← The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS
The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS
SaaS Distribution Channel: Partner Deals to $100M ARR
00:50:24
Zhong Xu (Deliverect) on using integration partnerships as a SaaS distribution channel to reach 80,000 restaurants and nearly $100M ARR across 50 countries
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan. AI has changed the playbook for building and growing SaaS. Every week I talk to founders who are writing the new one. My guest today is Zhong Xu, the co founder of Deliverect. They connect delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash to a single system for restaurants. Zhong's already had a successful exit. His last startup merged with LightSpeed, which IPO'd and today DeliverX serves over 80,000 restaurants across 50 countries and is approaching 100 million in ARR. But when they started, they signed up 100 restaurants and manually process every single order before writing a single line of code. Then Covid hit and growth exploded overnight. They opened up 10 offices in in just a single quarter and now Zhong is racing to build an AI layer for his business before the whole industry gets commoditized. If you're building or investing in a SaaS company, you already know security isn't optional. One breach and everything you've built can be at risk. That's where ThreatLocker comes in. Imagine having the power to decide exactly what's allowed to run in your environment and blocking everything else by default. No guessing, no hoping your existing solutions catch it. Real enforceable control. ThreatLocker is a zero trust platform that locks down your environment without disrupting operations, gives you total visibility, and stops unauthorized applications before they become a problem. If you want stronger security and tighter control, visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com if you're building a SaaS product or an AI agent, there's a good chance you're about to spend weeks and thousands of dollars on the basics. Things like AWS setup, authentication, admin panels, dashboards. Gearhart built something called the Basement platform that covers around 80% of the foundational needs out of the box. That alone can save you 5 to 10k in development costs and get you to market way faster. One of the products they help build is SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. They only take on a handful of new projects each month, but right now they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Book a call at Gearheart IO. That's Gearheart IO. I've interviewed over 450 B2B SaaS founders on this podcast. Success leaves clues, and I've been taking notes every week. I send out the shortcuts, the blind spots, and the tactics that actually work so you don't have to learn everything. The hard way over 5,000 founders read it. You probably should too. Sign up free at SasClub IE newsletter. That's SasClub IO newsletter. Zan, welcome to the show.
- [02:55]
B
Thank you, Omer. Thank you for having me.
- [02:58]
A
So for people who aren't familiar with Deliverect, can you tell us what does the product do? Who's it for?
- [03:04]
B
We started Deliverect around seven years ago. Deliverect is really the operating center or nerve center for restaurants as well, retailers to manage the digital sales channels. Right. What do I mean is, if you think about a restaurant today, you know, you have customers from Burger King to Popeyes to Little Caesars, they run all their sales almost 80, 90% digital through one site, digital marketplaces as Uber Eats, DoorDash, just eats Grubhub as well, even through their Instagram TikTok website, catering their kiosks, their app, and so on and so on. Right. So every restaurant today, VSP4, has so many digital channels, and so you need an operating system to manage the menus, the promotions, the customers in a centralized way. And so today we do that for more than 80,000 restaurants around the world. We are growing really, really fast because just in Q4, 2025, last quarter, we added over 8,500 restaurants in just a quarter. That's quite insane. I think that's more than most restaurants, public companies do in a quarter. And so for us, it's really helping them to navigate the ever changing digital world and make sure they are future proof themselves.
- [04:25]
A
Great. And this is probably an oversimplification, but would it be fair to say that you're almost the interface between the restaurant and the kitchen and the way that customers order and trying to reduce all that complexity in between while still giving them plenty of choice in terms of how they order or interact with the restaurant?
- [04:48]
B
Yeah, exactly. But if you put it simply, think about everyone has uber Eat or DoorDash. Once you see a restaurant, have you ever wondered where does the menu and the pictures, the pricing come from? Right.
- [05:02]
A
Yeah.
- [05:03]
B
So that's what we do. We push it through DoorDash so that it's alive. You know, one item is really out of stock because it's sold out. We make sure that you can't order it. But even like when you press the button and do the checkout and really said, I want the food, what happens then? It's not always DoorDash doing it. Right. So what happens is we get these orders and we inject that in the restaurant system. It can be their point of sale systems, their internal ERP systems. And make sure we track the whole journey of cooking being prepped, being packaged in the bag and then afterwards we even get a writer to deliver it. So you know, something very simple, you press a button and you get food is actually digitally or technically quite complex.
