Doorman

» see doorman.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

This is a product that could only have been invented in a country without apartment buildings that come with staff. In a Turkish apartman there is a görevli, the building superintendent, and the delivery goes to him. He signs, he holds it, you collect it on the way up. Nothing about that arrangement needs an app or a venture round, and it has worked that way for a great deal longer than either has existed. Doorman was San Francisco solving with software a problem that a lot of the world had already solved with a person.

Zander Adell and Kapil Israni started it in 2013. You gave the app your addresses, packages were routed to Doorman instead of your building, and a courier brought them to you inside a window you picked, usually in the evening when you were actually home. It ran returns in the other direction too, collecting things you needed to send back to a retailer. It started in San Francisco and later added Chicago and New York.

The pitch landed well because the pain was real and specific. Packages left on stoops in those cities got stolen, and buildings without staff had no fallback for a delivery that arrived at two in the afternoon while you were at work. Doorman was the answer to that, and for a while people paid for it happily, which turned out to be the problem.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shark tank money ~

Doorman went on Shark Tank in season six, episode thirteen, aired 10 January 2015. Robert Herjavec invested $250,000 for twelve percent. The seed rounds followed that year: a million and a half in June led by Motus Ventures, another million and a half in September with Matrix Partners and Structure Capital in it. Three million dollars total, which sounds like a lot until you price a courier's evening.

~ the arithmetic ~

The subscription was unlimited deliveries for a flat monthly fee, deliberately priced below cost to get people in. What happened next is the thing the founders described afterward and the thing every writeup since has fixed on. Subscribers who paid a flat rate stopped rationing. They ordered about twice as many packages as before, because each additional one was free to them and expensive to Doorman. Growth in usage was growth in losses, at close to a one to one ratio.

The fix was to raise the premium tier to $89 a month and add a per-package fee on top, which is the correct move economically and a difficult one commercially, since the entire reason people had signed up was that it was cheap and unlimited. It did not close the gap. The company was still losing money on deliveries when it ran out.

~ the last window ~

TechCrunch reported the shutdown on 25 September 2017. Users got a message saying the company was joining forces with a larger team, the phrasing that usually means an acquihire with nothing left over for the product. Operations ceased on 6 October.

The Internet Archive caught the homepage on 28 September, three days after the announcement, still selling evening delivery windows to anyone who happened to land on it. Then the domain went dark for a year and a half. Doorman had built something people liked enough to overuse, and overuse was the failure mode.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »