Many marketplace businesses face the same early tension: push aggressively for growth or slow down long enough to validate that the system actually works.
At the beginning, the pressure is almost always toward speed. Investors expect traction. Early customers expect expansion. Competitors are moving quickly.
But the decision a CEO is really making is more structural than tactical. The question isn’t simply how fast the marketplace grows. It’s whether the incentives across the ecosystem—customers, suppliers, partners, and the platform itself—are aligned well enough to sustain that growth.
Paul Roberts has seen the consequences of getting this wrong across multiple startups. His conclusion is blunt:
“At scale, misalignment becomes the most expensive risk.”
A marketplace can operate with small cracks early on. But growth doesn’t repair those cracks. It amplifies them.
Most early-stage companies move quickly through validation. Founders test pricing. They recruit early customers. They experiment with suppliers or partners.
In a traditional business, this process typically centers on one core relationship: the company and the customer.
Marketplaces are different. They require multiple groups to interact successfully at the same time. Each group brings its own incentives, constraints, and economic expectations.
For a platform business, alignment must exist across at least three layers:
If one group absorbs disproportionate friction or economic pressure, the system may still function temporarily. But the imbalance compounds as the marketplace grows.
Roberts has watched this dynamic repeatedly.
“Growth will only amplify the cracks.”
A pricing model that seemed manageable with dozens of participants can collapse under thousands. A supplier relationship that worked in early pilots can become hostile when volume increases. A platform that captured value too aggressively can trigger resistance from the very participants it depends on.
The larger the system becomes, the harder those issues are to correct.
One of the most striking aspects of Roberts’ approach to building GoodBite is the order in which validation occurred.
Before significant development began, the team validated alignment across every stakeholder group involved in the system.
Restaurants were asked whether the model solved real economic pain.
Students were asked whether the platform created meaningful value.
Charities were asked whether the mechanism fit their funding needs.
Only after those conversations consistently produced the same signal did the team move forward.
“Your mission, partners, and customers all have to be pulling in the same direction.”
This step is often overlooked because marketplace ideas are typically evaluated through demand. If consumers want the product, founders assume the market exists.
But demand alone is insufficient. Marketplace success depends on ecosystem coherence.
Every participant must believe the system improves their position relative to the alternatives.
Without that alignment, growth becomes fragile.
Once incentives are aligned, expansion becomes less of a forcing function.
The platform no longer needs to convince participants to join. The system begins to reinforce itself.
Customers adopt the platform because it delivers a better experience.
Suppliers join because the economics are sustainable.
Partners participate because the mission supports their goals.
At that point, growth becomes a consequence rather than a target.
“Growth becomes a by-product, not the goal.”
This shift is subtle but important for CEOs managing scaling businesses.
When growth is treated as the primary objective, leaders often override structural warnings. They prioritize expansion metrics over ecosystem health.
But when growth is treated as the output of alignment, leadership attention shifts to maintaining system balance.
The CEO’s role becomes less about acceleration and more about preserving structural coherence as the network expands.
Marketplace decisions rarely arrive with complete data.
Signals emerge gradually. Patterns appear before hard metrics confirm them. Waiting for certainty can mean reacting after structural issues have already taken hold.
Roberts describes this as a learned instinct developed through experience.
“You don’t need perfect data—you need enough signal to move with conviction.”
This is one of the more difficult disciplines for scaling CEOs. Acting too early introduces risk. Acting too late compounds it.
Marketplace leadership requires recognizing which signals indicate structural problems versus normal operational noise.
Incentive misalignment often reveals itself through small early indicators: partner frustration, supplier attrition, pricing tension, or subtle changes in user behavior.
Experienced founders learn to treat these signals seriously before scale magnifies them.
The complexity of marketplace businesses also reinforces a broader leadership principle.
The CEO cannot personally manage every component of the system. Instead, the role resembles that of a bench coach—setting the strategy, positioning the right people, and ensuring the system operates effectively.
Roberts describes it simply:
“A CEO is like a bench coach.”
This framing is particularly important in platform businesses, where success depends on multiple specialized functions operating together.
Engineering teams build the infrastructure.
Partnership teams recruit suppliers.
Growth teams manage customer acquisition.
Operations teams maintain service quality.
The CEO’s responsibility is ensuring those pieces reinforce one another rather than working at cross purposes.
Once again, alignment becomes the central discipline.
Marketplace founders often believe their primary challenge is achieving scale.
In reality, scale simply exposes whatever structure already exists beneath the surface.
If incentives are aligned, growth strengthens the system.
If incentives are misaligned, growth accelerates the breakdown.
Roberts’ experience building marketplace companies reframes the CEO’s decision. The real question is not how quickly a marketplace can grow.
It is whether the system has earned the right to scale.
For leaders building platform businesses, that distinction may be the difference between momentum and collapse.
Paul Roberts is the CEO of GoodBite and a serial entrepreneur who has raised more than $130 million across multiple startups. His experience building marketplace and platform businesses informs his perspective on incentive alignment, ecosystem design, and scaling strategy.
__________
Jeff Holman is a CEO advisor, legal strategist, and founder of Intellectual Strategies. With years of experience guiding leaders through complex business and legal challenges, Jeff equips CEOs to scale with confidence by blending legal expertise with strategic foresight. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Intellectual Strategies provides innovative legal solutions for CEOs and founders through its fractional legal team model. By offering proactive, integrated legal support at predictable costs, the firm helps leaders protect their businesses, manage risk, and focus on growth with confidence.
