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March 1, 2024
Uncover the secrets to mastering delivery excellence, transform your local food venture's narrative, and unlock new avenues of growth.
Will Schreiber: A little bit of a background before I dive into how we got connected and the mutual customers, but where in the world are you? Where are you based?
Kyle Levy: I am based out of Miami, Florida.
Will Schreiber: And you just moved outside. Are you taking this meeting outside right now?
Kyle Levy: Yeah, I'm fortunate enough where I can do that. It's 70s today, so taking the meeting outside. But yeah, it's nice to be in Miami, especially this time of year.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, much better. It's 35 here in New York. I am in the belly of the beast right now. I am like two blocks from Times Square. I don't usually work here, but I had a meeting and now I'm amongst the tourists.
So to give a little bit of an introduction, Kyle is the founder and CEO of Unihop, which is a delivery service that provides end-to-end delivery services for businesses that need to deliver products. I got introduced to Kyle actually from a mutual customer. We have several businesses in LA who were using Kyle to deliver their products. They reached out and said, do you guys work together? There needs to be an integration, which we are working on bringing live. Unihop and Kyle will be one of the first external integrations of Bottle.
I wanted to bring him on for a coffee chat before that was even live to talk about delivery and everything he's learned about getting your stuff delivered. Kyle, why don't you give a quick background on Unihop, how you got into it, and what exactly it is that you guys do?
Kyle Levy: So Unihop started really from a desire to have easier delivery for myself. I was a student at the University of Miami, was really sick in my dorm, needed groceries, needed my laundry done. There were lots of different services to get them all, but none of them were really easy. They all had their own little rules. So I started off just delivering to the local Miami area.
Then I realized that small businesses needed more help. So we started working with a couple meal prep companies locally. They were mostly just doing maybe 10 or so orders a week—lots of small businesses, cookie shops, a couple bakeries—to really help with that delivery. And then a lot of the drivers we were working with said, "Hey, I'm also doing deliveries for other platforms." Our thought was, why don't we just work with all the platforms? We work with all the drivers and we get to know all the drivers on the different platforms.
So really what it turned into was a platform where we're able to manage delivery. We're able to understand your different delivery specifications, whether it's a six-foot cake or it's a bunch of little brown bags. We're able to understand your delivery needs, pair you with the right type of delivery experience you need, and then work with you to build that into your everyday system. You can send us and tell us exactly what you want, and you can forget about delivery—we take care of it all for you.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, it's great. And I think to give context, Kyle's platform handles everything from pre-scheduled delivery to on-demand delivery and also operates across the entire country. He has a lot of experience dealing with delivery issues everywhere for all kinds of orders. So as we get into it, I'm curious just off the top—what makes for a really bad delivery experience for the end consumer? What are the complaints you see most often?
Kyle Levy: It really depends on the order. With meal prep speaking, it's typically something where the order is delivered at a time that's not convenient for them. For example, if we're doing a big route for a company and doing 50 stops on a Sunday, and the business says, "I need everything delivered between 6 and 8 PM," those are the specifications given to us. On our end, we're going to shoot for that two-hour window to give you that balance. But you have some customers that are not okay with that and they need their delivery at 6:30 PM or between 6:30 and 6:50 PM. And they're okay with spending a little bit more.
A great example would be a company in South Carolina and North Carolina. They had customers who, 90 percent of the time, would come and pick up the order themselves because they like going in the store. It was more of a shopping experience than purely meal prep delivery. But they had customers that said, "Hey, your delivery windows are cool and all, but I'm okay with paying an extra four dollars or so to have my delivery delivered to me on time."
So I'd say the number one complaint is the business not talking to us about their customer specifications for delivery and just saying, "I want the cheapest option, just do it." Whereas sometimes your customers have specific requirements that you need to listen to. It's really easy to add those details in. But I would say just a miscommunication on delivery time is probably the biggest complaint. But it can be easily fixed.
