An Idea Before Its Time
When Bastian Lehmann, Sam Street, and Sean Plaice founded Postmates in 2011, it wasn't designed to bring you late-night tacos. The initial, ambitious vision was to create a logistics network for local businesses to deliver their own goods—think furniture,
bicycles, and other large items—within a city. The founders saw themselves as creating an urban logistics platform, not a consumer food service. They signed up about 20 local San Francisco stores, including vintage shops and tailors, promising a way to help them compete with the shipping prowess of e-commerce giants. The problem was, while the idea was sound, the volume was painfully low. The service existed, but few were using it for its intended purpose. The grand vision was failing to connect with reality.
Rejection and a Cash Crisis
The slow start led to a critical moment of near-collapse. The founders had come from a previous, unsuccessful startup idea called Curated.by. Despite getting into the prestigious AngelPad accelerator program, their initial concept was met with skepticism. As they pushed forward with the Postmates business-to-business model, they struggled to gain traction and, more importantly, funding. Co-founder Bastian Lehmann has described how they were running out of money, facing a classic startup death spiral. Without a clear demonstration of demand, convincing investors to fund a complex logistics operation was a monumental task. The company was on the verge of disappearing before it ever truly began, a familiar story for many Silicon Valley ventures.
The Burrito That Saved Everything
The turning point came not from a boardroom strategy session, but from observing how people were trying to break their app. Users kept inputting restaurants for pickups and listing food items in the description field, requests the team had to constantly cancel. Realizing they were ignoring a clear signal, the founders decided to run a weekend experiment. They sent an email to their small user base: use the hashtag #getitnow, and they would buy and deliver anything from any store, no questions asked. The response was immediate and overwhelming. By the end of the weekend, they had sold nearly $10,000 worth of goods, much of it food from cash-only San Francisco establishments. They scrambled to make it work, buying dozens of Square readers to process payments and manually coordinating deliveries. It was chaotic, but it proved one thing undeniably: there was massive consumer demand for on-demand delivery.
A Pivot Becomes the Business
That chaotic weekend was the company's salvation. The data was clear: people didn't want a courier for occasional large purchases; they wanted immediate gratification for everyday cravings. Lehmann would later frame it perfectly, stating, "food to Postmates is what books were to Amazon." It was the entry point into a much larger market. The company quickly pivoted its focus from a business-to-business logistics provider to the consumer-facing, deliver-anything-but-especially-food service it became known for. This new direction attracted the venture capital that had previously been elusive and set the stage for its explosive growth. While competitors like DoorDash and Grubhub would create a hyper-competitive market, Postmates' near-death experience gave it the core identity that allowed it to become a pioneer in the on-demand economy.