__________
The Breakout CEO podcast brings you inside the pivotal moments of scaling leaders. Each week, host Jeff Holman spotlights breakout stories of scaling CEOs—showing how resilience, insight, and strategy create pivotal inflection points and lasting growth.
Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
__________
Want to be a guest—or know a scaling CEO with a breakout story to share? Apply directly at go.intellectualstrategies.com.
Transcript Summary
00:00 Intro: Inner vs Outer Game of Business
01:00 Robert’s Background & Early Journey
02:30 First Failures & Hard Lessons
04:30 Discovering Managed Services
07:30 Early Growth & Finding an Edge
10:30 Scaling Challenges & Plateaus
14:00 Leadership Evolution & Key Mistakes
18:30 Fixing Core Values (What Went Wrong)
23:30 Vision, Goals & Company Direction
28:30 Mindset Shift: Prey vs Predator
33:30 Building Alignment & Strong Teams
40:00 Strategy, Growth & Future (AI + Direction)
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Jeff Holman (00:14)
Welcome back to the breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman. Very glad to be with you again today talking with smart people like Paul Roberts from Good Bites. Paul, so glad to have you on the show.
Paul Roberts (00:26)
Great to be here, Jeff. Watched a couple of the episodes, loved the conversation, excited to be here.
Jeff Holman (00:32)
Well,
the conversation is comes from the guests. I mean, we get all these great insights. And so we're lucky to have you as we as we've had other guests that have done really cool stuff. So thank you. Yeah, so so you've done I mean, speaking of doing stuff, we might as well just jump right into that, right? You you've done a few things, a few successful things that led up to your current thing. We'll get a few details on each of those and
Paul Roberts (00:43)
Appreciate that.
Jeff Holman (00:59)
and get down to some breakout moments here. tell me first, you know, we talked a little bit in our icebreaker questions about family and about how you like to talk with your kids and your spouse about the things going on in the business. How does, I know some people who do that, some people who are very much open at home about business, maybe sometimes business is happening in the home. Like how does that impact the way that you
that you think about business where you've got these kids and wife and everybody is kind of, I don't know if they're involved involved, but they're involved, right?
Paul Roberts (01:38)
Yeah, they're involved because again, where I just think as executive CEOs, founders, this is unfortunately a 24 seven job most of the time. So you do take a lot of it. You do wear a lot of it on your shoulders all the time. Things are good. You things are bad. I think one of the biggest challenges is making sure that that doesn't bleed into the day to day at home. While you're talking about business, you're talking. I try personally to keep it as almost teaching moments for the kids of, know, this is this is
how you can be an entrepreneur. This is what entrepreneurs do. This is what CEOs do. And I think, you know, to keep it in the house is more from that teaching moment. You know, and I try, you know, my wife will realize I'm having a tough day. She's like, all right, let it go. You know, tomorrow's a new day. Like, let's have fun as a family and kind of put that aside.
Jeff Holman (02:27)
Yeah. Yeah. And that's that that can be hard to do. I mean, because like you said, we we are in this all day every day. And, you know, I have my own small business, but talking with the CEOs that I work with in other businesses like like there's a lot on your shoulders and there's not always a lot of ⁓ there aren't a lot of resources necessarily to turn to to offload that. Right. So you have to kind of put it away for the evening. It comes back out the next day and it's still there. Like, how do you manage the stresses?
and maybe release the pressures of being a CEO.
Paul Roberts (03:02)
One thing I've learned is that you have to really focus on the variables you can control. There's so much of it that's out of our control. You know, I can't fly over to India and sit at the desk of some of the developers and say, move faster, move faster. You know, it's, it's things are going to happen as they happen. I wake up every morning with a to-do list to try to, to impact the business ways that I personally can, uh, and try to let people that I trust and have put in those positions to do their job, do their job. Um,
you know, are there times where we need to kind of have a conversation of, okay, we need to speed things up. need to do this better. Of course. But I personally look at it as, you know, maintaining my sanity by looking at the variables. can personally put my finger on and say, okay, I can help the company grow by doing this. I can help the company scale by doing that. ⁓ if I just sat all day, you know, for 18 hours a day and looked at every single little nuance of what's going right, what's going wrong, I think I would lose my mind.
Jeff Holman (04:00)
Yeah. Well, so if you put other people in place to take care of those things that you don't have control over, other people can worry about that or is it just something that, you know, when the time comes and the situation is right, you'll be able to take care of it. How do you, because putting that off is helpful for now, but a lot of times those things are still there tomorrow.
Paul Roberts (04:20)
Right. It's not so much of putting it off. It's I always equate a CEO as a great bench coach. ⁓ you might not be out there hitting the final shot. You might not throw the touchdown or take the last shot of the game, but you put that person there. You gave them the playbook. You gave them all the tools and resources they needed to be successful. You know, I would always tell people, I, a lot of times the engineers, the data scientists, I don't really always understand everything they're saying, but I hired.
You you try to hire the best and the brightest who do know what they're doing, who do understand all those nuances. So that's kind of helpful where, you know, I can't write certain code. can't design certain algorithms, but you have those people who can, and you put your trust in them, which is a big part of it. You're trusted that you have the right pieces and you have to very quickly assess if you don't to make sure you get those right pieces. So, for me, that's kind of how I, I, I look at it that
I don't need to be the shining star nor am I most times in an organization. It's, you know, I just have the playbook and the resources to put the right people out on the field.
Jeff Holman (05:24)
Yeah, yeah. Now I want to hear about who the right people are and what the team looks like at Good Bites. before we do that, give us a flavor of some of the mild posts from your career that led up to ⁓ starting Good Bites.
