Postmates didn't need restaurant partnerships to start. They promised delivery from anywhere, then used real demand to figure out which stores to actually partner with. This "fake it first" approach to building one side of a marketplace before the other became the playbook for launching Winnie.
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I wanted to go back to Postmates since that's a marketplace that we all know of and has also paved the way for many of us, you know. So what were some of your key learnings from leading product there? And, you know, maybe even specific to it as a marketplace that you've taken with you to starting Winnie?
Yeah. So when I was at Postmates, it was not just focused on food delivery. It was sort of still like finding its place in the world and it was just like an on-demand delivery. You could get delivery from anywhere. And at the time when I started there, they didn't have any kind of merchant partnerships. So it was— you could get delivery from any store, but Postmates didn't partner with the store. You would just tell your courier, your Postmate, to show up there and you tell them what to get and they'd bring it to you. And then over time and during the course of my time there, Postmates started focusing a lot more on food delivery and then forming these merchant partnerships with the restaurants. So that Postmates could get the menus and that, you know, you wouldn't just have a courier show up and then be waiting after placing an order for food. And it was such a long wait, you'd actually send the order to the restaurant in advance of the courier showing up. So it was a lot more efficient. But my biggest takeaway from that was like, you didn't need those merchant partnerships to get started. Sure, it was certainly a nice addition and made the product a lot better. But Postmates was able to build a huge base of users and then kind of find its place in food delivery sort of because they just got started by kind of faking the supply side and just saying, you know, you get delivery from anywhere and then seeing where users actually cared about and then building the partnerships there and then focusing there. So we kind of I think, you know, maybe subconsciously took that learning into Winnie. Because with marketplaces, as I'm sure you all know, like, it's very hard to start both sides at the same time. And so, you know, that learning that, like, you don't actually— you could kind of, if you can be creative about sort of faking one of the sides and get the other one really going, then it's easier to then bring on the other side.
