Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. This is the place where I interview entrepreneurs in depth about how they built their businesses.
And joining me today is an entrepreneur who saw something, well, that sucked. It sucked pretty badly. He said, “I think I can do better than that. In fact, I know I can.” So, he started. He built it up and he built it up and he built it up and this thing that ended up being better than the local options today is in 250 cities serving 15,000 restaurants. What they do is make it easy for anyone to get food when they’re hungry.
His name is Matt Howard. He is the founder of EatStreet. It’s an ordering service that connects people with local restaurants for delivery and pickup.
This interview is sponsored by the company that will help you hire your next great designer or developer. It’s called Toptal. And by the company that will host your website right–it’s called HostGator. As you know, I’ll tell you more about both of my sponsors later.
But first, I’ve got to meet Matt. Matt, good to see you.
Matt: Nice to see you as well. Thanks for having me.
Andrew: Matt, I hate to start things off by bringing up your competition, but I did a quick search and I see Postmates, Seamless, Foodpanda, Delivery Hero, Zomato, Eat24.
Matt: There are a lot of places that you can order food from.
Andrew: Not to mention like the local guy who’s just going to go to the store and pick stuff up for me, the guy who kind of works for the store but is probably off the books. What do you have that separates yourself from all these guys? How do you stay in business?
Matt: Yeah. So there’s two main differentiations. First of all, we really–so, we’re based in Madison, Wisconsin. If you think about Madison, it is a tier two college town-type market.
Andrew: I was going to say that doesn’t make it much more appealing.
Matt: It’s an amazing city to be in. It’s kind of roughly 30,000 college students with just undergraduates alone, over 40,000 with graduates included. That’s where we started the company. We really focused on all the tier two markets across the United States. So, this could be cities as low as 100,000 people and as high as 800,000 people. So, right off the bat, when it comes to differentiation, our competition doesn’t have restaurants in our cities.
So, if you look at the markets we are focusing on, like Madison and Tucson, Arizona and Richmond, Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky–those are markets that we really focus on and we have the biggest restaurant list. Really, what it starts with, the most value for the consumer is to be able to order from the most number of restaurants possible. So, right off the bat, our competition doesn’t have those restaurants in those cities.
Andrew: I see. And my guess is that’s why Yelp partnered up with you. They don’t have somebody in these smaller cities that can go and get food for people.
Matt: Exactly. Yelp’s goal is to offer ordering for as many restaurants as possible. So, when we did that partnership, they saw the value of having all their restaurants in the tier two cities. Now, when we do have a competitor enter our market, there is still a differentiation. Really, for us, we really pride ourselves on making the most rewarding ordering experience possible. What I mean by that is we have a loyalty program that incentivizes you to order more often. So, the more orders you place, the more discounts and promotions you’re going to receive.
We also worked very, very closely with the restaurants to run different weekly promotions and monthly deals with them so you’ll be able to incentivize their users to order from their specific restaurants as well. So, you’re going to get extra little promotions by ordering on EatStreet and we’re going to continue to reward you the more you purchase through our product.
Andrew: Okay. That makes sense. Before I even get to how you built this up and that crazy thing that happened to you while you were in school that led for all this and I also want to talk to you about the trouble you had raising money from Silicon Valley. I want to talk about what makes you such a good salesman. But in fact, why don’t we go back before you even started this business. Apparently, you used to sell cars.
Matt: Yes.
Andrew: And you were good at it. How many cars did you sell your first 30 days?
Matt: Yeah. So, in the first 30 days I sold 30 cars and won salesman of the month. That paid for my tuition at UW Madison the next year. So, that was a great month.
Andrew: How do you sell 30 cars in 30 days to customers who aren’t eager to buy? They’re kind of skeptical, worried about the dangers of buying from you. What did you do?
Matt: I think the thing I did was I had a philosophy that you spoke to everyone. Sometimes sales people look at, “They’re not going to buy a car. They’re too young. They can’t afford this car.” My philosophy is talk to anyone because you never know what their background is and why they’re there that day.
So, even though I didn’t have this huge network of people that I’ve been coming in for years and have bought cars from me previously, my first month I beat out people that had been there for 15 years because my philosophy was talk to anyone and everyone, hear their story, make them feel comfortable because it is a very stressful environment to buy a car. I think talking to people, hearing their stories, finding the root of what they’re actually trying to find when buying a car is really important.
Andrew: If you talk to everyone, you’re basically wasting your time. If you talk to a kid, he’s not going to a buy. If you talk to someone who’s looking to just kick the tires, he’s not going to buy. What else did you do that made all that time worthwhile?
Matt: I would argue a little differently. If it is a kid–I consider a kid maybe 18 years old or 19 years old–you don’t know, they might have the ability to purchase a car. If someone is not buying and they’re just looking today, they might be looking to buy in two weeks. They might just be looking today, but they might buy in two weeks. That philosophy of talking to everyone eventually leads people to buying a car.
Andrew: What else? Once you had a conversation with them–I want to know your magic. I’m looking at the notes my producer took on the conversation with you and I’m seeing sales in there a lot, much more than I would have expected for what feels to me like a mobile company, like a web company. You had something else. I’m noticing the smile on your face that you know what it was. What was it about you that helped you close sales? Give me one technique that we can all walk away from and learn from.
Matt: I think the best thing you can do in talking to someone and trying to sell them something, like when it was coming to sign up for EatStreet, is them knowing one, that they can trust you, and two, that you’re going to work your butt off to help them in the best possible way.
So, when it comes to buying a car, putting them in the perfect car they most need, not just trying to sell whatever car I want to sell, putting them in the car that they actually want. I think trust is number one whenever you’re selling to someone. They need to feel like you are hearing them and really helping them through the process.
So, when it came to signing up restaurants, I heard the problems they had with our competitors and I strived to make sure that didn’t happen with us. They really saw that I have the passion and trustworthiness to help them.
Andrew: And you walked door to door selling at first?
Matt: I did. I did. Yeah. I went from one restaurant to the next door to door.
Andrew: I see. That’s why sales keeps coming up. All of these 15,000 restaurants that are now part of your system had to be closed somehow and in the early days, there was no name recognition, there was no lock in, there was no connection to Yelp. The thing that really bugged you, the thing that got you to say, “I think we can do better,” is what? What was the experience?
Matt: Yeah. It was kind of two things. Our competitor at that time had decided to start charging a service fee to consumers. So, they decided to start adding a $0.75 service charge to each consumer ordering. We also knew that they were also charging the restaurants. So, right off the bat, the idea of paying a service fee to order from a local restaurant didn’t really make sense to us.
