'If you don't innovate, you disappear'

When Deliverect became Belgium's youngest unicorn on January 24, no one was surprised. It was written in the stars that the Ghent scaleup would one day be worth more than a billion. It seems so obvious that we almost forget what a tremendous feat it is to write such a success story in only five years time. That there are many practical obstacles between dream and deed was something we heard from Jan Hollez, co-founder of Deliverect, at the end of February. In his office he welcomed our One Million Club, the group of scaleups with a turnover or capital round of at least one million euros.

In 2017, a year before Deliverect was founded, you could recognize a restaurant that did home deliveries from miles away. Indeed, next to the cash register, there were soon about five tablets hanging. One for Deliveroo, one for Take away, one for Uber Eats... As a restaurant, keeping track of all the orders through different channels was a hell of a job, for consumers the landscape was fragmented and the threshold for new ordering platforms was very high. In short, it was a system with only losers.

Jan Hollez and Zhong Xu knew the problem all too well. They had sold their startup Posios, which turns a tablet into a digital cash register, to Canada's Lightspeed a few years earlier. 'We looked in the market and saw some players, but nobody was really good,' Jan told the One Million Club. 'We had a network and knew the restaurants. That made it easier for us to ask them to open up their APIs.'

Their new company Deliverect quickly formed an answer to a missing link in the ecosystem. On the platform, all orders from different channels come together. The software pours them into one overview and links them to the white cash register, an inventory and ordering module, and the restaurant's accounting system.

The company quickly got off to a flying start and investor interest, thanks in part to Hollez and Zhang's previous adventures, was piqued from the start. Yet Deliverect initially held off a bit. 'You have to bootstrap your company and go through these different phases. First you have to make your startup as efficient as possible with a small team, and only then raise capital. Small adjustments at that point can have a big impact later on, which is why it's important to be as closely involved as possible as a founder in this phase,' Hollez said.

Barely a year after launching, Deliverect already had an office in Toronto. That they moved abroad so quickly was vital to the scaleup. You can't do business here with the typical Belgian mentality. You have to go abroad. If you don't, a competitor will blow you away internationally.'

Deliverect operates in a complex market and has more than 1,000 partners, including many restaurant chains operating worldwide. How people order food differs from region to region. In Latin America, for example, people do that more often via WhatsApp. We need to seamlessly integrate all these systems into our platform. To help those local customers, we need to have at least a few people on the ground, which is why we now have 14 offices. In a new market, we always go with the biggest players, after which the rest follow. Now we are mainly expanding into countries where the big chains who are our customers are asking for help. We are not yet active in India and China, because it is more difficult to get our ARPU high enough to make the adventure worthwhile. But what is not can certainly come,' Hollez told us.

The corona crisis really turbocharged Deliverect's growth, as suddenly people of all ages discovered how easy it is to order food online. 'I remember in the early days we processed one million orders and celebrated by jumping into the pool at my house. Today we process more than 100 million orders a year. In 10 years, we want to do what Shopify does for e-commerce: run 25% of all online purchases on their platform. We want to do the same, but for orders at restaurants.'

That growth is also noticeable in the team: currently more than 400 people work for Deliverect. 'Once you start scaling, you need people who stay focused on the day-to-day operations, so you can focus on the next step. If you don't innovate, you disappear. That's why one-third of the company is focused on further developing the product,' it sounded.

Hollez: "Finding people is one challenge, but onboarding so many people at once is not easy either. In January alone we had 100 new employees. On that scale, it's more important than ever that everyone in your company is equally passionate about the product and your values. Therefore, involve new employees in what is important and make work of celebrating successes, because successes lead to new successes. If people have to remember one thing, it might be this: aim for the moon, and if you miss you'll still end up among the stars.'

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