Memo: Enter MrBeast

Every industry is overdue for a digital-first reset. Even casual restaurants are beginning to adjust to a brave new world, accelerated like many other categories by the pandemic.

By and large, foot traffic slowed at shopping malls. Retailers and department stores earned the majority of the media’s attention, but in the process, tens of millions of square feet in commercial kitchens and dining rooms were going to waste. The wage workers who ran them suffered from job losses. Restaurants were sinking into bankruptcy by the dozen. Over the last year, new concepts began to take shape based on proven experiments. To better understand those experiments, I spoke with one of the foremost experts.

When Kat Cole calls to discuss the inner workings of food service, you answer the phone. There aren’t many executives with more knowledge or experience than her. Cole is stepping down after 10 years of success and innovation as President and COO at Focus Brands, the parent company to a number of mall dining fixtures that you’ve likely walked past thousands of times on shopping trips. Leading a company with billions in annual sales, Cole understands the power of placement and foot traffic. While customers aren’t walking past quite as often as they did before the pandemic, she was still incredibly optimistic about the prospects of her industry. Concepts like Nextbite and Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC) have revolutionized the casual dining industry. But the business isn’t new.

As early as 2016, UberEats tested virtual kitchens as a strategy to drive revenue for restaurants with excess production capacity. Today, there are over 5,000 virtual brands on UberEats across the country. Early on, in a partnership with a well-known casual wing chain, Uber tested a virtual brand concept within the Eats app to improve sales by rebranding their wings to reach a wider audience. It worked. When eCommerce met human resources and excess production capacity, a new vertical in dining was born. Today, this industry, also populated by GrubHub, DoorDash, and Postmates (which Uber recently acquired) is in the midst of another evolution.

A recent article on Today.com began with:

Ghost kitchen, dark kitchen, virtual kitchen, cloud kitchen, whatever you call them, they’re popping up everywhere, with estimates placing the number at 1,500 in the United States. [1]

Virtual kitchens and ghost, dark, or cloud kitchens are not all interchangeable. A “ghost” establishment, in this context, is essentially a commissary kitchen or a facility where restaurants produce food for distribution to their satellite locations. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick acquires real estate and converts them into food production facilities through his company CloudKitchens. Platforms like DoorDash, UberEats, and Postmates then markets the many brands that are built atop of the physical infrastructure. CloudKitchens recently raised $400 million from Goldman Sachs and the Saudi Arabia wealth fund to finance these real estate acquisitions.

Companies like Robert Earl’s Virtual Dining Concepts partners with existing restaurants to monetize excess capacity. And like many restaurants that rely on foot traffic at mall complexes, there is quite a bit of it. Earl isn’t just the owner of VDC. He has stakes in casual dining chains like Buca Di Beppo, Mixology, and Planet Hollywood. In June of 2020, Earl’s latest acquisition turned heads. The ownership  group of Bravo and Brio filed for bankruptcy just three months earlier due to a COVID-related hit to its already flailing business. Earl seemed to have another vision for them.

Earl Enterprises, the parent company of Buca di Beppo, Earl of Sandwich and Planet Hollywood, has confirmed the purchase of Bravo Cucina Italian and Brio Tuscan Grille restaurants in a deal that will bring back 4,000 employees left in “limbo” since FoodFirst filed for bankruptcy, Robert Earl, chairman of Earl Enterprises, said Thursday. [2]

Earl acquired capacity in much the same way that Kalanick’s CloudKitchens acquired real estate to build functional facilities. But in Earl’s hybrid format, he can accomplish both dining formats. Virtual Dining Concepts is driving high-margin business to this suite of causal restaurants. If they survive the pandemic, they will be able to service traditional and online customers at once. This isn’t unlike any other restaurant that delivers. What organizations like Nextbite and VDC are building adds a significant layer atop of the Olo-driven last-mile delivery network.