So, we really saw an opportunity to make it free again for the diners to be able to order from our product. So, EatStreet prides itself to being completely free for the consumer to order. There are no extra fees. What would you pay if you called in the order over the phone is what you pay on EatStreet. That was number one.
Then number two is once we realized that our goal was to drop the $0.75 service charge, we started talking to restaurant owners and realized there was actually a big pain point on customer support with our competition. So, they would call in to the support line and need help on something.
Let’s say they were shutting down early for the night. They would sit on hold for 20 minutes to get a hold of someone. When you’re a busy restaurant owner, waiting 20 minutes when you have a line out the door maybe because there’s a bar rush or something of that sort in one of these restaurants, they can’t afford to sit on the line for 20 minutes.
So, for us, we really wanted to make sure we had better support as well, which was crazy to think that one person, just myself, running support for two years could do that better.
Andrew: But it was the $0.75 that you initially recognized as the opportunity. You said, “If I could eliminate $0.75. . .” But what I’m hearing is that starting a business based on price, where you’re going to be cheaper than your competition feels like a very dangerous way to start. Why was that enough for you to say, “I have a business,” before you talked to restaurants, before they told you about waiting on hold, before you got to all that? Why did you think the $0.75 was enough that it would sustain you?
Matt: Yeah. So, when we looked at the market, this company in particular was the only one to actually start charging a $0.75 service fee. No one else was. So, we knew that this was kind of more them just making the decision they wanted to make more revenue than what they were currently making at that time and they decided to do it from the consumer’s standpoint and charging the consumer.
We did not go in cheaper for the restaurant side. We charged the same exact commission structure that that company did. We did not pitch ourselves as the cheaper solution. But we knew that the industry, all the competitors, all the ones you mentioned, none of us charged service fees.
Andrew: Yeah. So, then it doesn’t seem like you have enough of an advantage to sustain a business. What else did you think you were going to have?
Matt: Yeah. So, you would think that $0.75 isn’t really enough, but we did find that a lot of the consumers at UW Madison did start coming over to our product and start using it.
Andrew: I feel like the thing you just said there is part of the secret. You weren’t thinking of this as a broad business that was going to scale throughout the country and the world. You were thinking of it as something that would just be there locally for students and other people who live in the area. You were thinking of it not even as a business. You thought of it, you told our producers, as just a product.
Matt: Yeah. That is exactly what our mindset was. We weren’t trying to–we weren’t thinking about the next cities. We were thinking about taking over Madison, making it free for UW students to get and really focusing on students, not even focusing on people in the Madison area.
I think that was actually the best things we did because we didn’t get distracted with the idea that we needed to go to more cities. Before we ever even left Madison to go to our second market, it was profitable and doing very, very well, had more restaurants than our competition, had more orders coming in than our competition.
Andrew: How profitable was it at that time before you went to the second city, before you raised money?
Matt: Yeah. So, before we raised money, we each put in $1,000 of our own money to start the business. Within nine months it was profitable and within a six-month period after being profitable–so, in May of 2011 when I graduated, we had put $20,000 in profits in the bank.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: So, it wasn’t extremely profitable, but in our eyes it was. It was putting in enough money that it could allow us to start expanding the company.
Andrew: I get it. The company was called, if I’ve got this right, it was called Badger Bites?
Matt: Yes. So, again, it shows you we weren’t focusing the future expansion efforts.
Andrew: What’s the Badger reference about?
Matt: Badger being the UW Badgers.
Andrew: That’s it. So, you were really thinking that narrowly, just that audience. Once you had this idea, you had to go and get your first restaurants. I want to slow down a little bit and talk about the early days and then pick it up and talk about how you hire people and how you grew, but the first restaurants, how did you get them on board? I heard you didn’t even have a website.
Matt: We didn’t. I didn’t even have a product to show them. I really focused on the fact that–I knew their pain point. Once I talked to the first one or two restaurants, I found that the pain point was the support side of the business, it was knowing that they could call someone and get a hold of someone at any time to help them with problems–back then, six years ago, online ordering was still something very new a lot of restaurants and it was still new to a lot of Madison restaurants, even with the competitor there.
So, I think the thing that I did the most, what I focused on most was I was there to help them grow their business. I really told them that I was going to get out there and we didn’t make money unless we sent orders. So, my pitch was I’m going to work my butt off to get your more business and more orders because otherwise I don’t make any money. I’m going to do it with having better customer support and you can call me. Here’s my cell phone number. You can call me whenever you need help. I’m the founder of the company. I can help you with it.
I think it really resonated, the fact that I was a UW student trying to start a business, trying to do it better than competition and really focused on what their pain points were, which was definitely getting more orders and the support side of the business.
Andrew: This was–what was the year that you started it?
Matt: We launched in 2010. So, we started selling restaurants in late 2009 and then we launched February 1st of 2010.
Andrew: And you weren’t at the time aggregating, if I understand right. Today I can go to EatStreet.com and I can order food and have it delivered. It didn’t matter to them so much, if I understand right, whether you had a website or not because you were basically powering their delivery service, is that right?
Matt: No. So, we did have an aggregator product. We did have the ability to put all the restaurants in an area. So, from the very beginning, the first product, BadgerBites.com was the same idea, list all the restaurants in the area, type in your address, see which ones delivered to you and allowed you to order online.
So, one of the biggest misconceptions of EatStreet is that we do delivery. We actually don’t do delivery. We simply are the ordering product that you can use to order from restaurants. You can use us today to order pizza, tomorrow to order Chinese, the day after that to order subs. So, we are just the platforms that connects you with the local restaurants.
Andrew: Oh, and they send the person out to deliver.
Matt: Exactly. So, the order–
Andrew: Every new business that you get them is brand new business they wouldn’t’ have gotten otherwise and they pay you per sale essentially.
Matt: Exactly. So, we really view ourselves as our job is to send as many orders to the restaurant as possible. We are a marketing company to send them orders. So, our job is to get new diners that they would have never had before. So, we kind of pitch it as the fact that we’re a digital food court. Just like if you’re walking into a mall. If you’re not one of the restaurants inside that mall’s food court, you’re not an option. So, if you’re not listed on EatStreet, you’re not an option for them.
Andrew: So, Matt, that seems like a much easier sell then. You walk into a restaurant, you say, “Do you want more customers?” “Who doesn’t?” “Can I get a commission every time I bring you a new customer with a real order? Done. Great. See you later.” Is that it?
