Alright… So I have three hacks with me—one that is not like specifically a growth hack as such, or like in sales, but more like hacks when you do a startup. I have three different kinds with me. But I think that what I will speak about is more like, you know… so we’ve heard examples of how to growth hack and you can learn from that, but I think what I want to say about it is how we do growth hacking in our company, OrderYOYO because we do it all the time. It’s part of our culture and it’s about being creative and so on. So it’s more like how we, in everyday life, almost when we need to launch to get first in line, how you hack to get the best out of it. It’s a lot about creativity. So it’s kind of like saying “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” but you know, we find a hack because we’ve got so many challenges in our path so far that we just had to hack our way through things. Otherwise, it will be too slow. One slide and a couple of numbers, and that’s all about OrderYOYO. But OrderYOYO is a company that is disrupting the takeaway market. And it’s a long story and you will probably say, well, there’s Just Eat, and so on.
So what I normally say is that we are just like Just Eat but we are very different. So, think about Just Eat and we are completely different because what we do is a white label system. 85% of all takeaway orders come from returning clients. So think about it. Not the young ones who live on Amagerbrogade and so on, who like to go everywhere and get a kebab and something like that, but those of you who are a little more steady than that. You order your food normally from two, maybe three places. You take your pizza from that guy, and your sushi from Japan Sushi or Sticks’n’Sushi, or whatever. People tend to go to the same places and 85% of all orders come from the same returning clients for every takeaway. So why do they tell them to go back to the portal every time?
If you look at e-commerce, how it works, you will buy a lead. You hear about it all the time here, or on Facebook—you buy a lead and then you bring them on, and then it’s your customer. You don’t send them back. If I want to buy a t-shirt, I go to Google and I search and I end at Solanda—I buy a t-shirt. So what Solanda tell you afterward? “Please go back to Google next time, search for us, and find us?” And you’re laughing but that’s how the takeaway industry was until now. They keep going back and those poor fellows, you know, the ones who are making your food, are paying 20—30, actually 35% sometimes for every order, every time, even though they’ve ordered before. Some of you have maybe tried and your pizza guy will tell you, “Could you please call me next time? It’s better.” And who calls anymore?
What has happened is that Just Eat has matured this market and now everybody—like, look at the development we saw… there were horses and now there are cars, and now there are smartphones. Everybody orders on the phone. A lot of them, anyway. And that has gone in five, ten minutes. It’s changed from the phone to just ordering on your… You know. And those poor pizza bakers, they couldn’t follow along so they just gave it to Just Eat and Deliveroo and so on. And all of a sudden, they have taken over. We are changing that. We are making their own app and their own website, and they get the whole thing in a package-free, and then they pay on average 500 kroner a month. And they love it because they can save 20—30% on every order. That’s the short version.
Right. So, a lot has happened with the company in the last 12 months because one month ago—sorry, one year ago it really took off. This baby is like 3 years old, but one year ago it really took off. We went from… last summer we were at two employees; now we have 70. We had 20 restaurants; now we have 1,500. Everybody’s got an app. So we made 1,000—well, it’s 400 now—apps in app stores. If you go to the app store—don’t do that now, but if you go to the app store and you search for OrderYOYO, you will get 1,400 hits. It’s on Android and it’s native-made. it’s not like samlebånd or something. It’s real native apps. I think this month we’ll be getting 40,000 orders and we are in three countries, and we are Seed Capital’s fastest-growing company, the thirties. We got all the money from them, also the last option and the fastest. I got their investment in November and then already in February I called them and said, “Now I need you to give me the rest of the money.” And they said, “It never happened like that before; we have two years, we could just sit back and wait.” And I said, “Who wants to wait? Let’s go.” So, it took me six months to call the option. I got the rest of the money in June. It’s even faster than Viveno and Trustpilot. Everybody likes that, so I want to keep up with that. And we got some money. The way we look at it, it’s like we have made a sausage factory; and maybe that’s the wrong word. What I really mean is that we made a very, very lean kind of way, the way we work. Everybody in the company is working and they know exactly what to do.