Companies like Olo provide the interface between restaurants, their ordering systems and the on-demand ecosystem. With excess capacity at casual dining and a need for new demand, celebrity-driven virtual dining has emerged as a new prospect for a suffering industry. It just might work.

Within the next year, Virtual Dining Concepts, a subsidiary of Earl Enterprises has a goal of reaching 20 celebrity and 20 consumer brands in its delivery portfolio. The pandemic, combined with targeted social media advertising and the omnipresence of delivery platforms have brewed the perfect storm to fill a massive supply of kitchen capacity with these new concepts. [3]

The economics favor restaurant ownership groups that can typically earn nearly 60% of the gross margin of each sale. The celebrity that generates interest for the sale can earn as much as 25% for a sale that that they had little to do with. It’s a brilliant system. And thanks to a recent partnership with a YouTube creator, it’s about to become a popular option for ailing foodservice retailers.

Linear Commerce: Enter MrBeast

I downloaded the app (currently No. 1 in the app store), manually inputted my address and billing information and then waited for the branded sandwich. Constructed within the kitchen of one of Robert Earl’s Bravo restaurants, the “I launched 300 burger restaurants nationwide” promise was met with operational efficiency. When I ordered the Beast Style burger, I was surprised that it arrived with 15 minutes of purchase. I photographed it and laughed at the fact that Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson was going to successfully store hundreds of thousands of new credit card numbers thanks to this promotion, including my own. And then I walked upstairs to hand it off to my teenage daughter.

Oh my god, Dad. How did you get this? I love MrBeast. Oh my god.

At 13 years old, she’s adept at understanding the world of creators and their collective impact on culture, commerce, and trends. But even I was surprised that she was excited for a burger that she wouldn’t have otherwise eaten without the branding.

Jimmy Donaldson has quite the story. In a 2019 interview with Casey Neistat, the two creators discuss his improbable rise from obscurity to nearly 50 million Youtube subscribers. The 22-year-old owns an audience larger than most multinational media companies.

Donaldson represents a new class of creator with the power to move entire retail markets. In a recent conversation with DTC titan Nik Sharma, he mentioned an eye opening figure.

Was just looking at 2PM DTC Power List and as I was looking through, I wondered if you’d ever put creator brands that crush it. I think definitely Danny Duncan’s brand. I mean he’ll do nine figures in revenue with $0 ad spend.

For the vast majority of direct-to-consumer retail, achieving a $100 million revenue mark is highly improbable. Doing so without advertising is impossible. For the top 1% of creators, commerce is just a natural progression. They will earn far more in retail sales than through advertising.

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Here’s how much the biggest YouTube stars earned this year:1. Ryan Kaji: $29.5M2. MrBeast: $24M3. Dude Perfect: $23M4. Rhett and Link: $20M5. Markiplier: $19.5M6. Preston Arsement: $19M7. Nastya: $18.5M8. Blippi: $17M9. David Dobrik: $15.5M10. Jeffree Star: $15M

Ryan Kaji, the 9-year-old toy reviewer, has an omnichannel toy empire worth over $500 million by some estimation. What began as a trend of marketing merchandise has evolved as other industries have adopted eCommerce strategies. The digital layer provided by VDC, Olo, Nextbite, and others has provided new opportunity for this class of creators.

Before year’s end, you’ll see Marques Brownies and Dobrik’s Dumplings. And while the creators will certainly line their pockets, Robert Earl’s foresight into this marketing strategy is due to revolutionize an industry crippled by the lack of foot traffic that leaders like Kat Cole once relied upon to fuel growth in the industry.

MrBeast wasn’t the first creator to put his mark on a fast casual product. But this partnership will be the most transformative for an industry in need.

When this partnership was announced, it was common to see skepticism from commerce industry veterans and advertising executives. One chimed in: “I can’t figure out what’s even really that interesting about it, but I’m new to Mr. Beast.” Another added: “I still don’t see the connection to helping restaurants and charity?” But what’s truer than ever is that commerce follows audience. And the physics of building brands the traditional way is erased by the new mechanisms of linear commerce at scale. For a creator who spends a great deal of his time performing acts of charity, there seems to be more scale on the way, and not just for a struggling restaurant industry, but for the 50 million subscribers who’ve cheered him as he’s turned sponsorships and personal earnings into viral giveaways.