Will Schreiber: And as you were talking, we got a question come in. This one actually relates a bit to what you were just saying. In a world where there is a route with a time window—it'll be delivered between a certain time and it doesn't match up perfectly with the customer expectation—what can be done about food safety in those situations? How can you stress food safety to the driver during delivery as in delivering within a certain frame for an entire route, or finishing a route by a certain time? How do you get customers to leave coolers? How do you get drivers to do the right thing on delivery? We'd love to get your thoughts on making sure the food safety piece is handled.
Kyle Levy: That's another big thing. It really ties into specifications given by customers. There are some businesses that package all of their orders to be shipped so they're going to be good for 24 hours. It doesn't matter if they're left on the roof or next to the grill—they're really built to last. Others say, "Hey, we're putting them in paper bags, they need to be delivered 45 minutes after." It really comes down to cost and specification of the type of delivery.
Another really good middle point there is getting these insulated bags—I think they're like 80 cents on Alibaba. It's like a hot and cold bag. You throw everything in, you put your logo on it. It's also a good marketing tool. But those are typically going to hold for a couple hours. So if that order has to be left outside, it's still going to be good.
But another big piece comes down to: Are your customers going to be home between 6 and 8 PM, for example? Or does your customer want 6:30 PM? Do they want a more specific time? So offering that to your customers—saying, "Hey, we get it, you're busy. Do you want this higher level of service where we're going to match you every time and you're going to be there to receive that order?"
But one thing I would also say is a big piece of delivery that we found is super helpful: because we have live tracking and text updates, it's not really all of a sudden like, "Oh, wow, my order is 20 minutes away." They know in advance and they know it's on the way. Let's say they are out. They can run back home really quick and grab the order or they can prepare themselves to be home.
But we typically don't recommend doing more than a two-hour window for delivery—and I mean, pick up and delivery within that window—because it is food. So a lot of our deliveries are going to be focused on very time-specific delivery.
Will Schreiber: That's a great constraint, I think. Okay, a two-hour window is really what you should be budgeting for food if you're going to run a route. And the question also becomes: how many stops is that typically? How big of a route should you plan? I know we've talked to customers lately who said they've had a hard time retaining drivers because, counterintuitively, there were too many stops and they thought that would be good for the driver because they make more money. But actually, a driver gets fatigued and the food sits out. So I'm curious if you have information on optimal route length—how many drops per hour you could expect. I know that probably depends on the metro.
Kyle Levy: Yeah, it's really a two-sided issue. One, you can give drivers a bunch of stops and they're making more money. But the stops might not really be efficient, so you might have a driver go five miles north and deliver 10 orders, then 20 miles south and now they're driving a ton and they're not really dropping off frequently.
But the other issue you have is if you give a driver only five stops, then what? They're not making much money. And it's really hard when you have your own drivers because you then have to make sure they stay interested. Whereas if you're working with a provider, they're going to be able to give the driver five stops and then they can say, "All right, goodbye. I'm going to go do deliveries for another company." So you're keeping them engaged more.
Average stops per route is really tricky. In Manhattan, we could give a driver 50 orders, whereas in Atlanta, Georgia, we might only be able to do 10 orders per driver. It also comes down to how many bags does each order have? Is it something where each customer gets one box and one box is massive? It depends on how you package it and everything. Can we even fit that many orders in a driver's car? Do they have a big enough vehicle? Do we have to send a cargo van? Are drivers going to be interested in that? Because if you have a cargo van now, you can hold a lot more storage and it might not make sense to take a couple of meal prep orders.
It's a lot of balancing—keeping drivers interested and paying them well, but also making sure you're not paying drivers to do a ton of driving and not a lot of drop-off. You really want to condense how many drop-offs you're doing. So there's not really any perfect numbers. It's really case-by-case and it's a tricky one.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, I think on back to the tracking piece. I know it's something that you guys offer in your product, but if I were a business who really wanted to give more communication and visibility around delivery and time of drop-off, what have you found is the most important information to convey to the end customer?
Kyle Levy: So tracking in general is super helpful, but it's only helpful if people check it. So I would say a couple of text updates. One of them being, "Hey, I'm on the way," so you at least know there is an order coming to you. And then the next one would probably be, "Driver arriving shortly." So giving some sort of heads up of, "Hey, they're going to be there in the next 5-10 minutes." And then also that the driver arrived. If you send, "Hey, I'm almost there," and then the driver just shows up and you forget about it—typically, when you get a text, you look at it and forget about it.
