From Selling Scoops of Ice Cream to Founding ZeroCater | Hacker News Reader

From Selling Scoops of Ice Cream to Founding ZeroCater

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276 pointsrguzman42 comments

Arram followed the advice I normally give people applying to startups for non-technical jobs that have no relevant experience: he prepared tremendously for his interview and actually came with real suggestions on things we should do, and visualized himself in the position. On paper, he wasn't someone we would have considered (his previous experience was as a security guard and ice cream scooper with no college degree). But, out of all the candidates, Arram was the only one who had prepared as if he had already gotten the job and was going over first steps.

We actually ended up hiring someone else as the community manager, but I was impressed with Arram and wanted to find a place for him at Justin.tv, so we created the "grab bag of unwanted tasks." While he fluctuated between doing those things well and sometimes not as well, he became a contributing member of the team.

Because we were paying Arram not so much, I told him he should start doing the lunch ordering for a few friends' companies for some side cash, and pretty soon after he came to me and told me he was quitting.

Out of all the people who have "graduated" from Justin.tv, I'm most proud of Arram. His drive to start a company is incredible, and he's done it despite the odds. Proud to say I'm an investor in ZeroCater and I think he's going to make me some money as well.

Reading inspiring stories like this makes me realize how much of entrepreneurship is about taking risks rather than hard work. Moving to another place with a few thousand dollars in your pocket, quitting a stable job without a firm idea in mind, figuring things out as you go.

There may have been dozens of well prepared and hard working candidates available that day, but probably none were out of job and interviewing for Justin.tv at the time Arram was. There are also always tons of people working at perfectly great jobs, but a very few of us have the gut to stop working and forge a company built on nothing but determination to succeed.

You're first step is to switch mindsets.

You see it as taking risks versus hard work, then placing value on them.

I see taking risk just hard work. Just $500 left in my checking account? Work harder. No college degree? Work harder. Work hard to be able to take risks.

Everything else will be crystal clear thereafter.

> taking risks rather than hard work.

it's both. and appetite for risk is not the belief that nothing bad will happen, it's the belief that you will be able to handle anything that happens, no matter how bad. it's being at peace with the fact that bad things will happen.

most people live their entire lives trying to avoid bad situations that don't exist in reality, but rather live in their imaginations. in my opinion they are completely delusional.

a lot of entrepreneurs have been totally broke or were poor in the past - in my mind, this is what allows them to continually take risks. they know exactly what it's like being broke and struggling, it's not a mystery. it has no power over them. they simply don't care if they end up going broke. they know what it is, and how to climb back out.

"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." - Mark Twain

That's stoicism.

When you had him book orders for your friends, did you see it as a business opportunity, or just a problem that needed solving?

I saw it as a business opportunity for him, but I thought it would be a much smaller business.

Thanks for responding - I've been wondering about this ever since I heard the story behind ZeroC. It adds a different sort of color to things, and shows that you were trying to help him reach his goal of doing a startup the whole time. Kudos.

I always chuckle when I hear "MVP" in the same sentence as a RoR/node.js stack, complicated monetization strategies and A/B testing.

A bank account and a Google Docs spreadsheet. That's MVP.

Bang on. I would probably extend it to include the email-first startup strategy that was posted here by Sachin of Posterous fame a while ago. Since ZeroCater provides a physical service to companies and is located in SF Bay Area with a uniquely high density of companies it probably doesn’t apply here, but I can imagine some form of a computerized sign up is needed for other MVPs.

I can imagine some form of a computerized sign up is needed for other MVPs

Believe it or not, services businesses did actually exist before CRM software and online signup forms. The SF Bay Area does not have a uniquely high density of companies. You can totally do spiritually-similar things to this.

A spiritually similar example: Appointment Reminder didn't actually exist in summer 2010, but I had a two-page demo of it set up. I got $400 out of an ATM when I went home to Chicago to visit, and just wandered around the Gold Coast/Magnificent Mile region of the city looking for every hair salon and massage therapy practice I could find. I asked them all if I they took walk-ins and, if so, could I have 30 minutes of the owner's time for whatever the rate was ($30 or so). In lieu of the shoulder massage/etc, I said "I'm interested in the massage therapy industry. Would you mind if we just chatted for half an hour about it?" And I asked about how they handled scheduling, appointments, no-shows, etc etc. I also did a demo of my two-page AR mini-app on the iPad and asked if they would be interested in buying it when it was ready.

I think only one person actually accepted my money for the interviews. I got five-ish "Please tell me when that is ready" out of a dozen or so conversations. No Bay Area or signup form required. (I put their emails in a paper notebook. And lost it prior to launch. Whoopsie.)

This was mostly successful for me: it confirmed that there was a market willing to pay for AR without me needing to actually build it to demonstrate that. (My sampling technique, which found only massage therapists/hair salons, did sort of lead me off the rails as to who I'd eventually end up targeting for most of the business. D'oh.)