We are getting a lot of cold leads. We have a sales guy selling, we’ve got someone to do the production of all the apps, we’ve got someone to onboard the clients, we do some advertisement for them, and in the end, we have some really cool clients who are getting a lot of orders through the system we made for them. And there is like this assembly line—let’s call it that. We call it a sausage factory but it may be another word for chaos and it’s not. Everybody works very efficiently. But then we are focusing on things all the way. It used to be that it took us two to three hours to make every app, and now it takes us less than 15 minutes. So we hack the problems that we meet in different ways. Some of them are just like “Let’s try that and then do that.” I have a team of people sitting outside looking in and seeing where is the bottleneck right now, or where are we spending too much money on doing stuff? Then they try something, they take maybe five clients out in April… they take those five clients out, they try to do things in a different way, and if it works, they implement another way to do it, another wheel in the assembly line to make it more efficient. And it is really working well like this. Right now we’re getting 200 clients, 200 restaurants, mostly in the UK, into our system every month. And they all get an app, they all get a web, they all get running, and we are converting their customers from Just Eat, Hungryhouse, Deliveroo to this platform—then they save so much money. We are saving our restaurants, on average, 17,000 pounds every year. That’s a lot of money for them and that’s how we do it.
There are so many things we did, like using robots to crawl Google to find the most interesting restaurants in an area. So, if you say, “I want pizza, Liverpool,” then you have a search result and I use Stixy, which is also a seed investment of their robots, so we can just have that go and search for all the cities in the UK and all the pizza places. And then the top branded ones are the ones that we want because they have a great brand. And then those leads are given to callers and they start closing their clients. But there are so many things we do… Actually… Growth is not the problem, so we haven’t done that many hacks. It’s more like how we produce things and how we onboard the customers of the pizza places. That’s how we hacked a lot. There is another thing that’s funny which came to my attention. When I started Language Wire, like 17 years ago… so, you’re getting old, that’s one thing we realized, but another thing is that we’re working days now, and not like months or even years. Things need to happen now. And one of the places is how we hire people—and I’ll get back to that. It’s really… you know…
We are actually building a new app right now and we talked to another startup company in Denmark, that we needed their technology. And we had a great meeting because we’re doing a lot of manual things with some Indian guys. I don’t know what you call them, but guys living in India. So, not Indians; but Indians—but guys in India. So, they are doing things for us and we wanted to make that more efficient, and then we had a meeting with this Danish startup, and we said: “This is great, when can we meet?” “Yes, it’s going to take us a couple of months to build that.” And that’s just… Months? You know, like a couple of months from now, everything is different. What really is very different is that things happen really fast and, if it is not fast, we will hack it so we can find a way. It’s really amazing how fast the team is working right now. We are talking days or even hours to make things happen. So, I have three hacks for you…
The way we hire people—and I’ve actually taught this to many people now, so you’ll see the way we hire people, many others have copied that now, how we do it. And then I have a startup hack that you can just use, not just when you do a startup but also when you do things—like, don’t think about efficiency, just get going, and so on. And then a little growth hack.
So, this is how we hire. There is a saying now in our company. If someone is saying, “I can’t make the deadline,” get an intern. Now. This is how we do it. And we have hired more than 30 of those, maybe even 40 interns. We have 70 people—thirty and 40 of those interns. And, of course, they don’t get a lot of money, like 5,000 kroner. That’s standard, and that’s not a lot of money, I get it. But some of them are upgraded after two weeks. Some of them are managers in the company today and they’ve been with us maybe a month, maybe a year. It’s a super great way to get people in, check them out. The way we do it, and this is… We don’t do it that much anymore because now those 30 or 40 have student friends and they just come in, so now we don’t have to do this anymore. But you should really do this because… So, if someone comes… This is back in May and so on, and then people come to me and say, “I can’t, you know… Now we are getting a hundred clients a month and how should I do this?” I say, “Let’s get an intern.” So, the same evening, I posted this on Facebook and this intern meets startup.