Wherever 50 million fans go, industries will be disrupted. Sometimes for the better.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes | Art: Alex Remy | About 2PM

Memo: The DoorDash OS

DoorDash has an opportunity to power an evolved, local commerce economy where urbanization has taken a back seat to remote work, the homestead is more relevant than ever before, and the “arming of the rebels” has yet to capture the imagination of Main Street businesses. This is bigger than late night takeout: Food delivery is to DoorDash what book sales were to Amazon.

A singular failure has shaped my understanding of commerce and how digital would influence physical retail. In 2014, eCommerce accounted for just 7.7% of US retail sales, the investment into urbanization had a positive trajectory, and apps like Postmates and DoorDash had begun to eat market share of incumbents like Grubhub. With that backdrop, a close friend and I pieced together a mobile application with a simple marketplace function. It featured an open chat room to guide users through recommendations, sales, and checkout.

The experiment had one goal: To understand if eCommerce could improve the viability of local, analog retail businesses. To do so, we targeted hard goods (not food products). We built atop Uber’s then-available pricing API and enabled independent retailers to market their products within our app and ship products as far as 20 miles outside of the city. Uber’s drivers delivered the goods to their homes.

To accomplish this, we indexed the goods of independent retailers and tracked inventory with a relatively light integration that relied on imported Quickbooks data. And then each product’s corresponding image was pulled into the app through .JSON web calls. Given that the vast majority of featured stores were within a mile of us, contractors were tasked with acquiring the goods and bringing them to a central location to stage for delivery by Uber. The last shipment left by the close of business and inventory was painstakingly updated upon the completion of each business day. In just under a year, the app sold $627,000 in top line sales at an average margin of around 17%.

That’s where the positives ended. The price of doing business with Uber was costly and the fleet of drivers was subpar, causing a number of customer service issues. The demand for hard goods was outpaced by the demand for perishable goods (food). And the area’s physical retail scene was a draw, so most consumers opted to walk, drive, or bike over instead. The app eventually amounted to an expensive experiment in between jobs.

The Difference: Now and Then

The experiment wasn’t a complete failure, however. By the time that we shut the application down, we’d developed a better understanding of the intersections between real estate, retail, technology, and the limitations of small businesses. I also learned an important lesson about eCommerce adoption: 2014 was far too early. Today, the former 7.7% share of retail (in 2014) sales has tripled. Nearly one of every four dollars is spent online in 2020.

Given that our focus was on non-coastal markets and second-tier cities, the marketplace helped us understand the needs of retailers outside of the country’s main retail hubs: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and so on. The app experience was nowhere near perfect, but the experiment was valuable. I went on to build DTC brands, founding 2PM Inc just a year later. That friend of mine became the founder of Loop Returns.

Fast forward and many of the retailers who once considered eCommerce a distraction have now invested heavily into building online retail as a primary channel. Consider Josh Quinn of Ohio’s Tiger Tree, a multi-million dollar independent retailer and former partner of our app experiment. Quinn recently shuttered Tiger Tree’s doors to pursue an eCommerce-first strategy. He said:

It’s an interesting example of just how fast retail has accelerated in six years. To say I don’t think my customers would have seen the utility in an on-demand delivery solution seems laughable now. But we could have been better positioned. We did so well as brick-and-mortar stores that it kept us from investing the way we should have. It hurts to think of where we’d be if we would have put the time into eCommerce back then.

Quinn is representative of a large swath of retailers who relied upon a brick-and-mortar business before the pandemic. But he won’t make the mistake again. He added: “We are in the middle of local online retail being a thing. Almost half of our eCommerce orders go to the Columbus, Ohio area.”