- [05:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
- [05:55]
B
Yeah, I mean we are a global company. Over 450 people in 13 offices around the world. Literally I wake up from Sydney to we have offices in Mexico City, New York, Atlanta. So it's really global. Today we process more than orders for more than 80,000 restaurants around the world. And look, soon we'll cross 100,000. So that's going to be a milestone. But even more important, I think in August we processed in total more than a billion orders for these business. A billion orders. It's quite a lot in dollar value that went through our system. That was almost $25 billion that went through our system. And that's true the history of our journey. But just this year we're doing more than 500 million. So we're getting to a decent scale where I think we are really the backbone of digital food on that we're the global leader and we're really, really excited.
- [06:54]
A
What's next and where are you in terms of revenue ballpark.
- [06:58]
B
So this year we'll probably getting or breaking the 100 million in committed AR. It's really exciting. I think that's really the marker for any company, right. You want to make sure that you get to size and really be sustainable as we go.
- [07:16]
A
Now you have a really interesting journey in terms of how you got to Deliverect. And the thing that stuck out for me was that you said your first gig was when you were 17 years old, you started building websites for restaurants because was it your father was selling point of sale systems to restaurants?
- [07:39]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean he was the first generation of immigrants from China to Belgium. That's where we grew up. Back then he, you know, nobody want to give him a job, although he has a PhD or a Master in material science. And so to survive he random went to Asian restaurant to wash the dishes. Right. And so what happens is one of these owners said, hey, you're a smart guy, can't you make a system for me? So what he did is he bought a book learn C in 30 days and build a point of sale for Chinese restaurants. Still has it, but you can't imagine having a dad like that. So I think from age 14 he was like, man, when are you going to work though? You can't like just, you know, you need to do stuff with your life. And I turned 15, he was like, you really, really need to do something. So when I turned 16, I went to study, you know, Dreamweaver back then for people that I was very, very old to create websites. Today you don't need to do that. And between my 16 and 18, I made over a thousand very, very ugly, I would say Chinese website. So that really taught me that the entrepreneurship side of it. And that's also it's possible to at that young age to make money to do something that has an impact for these restaurants. So that's how I started my journey.
- [08:59]
A
That is awesome. And did you also after that build your own point of sale system?
- [09:07]
B
Yeah, so I got, I would say the microbe to really do software. So I studied software engineering, created mobile apps before the iPhone existed. Back Then was Nokia M95 was a smartphone of our age. And so I did a lot of that. And one thing that we really saw is when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone that was such a game changer moment that I thought, wow, we need to do something about it. And when he came out with the iPad, I connected with the historical knowledge I have of the restaurant industry with the fact that you can have a new medium where things are cloud based and you just have commodity as hardware instead of installing bulky hardware, driving every time, couple hours to install stuff. And so that's really inspired us to create one of the first iPad point of sale out there. Basically me and my co founder, we coded the complete iOS app in nine months time while working a full time job basically during traffic jam and all our holidays and weekends. And yeah, we released that to the world. And that company is one of the biggest point of sale companies now in the world. As we merged that in 2014 with a company called Lightspeed and we IPO'd that in 2019. So I think Lightspeed today has around 150, 160,000 restaurant retailers around the world. And that has been a great journey for us.
- [10:41]
A
That's awesome. So tell me where the idea for DeliverX came from.
- [10:45]
B
So most of the ideas, I think people always ask me how does these ideas happen? Most of the time I just listen to customers. In the case of POS iOS or the iPad podcast, it was literally because I went to restaurants to do support and they called me to drive three hours and then to fix something, I did something very small and just wasting so much time. I thought there was Something better in the case of Deliverect was really again listening to restaurants. So I visited obviously a lot of restaurants and when LightSpeed IPO'd, I was gonna take a long sabbatical. But all these restaurants said, hey, you can't do that, there's a bigger issue. And I really said, what's the issue? Do you guys have. I already solved all the technical stuff for you guys and for them was really the move from physical to digital. They said what's gonna happen if what's happened in retail is gonna happen in restaurants? What happens if, you know, there's these platforms, Uber just starting. That's going to take from now a couple percent volume to 50, 20, 30, 40, 50% of my volume. What happens in the future where you have home automation devices that listen to you and just orders? What happens if you have a smart fridge that sees there's no beer anymore, that auto replenishes that? What happens if there's drones and robots? They went actually quite far. But in hindsight I thought, hey look, it sounds so futuristic. But in a decade that's probably the case. Fast forward seven years, I think we are very much in that world. And so that really pushed us to create a platform to help these restaurants to make that transition. Because at the end of the day we want to make sure restaurants can do what they like and that's cooking and serving their customers.
