![]() (P9) When we announced we were keeping both the GrubHub and Seamless brands, the resounding response was, “Why?” GrubHub was doing a really good job nationwide–but Seamless had incredible brand awareness in New York. So, we can copy what they do and make it better, or we can merge with them. My view on competition is, if someone comes along with an improved product at a cheaper price, then we damn well better do a better job, or we deserve to fail. ![]() Seamless consistently made very smart decisions, both with product and marketing. I would have been loath to say it before we merged, but the companies were similar–we were solving the same problems but in different geographies. (P8) Before the merger, Seamless was our biggest competitor, so I was very aware of what it was doing. In New York City, you’ll see Seamless ads plastered on the subways and buses. It has been a staple of our advertising ever since. We had noticed that the person managing the outdoor ads was really bad at taking them down, so we knew if we bought a month of space, we’d get five. We figured this out when we advertised on mass transit in Chicago. are hungry and very susceptible to our message. People coming home from work around 6 p.m. ![]() (P7) We’re one of the few consumer internet companies for which offline advertising works really well–specifically, at transit hubs. The rest of our sales team is in Chicago and New York City. These days, instead of having managers in each place, we just have people on the ground in our top 10 markets. We ultimately hired a San Francisco manager who physically went to restaurants, signed them up, and built our network. So we had to figure out a way to build a market, drive awareness, and sign up restaurants without having to pay rent. We wanted to be a national company, but we couldn’t afford to put an office in every city in the U.S. We didn’t know the neighborhoods the way we do in Chicago. (P6) Still, expanding to a second market was really difficult, because we weren’t living there. We opened in San Francisco in October 2007 and closed our first capital round that November. People in San Francisco loved it, and investors noticed. The restaurants were really receptive, and the orders started coming in aggressively. So we said, “Screw it! We’re going to do it anyway.” We flew out to San Francisco to sign up restaurants and do guerrilla marketing. The longer they can push you off, the more options they keep open. VCs are slow to say yes, but they’ll never say no. We tried to raise venture capital to do that, but it was taking too long. The next step was expanding to a second city. (P5) We realized we had a really good product that was scalable. Finally we said, “What if we take a 10 percent commission on whatever we sell for you?” Restaurants loved that. They had spent thousands of dollars putting up crappy websites that nobody ever found, so the idea of paying for another site of unknown value wasn’t appealing. But when we started asking restaurants for money, most of them didn’t see the value. We initially charged them $140 for six months of premium placement on our website. We thought restaurants would pay for the ability to capture the attention of hungry people. (P4) Mike and I collected hundreds of menus around my Chicago neighborhood, and he wrote some code. That’s when I heard the screeching wheels in my head: Why wasn’t there something like this for food delivery? At the time, we were working on geographic lookup searches for rental real estate. We were frustrated by the lack of dinner options as well as the pain in the ass of calling restaurants and reading our credit cards. The eureka moment for GrubHub came when Mike and I were working as developers for. (P3) Innovation works best when there’s a problem to solve. And, if he gets his way, no one will ever have to phone for a pizza again. In April, Maloney, who is CEO of the combined company, led GrubHub to a successful IPO. It also merged with competitor Seamless (another Inc. 500 in 20, GrubHub hit $137 million in revenue in 2013. In 2004, he and co-worker Mike Evans launched GrubHub, an online food-ordering service, in Chicago. (P2) It was just another hungry late night at work, but Matt Maloney sensed an opportunity. (P1) GrubHub co-founder Matt Maloney took his Chicago food ordering service from scrappy startup to a public company worth $3 billion. How I Did It: Matt Maloney of GrubHub and Seamless
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