Haha, great story, thanks for sharing the walk-in appointment idea. Sorry about your notebook though. This does change how I used to think about validating ideas. Email signups and fancy landing pages can be replaced by personally going over, handing out business cards, and pitching your ideas whenever you get a chance like it says in the original post.

Amazing the amount of useful information you can get just walking around town talking to people :)

Who did you end up targeting?

That's a long story. Suffice it to say that I have more exterminators as clients than massage therapists -- apparently when a client forgetting an appointment means your three employees just drove 45 minutes to get locked out of a house that irks (and costs) more than just having to play Angry Birds until you get a walk-in.

Where's the P? Don't you have to build something for it to be considered a [P]roduct? Where is the line between MVP and just prospecting?

From the comments section, by Arram himself: "Learn to program people. A lot of that pain was unnecessary."

Exactly!! This is very true

A Startup has nothing to do with a 'node.js/RoR/GoOnSkis/etc' stack or computes. The association is statistical rather than structural.

The business comes first.

Of course programming helps and saves pain. But my money is on the business knowledge first.

Yes, the 'computer people' like to bash the business people, and it is often true that sometimes they have bad ideas or act like they know the business when they don't. This is like the tech specialists thinking a product will sell only based on its tech specs.

I've been in the Valley for around 15 years, and I'm not someone that revels in job perks. Sure everyone loves perks, but I prefer a great work environment, and interesting work, etc, over things like snacks, X-boxes, etc.

That being said, my current employer has Zerocater and I freaking love it more than any other perk in any job I've had. Sure, maybe 1 out of every 5 meals isn't a winner, but I still really really love it. I wouldn't come close to quitting my job if we couldn't afford Zerocater anymore, but I would be sorely disappointed, because the convenience of having food brought to us, the high quality, and the great amount of variety is something that I really appreciate.

Actually THIS is why I love HN, because it gives me access to data like this comment, which while anecdotal, helps me validate my idea. My guess is that most perks businesses offer mean NOTHING to their employees but that there are perks out there that would.

I'm not much of a sucker for inspirational stories, but this is one of the best I've read in a long time.

I had zero idea of what that company was about and only clicked on it out of idle curiosity that it made the front of HN.

Seriously, that was one of the most inspirational things I have read.

In another thread, someone mentioned the idea of a "valuable problem." Find one of those to solve and you will make money. And dahyum what that company solves is a valuable problem and how he started was so low-tech that it should be embarrassing to everyone who thinks they must have X-Y-and-Z to go.

Napoleon Hill said, "Start where you are with what you have." That guy did. And killed it. Good for him!

It occurred to me as I was writing another comment about how much I love ZeroCater that they might be the perfect fit for what I'm trying to build right now. I've started validating and getting Beta customers for a personalized perks program where people don't get a set group of company0wide perks, but instead get them personalized to what makes them a happier and more fulfilled person. I've been trying to figure out the catering problem, because I don't actually want to CREATE any perks, but instead partner with people that already fulfill things that would be considered perks. Catering is definitely the one I have the hardest time imagining managing.

Is this an appropriate place to ask if anyone thinks ZeroCater would be interested in being the fulfiller for catering for that system and/or they could ask Arram or the appropriate person what they think? (email = tommy@thecityswig.com)

That idea sounds exactly like BetterWorks, a Los Angeles-based company that shut down earlier this year. BetterWorks offered companies a way to offer customized perks on a per employee basis by giving each employee an "allowance" to use on whatever combination of perks they wanted.

The problem, in a nutshell, was that the idea didn't scale. They needed two sets of salespeople: one for the customers, and one for the perks providers. Customers were difficult to acquire because many were dubious about limited "perks" to a small set of providers. Obviously, this meant that BW needed a lot of perks providers. However, the perks providers were even harder to reach, as many of them had no need to try yet another customer outreach opportunty demanding X% for little to no work. Moreover, perks providers were frequently not the only providers in a particular area, so discounting competition eroded prices, lowering the income realized through this method of customer acquisition, and thus the benefit of using BW.

Yep, we're working on something similar to BetterWorks. I don't want to say publicly what I think about the way that company was run, but their failure is more validation for me (in that they were able to get the model to work at some scale, but not the scale they wanted) rather than a warning.

My idea is about creating and managing perks that CAN scale, and using auxiliary businesses to provide them. Since our perks are about things that make employees happy, tangible things are only one subset of the things we're going to offer, and all of those will be provided by large providers acting as partners. Only some select local businesses will be offered for very specific reasons.

That, by the way, is why catering has been so puzzling in this equation. I don't want to organize catering myself for the very reasons you mentioned. I want to have 1 set of sales people: people selling to businesses to offer perks, and then as many scalable partners as possible offering the perks.