This is a great group Nivla has started. And then I made a doodle; you can’t see this, but I made a doodle, so I have four interviews tomorrow: 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, and 11:30. The first one gets it, first served. And it’s closed. It took me 15 minutes when I posted this, and I always did it late at night, so I would only get the ones who were not like gone to sleep too early. I always did this at 12:00 or half-past 11:00 or something, always. The ones who, you know, they want something… And then it took me 15 minutes. And then those four interviews were booked for the next day. Then the next day, 10:00, the first one came; they got 20 minutes and fine, bye-bye. And then the next one, the next one, and the next one. No CVs, no emails, no communication. Then, after those four are done, I will call the one I like the most, sometimes maybe there’s actually two, so I just hire them both and I say, “Can you start tomorrow? Bring your own computer.” And they all did. So from today, it took me two days and then I have some fresh hands.
So what do I need to do? I Google hours. Fine. I’ll do that. Like that. This has really been working a lot. This is one of our secrets and I’d like to share it and just go and cover this. Do copy, paste with all of you, and whatever your company is. Just do it because you get such bright people. Because we are 70 people. I think we are five Danish guys, and one guy from Jutland. So maybe six, and that’s it. The rest are people from around Europe and even Asia and we’ve got one from the U.S. And I really like this in the company because right now we want to expand and go global and it’s great to have people from… But it’s also students who chose to go to Denmark. It’s another kind of people, I think, who are already not like the average in their country but they came here because they want to have a better life or a better study, or just want to see the world. Those are the kind of people who are in the company now. I really don’t like hiring Danish people because, right now, if I am to hire Danish people they say, “Yeah, I’m fresh out of the academy, I just searched on Google, I should get 35,000.” Are you crazy? I’ll get seven people for that. Seven. So we don’t do that so much. Of course, these are not managers from day one; and of course, we also hire, you know, managers on another level. But we get a lot of these guys. Or India. Those guys are cheap too. We use a company in India where you can get a full-time person for 7,000 kroner managed and they do all sorts of things for us; it’s super cool. It’s full time. Those guys are part-time, but India is full time 7,000. You should really do that. It’s like this book called Four Hour Work Week or something. He’s onto something. Let them work. I mean, and then…
My other startup hack… And this is… Every time I do a startup education, I go out and I always use this one because, if you want to start up something, you should really get five clients right away. Super quickly, get five clients. Everybody with an idea like, hey, couldn’t it be great? Let’s develop something… Two years later, you come out or you don’t do anything at all. It’s super important that you today get five clients. And then people say it’s not possible, but it is. Go sell it before you have it. Even, people, if you’re like “I wonder if I can make a flying bike.” You just go out and make a landing page and go on Google for AdWords or Facebook and just sell it. And if you get like 10 hits an hour, you’re onto something. So, before you build something, go out and see if there’s a need for it before you build it. This thing is like, “I wonder if I can sell good coffee here. I wonder.” Instead of buying a super cool brown coffee machine that can take coins and everything, you just buy some paper thing here, and then you make two holes; one it says to put in money and on the other one, out comes coffee, and I will be in here myself. I borrow a coffee machine from someone, I go to a 7/11, I buy a very expensive coffee. You say, why don’t you buy cheap? It doesn’t matter. Because it’s quick. It’s open right now and can get started. So I can sell a coffee here in an hour. I can start in an hour. Maybe even before you leave the building.
And there are three things, let me see if I can remember—but there’s like three things good about this. I can start really quickly; it’s cheap to get started because it costs like 100,000 to get a really good vending machine with everything and even coins and so on, so it’s really quick; I accept almost all payments or almost any currency. I don’t care, because it’s just one big hole, you just throw it in. But the most important thing about that one is actually the market input. Because if I did this and they say “Oh, I normally do speeches.” There are many foreign people, I would say, “Coffee, five kroner, put it in here,” and then coffee comes out here. Then an Indian guy will say, “Hm, where’s the tea?” And I would hear this. “Ah, he wants tea.” And then the next day I’ll have tea. Then they come, “Where’s the goulash? I’m hungry.” Fuck, I’ll have some goulash tomorrow. And if I had a vending machine, I would never get that input, and that is the most important face in a startup; that is the product-market fit face. That is where your product hits the market and you listen and it is missing a red button, or its missing tea, and you would know about it. That’s why someone before me said that the founder has to go and sell his space in the beginning; it’s because you need that feedback to change your product for the right product-market fit. And it doesn’t matter that that was, “Oh my god, its 45 kroner used in 7/11—I can get that across the border for like 20.” It doesn’t matter in the beginning.