Paul Roberts (05:38)
Yeah, I've been a serial entrepreneur since, you my early twenties. And I was joking with somebody the day you bat 300 in baseball, you get into the hall of fame. I've probably done just around that successful startups. You know, I've raised over $130 million over the last 10 years for companies that I helmed. ⁓ During the SPAC boom, we raised a little over $100 million for that SPAC. ⁓
You know, for me, was always, how do you, how do you find, you know, real problems to solve, that are going to have scalability and, ⁓ you know, we've done some unique things around data science and machine learning. ⁓ and with good bite, the whole focus is how do you combine everyday behavior with, doing well? So our motto is, you know, eat well, do good. So, you know, we're, we're building a, a food delivery platform that, gives back with every order.
So this is ⁓ something that I'm not reinventing food delivery. I'm not going to reinvent charity. But if we can combine the two of them into a very seamless, scalable platform, we could have real impact and obviously help people along the way.
Jeff Holman (06:51)
Yeah, you're putting a Paul Roberts stamp on your own business model. Well, so from those from those experiences ⁓ pre-Goodbytes, what are a couple of the lessons that you picked up that you've been able to now apply as the CEO of Goodbytes?
Paul Roberts (07:06)
⁓ Where do I start?
Jeff Holman (07:09)
Yeah, the thousands, the daily lessons, right?
Paul Roberts (07:12)
Yeah. At scale, because we all are building companies to scale for the most part, misalignment becomes the most expensive risk. Early on, we rush, we rush, we rush, and sometimes things get misaligned, things get done improperly. And then as you start to scale, it really becomes expensive.
Jeff Holman (07:13)
Which ones stand out
Are you talking stuff like having the wrong tech stack? Are you talking about team and culture? Are you talking about pricing?
Paul Roberts (07:42)
Or
any of them and I've kind of dealt with all of those where you know, hey one one company we decided hey, let's use our language this you know unique language and great. So we code our first iteration in our language and I realize is about 45 early developers across the entire United States. I just happened to meet a really good one day one, you know, New York City. So now all of sudden he's like, well, I would have probably suggested we don't use our line. I said that would have been nice to hear earlier.
And then the hot, you know, hiring, like I mentioned earlier, you know, everybody looks good on a resume and an interview. A lot of times it's, you know, you have to cut your losses quickly and move on. ⁓ so all of the things you mentioned, pricing models, a lot of times when you, you, you build a product, you build a company, you have a certain pricing model in your mind. But then once you go to test the market, it completely changes. ⁓ yeah. So I think there's all of those. have to be somewhat flexible.
but also giving yourself an off ramp as you scale. Because I think if you lock yourself into that code, if you lock yourself into a certain employee or pricing, you you could find yourself in a very, very tough spot when you start to scale up. you know, I've seen teams where, know, one person, I would always joke, you know, who's got the keys to the elevator. If it's only one person, we're in trouble. You know, we have to have a distributed risk in the organization.
Jeff Holman (09:05)
As you're saying this, it makes me think of some experiences I've seen with clients where, you know, sometimes these early, you know, first, second, third time CEOs, they go out and they learn all these lessons and then they kind of pull back. They're like, man, I just, can't take this anymore. I gotta take less risk or whatever. Every CEO who's started companies has been through these lessons in one form or another.
Has going through these lessons made you, you know, in some aspects more cautious how you approach things? Has it made you more bold? Has it just made you smarter? Like, how would you, how would you characterize what you've taken away from the lessons?
Paul Roberts (09:48)
Yeah, you I think what I've learned over the last few decades, it's you can't learn in business school. You only can learn it by doing it. So I, you you wore the black eyes, you did the thing, you lost the money, you scaled the company, you won, you know, all these different things come from experience. So being more bold or more cautious, I don't think I necessarily lean one way or the other. It's just.
You see where a lot of the landmines are before they come up on the journey, if that makes sense. And again, you realize things where, you know, a big thing I believe in is try not to make the same mistakes twice because, you know, as a CEO, it's very, very painful. ⁓ You know, so if I made it a company ago or two companies ago or a different fundraising event, you try not to make it again. ⁓ But I think that it's that knowledge of being through that experience.
Jeff Holman (10:22)
Yep.
Paul Roberts (10:47)
that can afford you the ability to be a little more bold because oddly enough, you're a little more cautious in certain areas because you've been there. You realize not to make that mistake again.
Jeff Holman (10:59)
I talked to clients about and friends and everybody, business owners, about seeing around corners that you haven't seen around before, right? And acting like a second time founder when you're really a first time founder and trying to leverage those things. How do you, so clearly when you've been through a situation and you've seen the results of that, you know, okay, next time I'm going to do the same thing or I'm not going to do the same thing. How has that influenced your ability to make decisions about corners that you haven't seen around yet?
that you haven't actually experienced.
Paul Roberts (11:31)
I think you just start to trust your instincts faster. You don't need the perfect information. You don't need the perfect data. You'll get the data. I think you just need the right signal or enough of a signal to move with conviction because you almost have that third, you know, let's say, I don't know, you have a sense, have something that's telling you, okay, I have a general idea what's around that corner. And I've done this before, I've peeked around strange corners in business and it's not the end of the world. We've gotten out of it.
Um, you know, you just try not to ever have that fatal blow, I guess.
Jeff Holman (12:05)
I love that phrase. I haven't heard anybody say it that way. Peeped around strange corners.
Paul Roberts (12:10)
Once it came out, said, wait a second, I have to clarify this a little bit.
Jeff Holman (12:15)
no, I didn't take it in any other way. Like I think as a business owner, you are peeking around a lot of strange, unfamiliar territory and you're just like never been over that hill.
