San Francisco, neighborhoods and our favorite…
We just launched the beta for Get It Now in San Francisco and one of my todos here at Postmates is it to write a blog post about the launch and for that matter, start this entire company blog. I should point out that we’re a team of 11 now, all native speakers, except me — I’m German. German but nice, how my good friends like to point out. I will give this my best shot, but I apologize ahead of time for the clear abuse of the English language that will without a doubt happen over the course of the next couple blog posts.
San Francisco, like many other cities, is highly driven by its neighborhoods and people’s favorite places within them. Almost everyone I know has a favorite place in the city. A favorite restaurant, a beloved deli, a tasty food truck or friendliest brick and mortar store. The problem is that these places are not always in reach. They often only operate one location in a city so unless you’re nearby, their products aren’t available.
When we launched Postmates last December, we made it our mission to offer all of these local places an Amazon like delivery experience through our existing Postmates app but we’ve also had to face the reality that we can’t change a city over night. We would love to sign up every retail store in the city, capture their inventory, unlock it, make it searchable, turn it into a store front and make ordering form your local stores seamless, more resourceful and faster than shipping your items across the country. The reality is that we won’t get this task done anytime soon if we don’t hack the system a litte bit.
Hacking the system
So instead of waiting until we signed up every merchant in San Francisco to use Postmates, we decided to give you magic powers to order anything from your local stores, whether they currently use Postmates or not. Get It Now is at its heart a huge warehouse that you can access and have items purchased and delivered from at any time. We use our own urban logistics platform to coordinate an army of Postmates equipped with credit cards to get you the best of San Francisco in under an hour.
Think late night Pizza from Little Star, skipping the brunch lines at Dottie’s or ordering delicious food from Mission Pie. Suddenly your favorite places are within reach regardless of where you are in the city.
Ordering through the app is intuitive and easy. You can browse the items in our featured places or search for any place in your city and write us a shopping list of thing to buy. Going forward we will make things even easier, with the integration of complete menus from your favorite places.
We also decided to change the price structure for our Get It Now app. For the beta period your very first delivery is free, subsequent deliveries cost $7.99 plus a 5% service fee on all purchased items.
If you haven’t already, head over to our sign up page, download the beta version and send us your feedback at: bastian@postmates.com. In return, we’ll reward you with a free delivery.
Finally here are some of our favorite places in San Francisco:
Hard Knox Cafe on 3rd Street by David
Chow on Church St by Sean
City Beer Sore on Folsom St by Bastian