Matt: That is the driving force. For them, they want more business and they want new business. I think sometimes, though, restaurants will look at it and say that you’re just cannibalizing the orders I would have had otherwise. You’re bringing to the website that was going to order off my website anyway. So, that is a very big hurdle that you’ve got to overcome. So, until you’re showing significant volume, there are always restaurants that don’t want to join the platform. Once you’re driving the lion’s share of the traffic in the city for online orders, then they eventually come on board.
Andrew: What was your response when someone said, “You guys are going to cannibalize the orders I’m already getting? Basically people order from me or they order from you, but they’re still going to order the same sandwich. Why should I route them to you and give a commission?” How did you respond to that?
Matt: Yeah. First of all, I’m a firm believer that being upfront with someone is really helpful, especially with a restaurant. I would tell them, “There are going to be times that we cannibalize some of your sales. There are going to be some diners that were going to order from your website anyway that come to EatStreet and eventually still order from you and I charge you a commission, not going to lie about that.
Then I go into the fact that I ask them what is one of their biggest pain points. What is the thing they hate to do the most? Almost every restaurant owner will talk about marketing and how expensive it is and how they’re just not very good at marketing. That’s really what I focus on in the pitch is we want you to make great food. We want to drive you as many orders as possible so when you make great food and offer great service you grow your business.
Really the pitch for them is you stop worrying about marketing. That is our job. When we started the company, a lot of restaurants were sending coupons in local newspapers and sending out menus to every person in the city. Those types of marketing initiatives are becoming less and less because they’re relying on companies like EatStreet to drive their orders.
So, once I kind of explained to them our goal is to drive as many transactions to them as humanly possible, they understand the concept and they understand that sometimes I will be cannibalizing, but the majority of times I will not be.
Andrew: I like that. That’s a good sales technique, isn’t it? It’s generous, it’s considerate, it’s honest, but it’s also a sales technique.
Matt: Yeah. Definitely. Again, I said form the beginning that trust in my opinion is one of the biggest things. If you’re a sales person and I respond I’m not going to cannibalize any of your sales, they understand that’s a lie. They know that’s a lie. I think being up front with them is the right tactic there.
Andrew: Okay. I’m hunting around to see what you did to promote yourself. I came up with one thing that couldn’t have been it. There’s got to be more. Let’s talk about that in a moment. First I’m going to talk about my first sponsor. I’d like to hear your opinion on this.
My first sponsor is a company called HostGator. They host websites really easily. You just go in. They set you up. The site’s not going to go down because they have such a good infrastructure, all that. If you were starting over today, Matt, right now, let’s not say even in college because apparently you were pretty advanced even in college.
Let’s say you were in high school, had an opportunity to start a brand new business with nothing but a hosting package because your parents wouldn’t give you money. What would you do with it in today’s market? I’m asking because I want some ideas for my audience.
Matt: Yeah. So what would we do with the hosting package?
Andrew: Yeah. You personally. It’s not Matt, the guy who’s raised millions of dollars, not Matt, the guy who’s kind of an internet celebrity in the tech space–we’re talking about just Matt, the guy who’s now with our imagination in high school. What would you build on it?
Matt: Yeah. So, first of all, actually, I know what I would do because in high school, my dad actually started a business. When he started his business, he had no idea how to first of all start a website and host it. Right off the bat, in high school I’d go back in time and help him do that. So, if there was an easy way to get a website up and host it and know that it’s not going to have any issues and I could actually easily show my dad how to run it for his business, that is what I would do.
Andrew: That’s a brilliant idea. We really forget about how hard it is for people to get their websites up or even if it’s not that hard because they can figure it out, it’s time consuming. There are a lot of people who don’t want to put that time in. I actually interviewed a guy who ran a company called Restaurant Engine. He said his whole gig was he was going to build websites for restaurants, only restaurants and only using a set kind of template. That’s it.
And anyone who wanted a restaurant would go to him. He’d build a website for them. Boom. It’s all done. Because he was doing it for restaurants, he was able to keep it customized so he knew exactly what needed to go into a restaurant website and they could customize it a little bit. He would help them customize it a little bit, but they couldn’t really go outrageous and ask for anything they wanted. That gave him a really good, consistent revenue and it was hard for others to beat him because he did it by hand, his and his team did.
Anyone out there who’s looking for an idea should look for people like Matt’s dad who want to build a website or people like the guys who–Brian Casel is his name–who built Restaurant Engine. Just pick a topic and say you’re going to build websites for people in that topic and you don’t even have to build it all from scratch.
You’ve got WordPress that makes things easy. You find a handful of themes. That’s it. Imagine you do it for mechanics. I’m going to be the guy who sets up websites for mechanics. Here are the 12 different themes that I can create for you. Don’t call them themes. Say here are 12 different looks that you can give them. Here are the different services you can setup. Boom. That’s it.
You can do the whole thing on HostGator because you know what? If they ever have a problem, you can just call up HostGator, get a real human being on the phone and they could take care of it. HostGator will give them, your clients now, unmetered disk space and bandwidth. They’re going to give them unlimited email addresses. So when they say, “Hey, I hired my kid. Can I get an email address for them?” Yes, you can. “I hired my girlfriend.” Yes, you can give her email address too. “I hired my boyfriend.” Yes. I don’t know why you have a boyfriend and a girlfriend but I can give them both email addresses.
So the first step is you should go to HostGator.com right now, HostGator.com/Mixergy. Sign up for your own page, use WordPress, frankly, and say you’re setting up a business helping mechanics build their websites or helping shoe salesmen–no, not shoe salesmen, they don’t need it. But you find a little niche and you say that’s what you’re going to do and you set up the website. It’s easy. Then you use HostGator to host sites for your customers.
Here’s the URL and why you should use it. The reason you should use it first, they’re going to give Mixergy listeners 30% off just for using the special URL and then they’re also going to give you the 45-day money back guarantee, then they’re also going to help you build your business by giving you $100 AdWords offer. The Google AdWords offer is spectacular, $50 search credit from Bing and Yahoo. They’re going to give you all the WordPress tools, etc., free business listing on YP–I know you guys do business with YP. I think you do. Right? You do.
Really good system. All you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. If you hate your hosting company, like most people do, you do not have to take it. It’s not like elementary school where you hate your teacher and you have to suffer through it until the end of the year, you can move, move to HostGator. In fact, if you’re on WordPress, they will move for you.
