Project Name:

Food-To-You

Team Members:
Alex Chang
Sichang Yu
Omar Abuhamdeh

Introduction

This past week we’ve been busy trying to refine not just our main product idea, but also our
primary hypotheses we want to test and how we would test them. Specifically, after meeting
with Professor Salas, we realized that our value hypothesis, that people would be willing to pay
enough for delivery to keep our app viable as a startup, will need to be rigorously tested.

Vision. Based on your brainstorming, what is a succinct explanation of the vision for
your product or business? You will be stating this again in Phase 2 and Phase 3, and it
likely will change.

We envision a product that seamlessly connects students looking to have their food delivered
with students looking to make money on campus. After a student places an order on the
Brandeis Bite App, they could simply create a delivery task via our app, Food-To-You, where
they would input their name and their dormitory, along with how much they would be willing to tip
a delivery-person. Our app would automatically suggest a balanced tip for the order, given the
distance that the courier would be traveling.

After creating their order, a student courier would be able to accept the order. They would travel
to the food pickup area, find the correct order, and then deliver it to the given dormitory,
whereupon they would receive a tip. To maximize their earnings, student couriers would also be
able to deliver many orders at once.

Hypotheses. Prioritized and classified by type. Including whether they've been tested and
what the results were. Obviously you will not have tested all of them yet, and some you
may never test.

Value Hypothesis #1:

Enough students on campus will be willing and able to spend money on having their orders from
retail dining locations delivered to them. While the price per order may vary, we are aiming for
an average tip of roughly $5.00. With more than 1800 students currently living on campus who
all need to eat three meals a day (more or less), we believe that we can get roughly 50 orders a
day on our app, which would translate to a daily revenue of $250, or a monthly revenue of about
$7,500.
Though we feel that personally this is a service we would utilize frequently, we still realize the
need to test it with a larger group. Going forward, we plan to conduct student interviews where
we ask other students who are living on campus about their pain points in getting food, and
what they would be willing to pay in order to alleviate some of those pain points.

Value Hypothesis #2:

Furthermore, we hypothesize that there are enough students on campus who would be willing to
deliver these orders in exchange for additional income. With an average tip of $5, even if the
longest delivery time took 20 minutes, the student courier would be making ~$15 an hour, which
is greater than or equal to most student wages at Brandeis. Furthermore, this is not even
accounting for the possibility of delivering multiple orders simultaneously or the time savings if
the courier were to utilize an electric scooter or bike. Thus, we believe that we would have an
ample supply of students willing to deliver orders across campus.

Growth Hypothesis #1:

We also believe that this is a service that has the capacity to expand beyond Brandeis to other
college campuses all around the country. We plan to test this hypothesis by assessing what
percentage of universities also offer mobile ordering and pickup similar to what the retail dining
locations at Brandeis offers.

Growth Hypothesis #2:

We also believe that this is a service which has the potential to spread rapidly between students
at Brandeis university and beyond. We believe that when even one student utilizes this service,
others around them will see how fast and conveniently they received their food, and be
encouraged to utilize our service as well.

We also believe that we can utilize referrals and subscriptions to not only grow our business via
peer-to-peer referrals, but also provide a reliable and organic engine of growth. We believe that
by increasing the switching cost for our customers (via subscription plans which offer discounts),
we can encourage them to utilize our service more often than our competitors, whom we see
primarily as other food delivery apps such as GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash.

As for the sticky engine for growth, we believe that once people start to use our app, feel the
convenience and time-saving features of our app, then they will become habituated with it,
which means our customer loyalty would be high.
Test at least 2 hypotheses with real out of the building experiments, of various kinds,
using a variety of MVPs. Write them up and comment on the process and how it worked,
what hypothesis was, and whether it was proven.

First Test of Value Hypotheses:

We first wanted to test our two main value hypotheses. To do this, we scheduled a meeting with
Professor Salas to discuss our product idea in more depth and detail. We began the meeting by
giving a short elevator pitch of our product idea, and then discussing his feedback on it.

- Although we personally may be willing to use such an app, how will we demonstrate that
there is a greater need for it by other students at Brandeis?
- How will it be profitable enough to pay 3 people (or even just 1 person) a $50,000/yr
salary?

Although we definitely didn’t prove our hypotheses, we were glad to receive honest feedback on
the idea and receive direction on where to go next. Though we realized we could pivot away
from this idea, we wanted to further test it via in-person interviews with other Brandeis students.

Second Test of Value Hypotheses:

To further test our value hypotheses, and to gauge whether food delivery is a viable solution to a
common pain point that other Brandeis Students experience, we conducted a focus group
feedback session with the members of one of our suites. This focus group session occurred
Thursday night (9/30/21) around 7:00 PM and lasted for roughly half an hour and had 6
attendees. Below are the questions asked and the responses:

1. How often do you utilize food delivery services such as DoorDash or UberEats?
a. Some people utilize delivery services several times a week, while others never
ordered from them. One person said that they prefer to order from nearby
restaurants on South St. and walk there, pick it up themselves, and then come
back to the suite.
2. How big is your typical DoorDash order? How much of that is in tips/fees and how much
for the food?
a. Of those who order from DoorDash, the typical order size was around $20.00
with roughly $5-$9 of that being for delivery fees and tips.
b. One person was a DoorDash subscriber, who paid a monthly fee of about $10 to
receive discounted delivery fees on their orders. They said that it makes sense
because they order food delivery so often.
3. How would you feel about using a similar service that delivers on-campus food?
4. How much do you think is a fair price to charge for delivery from on-campus retail
dining?
Markets and Customers. List of customer categories or types, and an explanation of their
role in your startup. Be specific about why each customer type makes sense for your
business.

customer: students living on campus.

Professor/ staff

As for students, they could be categorized in two types.

First one: If they do not want to waste their time waiting in line to get food or they
are sick and do not have energy to walk around campus, we are here to help.
Second one: Students who deliver things. Although they deliver the service ,
they are also our customer since they need to sign up for an account in our app to do so. We
will not offer a platform for them to earn money for free. We might charge them a little per month
for them to be able to deliver using our app.

As for professors or staff working on campus, they might want to deliver something to a place
which needs a long walk. We could also help with that to save time for them.

Meeting Notes. List of dates and times and attend students of each team meeting with a 1
paragraph summary of results.

Meeting with Professor Salas: 9/29/21 @2:30PM:

At this meeting we met with Professor Salas to discuss our product strategy and whether it
would be a viable idea to pursue for this course. We explained our idea to Professor Salas and
we received feedback on the idea and our underlying hypotheses. Summary of feedback (from
above):

- Although we personally may be willing to use such an app, how will we demonstrate that
there is a greater need for it by other students at Brandeis?
- How will it be profitable enough to pay 3 people (or even just 1 person) a $50,000/yr
salary?

Team Meeting: 10/1/21 @5:00PM:

At this meeting we discussed our work so far in terms of testing our hypotheses. We also
worked to write up this Stage 1 Report on what we’ve done so far. Finally, we discussed what
we planned to do over the next week, and the possibility of pursuing a pivot if we think another
product idea might work better.
Links. Includes a link to the Trello space with content as outlined above and any other
relevant links

https://trello.com/b/s2xGxYjF/food-to-you

Reflection and conclusion

We believe that our product will solve a real, significant problem for many students at Brandeis
and around the country. We are looking to gather more evidence and data on how profitable
such a product would be. We are also remaining open to pivoting if we believe another product
may serve our customers better or if we find another customer paint point we think we could
address more effectively.