Stanford students built paloaltodelivery.com as a fake delivery site to test demand. They got a real order within an hour on January 12, 2013, so they picked up the food and delivered it themselves. Orders kept coming, and they realized delivery was viable.
what if we built an experiment instead? And this experiment was very straightforward. The idea was, okay, why don't we put together a simple landing page? So one single-page static HTML website where we found a bunch of restaurants we liked in Palo Alto that didn't offer delivery. So we compiled it into these PDF menus, we threw it up on this website, and all this website said was, if you want to order delivery from these 8 restaurants, call this phone number. And it was a Google Voice phone number that ran the cell phones of the founders. And the whole point of this website was, if we put this out there, how many phone calls we would get. It's not a— it was essentially a fake delivery service, but the idea was to see how many phone calls we'll get. It was a data collection exercise. And then we can use that data to then support, oh, there's demand for delivery, therefore we should go work with these restaurants to build something, right? I mean, that's as far as we thought, nothing further. And then literally, like, Like an hour later, we got a phone call. Like we picked up our phone. It was the Google Voice number on Palo Alto Delivery dot com. We picked up the phone call. First of all, I have no idea how this person found this website. I mean, even to this day, I still have no idea how because we haven't told a single person. So he literally must have just typed in Palo Alto Delivery dot com. He we picked it up, and yeah, it was this guy. Somehow he found our website. He he wanted. I remember his exact order. He wanted shrimp pad thai and egg rolls from this restaurant. Unfortunately doesn't exist anymore, called Bangkok Cuisine in Palo Alto. And I remember in that moment, we were kind of taken off guard a little. Originally, we were supposed to tell— the original plan was to tell this person, no, this is not a real delivery service. It's just a data collection exercise so that we can complete our class project at Stanford. I think in that moment, this guy seemed really, really hungry, and we kind of felt bad telling him this is not a real delivery service. So I certainly did not have the guts to tell him it was not a real delivery service. And so I said, hey, what about my co-founders? Do you guys want to tell him? They didn't want to tell him either. So we said, you know what? It's just one delivery. How bad can it be? Why don't we just do this delivery ourselves? We can actually learn about how this whole delivery thing works. Not like we have anything better to do. So we literally just placed a— we picked up the other phone, called Bangkok Cuisine, placed a takeout order. We got in our cars, drove over ourselves. picked up the food and delivered it to that customer. So I remember the exact date, it was January 12th, 2013, and that was the start of paul2delivery.com. And the next day we got 2 more phone calls and we decided, okay, we'll take those 2 as well. And then it became 3 and then 5. And the next thing you knew, like the whole paul2delivery.com just went viral on campus. Everyone was ordering. We were the delivery drivers going back and forth. Again, up until this, there's no technology and this is literally just Google Voice phone calls. We're just— and then on the other end, we're just placing the takeout order ourselves over the phone, and we're just coordinating everything through texting and Google Spreadsheets and things like that. So that was how DoorDash got— well, later it became DoorDash, but that was how Pollo To Delivery got started.