- [12:29]
A
So there are four found co founders of Deliverect, is that right?
- [12:35]
B
Yeah. So in the case of Posiss, we were just with two. The reason we got more is we learned that although we can make the products and certain bits, you need other elements. Right. So we have one co founder that was great in integrations. Yanami are great in strategy and making the product. One is great in integrations. And then we have other co founder Jerome, that's our president now that was a key element that could scale a go to market side of things. Right. Because one of the things I learned through the years is the idea doesn't really matter that much. And I know for a lot of people making product is hard. Making a product is not that hard. What's really, really hard is distribution. How do you get whatever you're making that is good or at least at par in as many hands as you can. And so to nail that, that's where you sometimes need people that can build a go to market engine. Right. For me before when I, you know, were young, I always thought you build it, it will come. And sales is just, you know, they just talk. But actually Sales is really an engineering process. So you need, you know, people that can engineer that sales side of things to make sure you can scale.
- [13:49]
A
So tell me about how you got started. So you've seen this opportunity, this idea. What did that first version of the product look like? What problem did you initially pick and say, I'm going to go and solve?
- [14:03]
B
So this is a really big one where we learned that MVP is really mvp. I'll tell you why we learned from our first company with POS iOS we coded nine months. Didn't sound a lot, but actually we went so overboard in features. We had drag and drop tables. We could put pictures on the product and we could probably have launched it in three months or two months, but then we wanted to do it perfect. And so when we started deliverect, we really said, look, let's not make this mistake. The MVP is what if I'm going to do it. So literally I sold to a couple restaurants. I was behind the scenes each time. When the order came in, I was manually inputting in their system without them knowing it. And that was the automated way so we could launch from day one. Second time, when we saw, hey, it was more than we got to 50 to 100 customers, we're like, okay, let's make sure we can map it. Then we start coding. But it was very rudimentary. Excel sheets, you need to think Burger A. And then we map that to what's in their point of sale. So that could get injected without all the whistles, with all the features we have now with making menus and automatically getting injections. So the MVP is almost no product. And that's what I want to emphasize to listeners, really. Do not over engineer it because you actually have no idea what you're building anyways until you get scale, what are you building? So get to markets as quick as you can. Maybe analogy. I was talking to one of the largest investors in the world that invests a lot of AI companies and I asked them, hey, what? What's the difference between classic software companies and AI? And his answer was actually enlightening. He's like, it's still iterations. The difference is before even if you guys are working agile, you release every month, five, six times. Right. That's a lot. But these guys can release 50 times, 60 times. So they're beating you by 10x because they can so quickly code these things. Right. So that's really a lesson learned. Iteration and MVP is key.
- [16:14]
A
Yeah. So basically I think it's like the wizard of Oz. Mvp, right? Is what we'd call that where you are sort of selling a product on the front end to customers. But everything behind is not code, it's human delivering on that. And was it just you doing that for like the first 50 customers with all these orders coming in?
- [16:40]
B
We were just, with Tum, we were just literally doing that quickly. We wrote a script because we're software engineers. The first couple of days, I think the first week we did it manually. And look, it's really a big lesson is don't always try to do things that scale, do things that don't scale. Because let's automate when we have volume, let's make the product when we have validated that more than one customer wants it. Let's do this. Once you have a certain skill. So you still can't convince the customer, right? Because if the pain is there, there is certain amount he's willing to pay. Although it's not great, he's still wanting to do it. So in that case, we said, hey, what if you pay us just 50 bucks a month? Is that worth it? And because that's worth it, you can easily see the value. If you can automate and grow that, that's how you start.
- [17:34]
A
What did you show those first 10 customers? Like, what was the sales pitch? Was there a demo? There's kind of not much code right at that point.
- [17:46]
B
I do think it's easier if it's the second time. There's some trust involved. But even if it's your first time, you can find your maybe mom or pop shop that says, hey, trust me, I'm going to do it, or your friend store that has it to prove your MVP basically can trust. And like, look, we have done this a lot, you know, you know, we can bring these products. Let me help you to do that, you know, and we will start with one store. We'll then go, you know, they have 100 stores. Maybe we scale as we go and you measure it like that. And only requirement I ask with them is, okay, you're going to get a large discount. I just want you to be my reference case, right? I want to make videos. And you're going to tell me how great automation is. It was all manual. Say it's all, you know, quality is better, no more mistake stakes, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So, you know, that's how you do it in the beginning.