Paul Roberts (12:26)
I'm
speaking to somebody this morning and they're like, well, you know how much experience you have in the food restaurant industry? said zero. know, but, but I understand it's a marketplace. have supply demand. have these mechanisms that I do understand very well from other companies I've started. So it's, you just have to kind of insert, you know, food delivery versus websites or, know, different things in my mind that I could easily get my head around. So yes, it is a blind spot. is picking around a corner, but, ⁓
at the end of the day, it's a pretty fundamental business.
Jeff Holman (12:58)
So when you made the transition from earlier business into Goodbytes, well, tell us first, give us the overview of Goodbytes. Give us your elevator pitch for that.
Paul Roberts (13:08)
Yeah,
you know, very similar to every food delivery app you've ever used, DoorDash, BrubHub, Seamless, etc. No big difference there. The main difference is that when you go to place an order, we're going to give you the opportunity to select a charity you want to support. So today we have a handful of national charities like Make-A-Wish, No Kid Hungry, ⁓ lot of local charities. ⁓ We're very focused on the college campuses because most Greek organizations, student organizations,
They have to support a charity every semester. You're also ordering food at a rate significantly higher than your average consumer. A lot of time.
Jeff Holman (13:46)
wife.
Paul Roberts (13:49)
A lot of times the students are using mom and dad's credit card. It's almost funny. You know, it's monopoly money today. So what we're doing is, you know, rebuilding today, a food delivery marketplace with restaurants and consumers and charities in the middle. we're introducing, you know, really good behavior, ⁓ charity behavior every single day for these, these college students who, you know, when they're ordering a plier bowl or they're, you know, they're tacos.
They're also delivering $2 to a charity that really has it.
Jeff Holman (14:23)
Oh, nice. Well, I guess I should clarify my wife does a lot of Instacart for the family, I guess not as much as the DoorDash type stuff, GoodBites stuff. That's fair. Well, I want to hear about the charity aspect of it, but I want go back just for a second to what we were talking about to of link the prior experience to starting GoodBites because I'm really curious, did you have experience in the business? I think you just said not a lot of experience in the food business, but what kind of things did you bring from your
past experiences to say, yeah, this is where I'm going to go. This is what I want to do. And I've got a few skills that I can bring to this.
Paul Roberts (15:02)
So prior company that I built was a programmatic advertising company. we, we took a tremendous amount of websites, publishers, um, you know, connected TV apps and we connected them to advertisers. So to me, it's a very similar marketplace where we're connecting supply and demand. If you just insert, you know, the websites and the apps with the consumers and the advertisers with restaurants, we're just basically creating pipes. Uh, if I tried to build.
You know, goodbye 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it would have cost 50 to a hundred million dollars. But today you have these point of sale systems. Everybody has an API integration. Everybody's connected. So for us, we're basically acting as a middle layer between all these different, you know, all these different delivery services, all these different restaurants, all these different PLS systems, all of these different charities. And we're giving the consumer a nice, easy front end to go in and basically order food and feel good about it.
So like I said, if I tried to do this and I've looked at, spent countless hours reading through the public filings of these other large marketplaces and the amount of money they spent to build driver networks and connectivity between all the restaurants, it was hundreds of millions of dollars. But now that we've done that, we can build on top of it.
Jeff Holman (16:24)
Yeah. Yeah. So the cost of entry is, is not nearly as high. you're, you're not the first mover in the market, right? There are other people have existed. ⁓ is there, is there some hesitancy when you're saying to yourself, okay, these guys have been in the market for a while they've established. mean, they've, they've built the infrastructure too, which you can leverage, but should we really go up against some of these people? Is this like, this where we really want to be?
Paul Roberts (16:51)
One of the first people I called is a gentleman who's invested alongside me in numerous ventures. And I said, I'm going to rebuild DoorDash and Grubhub, but do it right. And he laughed. And he said, you're just crazy enough to do this, aren't you? I said, yeah. And I said to him, the entire angle right now, if you look at the behavior of the consumers, they're getting incredibly frustrated with the fees that they're paying.
the restaurants are being charged anywhere from 15 to 30 % by these platforms. And if you speak to a restaurant owner, know a lot of restaurant owners here in New York, they say my margin is not 25%.
Jeff Holman (17:28)
But the platforms want to take that entire margin.
Paul Roberts (17:32)
Correct. So now what happens, the consumer gets hurt because that restaurant owner has to increase his prices across the board on his menu. Anytime somebody orders through one of these apps just to cover the fee. And there's other issues like these platforms don't share any of the consumer data with the restaurants. So a friend of mine, he's got, you know, six restaurants here in New York. He said, I'm basically a ghost kitchen for these, for these platforms. Yeah.
Jeff Holman (17:42)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Paul Roberts (18:00)
consumer comes on, see me, they order the food, a driver shows up with a number, I match the number to the tag, I give them the food and off they go. I have no connection with my consumer. So I think ⁓ you're seeing a lot of, I don't want to say use the word regret because obviously they're generating a lot of revenue, but I think the business model is causing a lot of angst with restaurants.
Jeff Holman (18:23)
I mean, certainly there's got to be tension, right? Somebody who's built a brick and mortar restaurant has seats to fill and staff on site. All of a sudden, they're balancing the operating, the normal operating costs with the ghost kitchen model. You know, it also makes me think, because I've talked a lot of guests recently for whatever reason, I've brought up the book, Unreasonable Hospitality. And the way you mentioned it just made me think of that. You know, how do you build unreasonable hospitality for
a consumer market that you don't actually have the data for and don't even interact with. Like that's you you're missing out at one of the maybe most fulfilling parts of a business, right? Building the community around that restaurant. Just a quick note about our guests. I host the breakout CEO podcast to share behind the scenes insights from scaling businesses. As an attorney, I see the real challenges leaders face long before success becomes public. But client stories
have to stay confidential. So we invite guest CEOs to share their own moments of struggle and success. I'm so grateful to our guests and my team at Intellectual Strategies for making this show possible. Now, let's get back to the show.
