tl;dr — We gave out over 350 Pizzas. Requesting a pizza obviously takes less time than ordering pizza. We’re tech guys, not Pizza Delivery Specialists. Sh**show5000 ensued! (Lots of fun though!) ..it may seem simple, but try ordering 350 pizzas amongst 6 people, with no preparation☺ Harder than it seems!
It’s about 8:30pm on the eve of Bitcoin Pizza Day, sitting around the work stations after a day of grinding out code and customer service. Brayton Williams (Co-Founder of BoostVC) suggested an idea of doing something to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day. Awesome idea Brayton!
Naturally we whip out a bunch of nerf guns and begin shooting them around the office trying to conjure up something awesome. With only about 8 hours to prep this, time was the enemy. We conjured up some totally rockstar ideas but they would require days of planning for them to be executed properly. (We’ll keep them for next year!) So we thought let’s just give away some pizzas. Simple Idea. People like Pizza. We all have a bit of fun with it. Win-Win.
“We’ll do $0.99c Pizzasfor the first 150 orders that are placed.”
Well in theory, that was awesome. Why $0.99, why not just make them free? If we make them $0.99 it’s kind of cool to show the ability of Bitcoin being able to make a transaction for less than $1 and be financially feasible from a payment processing perspective. So we went with that! Cool. Idea’s there. So we threw together a landing page before bed and prepared an email for the morning to sharing the good news with everyone. Aiming for US/Canada only because we were pressed for time and the logistics and potential issues with credit cards for the International users were a bit of speed bump that we didn’t have enough time to research and we really wanted everyone getting a pizza who ordered one.
So we wake up (one of our team members, Michael, is in Sydney at the moment which is on opposite timezones; he’s still awake to see if we need all hands on deck.) and send out the email early morning PST. Post it to the Bitcoin community to let them know they can grab one if they would like, kick back and see if anyone is hungry.
Well… Wasn't that naive. Within 1 minute of the email being sent out, we’d gotten 10+ orders. So we’re like, hmmmm… Ok, that’s cool. Let’s get ordering! We decided to do them by phone because the online ordering systems were blocking orders from IP’s if you placed within 15 minutes. Great, this should be fun, about 35 pizzas now, 10 minutes in. We had turned our snapCard office from normal days of coding and customer service into a chaotic all hands on livechat/Pizza Ordering, into the world’s newest Pizza delivery support center.
So now the orders are coming in, the Bitcoin community has heard about it. Orders flooding in and we’re racing to get everyone ordered as soon as possible. Michael jumps on reddit to control the crowd and double check on any questions that people might have about if it’s real or why are there delays. You’ve got a flow of Pizza requests coming in every 15 seconds, with the average time to order the pizza taking 1:48 seconds. Naturally, this smells like a back log. We saw it coming but knew we had no choice but to keep our heads down and smash the orders out and just make sure that people know we’re on it.
“Feel free to inbox me if you have an order number to check on.”
Famous last words. We now have 80 people who “Ordered first” haha… So we start double checking and giving out ETA’s. Some people waited almost 3 hours. Which, we thank you for. The term “We appreciate your patience” was used a few (zillion) times. It got to a point where we had to say “Seriously, thanks for being so patient. We actually mean that, not just some bs customer support response.” — We meant it aswell.
As we began approaching the 150 cutoff mark sooner than expected, knowing that the fun was about to end, we crunched some numbers and asked our office, “Who’s keen to keep this absolute chaotic mess going?” A general consensus in painful laughter and we all thought, alright then we’re in the eye of the storm. Let’s keep pressing on! So we rallied together and let it rideeee!
Pressing on and getting all the orders finalized for everyone, and cleaning up the customer inquiries on Twitter and Reddit, the Pizza storm had ended… We got a lot of people fed in a short amount of time, we were thrilled that even though it didn’t go 100% smoothly, everyone ended up sorted. Now we just all had to do our normal jobs after the pizzafest5000 was all tidied up.
All in all it was a fun experience and we’re so happy that everyone got a kick out it! We look forward to doing some much better prepared awesome things for you guys ☺. Thanks for your patience! (wink)
But seriously. A huge thank you to everyone for making it a crazy day filled with slices, sodas, and lots of fun! Hope everyone has a great week and we look forward to reaching out with the next cool idea we’ve got up our sleeve!
Kind regards,
- snapCard Team -
