CTO Corner #6: Making an on-demand service part of a lifestyle
I’m Leo, a software engineer at Jebbit. In this week’s CTO Corner, I sat down with Drizly’s CTO, Hugh Hunter. We talked about how his team built a lifestyle product, what it took to create an app for an on-demand service, and how to get user feedback.
How did you get into engineering?
I graduated from college with a math degree right in the middle of the first dotcom bubble in the late 90s-early 2000s and just got right into a startup. I had never taken a Computer Science class or done any programming, but they were looking for anyone who liked computers and wanted to get involved. I went to a couple companies out in California, and then the bubble popped, and it was almost like a reset button. I got involved in the film industry for a while, managed to sell a screenplay to a studio, and then decided that that was a really tough way to make money. I was pretty good at engineering when I was doing that, so I thought, “Let’s get back into this.” I put the film stuff back on hold and started on the path I’m on now, bouncing from big companies to startups, just trying to get my sea legs, trying to figure out what kind of environment I like to work in, what kind of technology I like to work on, and it happened organically from there.
Can you tell me about your rise to the VP and CTO level?
If you spend enough time as an individual contributor at different types of companies you start to synthesize that together and realize the kind of environment that you do best in and enjoy working in the most. You start to want to exert your philosophy on the team, so I started looking for opportunities where I could take on more of an explicit leadership role so I could create the environment that I enjoy working in.
When something like Drizly comes by, it’s the best of all worlds because it’s a product that is really easy to enjoy working on, and I was fortunate enough to come on board at a point where there were no engineers. I had the opportunity to build the culture and work environment, and also be working on something that is really a fun problem to solve.
What is the Drizly story?
The Drizly story goes back quite a lot farther than you might read about. We’ve been in our official form since 2013, but Justin and Nick, our cofounders, were starting to figure it out in early 2012. They were in college wondering, “Why can you get food delivered, get your laundry picked up, hire a car, but can’t get alcohol delivered?” Turns out, you can get alcohol delivered, just not a lot of people know that you can. They started trying to figure out why eCommerce didn’t exist in any meaningful way with alcohol, and then how to build an eCommerce offering that navigates all of the tricky regulations in this industry. They were lucky to have started in Boston, which is one of the more rigid cities in terms of regulation, so they managed to put together a model that worked in Boston and in Massachusetts, and then they could apply that to other states. If they had started in a state like California, where it’s a little more wild-wild-West, they would’ve had a harder time coming to Boston or New York. They started where it was hardest and they’ve been building on that ever since.
We launched Canada late last year. Anywhere there’s state regulation around sale of alcohol is an opportunity for Drizly. Obviously, eCommerce can work anywhere alcohol is sold, but there’s a particular value for the Drizly platform in environments where there’s a desire to maintain a certain level of control of the sale and handling of alcohol. We take a very deferential approach to all that regulation, we’re not trying to be a disruptor. We’re very interested in helping existing incumbents bring technology to their businesses, but in a way that’s not going to run a foul on these regulations. Canada is similar to the US in the way that they treat that, so it was a natural place to expand.
What was the process like developing an app for an on-demand service?
What’s most present every day as we’re building new features and solving new problems is the fact that we have customers on both ends of transactions. We have retailers who are doing all of the deliveries and taking all the orders, and these are all people that have businesses outside of Drizly. Building software that’s easy for them to use is every bit as important as building software that’s easy for the customer to use. With our retail stores, we have to encourage them to do things the way we want them done, via good software and good UX. That’s almost as challenging a problem to solve as the consumer side. The consumer side is a lot of standard eCommerce problems that you need to solve, like how do you let people browse products, how do you check out your cart, all these things anyone who’s been in eCommerce for a while has worked on a million times. But the retail side is the really interesting aspect that I think on-demand brings to the floor and is where a lot of our really interesting problems will be solved.
How do you get user feedback to keep improving customer experience?
We do quite a bit of outreach to our customers. Our product team will frequently bring groups in for in-person focus groups. We’ve done work with UserTesting.com, where you put wireframes out there to get people to try to use things. We also spend a fair amount of time observing retailers using our software — we’re talking to them constantly about where their pain points are. We’re still in the process of finding the most efficient way to get feedback, but it’s really just observing people and talking to them.
Internally, what we do that’s kind of interesting is we have our internal tools for our customer service team to manage orders and to communicate with stores and users. They do a monthly Google hangout, where they share their screen and you literally see them using our internal tools. You can learn so much just by watching someone use your product.
Do you think we have reached a maximum capacity for apps with on-demand services?
I think we’re ready for consolidation and aggregation with on-demand. I’m a perfect example of someone who wants to save time by outsourcing something. But now I literally have pages of apps on my phone, each one for some narrow slice of the on-demand economy. I think there needs to be some simplification of the offerings that are out there. I’m sure there are things out there that are still ripe to being on-demand-ified, but I see the trend of consolidation and aggregation more than companies like that going out of business.
People will get in these battles. The switching costs are so low when you have Uber and Lyft on your phone, or Instacart and FreshDirect on your phone, so you’ll use one and then you’ll get lured away with $50 to someone else, and then you’ll get lured back. It’s a vicious cycle of going to whoever’s willing to pay for your attention. It’s not sustainable, but it’s good for the consumer in the short run.
Really what you want, and what I appreciate about the real big dogs like Uber, is that the app is enjoyable to use while I’m using it. You get your ride started as seamlessly as possible, and then you’re back on with your life. The best apps are the ones you use without thinking about it — as easy as going and opening your mailbox, just something you do.
What do you think will be next type of service?
There are on-demand barbers, on-demand mechanics, oil change, all this stuff! I go on vacation somewhere that doesn’t have coverage for all these on-demand services and I’m like, “Ok, I guess I have to go to a drugstore for the first time in a year and a half.” It’s pretty funny, you don’t realize how quickly you become dependent on them. I can’t think of an iteration of on-demand that involves a new vertical as much as I can think of that aggregation and consolidation.