So having those reminders, especially when it gets closer to that critical point of delivery, keep reminding the customer: "Hey, driver's going to be here in a couple of seconds. Driver's here, receive the delivery." Because you don't want a situation where you say, "Hey, I'm going to be there at 2 o'clock," and then the driver is 30 minutes late. The customer's pissed off because they thought it was 2 o'clock. And now the driver is there, but the customer's not picking up the phone because maybe they want to take a shower and they're off their phone. And now you have a driver who can't deliver. They don't really know what to do. They could leave it, but let's say you requested a signature on it, or it's a private residence and you need a code to get in the gate. Now the driver's like, "Shoot, I don't know what to do. I can't do anything."
So you fall back on your plan B and plan C, and the goal is never to get to plan B. So I would say, especially when you get closer to the actual delivery point, having lots of updates there.
Will Schreiber: And I would imagine communication is the number one preventer of customer complaints. I'd be curious what else, apart from not knowing a delivery was coming or being surprised or feeling like the food was left out because you weren't aware—okay, you solved that problem. What are the next biggest trip-ups on bad deliveries for customer complaints?
Kyle Levy: Things being forgotten. That's the one that we typically see a lot. Let's say you have two bags and you're not prepared and the driver comes to pick up the orders and they're like, "Where are my orders?" And you're like, "Oh, here you go. Here you go. Just take them." And then there's one extra one in the cooler that you forgot to take out. Now there's an order missing.
And drivers are always—their goal is to deliver the item. The moment the customer's like, "Hey, where's my other thing?" they get confused. If they now have to reach out to the store, that delays all your future deliveries. The customer's pissed off because they think that they're being taken advantage of, or you don't have their order ready. And it just shows a lack of preparation, a lack of professionalism.
I would say, when you offload delivery, you have to realize that the driver or the company you're working with is not in the store with you. They don't know that your fridge went out at 5 o'clock yesterday and now you have to move everything around. So you really have to be prepared and know that your job is taken care of so that the driver or we can do our job.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, and back to keeping drivers happy and helping them do the right job—do you see best practices around tipping drivers beyond each delivery? What do you recommend for companies to do? I know if you haven't been through a Unihop flow, there's an area to even tip a driver on a certain route. And I'm curious your thoughts on best practices there and what you might see in terms of uplift of service.
Kyle Levy: You really have to think about what are the specifications of the delivery. The way we price and the way most couriers price is by the basic delivery. The moment you want a driver to walk up five flights of stairs or you want them to take—let's say a customer is ordering for a whole office and you have not just one bag, but 20 bags and they have to go back and forth to their car—really break apart your delivery and what it's costing you and what you think the value of that delivery is.
So a great example would be a company we started working with recently. They were doing all the deliveries themselves and it was a total pain. I went to them and said, "All right, here's the price I can give you for delivery. It's going to be X dollars per stop." And they're like, "Oh, we have one customer that has five bags." I'm like, "How do you package them?" They're like, "Oh, they're big bags." I'm like, "Okay then. If you're charging your customers, let's just say 10 dollars per delivery and we're charging you 15 dollars, and you're charging 50 dollars worth of delivery to all those customers and it's just one drop-off—say, okay, maybe I'll add a 10 dollar tip, or maybe I'll add a 5 dollar tip, depending on how big this order is—just so you can make sure the drivers are excited about picking up from you."
One of the worst things that can happen to a restaurant—and not so much meal prep—at a restaurant where you become a really bad service restaurant, your orders are never ready on time. You have drivers waiting, drivers canceling off. You will get ghosted by every platform. Drivers will see your order and they will cancel it. I've seen it happen before. Not with us, but I've seen restaurants like McDonald's—if a McDonald's is really bad, drivers will refuse to pick up from it. It happens with Uber all the time, and Uber has to mess around with their pricing.