Do not be stuck with a life or a hosting company that you do not love. HostGator.com/Mixergy. They’ll migrate you if you’re WordPress or they’ll make it easy for you to migrate on your own if you’re using some other thing that I don’t know about. HostGator.com/Mixergy. Really grateful to them for them sponsoring.
Matt, I went back in time to see what you were up to. The only thing that I could find that kind of shows what you guys were about was this old Facebook event that you guys did for Badger Bites where Badger Bites was going to, on November 15th, 2011, donate 100% of its profit to UM Humorology. Do you remember this?
Matt: Yeah. I definitely remember. I set it up.
Andrew: That was you typing into WordPress. Humorology, what is it exactly?
Matt: So, it’s a nonprofit organization on campus. It’s a yearly event put on by the fraternities and sororities of UW Madison where they come together and do–they sponsor, each fraternity or sorority sponsors a nonprofit and then they do a big show where all these people do these musicals and sketches and all of that and all the proceeds go to their charities. So, it’s a great event every year on campus still being done today and we’re still–we actually just still sponsored it this last year as well.
Andrew: My sense is it wasn’t huge, but it’s kind of clever the way you used Facebook. You created an event. You invited 887 people and it’s your way of messaging 887 people using Facebook, which is where they live, about Badger Bites and about why they should try it out. 34 people said they would attend, but as I said, hundreds of people got to be aware of it. That wasn’t the biggest thing. What really worked for you for getting people this attention and new customers that you were promising?
Matt: Yeah. I’ll never forget this story. That’s for sure. Once we had the product built, marketing was obviously something that was really important for us, driving more diners and getting more diners using the product because that’s how we made money. We decided to run a weeklong promotion where we did free General Tao’s Chicken with a local Chinese restaurant. So, all you had to do was use EatStreet to order. It was completely free. It didn’t cost anything.
So, as you could imagine, a lot of college students like discounted food, but they love free food. We did this promotion. We put out flyers and immediately on the first day we had 250 orders. That was by far a new record, about 10x our record. So, we had about 25 orders in one day before that. We had 250 the first day of this promotion. It quickly went up to 400 orders and one restaurant was fulfilling all of those orders.
So, it was a crazy week. I was working in the restaurant helping them do deliveries, helping them keep track of all the orders coming in. But it really helped us blow up at the University of Wisconsin.
Andrew: So, I see. You spend money on that and then once people tried you once, they came back and bought form you again?
Matt: Yeah. That was the whole thought process. We were helping the restaurant subsidize the food. So, we were throwing in $2 per item that we sold that week. So, we sold a lot of items. So, it ended up costing us–
Andrew: You were giving it for free though. You were saying General Tao’s Chicken free. You paid for it or they paid for it?
Matt: So, the consumer paid nothing. The diner paid $0 for it. The restaurant and we, EatStreet helped pay for the actual food. So, we paid the restaurant $2 for every item that we sold, which still didn’t break them even, but they knew they were going to get a lot of new people trying out their food. That was the real focus on it. So, we paid $2 per entrée that week.
Andrew: Okay. What else did you do to grow? What did you do to get the word out? How would people even know it? Was it just flyers?
Matt: So, in the very early days, it was just a lot of flyers. It was a lot of spreading the word of mouth. Once we ran these promotions, we saw that obviously free food brought a lot of people, but then what we started doing is still discounted but not as heavily discounted food items. So, we ran a $3 pizza promotion for a couple weeks. Then we ran $2 tacos.
We had all these different promotions that were constantly running. So, we did like a weekly deal. By doing those weekly deals, more and more people came to check out the website to see what those promotions were. So, that’s really what sparked the majority of the traffic in the early days.
Andrew: Matt, there are going to be a lot of people who come to discover this interview because they happen to know about EatStreet and they’re curious about what you’re doing. I don’t know how many of them are going to come back. Even though they’re going to love this–I can’t see them not loving this, frankly–even if they’re going to love it, I don’t know how they’re going to come back.
How did you measure to see whether people actually came back to buy more food for you after you gave them something for free or if they were just freeloaders who happened to enjoy free food and forgot about you afterwards?
Matt: Yeah. Back then we were just trying to see did our order volume go up the day after the promotion went off. We knew we were getting roughly 25 orders a day before the promotion started. Then all of a sudden once it ended, we were more towards 40 orders a day. It was more like, “Okay, we’re getting more natural traffic than we’ve ever had before.” There were freeloaders in there.
Today we don’t do free because we realize once you put all the unit economics behind it, there are a lot of people who are never going to come back because they only did it to get that free item. So, today we’re a lot more sophisticated with our data and we know how to acquire a diner and how to retain them later on. But in the early days, it was all about we just wanted traffic. Once we saw that there were some people come back, we knew that was a strategy we could do.
Today we’re much more scientific about it, making sure that we’re doing the right promotions at the right time to the right users.
Andrew: I wanted to see what this first version of the site looked like, Badger Bites. But you guys have a robot.txt file that says, “Don’t look at it.” Even Google search results, anyone who goes and types in Badger Bites into Google, hits enter is going to come up with random stuff they don’t want, type in BadgerBites.com into Google and here’s what it says, “A description of this result is not available because of the site’s robot.txt.” What did it look like and why are you guys hiding it?
Matt: Well, I don’t think we’re trying to hide it. It’s been about four years, so I’m not sure too many people even remember the name Badger Bites because we became EatStreet pretty quickly because we knew we wanted to start expanding the company. We’re definitely note trying to hide it. It is not a pretty website in today’s standards, without a doubt, but it was really great for back then, for what we needed it to do and what people expected, it was a great product. Today you would look at it and say, “I would never put my credit card information on that website.” So, I can definitely send you a picture of it.
Andrew: I would love it. Please, email it to me. I think we have to save that for history’s sake.
Matt: I’ll send you what I … I’ll even do you one step further. I’ll send you versions one, two and three because we actually redid the Badger Bites three times.
Andrew: And you’re going to be okay with my publishing it publicly, right?
Matt: Of course.
Andrew: I’ve got to see it. You’ve got to tell people about the daily report. Sorry?
Matt: You’ll laugh when you see it.
Andrew: I’d love it.
Matt: Every tech company, you’ve got to continue to rewrite your product and make it better.
Andrew: I do that a lot with tech companies, where I go back and see what their pages used to look like to get a sense of the evolution and it’s shocking how many really well-designed sites had pretty bad first versions. Part of it is that aesthetics change. People are going to laugh at the emoji culture in the future, just like we laugh at the old .gif culture of Web 1.0. Some of it is they were just tossing something out to see what would happen.
