Goldbelly

Goldbelly: YC founder ships frozen Lou Malnati's pizza nationwide

Shaan breaks down Goldbelly, founded by Joe Ariel (ex-CEO of Delivery.com), which lets local mom-and-pop restaurants ship their signature foods nationally. It went through Y Combinator and raised close to $30M, with demand so high pizzas now ship with delays.

“He was the CEO of Deliver.com. So he has a history in the restaurant business. They raised close to $30 million. And Joe, Joe Ariel is his name. He, their office was up the street from my house. I live in a residential neighborhood and they had a house they lived out of and they went to Y Combinator. And I have to imagine they're booming right now. They're booming so much so that the pizzas all have delayed delivery due to high demand.”

Sell the story behind the product, take a cut

Shaan describes Huckberry and Goldbelly as businesses built on storytelling: find cool products, tell the origin story to a big email list (Huckberry has 1-2M men), and take a cut of revenue. The narrative, not the product spec, drives the sale.

“So what the, the business of Huckberry, it's basically a huge email list of 1 to 2 million guys. And what they do is they find really cool clothes and they, um, tell the story behind it. So for example, they had a duffel bag that was made from a, uh, the founder was an army guy who used to skydive., and the duffel bags were made out of old parachutes because apparently that's like an interesting material. And they told a story about this and they just blasted out in the email and they just take a cut of the revenue.”

Steal thisBuild an email list around the best-of-X products and sell the origin story, not the spec sheet.