Sam Parr talks with the founder of Farmstead, a Portland grocery delivery startup undercut by buying wholesale. Coronavirus demand jumped 20 to 30 times normal levels. Some delivery platforms hired workers from closed strip clubs, creating PR stories like "Boober Eats."
So there's this cool story. This is not a YC startup, although it maybe should have been. Um, cool story where basically in Portland, you know, right now with coronavirus, everybody's getting deliveries, right? And so I have a friend who runs a company called Farmstead, and they do grocery delivery. They've been doing this for, you know, 2 years now, and they all— they all Farmstead does is they deliver, you know, your staple foods: milk, eggs, bread, stuff you need repeatedly, and you don't need, you know, going to the grocery store every time you run out of milk kind of sucks. So they just deliver it to your door. And so they're like a version of Instacart that's just focused on the staples.
Okay.
Now, uh, and also, you know, sort of key difference, Instacart goes to the grocery store and buys stuff and marks it up. These guys are the grocery store, so they just have a— they buy wholesale and they sell retail, so they don't mark it up. They actually get good prices.
Okay.
So good startup. They are exploding, 20x, 30x oversubscribed on demand right now because everybody is ordering food in because of coronavirus, right? So everyone's getting to try this like delivery thing. They're sort of forced to do delivery for the first time.
And what's it called again?
Those guys are called Farmstead.
Oh, not Farm Theory. Okay, Farmstead. Okay, Farmstead.
Yeah, this is my buddy's company. He listens to the podcast sometimes, so shout out if he's listening. So, um, cool name.
Love the name.
Yeah, great name, great brand, it looks good, and the product is good. So I actually, I like it a lot. Now, one problem that they're having, and that every delivery company is having right now, is that they're short on drivers, they're short on delivery people. They have too much demand and not enough ability to fulfill. So this company in Portland started hiring out-of-work people from the coronavirus. Now, what, what industry has been affected by this? Strip clubs. Nobody's going to strip clubs right now during coronavirus. So they hired the strippers to do delivery, and so they got a bunch of PR from this.
What's it called?
Uh, I gotta, I gotta find out which company it was. I don't know if it was DoorDash or whatever. I don't even know if the company really did this or the strippers just started signing up for this. It's like, oh, we got to make money, so what are we going to do? I guess we should become, you know, delivery people right now for, for the internet. I see it, I see it. Which, do you know which company it is that they're delivering for? Does it say?
He jokingly calls it Boober Eats. So it all started as a joke with Lucky Devil Lounge, one of his clubs, and no one was coming in and they go, we need to do like Uber for weed delivery or Luber for sex lube delivery. And I was like, let's do Boober, which is topless girl picks you up and takes you to a strip club. And so anyway, that's the joke is that it's I don't think it's real, but it did get PR.
Yeah, did get PR. I think, I think I did read that they were, uh, like the gig workers are basically shifting from one to another, right? If you can't— if, if the demand has gone down in this area, it's gone up in delivery, then more people are becoming delivery drivers. And, uh, so anyways, I thought that was interesting.
There's another one, it's called Meals for 4-Inch Heels, or Meals in 6-Inch Heels.
Well, I don't know if it's smart to create your own delivery company, but I think, uh If you're a stripper and you're out of work right now, you know, girls gotta eat, gotta do something.