- [18:38]
A
I love that. And so at what point did you actually build a product? How far did you take this and what was the signal or, you know, that that told you this is enough. We need to have a product now.
- [18:58]
B
I think that's quite quick. First of all, I start talking to a lot of restaurants, right as we serve them. I think I talked to in the early days, the first three months, almost to 2, 300 restaurants. Like literally you just go out there, you just, you know, it's not that hard to talk to them, but you need to every day you can talk to at least 10, right? And especially if they have changed, so you talk to them. And I validated that the issue is quite everywhere and I even validated that across countries because like is it the really same for one country or is it everywhere? So we realized this problem is really, really important. And because of our background in point of sale, we understand, we understood the complexity of doing it, that it's not just building add on, it's, you know, you need a different platform because a point of sale is very hard to update the software because you can't just do an update on Friday evening because you know it's payment and there's hundreds of customers. But then in the reality, in the software world like Uber Eats will release their software on Friday evening because they, they just don't, they move way quicker. So we need to build a platform above it. And so we started coding and every time I think I start a company, I code the product, code the product ourselves. I think in this case it took us two, three months. We had something very quick script in a week so we could get customer online. But then we thought, hey, we need menu management, we need to make sure they can manage their locations, we need to make sure there's quality, et cetera, et cetera. And that took us three to six months. So that's really the start of things.
- [20:29]
A
What did you learn from your previous experience about feeling like you spent too long building the mvp? You took a very different approach with the MVP with Deliverect. But when it came to building the product, what did you do differently to make sure that there wasn't feature creep or a bunch of things that you really didn't need?
- [20:52]
B
Actually it was reversed because once you know there is product market fit the first time we put a lot of feature that we didn't think about scaling. Because if we're honest, when we started pos, we're like, yeah, well you know, in best case we get 5,000 restaurants, right? And what's the maximum order? So to give you an idea, early days we didn't even have a cloud database. We had a, you know, I had a server at my home that was running SQLite like that's not made for anything. But in the early days up to a thousand was perfect because it's super quick, was in memory but it was not scalable. And so we did learn like hey, if you build this and you find the product market fit, think about architecture and scalability because changing these things afterwards is really painful. So we did do the right way, making sure that we have redundancies, we build in multi server fallbacks and so on. So that's what's really important because when it goes, then it really goes. You actually don't have time to refactor all your code so it becomes spaghetti and you don't want that.
- [21:55]
A
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- [23:37]
B
Look, there's no such thing that you build and it will come. Everyone's like, even we have product managers that like, but when we release this feature there will be hundreds of customers using it need to be perfect. I said I guarantee you there will be no One, maybe one. Really don't assume that there's that avalanche, you know, it's iteration. Right. Be happy if you have one or two that gives you feedback and worst case you lose them. You know, especially the early days, it's not bad as in the later years. Look, today we can't make these mistakes. We run largest companies around the world because if you lose trust and one of these changes, you're not going to get back. But who cares in the early days, you know, you can, you know, if you talk about restaurant, there's what, 10 million restaurants? Well, 10 million shots. Right. So there's no real risk towards it. Right. And so, you know, make sure that these customers are co building, make sure they are also evangelists. Right. Tell them like, hey, I'm building this together with you. I want you to be my ambassador, I want you to challenge me. Here's my WhatsApp, here's my phone number. Keep a very tight loop and use them actually as your better customers. Right. And that works really well. They want to help.
- [24:45]
A
So were you selling to single location and multi location businesses in those early days?
- [24:52]
B
Yeah, well in the first company, not because we were doing just SME, we didn't know better. In the case of the lurec, we thought about, hey, it's hard to scale single location so we need to make sure it was future proofing as well for larger locations. But again because it's the same domain or same field and then it's my second company, we did have unfair advantage where I knew all the point of sale vendors and I had their numbers, I knew most of the customers that we needed in the early days. So the trust site allows you to go a lot quicker. I'm not sure if I could have built Deliverect without the previous experience and network we built before. Right. So it's sometimes chicken and egg and you need something to start.
