Underdog Founders - Alvaro takes on Uber Eats to reimagine fine dining
How do you get gourmet restaurants to believe you will do better than Uber Eats?
Alvaro grew up in Spain, dreaming about finance in London at a top firm.
He landed his first proper internship in investment banking in Lisbon, at 21.
Alvaro always felt like a doer and was shocked by the bureaucracy and rigidity of his new corporate reality.
He fondly remembers one particular manager who went into banking for the money and counted down the days to his retirement.
As soon as he got to his desk.
Every single day.
For more than t-w-e-n-t-y years.
In his own words:
“I just really dreaded waking up one day and thinking I wasted my life away. I want to squeeze as much as I can out of my time here”.
The startup bug bit him for the first time when he and his friends started using Uber.
“It was just awesome, I loved the app, I contacted the team to learn as much as I could about their model at a time where they really needed more cars”.
Alvaro fell in love.
“I used all my savings to get my hands on 3 cars and drove one of them myself, every night after I left the bank until 1 or 2am.”
As a Spanish 21yo guy living abroad, local banks didn’t want anything to do with him. He barely paid the bills.
In 2018, as Uber also grew, he eventually convinced the banks that this was a legitimate business and by 2020 he was able to grow into one of the 10 largest fleet managers in Portugal.
Covid hit, and suddenly he was forced to park his entire fleet on the streets and let all the drivers go.
Stuck at home with +50 cars not moving, he started wondering if gourmet restaurants felt the same.
He knew they were also getting hit by covid, so maybe some of them would at least listen to what he had to say.
Maybe they could help each other.
The idea kept brewing - Volup was born.
An Uber Eats-like app exclusive for gourmet restaurants.
He decided to talk to investors.
They shot him down on the spot:
“You’ll never be able to compete with Uber and Glovo.”
“The premium clients want the real restaurant experience, they won’t order in”.
Armed with cash from his first business, he started self-funding his way into food delivery.
They built an app, started ringing restaurants with a slide deck, and got doors slammed in their face all the time.
Yet things started to change when he asked this question:
“Do you want your food to be delivered in the same box carrying McDonalds?”
They onboarded 5 restaurants and got ready for launch.
During the launch week, they were hoping for 50-60 orders.
They had a single order on their first day - their own.
After 2 months of pain, the government enforced a lockdown and Volup got featured in local media as the new cool thing in foodtech.
"I scrambled and asked every single friend and family member to help us deliver orders."
His home was now a logistics hub for their drivers.
Every chef that shot him down was now calling him back to get listed.
They just became the top equity crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder's European launch. Alvaro is now 75K short of breaking the record for Portugal’s largest equity crowdfunding campaign. They’ve raised 523,530 EUR at the time this was written.
Regular clients are joining the cap table, and their NPS is unbeaten.
Some competitors even tried to buy their restaurants by giving them a 10k signing bonus if they leave Volup.
All because he wasn't afraid of doing something new and competing with Uber Eats.
Underdog Founders 07 - Alvaro Meyer from Volup.
If you know underdog founders winning against all odds, we’d love to meet them.
Dive deeper into the startup world with us. Follow us over @Joao_F_Santos — our Twitter's taking its first steps.
#fooddelivery #crowdfunding #underdogfounders