Paul Roberts (19:34)
And Jeff, I think you just hit the nail on it. You know, a big part for us connecting the consumer, the restaurant, but a charity. So everyone feels part of something bigger than just the transaction. Yeah. That order starts to feel personal. You know, we give the charity, you order your, you know, your, your meal, your pizza comes, you know, 30 minutes later, you're getting a text message from the charity thanking you and explaining what your $2 actually means to that charity where somebody like no kid hungry, it feeds, you know, five to 10 kids.
So now all of sudden you're eating your meal, it has such a greater impact. And then we're hoping that this ties back to the restaurant, the meal. It's no longer, hey, I just ordered from this massive conglomerate. It actually has an impact. The restaurant's a part of that. restaurant owner can feel good about that as well.
Jeff Holman (20:23)
And there's a whole, there's a whole side of the business with it, with the nonprofit, right? Like I sat on the board of a nonprofit here in Utah called Friends for Sight. They would screen kids at a certain age for amblyopia or, you know, what turns into lazy eye. And if you catch it, you can correct it. If you don't, you can't, or at least not as easily. I'm not sure if you can correct it or not totally, but they did this. And I remember them talking, this was back before, I don't know, this was maybe 12 years ago. And they were talking about how they were one of,
I think two or three charities who were approved to be on the DMV renewal forms and you could check the box, add a dollar, add $2, whatever it was. And how that, even though it was such a small amount, that was a huge part of their operating budget because it worked, right? And they had access to it and other people probably would have loved to have the same access. I'm not sure how that worked politically, but you know, so you're really...
giving an avenue to the, I mean, from a consumer standpoint, I think it'd be easy to say, ⁓ gosh, you know, I'm making a little contribution. Yeah, I feel good. But to the nonprofit, some of these programs that really give them exposure can create an entire, you know, operating budget for them that wasn't there before, right?
Paul Roberts (21:43)
Yeah, it's huge. And you're right. We're making very similar to the license plate idea. It's how do you make giving effortless, you know, build it into everyday actions. And then suddenly those small gestures, like you said, could be one of the biggest, you know, donate, donate, donation channels that these nonprofit see. Yeah, what a lot of charities struggle with also is in America, we're typically giving, you know, about 70 to 80 % of donors give one time and don't give again to a charity.
But it's hard for them to stay engaged. And I think that's one thing we're trying to address where, you know, after a while, the charities will say to us, well, how many more please or how many more mailings, how many more emails or postcards can be sent? Now, all of a sudden, it's OK. We know, you know, Paul and you he's got three boys are playing a lot of sports. His wife, we're always running around. We order food maybe a few times a week. I could have a real impact without really doing anything more than I was already doing.
Jeff Holman (22:41)
Thank
Paul Roberts (22:41)
⁓
And then it gives the charity a great opportunity then to engage with that audience in a very positive way. They're not calling, they're not asking for your credit card number anymore. Jeff, we you to run another 5K. It's thank you for your donation. It's a very positive, net positive interaction with the person who donated the money.
Jeff Holman (22:59)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Creating those recurring touch points that I don't know if there's a phrase for it, there's a marketing phrase for it, right? I went to recurring revenue and what's the analogous for recurring touch points for a nonprofit, but it's probably just brand exposure, right? Yeah.
Paul Roberts (23:17)
It's engagement also. It's, know, and the audience we're targeting that college student is such a valuable audience for charities, especially as they're coming out of the education side of the world into the what's called making money side of the world. You know, they're looking for, okay, where do I have a higher purpose here? Where can I help make an impact? So they're also learning about charities through GoodBite that they might not have already known about.
Jeff Holman (23:43)
Well, so Paul, what does GoodBite look like today? Like what markets are you in? What does your team look like? Things like that.
Paul Roberts (23:50)
Yeah, so we're currently in beta at one university. We'll be at 50 universities hopefully by the end of March. We have a goal to be at 100 campuses next year. Hopefully we're going to be somewhere in the neighborhood north of maybe half a million orders per month, which will equate to about a million dollars donated per month. have right now we have 208 college ambassadors, university ambassadors across the US ranging from
Jeff Holman (24:09)
Wow.
Paul Roberts (24:17)
you know, big SEC schools, big 10 UCLA, you know, university, know, state university in New York system with, with students, because they're the ones who honestly really care. And they're the ones who are getting this, you know, really engagement on campus. So they're the ones talking to their fellow students of, know, I see you your coffee every single day to class, you know, use good bite now, rather than this other platform. We're going to get $2 to do a local food bank or.
you a woman shelter here in town. Um, I don't, and I've said this numerous times publicly, I don't want to have a massive, you know, three, 400 person company. Um, I think so much can be done with AI and so much can be done with, you know, repeated tasks with AI, which is great. That, you know, maybe another podcast for another day on how AI is really changing the workforce, but it's, it's been something else for me personally.
Jeff Holman (25:14)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, so as you've been building this, as you've been putting the ambassadors in place, as you've been rolling out the beta at the university, like, what's been working well?