Matt: Yeah. We wanted to build a minimum viable product. Like I said, this was a project. This was not really a company back then. The website was fine, but it wasn’t great. It was good enough. It got people to start placing orders. You couldn’t even use a credit card on the first website. We didn’t even have the ability to put in credit card information. But we saw traction on it. That’s what made us rebuild it. So, if we had tried to make it perfect, it would have taken too long to launch and we probably would have never actually got the product out originally anyway.
Andrew: Speaking of launching fast, this daily report–what happened there?
Matt: So, the first day that we launched the company–so, we thought we were ready, but you’re never truly ready. I always tell people that the best knowledge you’re going to gain is after the company launches. You’re going to learn more about your company and more of what you have to do in the future after it actually gets out there. So, I always push people to get it out there. We did that.
The first day I got a phone call from a restaurant owner saying, “We just closed off for the day. We got a few orders from you. Great. Can you send over our daily report?” I looked at the restaurant–I was talking to them on the phone. I said, “I don’t know what a daily report is. What are you talking about?” He’s like, “Well, your competition at the end of every day sends us a summary of our sales and we use that to close out our register.”
Well, that’s not something I knew. That’s not something I knew was part of my competitor’s product. The restaurant was pretty upset about it. He just said, “If I’m not able to close out my register, you can take me off your service. So, I need the daily report.” So, we actually lost our first restaurant on the first day because we didn’t have that functionality.
So, I looked at my cofounders, Eric and Alex, and I charged them with going through and building out the functionality for our daily report before the restaurant opened. So they pulled an all-nigther that night, built the functionality, and by the time the restaurant owner got to the store the next morning, it was sitting there waiting for them.
Andrew: And did you get that guy to come back?
Matt: Yeah. He called me up that morning and said, “Okay, turn this back on.”
Andrew: How did you know that he wasn’t a crazy guy who just happened to need data for data’s sake versus someone who’s worth creating a whole new product for and staying up for so long to build it?
Matt: At that point, every restaurant was worth everything to us. We were trying to be better than our competition and I knew support and helping the restaurant was really the only reason we were able to get this company going in the early days.
So, I knew that every restaurant mattered and when they asked for something like that and gave me a clear reason of I need to close my register out at the end of the day, it was very clear that’s something they really needed. And that trend continued. We had calls coming in all the time from restaurants saying, “Your competition does this, they do that, you need to do it as well.”
Andrew: Is there anything that you did just because they asked for it that in retrospect was just a bad decision not used by anyone else?
Matt: Yeah. There definitely was. One example that can think of was we built the functionality to allow restaurant owners to make full menu updates. So, we let restaurant owners do small menu updates to be able to change a few items, change pricing. But what we found was restaurant owners don’t want to go in and actually build out their menus. They want us to do that. That’s our job.
Our job is to make sure that their menus are updated and are correct. We built all this functionality to allow a restaurant to go in and update the menus themselves and then we realized no other restaurants wanted to use it. Even if they did, they actually generally didn’t do it correctly. So, then their sales were affected and they were mad at us because the prices were all wrong and we realized that was not something we should actually do.
Andrew: So, now if somebody wants to make a change or even put their menu in for the first time, are they actually calling a human being at your company to do it?
Matt: They can do it a couple different ways. If it’s a small menu update, just small little changes–a lot of the times restaurants are not changing their entire menu. They’re making one item. They’re out of one time, so they need to it off the menu for that night. They need to change one price because they realized it was wrong. Those types of small menu updates can be done through our tablet that we provide restaurants or through our restaurant dashboard. So, they can login to a dashboard and manage their account. That’s something they can do. Or they can call us and 24/7, 365 customer support, someone always willing to do it right over the phone. So, they can kind of pick and choose whatever they prefer.
Andrew: And you’re giving them a tablet?
Matt: Yes. Not every single restaurant because a lot of restaurants actually don’t want tablets. They’re a little averse to technology. So, a lot of the times we don’t, but in that case, they can actually use the tablet. So, it’s really up to the restaurant. If we’re driving them significant order volume and they want a tablet, we’ll definitely provide them one.
Andrew: By provide, do you mean are you giving it to them or are they buying it?
Matt: They are not buying it. It is completely free.
Andrew: You’re giving it to them?
Matt: We are.
Andrew: So, what’s the pricing structure for you?
Matt: Yeah. We charge a commission on every order. So, there is no startup cost to be on EatStreet. So, when we give a restaurant a tablet, it is simply us giving them a tablet and having to eat the cost on it. We only make money if we send restaurant orders. That’s the only way make money.
Andrew: What’s the percentage you guys take?
Matt: We take about 10.5%.
Andrew: 10.5% on everything that you send over?
Matt: Yes.
Andrew: And you’re still the marketing arm for these guys?
Matt: Yes. Exactly.
Andrew: What do you guys do today to market now that you can’t do flyers because you’ve outgrown them?
Matt: Well, we still do flyers. It’s definitely a small portion of our marketing.
Andrew: You do? In the mail?
Matt: We actually do very aggressive guerrilla marketing campaigns. So, we go from college campus to college campus working with fraternities and sororities and student organizations and going into classrooms and making announcements, things like that. We still have a guerilla marketing team. It’s definitely a small portion of our marketing budget today but it’s still something we do because it’s something that spreads the word faster across college campuses.
We’re really focused on digital now. A lot of search marketing, a lot of social marketing, so a lot of Facebook, Twitter ads, a lot of Google, Bing, Yahoo ads. Then we recently launched our first TV ad. We’re going to be on TV more aggressively this fall. We only launched it in five cities to start with. But more mass media is what we’re now focusing on with our recent investment.
Andrew: Can you imagine as a kid watching television and saying, “One day I’m going to be on television or my business will be?”
Matt: Yeah. I’m not going to lie. I had a little tear coming down my face when I saw that TV ad for the first time.
Andrew: Literally?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: I get it.
Matt: It was a special moment. It’s a lot of work to build the company to where it is today and to really see it on a TV, see it on Jimmy Kimmel Live for the first TV spot. It was really amazing to see it. It was one of those moments that I definitely won’t forget.
Andrew: So, tell me more about this college campus thing you do? What do you do on college campus within classes and sororities and fraternities?
Matt: Yeah. So, what we do, first of all we focus on all these tier two markets. Usually when I mean tier two markets, I really mean college towns. So, like Champaign, Illinois, Bloomington, Indiana, Ann Arbor, Michigan, those are the types of markets.
Andrew: Sorry to interrupt but you’re also here in San Francisco. I think I can even get Frjtz French Fries from you guys and this is not a small market. It’s not even a college market, really.