I've heard some pretty terrible stories about the vegetarian options offered by ZeroCater. It seems that many times they give the omnivores a full meal and then the vegetarian meal is the same meal without the meat, meaning it contains virtually no protein.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I am sensitive to other people's preferences. Has the situation changed lately?

I am the lead developer at ZeroCater, was a vegetarian for 3 of the last 4 years, and I can honestly say I that never had access to vegetarian lunch options remotely close to the variety and quality we provide to our clients.

We currently offer 4335 vegetarian options from 190 vendors, ranging from a Quinoa Salad with Green Apple, Crumbled Gorgonzola Blue Cheese, Candied Walnut and Organic Baby Spinach to a Roasted Pepper and Mushroom Calzone or Green Chile Mac & Cheese.

Our most common complaint from vegetarians isn't the lack of options; it's that the omnivores took all of the vegetarian food before they got to it.

Reading the article made me smile. Reading your comment made my day.

Looking forward to trying your service someday. :)

I'm not sure how involved you guys get with the post-delivery processes (i.e. what the companies do with the food after it's delivered), but here's an idea you can communicate to try and solve that: One of the things I asked our lunch caterers to do was to put the vegetarian food at the very end of the lunchline. People tend to pile their plates with the food they see first (I believe Google modified its lunchlines to include healthier food at the start of the line due to this phenomenon [0], which is what gave me the idea) so if the vegetarian food is at the end, the omnivores will have less room on their plate for what they sometimes perceive as side dishes.

It worked. Our vegetarians always have food to eat now (there's even leftovers).

Of course if you don't have an ordered line, just have a vegetarian volunteer run over and horde/separate all the vegetarian food before the others get to it. This is what we do for dinner.

[0] Source: http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/...

Edit: Added source for the Google article

As a vegetarian fed by ZeroCater, it feels like a lot of the time the thinking goes something like 'we have 20 meat-eaters and 3 vegetarians - let's get 20 lamb/chicken shish kebaps and 3 vegetables ones!' It sucks to have to make a meal out of sides, and it seems like the meals are structured most of the time such that quinoa salad or mac & cheese are perceived as being sides. And I don't think the solution is to tell meat-eaters not to eat vegetables - everyone deserves them. Anyway, I have to be very aggressive about getting to the front of the line for food. Also, sometimes the vegetarian option is just lo mein or a green salad - it rarely meets what I would consider a minimal nutritional standard of ~10-20 grams of protein. I pack protein powder to supplement my lunch. To be fair though, it is tasty!

I'm curious, what's wrong with 20 meat/3 veg for these single-serve meals? Most meat-eaters wouldn't be happy being forced to eat the vegetarian option, that's bound to happen unless you provide more food than necessary. The rest of what you said only applies to a lunch not served in individual portions.

Because people help themselves to food, everyone takes like 1/2 meat and then the first six people take 1/2 veg as well. I agree, for single serving meals like sandwiches that are not easily dividable, it makes sense to only have a few vegetarian ones. But those meals are usually at least 60% not-meat for meat-eaters (bread, rice, veggies, whatever). Basically every other meal is not single serving, and the veggie entrees are seen as just another side. It's usually family style.

Very inspirational and fascinating account that is probably worth a movie and a book on entrepreneurship. Also reminds me of the trademill quote by Will Smith http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doqS35FfcUE. One side note here is also the net risk Arram actually took. He is a single guy without dependents and health insurance to worry about. Without college degree and other specific skills he really had little to lose in terms of other lucrative job offers on hand, for example, compared to a Harvard PHD in CS with a wife and two children would have. That scenario ironically simplifies lot of complexities around for pursuing entrepreneurship.

Sounds like great execution, but one thing I find remarkable that of all the talk here of 'the internet is going to cut out out the middleman', and most business plans being build on that, this business is basically about adding a middle man where historically none existed (because of slim margins). Quite neat to see it work out so well - it seems a middle man can add value, even if that added value seems small at first sight.

Thanks for sharing your story Arram. I'm going to be making this a required reading for my college students. Most of the time, young people are advised to find stability and to be level-headed about their goals, and in the process lose their passion. This is reminder that to succeed, you need to be bold, creative, and energetic.

Just to throw my 2 cents here.

My brief but meaningful interaction with Arram and the team at ZeroCater was nothing short of exceptional. Exceptional care for their service and customer, exceptional determination and conviction. They are an intensely likeable people.

All the best Arram!

Just for the record, I remember ZeroCater's demo day and it seemed like they were already off and running without needing to raise more money. At least that was the feeling I got when listening in the crowd.

Is there a TechCrunch linky that actually works for poor souls stuck in the Android Ghetto? I would love to read this.

This is the kind of article that keeps me coming back to HN. Great inspirational story!

great story

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