The First Steps For Starting Slice

What were the first steps that you actually took to starting Slice when it was maybe mypizza.com? Yeah, I would say before even starting, the first thing that I did was try and learn a lot more about the industry. And so I had a lot of personal experiences with small business owners, pizza shop owners who wanted me to help them with websites and online ordering and online marketing. Back then it was like Google keywords and all that good stuff. And, you know, I think they were coming to me because of my background in IT, because of the prior company. Certainly helped a bunch of family members in that journey, but before I kind of went all in and decided to launch a company, I wanted to learn about, you know, really 3 things. One is how big is this industry? You know, I think TAM, total addressable market, is critical. I know there's an opportunity always to expand the TAM, but the initial TAM has to be worth it. So what I learned for pizza was that, you know, at the time it was about $35 billion of revenue was passing through— again, back then I think it was like 60,000 pizza shops in the US, and that's revenue passing through these pizzerias. Today it's 78,000 locations who manage collectively about $47 billion a year in revenue. So this is not including frozen pizza or Costco pizza. These are like pizza shops. Second thing I learned is, well, I mean, how much of that is like Domino's and Pizza Hut? And so the big pizza chains combined total made up about 25% of all locations. So 75% were predominantly small businesses, independents for the most part, really fragmented in both geographies and brands. And then the third part was, um, you know, um, what solutions are available for them and like why are they not able to solve for these problems themselves. And then you— that's sort of where I had the most personal experience because you kind of know that most of these shops are owner-operated. These owners are working, you know, alone. Um, they're for the most part making pizza, maybe answering the phone. They're not thinking about their website. They're not thinking about online marketing. They're not thinking about technology and all these things. Um, and so I went and spoke with a few family members. I said, hey, Like, why didn't you just go and apply to open up a Papa John's, right? Like, they figure all these things out for you. You don't have to think about not having a website or, you know, a point of sale or, you know, all these things that are really important to your business. Like, you can be part of that Papa John's network. And you realize that there's one really, um, critical flaw with the franchise model And that is that it kind of takes away the creative freedom from these small business owners, which tends to be the main reason why they go into business to begin with. And so the moment, you know, those conversations happened, I realized that there is an opportunity to build what I call a reverse franchise model. And that is— I don't know if that's a good term, but that's in essence to provide franchise-like benefits to all of the unfranchised and champion their authenticity, their creative freedom. So in essence, how do you make them all kind of operate like a Domino's model, but each one has its own brand, Mike's Pizza Shop, Ilir's Pizza Shop, and maybe you're selling Detroit-style pizza and I've got New York thin crust and And so that was the lesson. And then the first thing I did was try and get— back then apps weren't really that important. It was like 2009. So I tried to get pizza.com as a brand. I couldn't do that. So I got mypizza.com. And then, you know, that was sort of— that was day one, which was, okay, we're gonna build this challenger brand called MyPizza. which collectively will represent 75% of the market and compete with Domino's or Papa John's.