Jason Droege explains how Uber Eats launched by hacking the existing rides platform and running scrappy experiments with minimal resources. The team relied on word-of-mouth to find product-market fit instead of heavy marketing, and Droege advises founders to validate ideas ruthlessly rather than fall in love with them.
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Thanks, Jason, for being here. Great to, great to have you. So many interesting insights. So I'm actually also an Uber alum from back in 2016. It's been a while. Founded a marketplace in the expertise economy called Leland. We just raised a seed round. We've been at it for about a year. So I'm curious about the testing model of the kind of the scrappy early days that you described of Uber Everything. What are the— it sounds like the team is about 8 or 9. Curious, like, what kind of product support you got, what kind of go-to-market resources did you do, like kind of condensed sprints? Like, how did you guys think about testing these in an efficient way in order to find the right kind of next step?
Well, we ran all 3 experiments with no designers, product managers, or engineers. So I'll start there. We basically hacked the rides product. If you were back there in 2016, if you remember, there was— there used to be this slider on the bottom. It'd be like UberX, Uber Black, Uber Van, whatever. whatever was in there. And we just added Uber Corner Store, or I think it's called Uber Corner Store, Uber Rush to the slider. When you slid over there, it popped something up that said what you get. You recall how we used to do Uber Ice Cream, and it would be like, slide over here and you'd hail a car and get ice cream? It was basically that tech. And we were able to get signal based on that. Obviously, if we didn't have that as a platform just to be able to dispatch a car. We, you know, we would have needed to build something. But we didn't have an engineer until like late 2014, maybe. Yeah, maybe like September. I joined in February, so didn't have very much. It was mostly ops people hacking together, which is a very like Uber thing. As far as what we were looking for, I just, you know, I'd started 3 consumer businesses before this. And I just don't believe that you, you know, especially with the ability for Uber to like send out an email to 50,000 people. I mean, if you send out an email to 50,000 people, even if you have a totally garbage product, you'll see a signal. Now the signal might have a higher magnitude if the product is better, but if the product is terrible and you're solving a consumer need, a deep consumer need that will turn into a big business, you'll see the signal if you expose it to enough demand. As far as how do you do that if you can't send an email to 50,000 people, which is obviously a benefit of working within a company, you have to be a little more qualitative about it. But I just look at word of mouth. And I've had a couple threads on Twitter about CACs and things like this and how much I just loathe the idea that we even start with the assumption that you need a CAC. And, you know, a bunch of people threw up on it. A lot of people agreed with it. And part of the reason why is because, like, if within your immediate group of like 30 or 40 people that you know who you can like beg to use whatever, you know, very scrappy version of the product, if you don't see like 6 or 7 of them be like, whoa, this is cool, and I'm gonna tell like a couple people because I think it's that cool, you're probably— you might be onto a good idea, but you're not onto a great idea. I mean, like, take Uber rides as an example, which had one of the greatest product-market fits of anything in history, right? So it's a pretty high bar, but that's the point of, I would assume, this group is you hold yourself to a high bar because you want to build a big business because it's just as hard to build a big one as a small one. And Uber had product-market fit before it was public. I mean, people were literally— they put like 3 cars on the road and people started ordering ordering them and spreading the word about it. So that's like, that's how I would think about it. The issue with, you know, the issue as a founder, and I don't, I'm not speaking for anyone here, although I imagine this is consistent with a lot of founders, is you fall in love with your ideas about how you think the world should work. And the world doesn't really care. You know, they're just looking to solve a problem. And so, you know, there's, you know, I did this at Eats. I've done this at every single business where like I put blinders on about like what I wanna experiment, world. I want to see healthier food in the world. I want to see more transparency into delivery. I had all these ideas. And then the truth was the market wants what the market wants. And if you don't serve that, you never have a chance to do the other thing. And so just being really candid with yourself of whether or not this is just an idea that you made up that you're in love with, which human beings do. clinical biases around this stuff, like, you know, or you just— you're on the right track, but you just are missing something small is pretty hard to do. Um, but I guess that's what I would say is like you have to be pretty ruthless about throwing away your ideas.