So one thing I would say is, if you have a client who has really specific instructions and every single week they're a pain in the butt, charge them a base fee higher. So if we're charging you 15 dollars, for example, charge your customer 18 bucks and build in that tip so you don't have to awkwardly say, "Hey, can you add a tip?" Just charge it in based on the customer. And really think about what is that customer value to you? If they're a customer who's a pain in the butt every single week and they're ordering 50 dollars for the food, probably not worth having a customer long-term. I think it's totally okay to fire a customer if they're being trouble with you.
Or let's say you have a customer who every week is, "Oh, the driver stole like one of the things of food." Drivers are not going to steal one package of food. They will get banned from delivery, and for a lot of these drivers, this is a big piece of their income. I've seen this before where a driver was accused of stealing an order—it was all chicken, beef, pork—and the driver was halal and he would not touch the meat. He left it outside where he was told to. They checked the ring camera and someone else was totally stealing the order, unrelated to the driver.
So really, I think the best thing you could do—and a lot of companies are doing it—before you work with companies, do the deliveries yourself. Understand that it's not the easiest thing in the world. Really think: what would you like as a delivery and how can that delivery be better for you? That would then be better for the driver.
Will Schreiber: I have heard from so many conversations that really treating your drivers like a part of your business makes everything better, even if the price doesn't change. To your point, if you're always late and stuff isn't ready, drivers notice and they get frustrated. They get frustrated with you. Less of a problem for meal delivery companies who are pre-batching and ready to go. I think it's a really good point to be professional, buttoned up, ready to go, and your drivers will just like you better and pay way for a better delivery.
I think one segue here is, as we've talked, most people don't realize there are services beyond delivering that could help businesses in the meal prep and meal delivery space. One of those is doing setup for catering and how that relates. So just from a high level, what kind of cost is associated with not just delivery, but delivery and setup, or these more complicated catering orders that come in and require trays and trays delivered into an office or even set up on a table? How does that change the cost structure and expectation?
Kyle Levy: So a lot of it comes right back to: are you pricing properly for the service? A lot of businesses, unfortunately, they have the mindset of, "Cheap. If I can cut a dollar here and it still gets done, I'm happy." But the issue then is if you give a driver seven catering bags with the food and there's no tip on the order and you're paying them like a base standard delivery, they're going to be pissed off. Especially if they have to go inside.
So catering pricing—some companies do it where they take a percentage of the order value. I don't love that because it really makes it hard to understand your margins and now your margins immediately get cut. But the pricing has to understand and take into consideration the extra level of service that's being done.
For example, for us, we offer something called special handling. What that delivery looks like is really just special handling—however you want it. The rate is increased because it assumes more. But we use special handling for two-tier cakes that are really expensive and very fragile. We use it for orders that are just really big. And instead of adding a tip, you're going to get drivers that are used to taking these bigger orders.
The third piece would be the actual setup. So maybe it's a really easy order—maybe it's just charcuterie—but let's say it's two charcuterie boards or two platters of food. It's really not something that difficult, but you want the driver to go inside. Maybe they have some trays inside with a little fire on the bottom. Set it up on the tray, make it look nice. And that's the mentality of special handling: you have to understand that the driver is not just dropping it off. They are going to be at the location for significantly longer. They're going to have to go inside. They're going to have to talk to the person. They're going to have to set it up. It's a level of delivery that's not just picking up and dropping off at the doorstep and leaving.
So understanding value—that's a big thing, especially for meal prep that's trying to get into catering. Understand order minimums. Don't waste your time with a hundred dollar catering order because that's not a catering order. A lot of companies will set like 150 to 200 dollar minimums and don't push it. Because if a business is, "Oh, I don't want to spend that much," there are other options. If they're not willing to play your game, don't play their game. I think that's a good thing: don't cut costs just for the sake of cutting costs.
Will Schreiber: I think that's great advice to make sure that you're taking in enough money to manage the type of service it is. And obviously, if it is catering, there needs to be a big enough order so you can appropriately pay for a commensurate delivery service that actually makes the catering drop-off good.
Alright, rewinding a little bit—another question. Back to running routes: how do you see businesses recollect those insulated bags? And then I have a follow-up question to this. If a business spends money and brands those bags, I'd love a circular economy where they're getting them back. Are there tips or things like that you see businesses use to actually get those bags back?
