Slice's founder grew supply by building a SaaS tool that gave pizza shops websites with online ordering. When owners resisted digital, he converted email orders into faxes so shops could keep their existing workflow. By 2015, Slice worked with 3,000 shops processing $40 million in orders, betting that all orders would eventually go digital.
Chapters
You know, so you did mention that these are, you know, small, small local businesses, right? Like the local pizza shops, and that it is highly fragmented. So, you know, how did you think about, you know, first onboarding kind of supply and like organizing supply in your marketplace?
Yeah, it's, I mean, by far the most difficult part about our industry. It's once you reach some scale, it becomes a real moat. You know, first 30 were like family and friends. Because I'm Albanian by background, Albanians own a lot of pizza shops. So I would just go to these, uh, family and friends and, and bring them on board. But our, our original product was actually not a marketplace product. It was a vertical SaaS tool, uh, and in our case it was websites with online ordering. Um, so, so brought on board a bunch of shops with websites and online ordering. It was just like one-to-one relationships, not many-to-many. And then pretty quickly learned that, uh, that kind of had diminishing returns because beyond a small segment of the market, most shops didn't even think they needed online ordering. Like, what do you mean online ordering? Why do I need this? I have a phone number. Um, and they all had a fax number on the menu. Like, every shop had a fax number. And so, uh, you know, for me, the, the reconciliation point was the following. One, I knew for a fact that eventually all orders would be digital. So, you know, I was operating under this belief that whether it was in a year or 10 years or even 50 years, like, all order volume will be digital. And then here are all these shops who don't believe that they need it. And then you look at Domino's and you look at Papa John's. Domino's at the time was 30% digital. By the way, today they just crossed 90%. I think they're 92% digital. And that is a massive advantage because you have all this data, you can predict demand, uh, consumers spend more money, AOVs are much higher, you can influence frequency because you have that direct relationship with the customer. So, so here we are, like, you have all these shops that didn't think they needed online ordering, and here I am believing that they absolutely did, they just didn't know it yet. And so how do you reconcile that? And so what I did was I figured out that I can convert consumer online orders into fax orders. Well, actually, before I get there, first thing I did was I said, okay, consumers can order online, I'm gonna get them all on an email, and will personally call every pizza shop and phone in the order. So I used my pizza, I sold it almost as a marketing service. So I said, hey Mike, you order online from Pizza Club. And then as soon as that order comes in, it would come into my phone and I would call Pizza Club and say, hey, this is MyPizza, we've got an order for you. And we read it out, literally would read it out. So that was, I would say, the first 300 or 400 locations were kind of operating like that, and it was just me. I remember switching my phone line to, uh, AT&T because it allowed you, allowed you to browse the internet and receive a phone call at the same time, or place a phone call. And so, you know, I could read out my email, uh, on my phone while I was on the phone with the shop, so I could just like read out the order. Uh, but then I realized that you can convert, um, online orders, in essence emails, into a fax automatically. So it was programmable fax. Uh, there's a company called Faxage, still around, we still use them, although now Twilio and some of these other platforms, uh, provide a similar service. And so, uh, eventually we just started selling fax ordering. We would go to shops and say, hey, I see you have this fax number, you have a fax machine in the back, how many times do you get an order from that thing? And they would say 1 or 2 a week. And then we were like, well, what if, what if you got like 10 orders out of that thing every day? They would say that was— that would be amazing. And so, uh, the adoption kind of went through the roof as soon as we figured that, that sort of hook. Uh, so we would give them websites with online ordering, but it didn't change their workflow. Like, they didn't have to adjust to technology, they didn't have to adjust their, you know, the way they operated every single day until we got to a point where they got enough order volume and they were tired of this fax machine printing. And then we would give them, uh, more of a tablet, more of a, you know, an online ordering system. So it was that for like 5 years, just sell to as many shops this idea that we can generate more volume for you if you participate in this online economy. And don't worry about it, for you all it means is that your fax machine is going to print orders. Um, and so when you fast forward to 2015 we were working with about, uh, 3,000 shops nationwide, uh, and we did $40 million in GMV, all orders passing through either the phone or the fax. Like, there was, you know, almost no, no technology on the, on the shop side. So, so that was all about supply. Like, um, and what we realized was that demand would come because we would enable websites for these shops where consumers were already trying to search for them and find their menu or find a phone number. And so we knew that there was existing demand for these known brands in the local market. We just needed to turn on the supply side, um, and that was, uh, that was kind of the approach.