When I started OrderYOYO, I called Søren Nissen from Dreyern and said, “Who do you use for credit cards?” He said, “Braintree.” Great. I went to Braintree and you can get started for free. Just get started. They have an API screen to use. Oh, my god! I love it! Let’s go! But then it was super expensive. It cost two kroner per transaction and two percent every time. Right now we’re getting 40,000 orders a month; that’s a lot of money. So I called him again and I said, “Are you crazy? It’s so expensive.” He said, “What are you paying?” And he gave me some really good prices. I said, “All right, cool, man, we’ll get there.” Because I don’t have the bargaining power right now, but I will get there. So we just started with it because I knew that the big guys are getting it much cheaper, so we knew that, you know, that would happen. Then I started negotiating with them and I did a really bad job because we’re not that big yet. Last year, I got 10-20 percent off, and then I just got a new head of finance guy and he’s a really tough negotiator, so he managed—even though I did this—to cut our prices with 75 percent overnight. So we saved like 80,000 a month from that day. That was in August. So that just says…
So my point is—just get started, get your clients, and then make your company more efficient later on. It’s a good idea to know that you get there with like “I have an idea.” Just get going and don’t spend time on lawyers or stuff, just get going. Otherwise, you know, you will never start. And our growth hack—and there’s a lot of things here, but one of our biggest [inaudible]… We have many challenges along the way. One thing we had as a challenge was that it was so easy for us to make the hack eventually—sorry, the app and the website, and everything… Then we came to a challenge in the spring when we found out that, even though we gave great apps to this pizza guy and we gave him the web and everything, we needed for his existing clients or new clients to start using the system. And this was a pizza guy, so he knew nothing about AdWords and the like. And he got a lot of orders coming through Just Eat and so on. We needed to help him do that. And then we thought there are three ways we can get his customers. This is like business-to-business-to-consumer.
We need his customers to start ordering on the system that we built for him. And we could get new customers, like someone who has never ordered there before. That’s a little pricy. Then we could try non-portal customers, those are the ones who like to call. And we had to change that behavior. You can take the ones who already ordered on an app that was called Just Eat and just convert them. It was easy actually because those guys like to give a discount because they’re paying 20-30 percent anyways at Just Eat so when they’re playing with us, and they only pay a small fee every month, they like to get a 10 or 20 or 15 percent offer deal or free delivery or something. All we had to do is tell those customers now there’s, you know, “I got my own app.” So we did a lot of great [inaudible]. And we’re still doing a lot of great things like stickers every time there is an order, so it’s really beautiful like that. When you order from Just Eat and you make an order, and it comes to a pizza guy and often it’s the pizza guy himself who delivers out, he even makes a little flyer there saying “Thank you for your order, next time download my app and save 10 percent.” Why don’t you do that? That really worked!
We had some of our customers doing SMS—that really worked. But then we got a letter from Just Eat saying, “We don’t like that.” So we don’t do that so much anymore, but it’s a really cool hack. Because if you take those 500 customers who order from Just Eat and Juventus Pizza, and you send them an SMS, and maybe Forbrugerombudsmanden doesn’t like it but it really is a great idea… and you send them an SMS saying “Hello, this is from Juventus Pizza where you ordered 100 times before and we, of course, like you, and now we’ve got an app and you can save 10 percent or 20 percent the next month. Do it.” Then there’s a link for downloading. That was really good; that was almost too good of a hack. And it was too good, so some lawyers didn’t like it and maybe for Forbrugerombudsmanden would come [inaudible]. We slowed that down a little bit. In England, it’s not that dangerous. So it’s a really good hack.