- [25:37]
A
Yeah. We were talking about this earlier. The fact that when you started building these websites at 17 for restaurants and by the time you founded Deliverect you had like what, 12, 13 years of experience in the restaurant industry. And so you have deep domain expertise, you have relationships, you've built trust. And I'm curious like how much you've kind of partly answered that question, but how important was that versus a great product and innovation and all of that stuff.
- [26:13]
B
Look, great products always need it, but if you build something great, there will be others that will also do it. There's no idea. That's only limited to you. Especially if the problem is big enough. Having that Network and distribution and getting as quick as you can to the customers, that defines who wins, nothing else, right? I'll tell you why. Like for example, when we started our iPad point of sales, we were actually before Square launched, right? So think about it. That was the, you know, and you know, when we launched on Square launch, we were like, why the hell did we make it so complex? These guys just have free buttons and a payment saying, that's it. We could have done that in a month instead of nine months trying to do drag and drop tables and coloring and, you know, user interface changes, allowing the customers to customize everything thing. So, you know, having that and getting distribution and getting it to the customer first, that's what defines winning. Not, I'm sorry, not your great product. It matters. But, you know, most innovation, you know, don't win unless you have distribution.
- [27:20]
A
So for a founder who is starting out today in the early stages, trying to get traction, and now they're realizing, I should have started 13 years ago like Zong and built relationships and all of this stuff, what's the next best thing that they can do or you would do if you were going into a new space?
- [27:44]
B
Well, if I want to go a new space, I would talk to as many people as I can. I would learn, right? So the reality is you don't know what you don't know. There's a lot of things that to make a business really successful, you need, you need to have some secret. What do I mean? It's like you need to know something that whatever you think it's like that it's the book Peter Thiel 021. It's like, where you believe it's not true and everyone thinks something else. I'll give you an example. In Deliverect, everyone in the world, all the investors said, a point of sale will do what you do. And I knew that this was not true because I built one of the larger point of sale companies out there. I was trying to make this in the company. I'm like, this doesn't not work, doesn't fit, it's not going to scale. But because everyone thought, hey, this doesn't make sense as a standalone company, people didn't do it. Besides, obviously all the point of sale companies, they get it and they're like, okay, let's partner with Zome because we're never going to do this in house. So this is where you need to have deep domain expertise, understanding the ping that sets you apart. Right? Well, everyone else thinks, hey, why would you build this thing? There's no point.
- [28:55]
A
Yeah. You've talked about distribution several times and the importance of this. And these days we hear a lot about AI first startups that are getting to the first million, 10 million super fast. But for you guys back in 2017 when you started this business, I think you got to over 10 million in ARR in the first two and a half years. Right. So can you talk a little bit about what drove that? You mentioned the, you know, kind of thinking about the GTM engine early on, but what helped you get that level of growth so quickly?
- [29:36]
B
So one of the things we did was if you think about in the first company was App Store being distribution, you put it on the App Store you had. In this case, we were like, okay, you know, we know restaurant, we can call them, but that's not quick enough. So we partnered with a lot of point of sale companies because of my background. I know that they needed us and they have obviously a lot of restaurants. So because we partner with them, they could distribute us. So instead of signing customer, guy, customer, in the same time frame, I can probably sign 10 point of sale companies that in their own signs every month, maybe 100 customers. So that partnership motion was very important to that success. To be fair, it was not always easy because some of these point of sale vendors were competitors. So when I called the CEO most they, they all let me meet them. But then I think one really let me wait more than one and a half hour. In, in, in, in the, in the, in the launch, I'm like, what happened? He's like, zone, that's the only payback you will have for competing so hard with me. But so that helps. Right. And so, and as we go, of course we also had Covid that accelerated everything. So that's helped the awareness or getting what normally would take more years to adopt for these restaurants in a very short time. Right. So timing is crucial. You know, it's the perfect storm. And you know, when there's a perfect storm, you try to ride a tsunami and try to not fall off. That's basically what you do.
- [31:08]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like it was a sort of a delicate relationship with these POS systems. So how did you kind of pitch these partnerships? I often hear about founders who know that they should go and build partnerships, but often getting those partners signed up on board, committed, knowing how to sell your product or promote your product, it's in the execution that things fall apart. And so what kind of, I guess, challenges did you face and how did you overcome those?
