Ilir Sela explains how Slice shifted from a SaaS platform to a direct-to-consumer app, then built B2B products like Slice Register and SliceOS to lock in merchant relationships. The key insight: customers rotate among 4-6 local pizza shops, so owning that connection matters more than the transaction.
Kind of going back though, you know, to, I would say like 2017, kind of 2018, you know, transitioning from primarily being like a SaaS tool and kind of building out, you know, kind of more tools, you know, when it comes from like ordering payments to, you know, POS and eventually even kind of like first-party delivery. Could you share about maybe how you thought about kind of, I would say, like your product approach and strategy with, you know, unlocking the bigger opportunities with Launching new products?
Yeah, look, the number one, uh, you just have to have a set of beliefs. Um, and I knew and understood that as long as we, uh, we had a core relationship with the seller, with the merchant, that everything was possible. Like, own the relationship and everything else will be 10 times easier. But if you do not own the relationship with the merchant Uh, and you're just predominantly like, you know, for me it was like, okay, do we go direct to consumer? Uh, you can certainly build a, build a big business, but it would cost a lot of money and consumers are fickle. But one thing that's reality is what— that's real is that, you know, pizza shops will have demand no matter what. And so you just have to be really closely tied to the pizza shop owner an operator in order to make sure that the business can scale and thrive. So, so we made it clear that our, our main customer is the shop. Once we had all of these websites and all of these pages sort of really unlocked, and there was just significant demand and significant traffic coming to our properties, while it was very much long tail— so imagine, you know, mypizza.com maybe got 5% of our traffic, and 95% came from all of these other websites and menu URLs that we enabled for, for pizzerias. Eventually, we knew that we can consolidate them all into one platform because we saw the consumer experience and what consumers wanted. So going into 2017, what we realized was that consumers are actually loyal to 4 to 6 different pizza shops. like equally. Uh, they're not sort of switching off because they don't like one over the other for whatever reason. They just kind of rotate between 4 to 6 shops. And, and so that was what the consumer wanted, was ideally like a dashboard with 4 to 6 of their local favorites. They're not looking to discover, by the way. They're not, you know, for the most part, they're not looking to like find something new. They just wanted to replace the phone and they wanted to have a rewarding experience, you know, between their— and somewhat consistent experience between their 4 shops. And then shops want, you know, the consumer to be loyal to them and only them, right? And that's the tension point. So what we realized was that we needed to really launch a direct-to-consumer marketplace And that's the Slice app. We launched that going into 2017, and the idea for the Slice app was really to connect the customer to their local favorites and make it much more about loyalty and frequency and repeat behavior than discovery. And, you know, using the data and the knowledge that we had from these long-tail websites that we built, And, and that was sort of the premise when we, when we kind of launched Slice in 2017.
Awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing with us on that. Yes. So kind of beyond the, you know, the kind of consumer ordering on that side, right? Like, could you share it, like what stages you launched, I would say, like the POS, you know, and like first-party delivery?
Yeah. So first-party delivery was enabled from day one. First-party delivery is honestly, it's just, this is more organic because The overwhelming amount of pizza— the overwhelming majority of pizza shops in the US have their own delivery. And so all we wanted to do was kind of make that product and that experience easier for them and more efficient. For, you know, the first 8 years, it was just organic first-party delivery without any technology. In the last couple of years, we launched a delivery management product. that allows a pizza shop to plug in their drivers and then assign orders and route optimization and all that stuff. So again, another, in essence, SaaS product, one-to-one product, but we knew that it would make the consumer experience in the marketplace better. And then in 2021, so just a little over a year ago, we launched the Slice Register product, and that's more of a complete point-of-sale solution. That allows you to also take payments. And that was really important to us more as a workflow tool because as shops became more and more digital, uh, online orders just started becoming really, uh, much of a, an issue for them in order to manage them. There was just tickets being printing— being printed in like all parts of the store. Um, sometimes it came from a tablet, sometimes from the phone, sometimes from some other tablets. So what we wanted to do was kind of reconcile it all into one system, and so we launched the Slice Register product. It is a point of sale. It does accept, you know, in-store payments, but for us, we view it much more as a workflow tool than, than an actual just point of sale tool. And then most recently, we launched something we call the Goods. Yes, it's called SliceOS, Levy. So, and then, yeah, most recently we launched the Goods, which in essence takes some of the economies of scale that we've unlocked through our network. So if you think about it, Domino's has 6,000 locations in the US. They pay $14 per bundle of pizza boxes. An independent shop pays about $35. So a Domino's location pays $14 for 50 boxes. An independent shop pays $35. By the way, this is much of the reason why, you know, Domino's can charge so little for their pizza while, you know, a local pizza shop is charging $25. And then, you know, with Slice, uh, we've launched the goods. We've lowered the cost of boxes for an independent shop to $20. Now we believe that number will be much lower as we create scale in all of our geographies, but starting with pizza boxes, we've lowered the cost from $35 to $20, and now we make those boxes available to our network. So to sum up this, you know, B2B products that really build strong relationships with these owners, we become very integrated with these shops, and then we leverage that integration to deliver a world-class consumer experience.
