Today we’d like to introduce you to Bruno Didier.
Hi Bruno, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been an entrepreneur ever since I was young. I’ve always wanted to improve things, solve problems, and make decisions. I also love to listen to and learn from people, and I’m good with tech. So in 2013, after three full years in the USA, I left a good position in SF (at a nationwide catering company that deals with delivery issues every day). I left my life as well (visa, apartment, friends, habits, etc.) to go back to France to start working on Trackin. It is food delivery software that allows anybody to start an efficient delivery business within a day, without knowledge, and anywhere in the world.
After three months, we had a prototype, and I traveled around to meet with potential customers to see if we were onto something. We participated in a nationwide French startup challenge and ended up winning. This netted us 25k and allowed me to hire my first employee and two interns.
We officially launched with my first client in March 2014. we continued to grow the business and were invited to join Y-Combinator (American technology startup accelerator used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch).
During YC, we realized we were a bit late for Trackin, but there was still room and interest to disrupt the catering industry, which I knew really well, so we used Trackin to launch Mobydish in 2015 in Silicon Valley and haven’t stopped expanding since.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’d say the ones in life and entrepreneurship lucky enough to enjoy a smooth journey are rare. I’m known among my peers to be very resilient due to the number of struggles we’ve faced as a company.
The day-to-day of food delivery industry is on its own, challenging enough (expensive and competitive), and requires a solid and caring team to deliver the level of service we’re aiming for as a company. Another challenge was creating a business model with healthy margins while staying fair to our partners, customers, and drivers.
Like many other startups, we also had fundraising issues where we lost a term sheet last minute, legal actions forcing us to downsize, compliance issues, and administrative challenges where I had to run the company from Europe while getting my new visa processed. Despite all of that, we doubled our revenue every year.
Since life is never a dull moment, personal & health challenges got added to the mix and made the whole experience a life-changing adventure.
Covid (and its multiple variants) has been the cherry on top! We’re very proud to have weathered the storm and to be around still feeding people in the beautiful town of Austin.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Mobydish is a full-catering service marketplace. We partner with top restaurants and deliver food to companies and events. You can order online for 10-1000 in just a few minutes, and we take care of everything else. We have our hired team of delivery drivers, trained to provide an awesome service from pickup to drop off, and will set up the food for you. We have extra services where our team stays on site and provides white glove services. We also work on a recurring basis with companies feeding their employees multiple times a week and include meal planning so that our customers can focus on taking care of their people while we’re taking care of them.
It is possible to order food in trays or individual boxes and let your guest choose what they want to order themselves.
What people love the most about Mobydish (besides our cute logo) is the quality of service and our consistency. From trained drivers, restaurant sourcing, driver tracking, customer service, and online ordering, we’ve connected the dots to make sure they’ll have a successful and seamless event.
We’re proud of the way we work with everyone (partners, drivers, customers), our service has a lot of built-in technology but ultimately relies on people, and the level of care we give them allows Mobydish to build strong partnerships and create a work environment where we can all focus on pleasing our customers.
What matters most to you? Why?
On a personal level, what matters most to me is to grow and learn new things. Life is short, and I believe in people’s potential to realize whatever their goals are if they put the right amount of time and effort into it and don’t give up. I am a big fan of my team when they’re trying new things, even if they’ve never done it. I’m here to support them and push them towards expanding their comfort zone because I know they’ll gain self-awareness, self-trust and feel like life is way easier after they’ve successfully faced challenges.
On a business level, having a positive impact in an industry that has so many challenges is what matters the most to me. We’ve been able to build a company helping restaurants make money, we’re paying our drivers really well and have very, very happy customers and offices raving about our service. Spreading happiness with food while making every contributor’s life better along the way is the best reward.
Pricing:
- $25 delivery fee minimum
- $100 order minimum
Contact Info:
- Website: mobydish.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/mobydish?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mobydish/