Paul Roberts (25:26)
It's keeping it simple, ⁓ not over complicating it. It's you know, this is a food delivery platform. It's going to save the restaurants money. It's going to help students donate money that that, you know, to a charity that cares and it helps the charities see that repeatable donation and also engagement from a very valuable audience in the college students. So ⁓ all three parties have benefited so far from GoodBite.
It's just a matter now of how quickly we can scale it across the country to every campus. And then the goal is within 24 months to be nationally, every city, every state.
Jeff Holman (26:03)
Yeah, very cool. I the goals. What's an area where you've run into maybe unexpected obstacles that you thought, this will be, you we'll just put, you know, you put these things in place and everything starts rolling from there and you're like, wait a second, there's another thing I got to deal with. What have you had to deal with as you've done this?
Paul Roberts (26:22)
I think the biggest one we've had to overcome is a lot of these bigger platforms jangle some incentives and get an exclusivity. So ⁓ restaurants will only be on one platform. ⁓ we're back to kind of, you know, think of creative ways to do that. We've worked with lot of universities and conversations to be part of their meal plan, different things like that. But that was one we didn't see. ⁓ anytime you're going to develop a market, you always have to quickly figure out the hard
side of the market. Yeah, charities, every single charity we speak to says yes, they want to engage with with donors, they want more donations. The students love the idea. They can't stand the fees, they can't stand the fact that you know, there's there's no other way really challenging on campus to raise raise donations. So this helps them. restaurant owners enjoy it, because they're paying less money and they could actually feel good. They're helping their community. So
That was the biggest thing we came up against was that some of these other platforms require the restaurants to sign either short term or long term exclusivity deals.
Jeff Holman (27:29)
That seems I'm surprised that they would do that. I mean, I guess I'm as I think about it, Coke and Pepsi, you don't find them at the same spots very often. Right. And so a lot of them, think either cost structure wise, they've created exclusivity or maybe they've got contracts. I'm not sure. But I guess I'm a little surprised that there's exclusivity. What's the incentive of the restaurants to have that exclusivity better, like a better terms, better pricing, better.
Paul Roberts (27:53)
Exactly. They'll typically tell them, you know what, your contracts, know, 30 % commission, you know, we'll, we'll do 20 % commission. If you give us an exclusivity for six months, you know, don't want our competitors apps.
Jeff Holman (28:05)
Interesting and that's if that's the difference between making making some profit versus making no profit then ⁓ I guess why not do it right? It's a Until there's yeah until there's until you see the competition out there well So when you've when you've approached these restaurants whether they've got the exclusivity or not You're talking to them one at a time. I assume right or or
Paul Roberts (28:27)
It's really the student ambassadors. So that's the interesting part of our model is we will have anywhere from from two to 15 ambassadors per campus. And one of the first things we do is build out a list of all the restaurants in the area, ⁓ sign that to the student ambassadors, build when Hey, I'm Paul from, you know, from student government here at a university. We'd like to start raising money for the local food bank and this national charity. We're going to do that by by ordering more food for you.
And the way that we're going to order that food is through a platform called GoodBite. There's no cost to you as a restaurant. You're actually going to pay less commission than you do currently with these other platforms. The $2 donation comes from GoodBite, not from the consumer or the restaurant. And we connect it relatively seamless into their POS system. It takes about 15 minutes to set up and the students can start ordering food that day. We try to make it, you know, restaurant owners,
Jeff Holman (29:21)
nice.
Paul Roberts (29:25)
You know, you walk in and they have a huge rush. You know, they're going to delivery at the back door. The phone's ringing. You have to be very, very quick, very direct. Here's what we do. Here's how we do it. We'd love to have you on board. If not, you know, we'll come back in a month. Hopefully. Yeah. Hopefully you have time then.
Jeff Holman (29:41)
Or when your exclusivity is done. Yeah. When you've, how do you manage the charity side of it? Cause I could see a lot of charities, like you said, everyone says yes, if you ask them. When I, if I were using the platform, I'd go on the platform, I'd order my food at the local, you know, whatever restaurant. And do I have, do I have them like I select my favorite and it just pops up my favorite charity each time? Or do I have to select from?
Paul Roberts (29:44)
Either or.
Jeff Holman (30:09)
a list of 50 charities in the area. How does that work?
Paul Roberts (30:12)
Yeah, couple different ways. So one is we can give a group like a hard coded link for people to download or use the website where it'll be a specific charity. They could always go back and change the charity if they want. We also built in like an impact calculator so you could actually see how much you've donated over time. ⁓ But any given time you could always go back and change your charity. Most times when you log in, depending on the campus, you're going to have an option of about eight.
charities. So it'll be a mix of national charities and local charities. But, ⁓ you know, we use charity navigator on the backend to verify the legitimacy of the charities. So we only, you know, work with eight plus charities. If there's a nonprofit that wants to get involved, we also have a section on our site where they can email us and say, Hey, we'd love to be listed. We give them their own link to share with their audience. Okay. Please use goodbye to order your food.
every time you order. you know, we're going to basically get $2. So we tried to make the UI and the experience of the consumer pretty painless. They select their charity one time and then they'll always see it in their receipt. But if they want to change it, they could always get into their account, just like a credit card or a delivery address and just change it.
Jeff Holman (31:24)
Yeah. What kind of adoption trends are you seeing? you seeing that this is, mean, nonprofits say yes, restaurants who are not in exclusivity, they probably just say yes because why not add another channel to their, what they're doing right? Like what about the consumers in this beta market that you're in? Is adoption easy because you're kind of leveraging network effects or have you seen some bumps trying to get to adoption?
