FIREPIE®

I have always been obsessed with convenience. As a kid, my mind would spin with ideas on how to make simple things work better. I would take my bicycle and my Tonka toys apart and try to modify them. That made me happy.

While in college I worked at California Pizza Kitchen now known as CPK.

It was an innovative rapidly growing fast-casual dining concept centered around a Pasquini Italian wood-burning pizza oven that heated up to 750 degrees cooking a high-quality pizza in less than two minutes.

One evening I forgot to order a BBQ chicken pizza for one of my customers.

I rushed the order and timed it. It took about 90 seconds to cook that pizza. Being obsessed with "convenience" I thought to myself, “That is faster than cooking a hamburger, why not do a drive-through version of this?” I spent the summer working on my business plan to unleash the convenience potential of these high temp wood-burning ovens. I was also accepted into the CPK management training program and learned about scalable operations. I thrived.

The years since are a blur. Although I never raised the money for my drive-thru pizza concept, that dream stayed with me in the back of my mind. 

I did move from Los Angeles to Northern California to help start a wood-fired pizza chain but then went into mobile technology and logistics software sales. At that time I saw a future when mobile devices and data would eventually converge. 

For the last decade leading up to starting Firepie®, I was selling mobility software to fortune 1000 companies, mostly related to routing and logistics.

The decision

In the winter of 2015, while sitting on my couch after being laid off from a tech startup that ended, I took a moment to reflect. I remember experiencing a feeling from deep inside, perhaps my younger self gently reminding me about my dream and quest of providing great pizza with a new level of convenience. 

Obsessed with convenience, I asked myself a question. “Can I deliver a wood-fired pizza in 15 minutes?”. It took three months using some complex software, but I eventually figured it out. In this process, I also inadvertently created a revolutionary distribution model that solves the riddle of the last mile of on-demand food delivery in major cities. So, with my savings, credit cards, and some seed investment from a great friend that really got what I was doing (who happened to work at Black Rock and did predictive financial modeling) I risked all and started Firepie®.

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On June 1st, 2016 Firepie®  launched operations. It was me alone in a custom-designed pizza trailer with a massive built-in 900-degree Italian wood-burning oven and a laptop. We call these portable pizza kitchens nodes. I was terrified, I thought "Three pizza choices, one size, delivered lightning fast? Will people go for this new experience?" I had no idea what the future would hold. That first month we did about $3000 in sales. We couldn't even cover the rent.

In month two our sales tripled. We had repeat customers every week! In month 8 Firepie®  reached $85k in monthly sales. In month 25 Firepie® exceeded $100k in monthly sales.  

We have had many twists and turns along the way and it has been quite a journey so far.  Currently, our average annual revenue is over $1M with our single proof of concept location. 

Here's some metrics

• In 2019, repeat orders represent 75% of orders each month
  
• New customer acquisition has grown by 15% since the beginning of 2019
• Average order total is up 5% this year
• Each month in 2019, 10% of our orders have been from customers that migrated from third-party platforms to our current mobile platform and apps, lowering the cost of those transactions from 27% per order to 3%
• CLV of our retained direct customers is averaging $301.
• With no real marketing budget, our single proof of concept reached $1.1M in revenue for 2019.
• Firepie avg delivery time (from order to delivered) is 17.6 minutes. 
• 4.5 stars on Yelp
• 3500 customers have the Firepie® (Powered by ChowNow) mobile app