Kyle Levy: It's tough. So I recommend cheap bags because if you ever get a nice bag back, it might not be for a while and you're going to have a huge overflow of bags where it doesn't even make sense from a cost perspective. You're going to have thousands of bags because you're only going to get some bags back after a certain time. So my recommendation is to get the cheap, disposable ones. But don't buy something that's plastic—buy the ones that are cloth that are still cheap because it's a great advertising tool.
I actually had some customers a few years ago when I was doing local deliveries myself say, "Hey, I don't want my bags. What do I do with them?" And I was like, "I'll take them because I would use them for my groceries." So it's a great thing for brand exposure. It's just like Lululemon. People use Lululemon bags all the time. They spend a little bit more on the bag, but it's a great advertising tool. You walk around, your logo is on the bag. It looks great. And now people are going to dual-use your bag.
There are situations where it's really expensive. So let's say you're sending a whole Igloo cooler full of orders and you're going to have that dropped off—a big order. Then it could make sense to have a driver do a reverse delivery. So we do a ton of those for businesses. They say, "I have a bunch of catering stuff I left at a business. We want a driver to pick up the order and drop it back off with us." Totally possible. You really just have to break down costs there. How big was the order? How expensive is that cooler? Does it make sense to just do disposable bags?
You really have to break down the cost because let's say it's 12 dollars there, 12 dollars back. Can you throw away 12 dollars of that order and still be happy? Return logistics is hard because then you also have to deal with: is the customer going to listen to the instructions and actually leave the bag outside? How do we know what to pick up? Where are they going to leave it? When are they going to leave it? Are they going to leave all the bags or are you going to now spend money to have a driver pick up a bag when they're actually supposed to pick up six bags? So there's a lot of tricky parts in it that are out of your control. They're out of our control. It's up to your customer if they want to participate.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, I think the advice of just a cheap bag is good. I know you mentioned a recommended one, but what is that bag you recommend and what's the expected price that people should be paying? And if they're paying a lot more, they should.
Kyle Levy: Yeah, I found on Alibaba—I typed in "hot cold bags" and I found if you buy a minimum order quantity of 500, you can get customized bags for 80 cents per bag. And then if you bump your purchase up to 5,000 bags, I think it drops down to 60 cents. So it's really a workable cost. And especially if you get bags that have your logo, people are going to use those bags again. You might even have a situation where some customers I know will drop the bags off themselves. They're with you for a year, they have now stockpiled 52 bags and they're like, "All right, I'll return them all." And you can even offer some incentives: come in the store and we'll give you a 25 percent off coupon if you drop off 10 bags. So there are ways to engage your customer and get them to do that return. But you really have to break down your costs and say, "Do I care about 4 dollars that I just spent on bags when the customer spent 4,000 dollars with me?" Probably not.
Will Schreiber: Right. I think that's a great segue into just costs in general. So I know you recommend doing deliveries yourself for a little while and really empathizing, seeing what it's like, seeing where there might be a breakdown in your own process before you go and either hire drivers or use a service or a third party. As you think through whether to use an external service or not and even analyze your own internal costs, what are like the walk-through of the inputs and costs into delivery for a business owner to think through the economics of their delivery program?
Kyle Levy: So it comes down to a few things. One of them being: are your customers able to pick up? So is pickup something customers can do? Because then at the moment for delivery, you're selling the convenience piece. So typically, if you offer pickup and people are opting for delivery, you can upcharge on delivery because people really want that added convenience service and they're okay with paying extra.
The alternative is if you're a delivery-exclusive business, you then have to think: what type of delivery do you want? Do you want to offer something where people can pay more for a specific delivery time, or are you going to say, "You know what? I can't focus on that. It's 10 dollars per person and you get your order between a two-hour window—Sunday nights." Or maybe Sunday and Wednesday. You break it up and keep it super simple.