Paul Roberts (31:51)
It's a hundred percent network effect. So what we see is when we onboard a new ambassador who's let's say, you know, the captain of the lacrosse team or, you know, the head of philanthropy for the sorority, we immediately see an additional, you know, four or 500 users, uh, immediately. And then it's all fans out because what we do is we reinforce the messaging to the users of, you know, why wouldn't you use this? You know, we'd love to hear the why not rather than the why.
because we want to make this as easy and frictionless as possible. ⁓ The logic is that if a restaurant is paying 30 % commission to one platform and say 10 or 15 % to a different platform, they're going to have lower prices in that second platform. So our pitch to the consumer is very simple. You're already ordering food. You care about a charity. The food could potentially be less into your wallet using this platform.
It's the same experience, the same restaurants, the same ordering process, the same delivery. Why wouldn't you use it?
Jeff Holman (32:55)
Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting market to go to. I guess you mentioned at the beginning that there's kind of this effect of a lot of people, a lot of students might be spending their parents' money, right? Some students are probably saying to themselves, yeah, I don't door dash. I order, you know, I get potatoes and rice from the grocery store.
Paul Roberts (33:17)
You
know, you get ramen, a couple of boxes of ramen to you through the week. know, loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and jelly to get you through the week. I get that. And it's interesting, we also see that from school to school, just the early surveys we've gotten where, you know, some schools that, you know, a huge number, huge percentage of the students are ordering food on a regular basis. And then some schools, you know, you're seeing students that's treated more of a luxury maybe every other week.
Jeff Holman (33:44)
But if you have enough users and I mean, it sounds like adoption or downloads of the platform is pretty easy to get. You get an ambassador, they bring their friends in there and they download the platform. What kind of use rates are you seeing there?
Paul Roberts (34:00)
So the good part is once it's downloaded and once the user is actually on board, we've made it pretty seamless for them to use it. the only hiccups we see, Jeff, and obviously things we need to address, if we don't have enough coverage in the region, that's the feedback we get from the students. some days I order Chick-fil-A, some days I order Chipotle. If we don't have both, the hard...
Jeff Holman (34:27)
And
then it might go to the other platforms that just so they don't have to swap.
Paul Roberts (34:31)
Yep, exactly. So we're coming up with, you know, some guardrails that if we're going to launch a certain campus, we have to have a certain percentage overlap with other apps before we launch. The worst case scenario is, know, Paul tells Jeff, hey, there's this new app order using this. And then you log on and there's two restaurants.
Jeff Holman (34:52)
Yeah. And the seven that I want to order from aren't on there. I could see that being an adoption struggle. So, how do you tackle that issue? mean, is it just a matter of sending ambassadors out to restaurants to get critical mass? Or is there some other thing that you're doing? do you leverage in the app, you you leverage, oh, we're just going to make, we're going to push suggestions for lunch out so that we can suggest restaurants we have on there.
as opposed to ones that they might be looking for that we don't have. ⁓
Paul Roberts (35:26)
It's right now we're tackling in a couple of different ways. The two big ones are obviously the ambassadors. we're basically replicating the model that these larger platforms used early on where they had, you know, street teams literally walking into the local burger thing, asking to speak to the franchisee. Yeah. We're walking into the local boba shop place that works. We send them in with an iPad. It's a very quick process. takes, like I said, you know, sub 30 minutes for them to sign up, connect their PLS system. And very shortly after they're getting
new delivery orders. ⁓ The other way is from the top down, working with some of the larger restaurant groups. So reaching out to their charity arm, their philanthropy team and saying, listen, you you want more students ordering from you. That's why you have three restaurants within the vicinity of the campus. The students now also want to give back with their order. We can help you combine those two, also charging you less money than these other platforms. So it's.
Jeff Holman (35:58)
Yeah.
Paul Roberts (36:25)
Again, quickly addressing the pain points while the added bonus of the charity. ⁓ We've gotten some really great feedback, but working with a franchise group that has a thousand locations, it takes time. You have to prepare for a couple cycles or a couple quarters. But in the meantime, we've also gotten a lot of the franchise information from those groups to say, well, here's Jeff, he owns 15 checkers restaurants down in the area looking.
we'll make a quick introduction, then it's up to Jeff. So we've seen a lot of, you know, lot of success reaching out to the, because a lot of these larger corporations have certain budgets to impact the local community in a positive way. And we're showing them, we're supporting the same charity you are. You know, we're seeing that with some local charities that have a national presence. You know, we're actually working with the same exact charity.
So the three of us will sometimes get on an email and say, how do we speed this up a little bit?
Jeff Holman (37:26)
For the benefit of the charity, let's get this going. Well, I love the model and I think it's interesting and it'll be fun to watch and see as it gets adopted more broadly. How would another CEO who's scaling their own business, whether it's in a similar industry or an unrelated industry, what would they take away from this discussion today and say, you know, I love that Paul is approaching these issues in a certain way.
here's what I'm going to, you know, here's what I can now apply in my business that I maybe hadn't thought of before. And I know it's, it's context specific, right? If we, if we, if we set up the whole problem and if you were that CEO coming in with knowing what your problems were, it'd be easier to draw out something. what's, what's, what are maybe a couple of the general lessons that you, that you think could be leveraged beyond just your own business.
Paul Roberts (38:18)
Yeah, I think one could be focused on really building alignment with before the scale. ⁓ We had to go out and have conversations with charity people, with restaurant owners, with consumers, ⁓ delivery companies before we even wrote a line of code. Because if we heard from one of them, I don't really align with this mission. I don't believe in it. This won't work. There wasn't a business model. So your mission, your partners, your customers,
They all have to be pulling kind of in the same direction. They all have to believe in the end result of what you're building. And then growth really becomes a by-product, not the goal. you know, we have people call us out, you know, how many restaurants are you going to have? How many, you know, well, if there's no cost to the restaurant, if there's no cost to consumer saving money, the charity, we're removing the friction points. Everybody's rowing in the same direction and wants to reach the same goal.
