In our reading material for the course, I found the interview with Stanley Tang founder of Doordash very interesting. He discusses doing things that do not scale. Doordash is now the biggest food delivery company in the USA. In the beginning however it was just a landing page created in an afternoon for their idea of home food delivery. When the phones began to ring, they did not have any infrastructure, so they just went and bought the food and drove it themselves. They used Google Doc to track the orders. They were really just testing the idea if it was feasible and if there would be demand.
If they had waited until they had all the infrastructure in place it is very possible their start-up would never taken off. Tang talks about how doing it like this also made them experts in the delivery busines because they went through the whole process themselves. It was not just theoretical they really have done all the parts of the delivery themselves. They talked to the restaurants and the customers buying the food. He says the three most important things they learned from founding Doordash were:
“First, test your hypothesis. You want to treat your start-up ideas like experiments. The second thing is, launch fast. We launched in less than an hour with a really simple landing page. And finally, it’s okay to do things that don’t scale. Doing things that don’t scale is one of your biggest competitive advantages when you’re starting out, and you can figure out how to scale once you have your demand.”
I believe for a start-up which we are developing, which grows fruits and vegetables locally in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way, this can be a good model. We already have a webpage and some fruits growing. The next step is just to open the page to potential customers and see what happens.