Matt: I’m glad you brought that up. Yeah. So, you can order from us in San Francisco and there’s a reason why and that’s because we have a few partnerships with local hotels where if you’re staying at that hotel, you can actually place an order through a tablet that’s provided in the room. So, EatStreet forms a lot of strategic partnerships as well. So, since we power the ordering for that hotel group, we need to have coverage in the market they’re in. San Francisco is one of them.
Andrew: I see. I’ve got to talk to you about partnerships because I feel like that’s one of your strengths and that’s one thing that most people don’t think about. We think about television ads. We think about flyers. We obviously think about Facebook and Google. Partnerships we don’t think about and many have you partnered up. But sorry, you were starting to talk about how you were in all these college towns and you do what with college students?
Matt: Yeah. So, what we’ll do is we’ll work with a few local restaurants to run these little specials and promotions. Then we will send in what we call our campus promotions team that will go on the university campus and they will put our flyers all over campus, they will go to student organization events and make presentation talking about what EatStreet is and then bringing in free food in return for letting us go present.
They’ll go to fraternities and sorority meetings doing the same thing, bringing in free food. Really their objective and their goal is to get people to see the EatStreet name, to start talking about it and know what it is. So, they will do a lot of guerilla marketing in those cities. So, they’ll just go from market to market and do that.
Andrew: And you have people who you’ve hired to go do that. I guess they call ahead. They make sure that everything is lined up and then they go in and they bring food. I see. Wow. All right. Let me do a sponsorship break and then come back and ask you about partnerships. My second sponsor is a company called Toptal. Do you know Toptal?
Matt: I do.
Andrew: You do? How do you know Toptal?
Matt: If I remember correctly, it is you can recruit engineers from it.
Andrew: Yeah. They’re idea was they said hiring engineers is really tough. What if we can come up with a solution for it that’s completely different from what other people do? Everyone else will either give you these cheapo freelancers who will get the job done if you can direct them well enough or maybe they’ll disappear on you, but they don’t charge that much, so who cares. On the other end of the market was people who were spending money like heavily spending money to hire recruiters, to pay those recruiters. What do you guys do to hire?
Matt: So, we do a combination of a bunch of different things, but we have a person internally whose main job is recruitment. She’s our head of recruitment and she goes out there and gets as many people on board on EatStreet as possible.
Andrew: Yeah. You need that, right? If you’re really going into a competitive market, you need to have maybe even more people doing that and more spend beyond hiring that person. So, Toptal said what if we can be the guys who test developers? What if we can be the people who can vet them by really having them talk to other developers? What if we can make this obstacle course so good that it’s like the Spartan Race? Do you know the Spartan Race?
Matt: I do.
Andrew: Spartan Race is like this insane race that puts people through their paces and they pay money to go through it just to see if they can come out the other end alive.
Matt: You couldn’t pay me to do it.
Andrew: I would love it. I would pay. I keep missing it, but it’s here at AT&T Park where the Giants play and I see it when I run sometimes. I’ve got to sign up for it. For people like me who love to run, for people like me who like to be assertive physically, that’s golden. For developers, they want that kind of intellectual race. They want to see if they can beat other people.
So, Toptal said, “Let’s set that up. Let’s set up the Spartan Race of the mind for developers and see if they can get through it and the people who get through it will then be in our little black book, so to speak. Then when people want to hire developers, they come to us and we connect them with the right developer in our little black book.”
When I say the right developer, these guys over at Toptal aren’t messing around. They hire yentas–did you ever see that movie “Fiddler on the Roof?”
Matt: I did not.
Andrew: You didn’t? You’re not missing much. It’s talked up a lot. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like older movies. But there’s a woman named Yenta in there whose whole job was to set people up and make sure that they got married to the right person. She was deciding for every relationship for a person. So, Toptal isn’t exactly like that, but they kind of have a Yenta. They have people there whose whole job is to match you up and they get ranked and rated and make sure it’s all done right.
So, when you go in and you say, “I need to hire someone,” they say, “What do you like? What’s your office environment like? What’s your company environment like? What are you looking to develop? What’s the long-term view of this project? Do you need somebody short-term, part-time, long-term, whatever?” Then they go in and they find the right person from their little black book.
If it’s a match, if you’re happy with them, you can get started within days because they’ve raised so much money from Andreessen Horowitz–Matt, they had a way easier time you did. I’m telling you. It was something like they had one conversation with one person. I think that’s basically what it was. Andreessen Horowitz invested.
Matt: That’s the dream right there.
Andrew: That is the dream. And we’re going to talk about how that was not your dream in a moment. The thing is that because they raised so much money, because they talk about being the best of the best, everyone apparently is afraid that it’s going to cost too much to work with Toptal. I think I might be scaring them off. Guys, it’s not that expensive. It really is affordable. It’s not going to be the super cheap thing, let’s be honest.
But part of the reason why it’s so affordable is they have developers all over the world in parts of the world where it’s not very expensive to go and get a sandwich. Here, I think it’s going to cost me $10 to get a plain old sandwich. It’s not like that in the rest of the world. That’s where they go and hire people. That’s where many of the people that they’re going to match you up with are.
All right. If you want to sign up, don’t go to Toptal.com. It’s a great site, but that’s for everyone else. We are a little bit different here at Mixergy. They intentionally are courting us because they know that we’re the people who are going to be talking about them. So, they gave us a special URL to make it even better for us than it is for other people so that we yap about it because that’s what we do here at Mixergy.
So, here’s what you’re going to get if you go to this URL. Mixergy listeners are going to get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when they pay for their first 80 hours. Think about that, 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours and that’s in addition to the no-risk trial period of up to two weeks.
So, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy or frankly, this is like a personal thing when you’re hiring someone. If you want me to make the introduction to my guy over there, just email me. I’m Andrew@Mixergy.com. Same email that Matt and I have used.
All right. We are talking about growing your business through partnerships and then we’re going to talk about how your experience was not like Toptal when you raised money. Let’s start with the partnerships. What’s the first partnership that you put together?
Matt: Yeah. Our first partnership was one of our best. We partnered with Yelp to start with. That was our first partner.
Andrew: What was your partnership with Yelp?
Matt: So, the whole goal with Yelp when they set out to offer online ordering to their consumers was to be able to add ordering to as many restaurants as possible. So, they wanted to partner up with a bunch of food ordering companies like EatStreet and then when a diner went to Yelp, found a restaurant and wanted to order online from that restaurant, they could click a button right on that page and then have an iframe ordering experience that we provided to Yelp.