The third option is you work it into your cost. You say, "Okay, on average, these deliveries are going to cost me 11 dollars. I might take a loss on some orders. I might make a couple bucks from my built-in delivery." Something I would always say is do minimums. So, free delivery if you get to 15 dollars in orders in a week, or 15 dollars for delivery if you order the minimum. If you order five dollars of orders, it's 10 dollars. And do tiers so you can build out incentivizing pricing because a lot of times—like I've done it myself—I had an offer where it was like, "Oh, if you add two more meals, we're going to have free delivery." And I was like, "I get two more meals and I don't have to pay 12 dollars? And I'm paying an extra 15 or 20 dollars. That's not that bad. I'm basically getting a free meal." So if you can increase the cart value, that's great for you. But also, another thing is sign them on subscriptions. If you can convince them to sign up for six months, they get 75 percent off delivery. If you sign them up for 12 months, free delivery. And that just helps your cost basis and understanding of customer acquisition and customer retention.
So there's a lot of costs in play and I would say treat delivery as just another item in the basket. If customers are ordering seven containers of food, they're really ordering eight containers of food—delivery is just an extra item.
Will Schreiber: I like that as a framework because I think one thing that stuck out to me of what you said is using pickup as a selling point or shelling point almost to charge for delivery, right? Because it's less easily upsetting as a customer to pay delivery when there's a pickup option, even if the pickup option is unreasonable to you. It's far away or whatnot. But it does drive back to this point of delivery being an item in the cart. Not only do I want this order, I could pick it up or I could pay to have it delivered. And I think as long as you price delivery fairly or something that feels fair, your customers feel pretty good about that. And then you're absolutely right on—okay, if it is an item you're buying, giving it away for something else in return, that recurring order—great, we'll give you delivery. The upsell on the cart value will give you delivery in the same way that it's "buy 100 dollars of stuff, get a free hat" or something like that. I think is a great way to think about it.
Kyle Levy: But also to that same point: do not set up your business to profit off of delivery to help your margins. It's one thing to charge 12 dollars and some of your costs are 14 dollars. Some of them are 12 dollars and you can show 10 dollars and take an average. But the moment you start to try to grow your profit by upcharging on delivery, the more you're going to incentivize customers to not use delivery and ultimately not to use you. They're going to see delivery costs and say, "Oh, if I use this other company, it's 3 dollars cheaper. It's not worth the extra couple bucks you make." It hurts companies, especially then customers will get to a point where let's say you set up your business and you say, "Oh, a 12 dollar order is 12 dollars delivery—that includes a 3 dollar tip. Now it's 15 dollars." The moment the driver shows up and the customer says to the driver, "Oh, I added a tip," and the driver said, "Oh, I didn't see a tip on the order," they're going to be pissed off with you. They're going to say, "Who am I tipping? Did I just tip the business when I thought I was tipping the driver?"
So you gotta be very careful with how you charge because transparency with delivery pricing is crucial and it will destroy your business if you're exposed by a customer.
Will Schreiber: I think that's a great point about being clear on where tips are going. And again, I think the other thing that customers have made a little bit of a mental shift on—at least I feel this way—is if there is a delivery fee, I'm genuinely incentivized to just order more all at once to reduce the number of times I'm ordering. And it doesn't feel bad. Like, I know that delivery costs money as a consumer. I think we all see that now with DoorDash and Uber Eats and everything. So if you charge a fair price for delivery, you could really incentivize positive behavior from your consumer to just get more when they do pay for that delivery and increase their cart value. So I think that's a great point.
I'm curious, back to cost structure—so I think those are really good points as to how to pass cost onto your customer. But let's say you don't get an upfront price because you're not using something like Bottle or you don't understand what a delivery is actually costing you as a business. I'm curious from your perspective: what are things business owners should think through as they think about what is the cost of me doing this delivery? Like, what is the typical mileage cost on cars? What is typical labor pricing? What is typical insurance or things like that that you might not be thinking of as part of a delivery cost?
Kyle Levy: So I think you touched on a couple of them—the basics of gas, insurance. You have to tell your insurance provider if you're doing delivery yourself because it's a huge liability. But another thing you think about, aside from depreciation of your car, is how much time are you spending planning a route? How much time are you spending driving back? Let's say you have to drive 20 miles out to a customer and you have to drive 20 miles back. That's a 40-mile drive. Another thing is how much time are you spending planning and just thinking about delivery? Are you having to talk to customers? Are customers texting you while you're driving and now you can't respond to other ones and you can't drive?