But then we do other things—like stickers—and now we are testing, you know. Maybe it can even pay off that the ones who ordered, we got their address so we can send them a letter saying “Hello, you normally order from Just Eat…” The point is here that we have customers, I mean we have our customers’ customers, people like you, who have ordered more than 200 times in one year from one place. And maybe a little bit [inaudible]. I haven’t checked him, he might be [inaudible]. But his name is Ronny, he’s in Valby. I don’t know if you know him. We laugh about him a lot. But he’s a great customer. He has ordered more than 200 times from the same place. That’s 25,000 kroner of pizzas in one year. If that would have been Just Eat, where he ordered before, that restaurant would have paid 5,000 kroner back to Just Eat just for handling that order. So we do that now for a small fee every month. That is the business.
The way we make traffic… we found out, we tested so many things, and we still do this, but this one is really good if we can get access to that in a legal way and do it right, and so on. It’s really worked well. Oh, that’s a lot… So… this slide I won’t show you because then you will read it and you shouldn’t. But my point is that creativity is a huge thing for our company. It’s a big thing to try to find another way, a cheaper way, a quicker way. “Couldn’t we… Shouldn’t we…?” Stuff like that. One of the hacks we have is simply to get people to do it. Oh, my gosh! You want me to do this all the time? Just get some people in. They can just do it. Or some Indians or something. They’ll just do it. So just get going.
Then I got, how do you say… the philosophy thing, because this thing is something that Lars just put on LinkedIn, sorry, Facebook last week and he was thinking about why do we have so much success in the west. We were so much behind and we’re only 10 percent of the world population and so on. And it’s amazing what the west or what Europe has achieved in the west. It’s amazing! If you look at the top 50 high-rank restaurants and biotech and everything, we’ve got it all. And why? He blamed it all on creativity and so on. That’s why it’s so important to lift it. In our company, it is allowed to do anything, just try it. Take five of our clients and go crazy on it. Just try something, just do it. And then do AP testing, like if I did it with paper, I did it with SMS, I did it with [inaudible]. What works? Another thing now, and we’re talking about, you know, what makes a successful startup… There is a tip you should see from this guy called Bill Cross, and it’s really interesting. It’s 10—15 minutes… where he statistically goes in and looks at what makes the success of a startup. Because the funny thing is that in every startup, even our company, there are so many other people doing it at the right time, at the same time. YouTube—many people tried that. Uber—they were not the first to do that. There are so many! Every time someone said “I got a unique idea, it’s my idea,” there are 100 people doing the same right then, all over Europe, all over the world.
Why do some make it and why do some not make it? What is the most important factor? They looked at five things like the idea, the team, the business model, funding, and timing. And the interesting part is that it is the timing that is the most important thing. That’s bad because if you’re born in the wrong [inaudible]. But it just says something about that. Of course, the team is important and, of course, the idea is good and so on, but the right timing is super important. And the reason why he said [inaudible]. He was an investor. He invested in a copy of YouTube but five or ten years before YouTube. And the problem there was that the internet wasn’t good enough in the U.S. So he put on a lot of videos but people couldn’t upload and download and watch because the internet wasn’t good enough. So it was bad timing. And then YouTube came just at the right time. Airbnb was born in the financial crisis when people wanted to save money and it’s cheaper to rent a bed or a room at someone [inaudible]. So that was just at the right edge of that. Maybe also Uber. I don’t know. But it’s just the right timing.
I believe that with OrderYOYO, now is the perfect timing because people are getting used to the internet, they already order on the phone, and now they can get it cheaper and everybody is happy. If I started OrderYOYO 10 years ago, we couldn’t have done it. Even though the smartphone may have been there five years ago, it wasn’t mature. But now, half of all the orders are online and so on, now it makes a big deal. If we were to educate the market to stop ordering on the web, that would be too much of a job. Now we’re just asking to do another app or another website—that is much, much easier. I think that was it. Right? Thank you!