- [31:47]
B
I think the Benefit is they did trust me. Although we competed heavily, they knew for a fact Zong is not going to build another point of sale. So there was like, okay, he's not going to compete outright with us. So more is like, hey look, let's partner. And then look, it's more making sure there's no channel conflict, right? I think what's, what's really hard for early stage companies is you sign a partner, they sign and you want also these end customers and you start creating these channel conflicts. Oh, this is mine. That was not true. You. So most of the time when we assign a partner, even if the customer came direct to us and they have certain interaction with the partner, we always attribute to the partner, right? So you don't want to create conflicts, you don't want to create situation where they feel like you are not honest. So make sure they, they are successful because when they are successful, you're not successful, right? Create a win win situation that works. And for the rest it's this following up, right? It's almost like today probably less because you don't have so many salespeople, but normally you could even go to the office of these companies. You work literally beside the sales guys and look, you give them some gift vouchers if they sign a deal that brings to you as like thank you and so on, right? So it's all these tactics you can do to get, you know, really these salespeople from these partner companies engaged, right? They need to like you. That's it. You know, it's not because their boss says sell it, they will sell it. It's you know, take them out, show them fun, show them that you mean it, show them that you care. You know, give them some spiffs, give them some gift card, give them something that you know, makes, makes something worth it.
- [33:26]
A
What about the integration with the, you know, the doordashes, the ubereats and these kind of people? Were there any challenges there or what was it like building those integrations and getting them up and running?
- [33:41]
B
I think we have a great relationship because we always honor them. But that was not always easy for them. Was like hey, we want to maybe have these own direct relationship. But I explained that it's really, really fragment world, right? People think about oh, restaurant point of sales, but there's 10,000 point of sale out there at least. So managing all these system, it's not worth it for them. Yes, they can integrate to one or two big ones, but never the long tail. And for Uber or Doordash, they obviously want A long tail. But there may be famous Chinese restaurant. It's definitely not using one of the point of sales. You know, it's going to be a local guy supporting it. So having that reach was important and as well, look, it just took a long time where we maintained our relationships. We also got investors on board that had great relationship with them so that they knew that we are not, you know, bad intended, that we are really doing things for the right cost. And now, of course, we are quite big with big sizes. They understand that and there's contracting in place. Right. But it takes time to win trust. And sometimes it's literally, you know, convincing one after other that you're doing the right thing. Most of them, they said, hey, I didn't believe you would succeed. But look, you can prove this wrong.
- [35:01]
A
Let's talk a little bit about pricing. Can you just explain how that works? You talked about initially anything was okay, right? I mean, hey, does 50 bucks a month sound good? Okay, great, we'll do that. But how did that pricing evolve in those first few years?
- [35:18]
B
I do believe you need to sell value. So don't just give it for free. Free. There's no. If a customer is not paying anything, it's not a customer. So, you know, also they will not give feedback. They don't feel, you know, people actually, you think, oh, they're gonna give you more feedback. They are actually scared. They're like, I'm not paying zone anything. I'm not gonna call them five times a day because they feel guilty. So they don't do anything. So make sure you do charge a fee. And what you can do is, you know, you need a discount. Charge a high fee, but then discount it backwards and say, hey, the first six months it's flatlined. Or what we always did is like, hey, the first, you know, you pay for one year, but you're going to get one and a half year or one year and nine months for free, Right? Why? Because, you know, you still can recognize the ar, although, because at the end of the year you can have a nice bump, but then you give them enough comfort that you're doing something, but also add something in return. If we get any discount, we always ask them to be a reference case. And most people like that. It's like, hey, we want to come make a video, promote your business, but tell something about us. Want to make a use case? I want you to intro me to four or five of your friends that are in the industry. And most people do that gladly. And that creates your distribution as well, your social proof that whatever you're doing is working.
- [36:41]
A
Yeah, I love that. I mean, you're very intentional about every customer. I'm going to give some value to them, but I'm also going to get some value which is going to ultimately help me improve my own distribution 100%.
- [36:59]
B
Because the best salespeople are your customers. If you think about it, in any business, if you have a peer that telling you this thing works, you're going to buy it, Right? Especially if it's someone that you look up to. So get these early adopters in any market and try to make sure they reference and then you start that maybe one story why we that's why we also scale so quickly with Deliverect around the world. We are now in 50 countries, literally. I opened, I think during COVID at a certain moment, 10 offices in one quarter. And people always said, why did you do that? And it was all virtual. I said, look, we learned one thing, that the idea that we have is good. That means in every country in the world or every big region, there was someone doing it. And so I learned one thing. It's really, really hard even if you're a big, big company to enter a new market if there's an existing incumbent with all the early adopters and actually made their name. So we said do this differently. What if we start everywhere, you know, we're competing at the same level. Worst case, worst case, you know, we need to close the country because we're number three. If we're number two, we can always survive. If we're number one, we won. And so after seven years in all the countries we are, or we are number one or number two. So that really allows you not to, you know, go and buy these companies to win the market. Right. So getting these early adopters is key for everything.