A lot of it is: break down how much time you're going to spend thinking about doing delivery. And you have to factor that into your cost because it might be fine when you're small and you're okay with working for free. But it's going to get to a point where you're going to be working your butt off and you're not going to be working as much on growing your business and actually cooking and building your product and your team. And you're going to totally destroy yourself because now you're working 60-hour weeks and you're only getting paid for 20 of them. And even if you pay yourself for delivery, you're not paying yourself to plan out the route, to drive after work, to get gas. There's a lot of things that will eat you up if you're not fully understanding the costs of delivery.
Will Schreiber: And are there any off-the-shelf recommendations of how to think about grouping customers together in order to split them into a route maker or something like that? Like, how do you guys think about: okay, I'm given 100 orders, how am I going to split these up? Are there like quick rules of thumb or anything on constructing a route or recommended approaches?
Kyle Levy: So the first one you have to think about is how long do you want stuff in a vehicle? So if you want things no more than two hours, you have to immediately think: what's going to keep a two-hour route?
The other one is: do you have any orders that are going to be more of a pain in the butt? I'm going to use very simple terms. Let's say you have 20 miles north, 20 miles south, 20 miles east, but nothing west. Let's say one day you have a customer that's doing one west. You now really have to think about looking at those south ones and which of them are close to the west so I could break those into two routes—because you don't want to send one driver to do one delivery. It's not worth anyone's time. But at the same time, you have to think about: if I send a driver to do a couple of the south deliveries and then that one west one, how long is it going to take them? How can I pay for that driver?
Let's say it takes them an hour to do all the ones that are south on their route and then they have to drive 30 minutes out west—you're going to be paying for essentially four deliveries just to get that one fill. So you really have to break down: how many drivers do you have available if you're doing them yourself? How many orders can each driver hold? Are you sending them in a sedan? Are you sending them with something that's a big vehicle? And then the third part is how many orders do you have that actually have to go out? Do you have to send them all on a Wednesday? Should you try to break them up—Saturday, Sunday, and then Wednesday, Thursday? What are your capabilities of delivery and how can you best batch them to meet the requirements that you have?
It's hard. It's a very hard piece, especially when you're doing it yourself. Let's say one driver calls off sick an hour before. Now you have to take on their orders. And if you're dispatching them to another driver, that driver might not have time. So there's a lot of pieces to that puzzle.
Will Schreiber: Question from the Q&A: Will Unihop be integrated with Bottle? Yes, it will. We are working on an integration now. Expect a button in the Bottle dashboard that will take an order and prefill the fields in Unihop the way that you submit in order to be done over there.
Kyle Levy: And something else you can do right now is because you can export orders, we have a CSV file upload where you can export all of your orders, format them a certain way, you upload them. So it's, you can do 10 orders. You could do 10,000. I don't know if we could do 10,000, but we could do 10 or we could do a couple. And that's already built in with Bottle, but a big piece and the Bottle button will be super helpful is, just like I was talking about earlier: you might have customers who want deliveries at a certain time. Those are going to be unique customers. You should not treat them like every other customer. If they're paying that extra price, you need to think of them as its own delivery. You handle that separately. It's not included with everything else. And it's okay to think split, but you have to have a very consistent structure for how you handle each type.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, I think it's an under-explored area in Bottle actually—of us doing a better job of making multiple fulfillment methods or options even easier to manage. Because I think there's green space definitely in offering more options for fulfillment. I think one major theme or takeaway of talking to you is: offer flexibility, offer these things, but charge for it if it's going to cost more. Charge for it and don't feel bad about charging for it. So having different fulfillment method types of "I want late evening when I'm going to be home delivery and that's outside of your normal delivery window, but I'm willing to pay more for it"—if you're interested in doing something like that on Bottle, let us know. We love to work with you on it. It's possible within our current software, but it's not obvious, I would say, and it's not the easiest way to set it up.
What were you about to say?