So, we actually power the technology behind it and then we send the order to the restaurant and make sure the order gets delivered to the customer. So, for Yelp, it was really a focus of just wanting to have more ordering opportunities for their diners and customers.
Andrew: Roughly how many restaurants did you have to have in place before that made sense for you to put together with Yelp?
Matt: I think at that time we had roughly 5,000 restaurants. So, we now have 15,000 today, so much, much bigger. But at the time, 5,000 was obviously big enough.
Andrew: 5,000 is pretty big. Was it hard to get even an opening into someone at Yelp? What was it like to put that first partnership together?
Matt: Yeah. I think it was actually easier than what you would imagine. I think people that like Yelp especially where restaurants are so important to them. Originally I’m not sure how I originally got connected with them, but it was not anything too special. They took the meeting because they know that restaurants are really important to them and that our job was to send as many orders to the restaurants as possible. So, obviously restaurants must like us. So, it actually wasn’t as hard as you think.
Once I made that connection, we were only at about 1,000 restaurants at that time, but once we got to 5,000 we did a press release on it they saw it and they called us and wanted to partner. It worked out great. It was just a one-hour meeting that eventually led to the partnership.
Andrew: But why did you wait until 5,000–actually you never approached Yelp–but why not approach Yelp at 1,000 when you had the idea? Why not approach someone else at that point?
Matt: Yeah. We did approach them when we had 1,000. What we decided was we just weren’t big enough to show enough value to Yelp at that time. So, it was something that we had that initial meeting, but it was like, “Hey, let’s stay friends, let’s stay close. We never know what’s going to happen. Once they saw we were up to 5,000, they were like, “Let’s get this partnership going.
So, I’m always a firm believer that when it comes to major partnerships like this, your goal is to get in early, make that connection and have that case be built because you never know in the future, you’re going to get to 5,000 and you’re going to want to partner with them and starting with them. Starting from scratch, it takes months., where if I’ve already had that meeting and I hit the 5,000, they’re ready to partner right away.
Andrew: What did you do to keep that relationship warm so when you were ready with 5,000, they knew who you were and it was easier to get started?
Matt: Well, the good thing is we went from 1,000 to 5,000 in only six months. So, it didn’t take a long time. But I always make a point, especially for something like that to check in after three months. So, I had a phone call with them about three months after, explained to them we were at about 2,000 restaurants. They were happy that we had doubled in three months. And then by the time six months rolled around, we went from 2,000 to 5,000 and then they were knew we were serious about signing up restaurants.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: Just one phone call in between is all it really took.
Andrew: I understand how the press release would have gotten you there. I feel like I’ve know that a lot of the reasons why people do interviews on Mixergy is for biz-dev opportunities. They know they’re going to do an interview here and someone potentially will contact them. That’s not why you’re doing this though because there aren’t a lot of Yelps in my audience waiting to partner up. I’m wondering why. Why are you doing this interview with me, Matt? What’s your goal here?
Matt: Yeah. Our biggest objective right now at EatStreet is to let people know that we’re here. There are a lot of people who don’t realize in some of these smaller cities that there is a product like EatStreet. We’re there. We’re in the majority of tier two markets across the United States. So, we want to spread the word. We want people to realize that. Go to EatStreet and download our app, be able to see the restaurants I’ve delivered to you. I would bet a lot of people watching this actually can order from EatStreet and don’t realize it.
Andrew: Is this the best use of your time though to spend an hour to try to get a handful of more customers?
Matt: Definitely. You never know who’s going to be listening to this interview. It could be a potential investor. It could be a potential partner. It could be a really active diner. You never know.
Andrew: I see. I feel like the first two are much more likely, like an investor or partner. What did you do to go from 1,000 to 6,00 0 so fast?
Matt: Restaurants?
Andrew: Yeah.
Matt: We grew out, in my opinion, the most talented sales staff that our industry has. We really found people that were go getters, that shared similar visions with EatStreet. They wanted to grow it as much as possible. So, we really found some awesome, talented people to help us grow.
Andrew: Let’s talk about how you structured this. I know we have just a little bit more time left. But the very first person who was not your friend, was going to be a sales person was who’s a little bit older. How old was he?
Matt: Yeah. He was in his early 50s.
Andrew: How intimidating is that, to hire someone in his 50s when you’re fresh out of school?
Matt: It was really intimidating, but I think a good sales person is someone who makes you feel comfortable. By the end of his interview, we were like best friends. That to me screens a good sales person. That’s who I ended up hiring.
I knew that we would gel well together and I knew that he was going to work really hard and take care of the restaurants because that was really key to our success in the early days and make them feel comfortable and do the best that he can possibly do. I definitely won’t forget because we joked around. He made a joke of, “Well, at least I’m younger than your dad.” And I said yes, but in reality he was not.
Andrew: That’s a nice thing for you to have said then.
Matt: Now he’s been with us for four years and I made sure to tell him that was not true. My dad is actually younger than he is.
Andrew: I imagine in the beginning you could just say here’s a blog, here’s a yellow pages or here’s an online version of it. Go out there and knock on doors and get people to sign up. Is that basically it?
Matt: Yeah. We literally will go from door to door, talk to the restaurant owners and just say, “Can we spend five minutes with you and tell you what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to grow you more business?”
Andrew: But once it was built, once it became a structured part of your business, when you hit 1,000 and you were ready to double the two and go to five, what did it look like then? What was the organization structure?
Matt: Yeah. So, when we decided that we wanted to aggressively go and sign restaurants, we did need to grow out our sales team and get more inside sales people. We do have a phone sales team hitting the phones all day long, signing up new restaurant clients over the phone as well. That definitely got easier as more restaurants started warming up to the idea of online ordering.
In the early days, when we first started the company, there were not a lot of restaurants willing to sign up over the phone. But as we grew as a company and started getting the name recognition and the restaurants started knowing who we were before we even called, it made I a little bit easier to sign people up over the phone.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Finally, let’s talk about raising money. Your first bit of money that you got, if I understand right, was from winning a competition, right?
Matt: Yeah. We won $10,000 right before I graduated from college.
Andrew: After my first company, I was invited to judge a lot of these business plan competitions. I don’t know if anyone is listening to me who’s in business plan competitions, I don’t know if they do them anymore, but if they ever get done, take that thing seriously.
Too many people go into those business plan competitions like it’s just another homework assignment and I’m just going to do it because that’s the way life is. You do what you’re told to do. There were a few people just knocking it out of the park at those things. Some of them like you win. Others may not win but boy, they make a huge impression on a room full of people you want to influence.