Now it's just a matter of putting all the pieces together. like I said earlier, making sure as we scale, we're building on the right foundation. Everything's in the right place. I don't want to rush because I don't want anything to kind of struggle at scale. But as long as everybody's aligned, you have all parts of the business aligned, I think you're in a good spot, regardless of whether it's food delivery or a cleaning business or...
building ships. Everybody's aligned, you're going to get there.
Jeff Holman (39:48)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. The trust, trusty validation steps, right? Make sure you validate before you're doing anything else. And that's, and that's harder in a marketplace because you're, you know, I've talked to clients who come to me and they're like, I'm going to build this and it's got, you know, marketplace. And I'm like, like, just think about, you know, it's not good or bad, but you're kind of building two separate businesses and then putting them together. Right. You got to get the consumer side market validated, make sure they'll buy from you and you got to get the
seller side marketplace, in this case, maybe the charities or the restaurants that they want to be part of it and make sure that they're going to participate. And then you got to make sure that you can put those two together in a way that everybody's happy. And so you're validating a lot more steps than if you were just, you know, opening up a, you know, a single restaurant, right? Although I don't know, I think a restaurant by itself still might be harder than marketplace.
Paul Roberts (40:43)
Correct. Yeah. And, and, and now is it, that was kind of, you know, also what motivates you because as you, as you validate the sides, you know, every side is going to add multiple layers of complexity. So that clarity on, Hey, we believe in this. ⁓ you know, I spoke to probably 50 restaurant owners. They probably spoke to a hundred college students. I probably spoke to 10 huge national charity, you know, the biggest charities out there. And they all said, I get it. I get it. Like, huh? So, you know, we want to be involved.
Jeff Holman (41:13)
Yeah.
Paul Roberts (41:14)
That
validation, it motivates you. It's like, all right, there's something here. I know it's going to be a long slog. It's going to take a long time to build this and get to scale. we validated the pieces. We iterated over time, obviously, but all three major components of the business were like, we like this. We want to be a part of it. How do we involve?
Jeff Holman (41:35)
Yeah, I guess it's natural that we're coming back to what we started with that aspect of making sure there is alignment because alignment scales well and misalignment also scales easily. So ⁓ back to that same point validating that everything is there so that it is aligned and will scale well instead of scale the misalignment.
Paul Roberts (41:57)
Yeah, growth will only amplify the cracks, right?
Jeff Holman (42:01)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is great, Paul. I really appreciate you sharing some of this with us. And I know there's a lot more to it. And we've got, you know, some things to watch as you grow. Where do think you'll be in five years from now?
Paul Roberts (42:12)
hopefully, you know, people are saying, Hey, you know, I, I use goodbye to order my corporate meal, ⁓ Sunday lunch with the family. You know, I think we want it to be kind of synonymous with, you know, ordering food and doing well. ⁓ I think there's going to be, you know, an opportunity to introduce this into other things like food delivery for excuse me, like you mentioned earlier, like grocery delivery, different things where
You know, there's a tremendous margin in between what consumers are paying and what these platforms are making. You know, we could put some of that back into the business and also take part of that and give it off to charity. I think it's a win for everybody. And, you know, I think this next generation also wants to, to buy from and be a part of companies and, and, organizations that are about doing good. So that's where we're going to be in five years. We're hopefully upset some of these giants.
Jeff Holman (43:06)
I love it. ⁓ Two more questions and then we'll call it a wrap here. ⁓ first of all, if somebody, if a student is out there wants to be a part of this or if a restaurant hears about this, where would they go to connect with you?
Paul Roberts (43:18)
Yeah, they can check us out at good bite charity. So that's our homepage for the all things good bite. There's there's places there if you're a restaurant, a charity, a student and you want to get involved.
Jeff Holman (43:31)
Awesome. And last question here, since we're talking about charities, ⁓ it doesn't have a whole lot to do with your business other than you're supporting a bunch of charities through the business model. But do you have a favorite charity that you'd plug on this if you had just a minute?
Paul Roberts (43:48)
Yeah, two of them. ⁓ One is, you know, Alzheimer's Foundation. My mom, unfortunately suffers from Alzheimer's. It's been a brutal time seeing her go through this, you know, and live with this disease. And then ASPCA, we're a very big pet household. You know, I love to see, you know, people adopting rather than buying. you know, I think ⁓ every kid, every house needs a pet. I think it helps the kids develop a lot of skills, lot of life skills, empathy, responsibility. So.
Those are two when I order Goodbye, I'll probably toggle between those two charities and hopefully have an impact.
Jeff Holman (44:24)
I love it. Sorry to hear about your mother. That's a wonderful cause of support though. you. Well, Paul, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today and I really appreciate you taking some time to share about your business and the insights that you've learned and leveraged in your business.
Paul Roberts (44:40)
Awesome. A lot of fun, Jeff. Appreciate the time and have a great day. Thanks for having me.
Jeff Holman (44:45)
Yeah, it's been great. And to all of our listeners out there, thanks again for joining us this time on the breakout CEO podcast. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you enjoy the show, a rating or a review goes a long way. Our mission is to promote the stories of breakout CEOs in scaling, sass, e-commerce and tech companies to equip peer CEOs with valuable perspectives and confidence.
Thanks again for joining us on this episode of The Breakout CEO. I'm Jeff Holman and I'll see you next time.