Kyle Levy: And also think about this: we had a customer yesterday for a business that ordered a 12-case of eggs and they paid 15 dollars for delivery. People will pay for convenience, especially like if they're super busy. We have one lady who has been working with us forever, and it's not even a business. She wants us to pick up her wigs from a wig place and deliver them to her, and then pick them up and bring it back. She does this four times a month. And she pays a lot for it because she lives far away and she's super busy.
People will pay. If people are paying for meal prep and they want that convenience, they're probably also customers who will pay for more expensive delivery because they need that extra convenience. We have a customer who is a meal prep customer. One specific person—she pays for the special handling because she wants the drivers to go inside her house. She leaves the door unlocked. And she wants a driver to go in her house, put it in the fridge, and reorganize the stuff in her fridge. And I don't like even doing this, but she's willing to pay. And she tips 40 dollars to have a driver do that when she lives five miles away from the store. And it's a big thing of: it might not make sense to you. It might not make sense to 90 percent of your customers, 99 percent of your customers. But if you can service that one customer and make them really happy, they're never going to leave you. Ever.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. I think that's where it's interesting. I think we're very used to not wanting to pay shipping, not wanting to pay shipping. And we've ingrained that as business owners until "my customer doesn't want to pay for shipping." But I think actually an interesting takeaway is people do know the value that a good delivery costs money. And being fair about it, but being upfront, and exploring ways to charge more for even better handling of food or more specific handling of food is definitely something customers are willing to pay for. And if implemented the right way, could grow who you're able to service. You could send orders farther out of where you currently operate. You could expand into business lines and into catering and things like that if you're comfortable figuring out how to charge for those things.
Anything else we've missed? Any funny stories about definite don'ts? I feel like you've covered a lot of ground here.
Kyle Levy: We deliver up to 350 miles. Don't take customers that are 350 miles away. It doesn't matter if they're willing to pay for delivery. It's never going to be a fun situation with food. You're going to be scared the entire time. You're going to think, "Oh my God, is the food going to be cold when it gets there?" Unless they're ordering a catering order and they're doing this once, it's not worth having customers that are 150 miles away. The order quality or tell them, "I'm sorry, there's another company that you can work with closer to it." It's just not worth the stress. It's not worth it.
People are willing to pay for convenience, but you also have to, as a business owner, step in and say, "I don't want to have to be scared every single week when I send this 150-mile order that is 150 dollars and they're paying me 150 dollars for delivery." There are certain situations where you have to say no, even if they're willing to pay for it, because it's just not worth that.
Keep things very simple for you. If you're doing a bunch of customers that are 50 miles and you have one that's 65, fine. But don't go from doing a 50-mile radius to 150 miles. It's not worth it. We had a customer do it. It's a total pain in the butt. Drivers are always like, "Yeah, I'll do it," but this seems wasteful. And you always have the customer like, "Oh, why was this delivery late? I'm like, "It was a four-hour drive. A little bit of traffic." So yeah, don't tell your customer, "Oh, Unihop does hour deliveries, hour windows," when it's this far. We can't do an hour window for 150 miles. No, it's not going to be something that breaks the laws of physics at one point. Don't go too crazy.
Will Schreiber: Cool. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for your time. I think there's a lot here for business owners to think about—pricing delivery, setting up zones, treating drivers. So if anyone wants to get in touch with Kyle in the meantime, before an integration goes live, let us know. We'd love to put y'all in touch.
If anyone else has any questions, we'll end it now.
Yes, a question: we will post the video on the site. We'll link to a few things discussed, like the bags and stuff that Kyle found. So yeah, we'll send out an email with the recording and a transcript and a link to where you can listen to this talk and every other coffee chat that we do.
And another question about the gift card. Yes. So we send gift cards to every coffee club member. By signing up for this, you're now on the coffee club list. This is our second coffee chat of the month. You'll receive your gift card on March 1st. We're going to start sending them on the 1st of every month with a schedule of upcoming coffee chats for that month that you can join if you want to.
Anyway, Kyle, thanks for your time. We'll post a link to this and really great what he's doing with Unihop. So if you're frustrated or annoyed with delivery, get in touch with him. As mentioned, integration coming soon. Hope everyone has an awesome Wednesday.
Kyle Levy: Thank you for having me.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. All right. See ya.