I’m not just saying it because it’s me there, but they tend to get investors in the room. They get other entrepreneurs in the room, frankly people who are way ahead of the students participating in the room that are worth impressing. Frankly, even if they’re not, it’s about doing well for yourself. Too many people just half-ass everything, especially in school and especially that business plan competition.
Then sometime later–I know we’re kind of skipping ahead–you came to San Francisco expecting what?
Matt: Expecting to get money because that’s where you come to raise capital.
Andrew: And what was it like? What’s the problem with raising money here?
Matt: So, first of all, I went to San Francisco knowing that I wasn’t–for the most part, I was not willing to relocate. Being a first-time entrepreneur, at that time I was 22, maybe 23 years old, investors are not just going to throw you a $1 million check and go back to Wisconsin and do your thing.
What I realized was that if I was going to take capital out from our in San Francisco, I was going to have to be based there. If I was a serial entrepreneur starting another company and had a track record with investors, it would be a different story. What I soon realized was if I wasn’t willing to relocate, which I wasn’t really at that time unless I absolutely had to, it was going to be hard to raise capital in San Francisco.
Andrew: Wow. I can’t believe they make it that hard. That’s the big issue?
Matt: Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe it was partly my pitch, maybe it was partly what our goals where, who knows? But it is generally the thing I kept hearing, which was, “We would like you to be based here if you’re going to do this.” That becomes less and less important as I’ve gone on with raising capital and shown the results and now we have significant revenue coming in the company, significant sales, it’s a different story, but when you’re in the early days and you’re really trying to figure things out, an investor wants to be close to you so they can help you. I get that.
Andrew: And keep an eye on you.
Matt: Keep an eye on you. Yeah. Make sure you’re not just going to Vegas on the weekends and spending all their money.
Andrew: What revenues are you guys doing right now?
Matt: We keep revenues very close to us, mainly because of all the competition that you mentioned. We don’t talk about revenues and GMV.
Andrew: Can you give me a sense of it? We’re definitely talking over $10 million, right?
Matt: Yes.
Andrew: Tell me when it becomes a problem for you to talk openly about it? Can we say it’s over $50 million?
Matt: It’s not over $50 million.
Andrew: It’s not over $50 million, over $10 million though.
Matt: So, you can say it’s somewhere between $10 million and $50 million.
Andrew: Okay. I’m comfortable with that. All right. Why don’t we close out by–did you ever hear my interview with one of your competitors? You’ve got to check that out. There’s so much freaking money in the space. I can’t believe this little thing that you started, knocking door to door is doing well and even though I’ve named some of your competitors or tons of others, they’re making money too.
Matt: It’s a massive industry. So GrubHub in our industry is the biggest. They’re the big public company.
Andrew: That’s the one whose founder I interviewed.
Matt: Okay. Perfect. They’re a very successful company, done very, very well. The majority of their revenue comes from just a few big cities. This market is a huge one. When you have all the delivery orders coming through a platform to local restaurants in a city, it’s significant volume.
So, even GrubHub being the biggest in the country as 40,000 restaurants, there are a million restaurants in the United States, there are a lot more to go. I think the big thing is you’ve got to find your niche and for us, that is tier two markets. No one is really focusing on those cities and that’s why we have decided that is our core focus.
Andrew: I get that, a lot less sexy and full of opportunity.
Matt: All the companies that you talked about raising tons of capital don’t have a presence in our market.
Andrew: Dude, there are like five over here. Every freaking week they’re coming out. They’re all competing for the same thing. You should see Curry Up Now, the company that apply showed in their developer conference. They’re showing Curry Up Now. You go on Curry Up Now there are like 50 different companies in there now all picking up orders of Indian burritos. They’re all competing here and they’re all getting their heads bashed in together.
All right. I like the direction that took it. Before I say goodbye and give your website one more time, I should tell people about one other thing. I freaking love my members. There’s this one piece of software that I used. It’s called Snappa. You ever see those really beautiful images on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter? I’m not just talking about a beautiful image with text on it, but I mean like persuasive, beautiful, well-polished thing that looks like an artist did it.
I found this software called Snappa to do it. The URL is Snappa.io. I played with it, it was so good. I didn’t know the founder. I just emailed the founder a note. I said, “Your software is phenomenal. It’s beautiful and thanks for making a free version available because that’s what allowed me to use it.” He emailed me back and he said, “Andrew, it’s me, it’s Chris. I’m a guy who’s actually a long-time Mixergy fan.”
It’s a guy named Christopher Gimmer, Mixergy fan, Mixergy Premium member and this is what he built. I freaking love it and I’ve got to tell anybody who’s listening out there. He’s not paying me to say this. I really like the software. It’s called Snappa.io. It will create beautiful images for you.
I’m grateful to Chris for what? He let me try it a little bit. I’m grateful to him for that. Frankly, I’m just proud. I’m proud that someone in my audience, especially a Premium member has done it. If you’re curious about what Premium members are up to, there’s a great example of it. So go check it out at Snapp.io.
My two sponsors, of course, the people unlike Chris who have paid me to talk about them and I’ve loved them for a long time and I’ve been customers of at least Toptal and HostGator too, I think–Toptal.com/Mixergy for hiring a developer and HostGator.com/Mixergy when you want to have a website hosted. Even if you’re hosting on a website now, put something together on the side you’ll love them, they’re that good.
Finally, anyone who wants to go check out Matt’s business, we don’t know if it’s in your town, but it’s EatStreet. I’m sure people are actually going to email me and say, “Andrew, it’s in my town. Why do you keep acting like everything outside of whatever city you’re in doesn’t matter?” I do think it matters–EatStreet.com. You should be proud. Your dad must be really proud, right?
Matt: He is. He’s a successful entrepreneur himself. So, he definitely is.
Andrew: I heard about that story. You’re watching television at 3:00 a.m. just hanging out on the couch. He is getting up, going to work and starting this business you mentioned earlier. What as the business?
Matt: It’s actually a machine shop. So, he makes parts for tractors. So, very, very different than what I do at EatStreet. But yes, he works 16 hour days pretty much every day.
Andrew: Wow. Still doing it. Are you going to retire him at some point?
Matt: No. He’ll never retire. There’s no way. I wish he would, but there’s no way he’s going to.
Andrew: I get that. I would like to never retire too. All right. Thank you so much for doing this interview.
Matt: Thank you for having me. It was great.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a apart of Mixergy. Bye everyone.
