a lot with marketing here... differentiate yourself through fresh ingredients or better supplies. Make that apparent if you have any leg up. Convince them you're better with some unique flair and customer testimonials.
You made a well designed front page. The colours are nicely fitting and the logo is great it associated with some kind of food immediately (made me think of spring rolls or something like that)! Just wanted to say that after a day of repeatedly stumbling upon extremely annoying hip, identical, scroll-untill-you-die sites, yours made me smile a little. And now I'm hungry.
How can I be sure you source from local markets? This doesn't scale easily either. How do you plan to combat carelessness when demand goes up and you all of sudden need to push out 1000 or 10,000 meals at lunch time?
Heh, np. I"m not in the area so I won't be able to sign up, but this seems like one of those "holy crap, why didn't someone think of this before" kind of ideas. Good luck with it :)
I guess you can never be entirely sure. (Do you have any ideas about how we can prove this to people?) Sometimes, we like to slip in notes about where the food came from, but we don't have any rigid guidelines set in place right now.
Perhaps you could have a nice looking "Our Food Sources" page that details the markets, farmers, etc? I might be the minority on this, but when I see food locally sourced I'm more likely to buy it than generic food brand X.
Locally sourced to me = fresher, healthier, and better for my local economy obviously
If I lived in SF I'd totally jump on this. I was so productive in college because I lived right next to a gym and my dining hall had unlimited eating from 7am until 8p, every day.
Questions:
Why did you pick $7? Why not $10 or $15?
What diet will the first meal plans be for?
Will it be all organic? Is it freshly prepared each day from raw ingredients?
I think it's much more affordable for a seed stage startup. Also, ZeroCater is more in the $10-15 price range and they're feeding more series A and above companies.
I got a Naturebox ($20/month) for my mom and she loves it. I'm considering doing the same this year for her and myself and I think its the right price point. If my company stocked Naturebox treats, they would be a huge hit. Most tech companies seem to be using the same service for their snacks. Whenever I visit another office I always see the same assortment of Popchips, Doritos, Pirates Booty as well as Vitamin Water, Crystal Geyser mineral water, Odwalla, and soft drinks.
What a wonderful idea. Just FYI, I went to share this on facebook, and the thumbnail was white on white. You might want to put a few metadata tags in there.
This sounds promising. I upvoted just because I want SF folks to afford cheap and healthy lunch. I hope it all goes well and you can expand to Seattle area.
I assume no drinks included as it's not mentioned anywhere and at $7 it seems very fair/competitive. If you get a sandwich or buffet in SF it's usually around $7-10 as well. Delivery can also be a nice bonus - especially since going out to get lunch at peak times can be hectic in the city.
I hope the food is not too heavy though as I remember we used to have a Chevys right by our office in SOMA and whenever we went there with the team for lunch we usually wouldn't be back until 2 hours later and wanting to take a nap at the office :)
I'm also curious what the minimum order amount is.
A strongly brewed iced tea. Apple cider and seltzer. Fresh lemonade. Unusual sodas.
Don't bother with run-of-the-mill soft drinks or hot coffee, or plain water, or indeed anything that a startup would ordinarily stock in a mini-fridge. They aren't interesting enough.
2. Cleanliness! Make sure you put in serious effort to ensuring the things you're delivering were prepared properly and cleanly. That they arrive nicely (tape soup lids well!). One round of office food poisoning...
3. Target individuals and teams. Get groups of people in companies to start "Lunch Pooling" (thelunchpool.com available :D). Make a minimum subscriber count of 3 or even more, so it's worth your while and people are forced to spread the word. Or even use the PayPal/Dropbox technique, people inviting others could get a free lunch. If enough employees do it on their own some companies will decide to just do it for the whole company. The Apple approach to "enterprise" sales.
4. Come to Santa Monica, CA.