- [38:29]
A
Let's talk a little bit about AI. What's been the most significant impact that AI has had on your business so far?
- [38:36]
B
Well, that's the one thing that keeps me awake at night. I think it's transformational. Internet, cloud, mobile and now it's AI. I think the difference is it's compressed in such a short time the innovation that's happening so rapidly. If just think about it like I think what the stat was beginning of the year was 5% of the global code was AI written by end year, 25%. If I look at Deliverect, I see that already 30%, 35% of code are guided but written by cursor cloud and so on. And so the change is profound. Right. And so what we are really focusing on is two side one, on the operation side, how can we run agents for a restaurant to manage the marketing side of things, their menu side of things, their throughputs helping them, getting better pricing and then the other side is getting ready for the age of agent E commerce. Right. Where I do think that's important, it's for us another channel, but where you're going to get home, you're hungry, and then they say how are you like this? Should I order it? You know, your Alexa or your Google home or even your fridge or any tablet or any platform. Right. So that's really the future and I think it's coming really, really quick. So if you're in the software industry, it's exciting but also scary, I would say.
- [40:08]
A
Yeah, definitely. I mean huge opportunities where you just described for Deliverect and how the whole restaurant experience or the food experience becomes so much better for consumers as well. Right. But what do you think is the biggest threat that AI poses to your business? What's the part of that that keeps you up at night?
- [40:35]
B
Well, I think we need to make sure we innovate, right? We need to make sure we are connected to these NCPs or these LLMs so that we are ahead. I think it's in any business stagnating like, you know, what you don't want to be is we are the intelligent layer, right? Because we don't just connect the orders, we help them to do menus and so on. So if we don't disrupt ourselves with providing intelligence so that you have AI that auto creates this menu, auto rebalances orders, auto changes, you know, the order of items and so on, then someone else will. And so once you lose that intelligence, we will still exist because someone needs to do the piping, the connectivity. But the intelligent layer is where the value is. So yes, you need to have the infrastructure. But being infrastructure alone, nobody remembers so you can make money, but that's not where the value is. And so being in that intelligence layer is crucial.
- [41:32]
A
So in a world where we hear a lot about vibe coding and it is a lot easier to build products these days and then if you're exposing all of your data to LLMs or through mcps or whatever, what do you see your moat being? What's the most important kind of part of this for your business?
- [41:58]
B
The value, I think really guard really the data, make sure you can't do something wrong. There need to be some rules and we still verify, right? Imagine we manage the menus. Imagine LLM says, hey, great, now you know, because there's something happening in the world or it's really bad weather, let's triple the prices. Because, you know, the assignment was make me profit. Right. Okay, give me a menu that makes me profit. Well, you know, they can do that, but then you're going to get a public outlash. Right. So how do you scope it? So today is a lot of these things we generate and then we ask permission from the human. But as we go, I think at a certain moment you will say, hey, run it automatically. There's no reason technically why you can't. You just want to guardrail it. That it doesn't do things that you didn't think about. Right?
- [42:48]
A
Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. Is there another example that you can think of with that? I'm just curious, what else would be a concern with this sort of agentic model and making this data available?
- [43:09]
B
Well, it's less the data in our case because we control restaurants. It could be overwhelming for them if they actually generate too much orders. Again, it's like maybe the LLM can reach out to certain companies to do advertising and then they swamp the restaurants because look, they were not foreseeing so many orders. Right. To tricking customers. Maybe if you control the menu and pictures, they can create random hallucinated promotions. That is not the value because you just want to bait your customers to order these items. So I think there's part of it where we are not sure what it is because if you give them direction, it will execute. But will it execute in the ethical way that you want to? I think that's where a lot of testing and research need to be done. And so Look, I use LLMs constantly and once in a while that thing hallucinate. Right. It's still the case. There's a lot of AI slop. And so do you want that in the real world where your brand is important, where your customer is there? So guardrailing that, it's reputation. Reputation is very hard to win, very easy to lose. Right. So, you know, you don't want that.
