StartUs Presents: Feast

Describe Feast in 50 words or less.

Feast is London‘s Late Night Delivery Service. In partnership with the best 24-hour restaurants, we deliver a variety of different cuisines at times you can’t get it anywhere else.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

I worked as a journalist and TV news reader for several years before I started Feast, and as challenging and exciting as that work was, I never felt like I was fully in control. When you’re working for someone else you’re always dependent on them to see your potential and to give you the space and freedom to achieve that. And in the big media institutions waiting for that can take many years. I’m also impatient and a believer that actions speak louder than words, so when I realised there was a big niche out there for nighttime food delivery, and came up with the concept for Feast, I just went for it.

7 years from now: How did your startup change the world?

London currently has a terrible 24 hour culture, I mean truly terrible. 11pm onwards is drunk idiot territory, and a time to be at home sheltering from the dangerous conditions outside. But in 7 years I’d like to be able to look back and think that Feast played a role in changing that. The Night Tube is about to launch which will stay open 24 hours on Fridays and Saturdays, and gradually I think we’re seeing a changing of perceptions that London’s services after 11pm really do need to improve. Currently bars and pubs close at 10.30 most nights, restaurant kitchens likewise, and if you want to get home anytime past midnight it’s an expensive taxi. This is despite London having a booming financial sector which works into the early hours every night, and a vibrant student and party scene, and a massive number of tourists coming every year. These are all people who want a better provision of services at night. And it’s these people we want to cater for, and solve the current problem of an incredible dearth of food options after 11pm.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

We’re in the very early stages of the company at the moment, so I measure success on growing week on week. Getting more sales in, and ensuring that each and every delivery is absolutely perfect and arrives on time. An easy way to see if you’re on the right track is obviously the number of repeat orders you get. In our first month 40% of our sales were repeat purchases, so hopefully that’s a sign that people like our product.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

It’s certainly not your conventional 9 – 5! I’ll usually get in around 10pm and phone round all of our restaurants checking that everything is fine and that there isn’t anything we need to take off the menu. Then I’ll call up our drivers just to check they’re all fine. Then it’s a bit of social media reminding everyone that we’re opening. And from 11pm to 5am it’s tracking all the orders as they come in and ensuring the drivers are aware of which deliveries they need to make, and of where they need to go. Then it’s home to bed by around 6am.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the late night food delivery service like you imagined it in the beginning?

So I had always envisaged a lot of the places we’d targeted in the months prior to launching would have been using us. We emailed/made connections/had meetings with lots of people who worked at the big investment banks and law firms in the city, as I know they often stay late working on big deals. However what we found was that in the summer months the city really slows down, and there are fewer people staying until the early hours. A lot of our first orders actually came from other entrepreneurs who had read about us and were interested to find out what we were doing. We also have quite a few customers who are up late and hungry and have found us on google. It’s really good to see that because I had always thought there were many people out there craving a takeaway at 2am, so it’s proof that the market for this really does exist.

Bootstrapped or financed: What fuels your startup now and what will in the future?

Currently we’re unfunded so very much bootstrapped. The beauty of the business model though is that the only costs we have are the delivery drivers wages. We don’t yet have or need an office, and we don’t make the food or buy the packaging, so it’s not that cost heavy. But we obviously need funding to continue to expand, so we’re looking for seed funding at the moment.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

A friend who works in marketing told me a great line: when everyone else zigs, zag. The food delivery market in the UK has exploded in the last 18 months or so. Every day you hear about a new delivery company opening up, or a current one that has raised x millions in their latest funding round. The good thing for us is that they’re all competing with each other for that main daytime market. I truly believe we’ve zagged and zagged well. I honestly can’t think of a competitor that does anything similar to us. After all, who’d be crazy enough to stay up all night every night of the week?

What do you look for in team members?

Ambition, creativity and a team ethic. I’ve always railed against convention for convention’s sake. If something doesn’t make sense or isn’t working you shouldn’t have to keep doing it just because it’s what has always happened. The whole reason we started Feast was because there was a problem that needed solving. We want our team to have that same attitude: This isn’t working so let’s try something new and see if it works.

Why would a talent join your team?

We’re really keen to promote in-house and believe that builds a good environment in which people want to strive to be better. We also give great benefits to staff including a small stake in the company. Finally and probably most importantly, if you have ambitions to start your own company, there’s no better learning process than working at one first, and seeing first hand how it’s done.

What was your most memorable moment so far?

The biggest high point was probably the day we secured two corporate accounts with big law firms, which instantly doubled the number of orders we were getting. The low point: For the first few weeks, when we weren’t getting that many sales in, I delivered the orders myself by push bike with a delivery box on the front. It meant I could talk to the customer and find out where they heard about us etc. Except one day I got to work and saw someone had put another lock on my bike, and let down the tires, obviously with the intention of stealing it later. I had to do the deliveries by Boris Bike that night… Not fun at all.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

Actions speak louder than words. All that time you’re talking about something you could be doing it. All that time you spend crafting the perfect business plan or developing sales projections on Excel that will never come true, could be time spent actually testing your product. Get out there and see what works and what doesn’t, you’ll learn a lot more that way. Finally and most importantly be persistent, don’t compromise and believe in what you’re doing.