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Investors have been feeding frenzy over food-delivery app start-ups in the past decade. But the external turbulence due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has put the global markets in a precarious state. This has affected stocks in publically traded food delivery platforms like Postmates, Grubhub, Zomato, Swiggy; thus turning the tables for the restaurant delivery partners who confidentially filed to go public in early 2020.
Shares for startup food delivery service have been trading below its initial pricing. Investors have been spooked with tapering off the funding with subtle market issues. And as it is preset beforehand that the capital accrues to the winners in the markets that people think are growing. Even as the investors invest in every funding round of the series, they are pretty much sure that a company, or let’s say a food delivery startup wouldn’t just get the funding for the sake that there is a lot of money floating in the system but as the market recovers these international food delivery app companies have to beware of the competitors as they may come from behind and win.
The article will have everything you need to know about Doordash, including the how does DoorDash work, how does DoorDash make money and technology stack to build apps like Doordash. Get started with the basics information, i.e. what is DoorDash?
Doordash is an on-demand restaurant food delivery app. It is named after dashers – the delivery guys who work in flexible shifts and get good tips. It was founded by four Stanford students and raised $60 million with a reported valuation of nearly $600 million. DoorDash spent 18 months developing its delivery service in Silicon Valley before entering the crowded San Francisco market. It can now be used to order food in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington.
Combining the basic functionality of an on-demand food delivery app, DoorDash has additional scaled its merchant engineering teams to meet new challenges. It has a new prediction service that applies its models to the data and serves various microservices that rely on data-driven insights. It empowers and personalizes the customer experience by implementing machine learning models on massive amounts of data to quickly generate large-scale predictions. This essentially curates search results, assigns dashers, recognizes fraud and more.
Their team has also introduced CUPAC (Control Using Predictions As Covariates) to reduce extraneous noise in online controlled experiments, thereby accelerating DoorDash’s experimental velocity. The rapid experimentation is essential to helping DoorDash’s push key performance metrics forward. Whether it is about improving their store feed ranking, optimizing the efficiency of their logistics system, or evaluating new marketing campaigns, it’s critical for DoorDash to maintain a robust experimentation methodology to ensure that the new releases improve business metrics in production.
| Founded | July, 2013 |
| Headquarters location | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founders | Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Evan Moore, Stanley Tang |
| Subsidiaries | Caviar, Scotty Labs, Inc. |
| Revenue | $1.9 billion (Nov 2020) |
| Number of employees | 3,279 (2020) |
| Area Served | Australia, Canada, United States |
| Amount Raised By funding | $700 million |
| Partnerships | Walmart – In April 2018, Mercato – in August 2019, Walgreens – In July |
| July, 2013 | Founded |
| October, 2013 | Received $2.4 million funding |
| May, 2014 | Amount Raised $17.3 million in Series A funding |
| March, 2015 | Amount Raised $40 million in Series B funding |
| March, 2016 | Amount Raised $127 million in Series C funding |
| September, 2017 | DoorDash Acquired Rickshaw |
| March, 2018 | Amount Raised $535 million in Series D funding |
| Aug, 2018 | Amount Raised $250 million in Series E funding |
| Feb, 2019 | Amount Raised $400 million in Series F funding |
| May, 2019 | Amount Raised $600 million in Series G funding |
| August, 2019 | Acquires Caviar, Scotty Labs |
| October, 2019 | DoorDash started its first DoorDash Kitchen in Redwood City, CA |
| September and October 2020 | Yum Brands’ KFC and Taco Ball announced partnerships with DoorDash |
Apps like Doordash has been taking chances to become the delivery ducky as it rose down funding round after investors lowered the shared price followed by raising the market share as its shares surpassed those of Postmates and Uber Eats in the U.S. DoorDash now has an extra $600 million in firepower to continue gaining market share in the U.S. and Canada, the only two markets in which it operates. As the investors predict, the money with Doordash will not be going into fuelling a price war with the rivals, rather the focus is on the market expansion and their next billion-dollar project – Doordash Drive which will be at par with businesses like Walmart. Considering the fact that their growth hasn’t come through the discounts, and this being the premier reason why the investors have continued approaching them in an excessive mode (2018 through the 2020).
The features in a food delivery app depend upon the number of the modules:
| Customer App Features | Admin Panel Features | Courier App Features |
|---|---|---|
| Registration And Creating A Profile | Registration & Profile Management | Registering And Editing The Profile Once Again |
| Search And Find Food Easily | Order Assigning | Managing Orders |
| Checking The Restaurant Profile | Dashboard | Navigation And GPS Tracking |
| Add The Food To Cart | Managing The Content | Status Update |
| Schedule the Orders | Managing The Orders | Wallet Feature |
| Delivery Person’s Contact Info | Accounts & Management | Delivery History |
| Make It Easy to Pay | Sending Out Push Notifications | |
| Order History | Loyalty Campaign, Offers, And Deals | |
| Track The Food, Real-Time | Analytics | |
| Rating And Reviewing The Food | ||
| Offers, Promos Coupons | ||
| Push Notifications |
Apps like Doordash serves by delivering from restaurants to customer’s doorstep and for each delivery they receive a 20% commission from restaurants. To be on top of the restaurant’s list for a limited time, for popping up in advanced search, DoorDash charges a certain commission. DoorDash also hires its own drivers who are popularly known as Dashers. The delivery rate however depends upon the distance of travel and how far will a dasher delivers. DoorDash’s tie-ups with the restaurants in consideration, but the average delivery fee that they charge is $5 – $8 / order.
Also read: Grubhub Business Model
| For Application and Data | JavaScript, Python, nginx, React, CloudFlare, Java, Redis, TypeScript, Django, AmazonCloudFront, Redux, AWS Lambda, Swift, Kotlin, Retool |
| Utilities | Google Analytics, Stripe, Twilio SendGrid, Optimizely, Segment |
| DevOps | GitHub, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Webpack, NewRelic, Yarn, Sentry |
| Business Tools | Jira, GSuite, AdRoll |
Customers do have options scattered in front of them when it comes to ordering food online, but they truly know what really makes them feel happy. As we focus on much loved all-time-favourite On-Demand Food Delivery Apps, our development experts take a leap over the best technologies in the market and seamlessly integrate customer’s choices with the best budget and timeline options to devise top on-demand food delivery apps like Doordash. Discuss your app idea with us.
Manish Jain is the co-founder and Managing Director at Konstant Infosolutions. He is responsible for the overall operations of the company and has played a major role in bringing Konstant up from its humble beginnings and, with his immense energy and drive, transforming it into a globally trusted name in IT solutions.
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