- [44:25]
A
Yeah, I just. Silly little example today I just went through this morning was I wanted to just look at a page on my site and just see how is this optimized for SEO or AEO or any of these things. And so I had Claude look at it and just say, hey, look at this URL and tell me, you know, how I can improve this. And he came back with a bunch of issues and I was like, oh, so I went to Claude code and I said, okay, actually go through the source and tell me how you would fix this. And Claude code comes back and says, I don't see those issues. I was like, what? So I go back to the first agent that I'd been working with and I kind of ask questions and it says, yeah, sorry about that. I should have looked at the source code before I made the recommendations. I was like, so what were you looking at? It's like just. It's a very small example, but you can imagine how tiny little things like that could have huge consequences for somebody or some business.
- [45:23]
B
Yeah, exactly. I think we are very much in the experimentation phase. I do think, look, AI will change a lot of our jobs and how the world works. But you need guardrailing. I think a lot of cybersecurity and guardrailing companies will arise as we adopt more AI.
- [45:41]
A
All right, we should wrap up. So let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
- [45:48]
B
Sure.
- [45:48]
A
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [45:52]
B
Timing is everything. And what do I mean with that is people said multiple times I succeeded. People say it's luck, but it's not luck. Sometimes you can. Timing is everything. For example, when you launch a product, if you don't see the wave happening, just wait. We could coded a point of sale app on Nokia N95s or on a Windows Pocket device. Never would have taken off. Right. So sometimes you just need to wait until the right time. And medium is there similar with Deliverect. If we waited too long to start. Look, we didn't foresee Covid, but because we were just on time, we could arrive that tsunami. So sometimes you need to go quick and sometimes you just need to wait.
- [46:34]
A
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [46:37]
B
There's a couple. I think the hard things about hard things is really good because it tells about the entrepreneurial journey. I think that that's a great one for people starting out. I think there's three books I would recommend zero to one. You learn a lot from Peter Thiel. A lot of practices. If you're starting out in selling, it's a book positioning. If you never read it, it's really, really good about how you need to get your customer view, your product, your positioning is everything. And the last one is crossing the chasm. I think especially if you're an early stage founder, you need to understand and don't get discouraged. There will be a lot of difficult times. But you need to move through the motions.
- [47:18]
A
Great books. All classics. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [47:24]
B
A chip on the shoulder. I would say grit, but it's a chip on the shoulder. I think most really successful founders have had something that they want to prove with all their might that people are wrong or whatever. They prove themselves because else why would you do it?
- [47:39]
A
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [47:43]
B
Yeah, I use a lot of tools, but in these days I use cloud code. I actually use it to brainstorm. There's a great methodology that our engineering team used and I started using it called bmat. So instead of you have agent that's actually ask questions. And the reason why is I'm an ideator, but then I need someone to challenge me on my ideas and so it's very hard to challenge yourself. So AI is perfect for that. So it keeps asking questions to validate or destroy my ideas and then it allows me to come to better conclusions.
- [48:18]
A
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [48:22]
B
I don't think I have. I thought about this question, but I don't think I have any other mindset set right now than running Deliverect. If I were to retire, I would maybe run a vineyard. Like make wine.
- [48:38]
A
Love it. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [48:42]
B
People don't know that I like to sit in traffic jams. I like to drive a lot because the first company I started, we coded half our times every day in traffic jams. We were sitting every day at least two and a half hour in traffic jams. And so my co founder was driving or we swap around. I had 4G or 3G back then. So one was coding, the other was driving. But then if you think about it, five days, three and a half hours. That's a lot of hours. That's 16 hours, 17 hours you could work. Right. So and I still to this day, it's a great time to think because nothing is distracting.
- [49:16]
A
Yeah, actually I love that too. I love to just get in the car and drive nowhere, come back with usually a better idea. What's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [49:28]
B
I like driving. One of the things I do is I drive classic cars. So I have done last year the Mille Miglia. So long long real class car races, or it's not really races often, but driving around, just zooming out, how old are the car? How better.
- [49:47]
A
Love it. So Zong thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure appreciate you sharing your lessons and story of building DeliverX so far. If people want to check out Deliverect they can go to deliverect.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [50:08]
B
Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm quite responsive there.
- [50:11]
A
Sounds good. Thank you so much. I appreciate you making the time and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [50:16]
B
Thank you ome appreciate the talk.
- [50:19]
A
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