This is the new economy that DoorDash is primed to capture. The permanence of remote work culture and the restrictions placed on urban dining and nightlife has spawned three separate trends. There is a shift from major cities to smaller ones, urban flight to suburban “cities”, and housing to the all-encompassing homestead.

Sanitized urbanization removes the perceived risks of living in urban areas while adding the value of – what’s often – upgraded infrastructure, improved schools, and lower tax bases. [2PM, 1]

As remote work and distance learning continues to become more commonplace, entertainment, commerce, and utility will shift from physical to digital as well. There has been an extraordinary shift from thinking along the lines of office perks to thinking about optimizing the home. Consider Wayfair’s sudden shift of fortune. In 2017, the furniture reseller traded at a $5 billion market cap. Today it trades at nearly $26 billion, a growth emblematic of a boom in redesigning the home for modern needs: remote work, leisure, and comfort.

If this is any indication of how small business owners will react to these macroeconomic changes, we can expect second and third-order effects in the housing market to continue to materialize.

Inside The Home

Like Postmates, which has long tested hard goods marketplace capabilities, DoorDash’s opportunity lies with supporting the businesses of independent retailers by providing new opportunity for them. Not just by delivering the goods but by fostering a marketplace that expands their reach to wider, local audiences. By streamlining retailers as sources of goods and developing new initiatives to reach customers, their marketplace partners will be more inclined to view DoorDash as an effective customer acquisition engine.

A possible future as DoorDash embraces the shift to the homestead (and innovative demand-gen partnerships).

Success or failure will depend on growth beyond food delivery as the core model. This means that the development of efficient customer acquisition, fair and incentivized pay for its last-mile workforce, and paths to hyper growth in gross merchandising volume are key to the company’s long term viability. Consider this excerpt from a recent analysis on DoorDash:

That inability to change the business model is also likely to keep DoorDash from making any meaningful profit. Grubhub, the only US food delivery service on the stock market, recently complained that food delivery is not enough to build a sustainable and profitable business. [2]

By instituting a local marketplace model, DoorDash would encourage retailers like Quinn who find value in reaching more customers in their cities without relying upon the postal service for delivery. Quinn cited his frustration with existing local shipping models:

Independent retailers like us are facing something of a crisis with USPS shipments being delayed. Not that I am blaming them – I understand the strains on their system.

Amazon Prime has popularized next day and same day delivery. Services like HBO Max have begun to shift resources away from physical theaters and towards home-streaming models. And founded a year before our local commerce experiment, DoorDash is now trading at $55.6 billion. Like Jeff Bezos former marketplace of books, Tony Xu’s marketplace of local retailers is in its infancy. While intended for restaurants, the technology could easily be applied to retailers. And while DoorDash touts partnerships with large and sophisticated companies (Macy’s, etc), the delivery app’s real opportunity lies with locally-owned retailers who’d rely on DoorDash for the technical expertise and the audience to grow their businesses – a model that not even Shopify could compete with right now.

In its short existence, DoorDash has evolved well beyond just  delivery logistics, adding services like Storefront, which enables merchants to set up digital ordering directly from their native channels. [3]

We look at apps like DoorDash and see food delivery. Rather, view them as the last-mile enabler for businesses who are leaning into localized eCommerce. Food delivery, alone, will not justify the $50+ billion market cap but a city-by-city network of local retailers may. This is the eCommerce era now. Like every other retailer, DoorDash must learn to create new demand and service it with creative solutions. I suspect that the company’s reach will soon extend beyond your kitchen or your mobile phones. In the near future, the app may function more like a retail operating system.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes | Art: Alex Remy | About 2PM

Memo: The Smartest In The Room

Apophenia is a word that I’ve long considered to be one of the most important in the English language. Both a normal phenomenon and an abnormal phenomenon depending on one’s mental acuity, its connotation is complex. It’s the ability to find meaningful connections between unrelated ideas. Ideas and community are the fuel of this phenomenon.

Apophenia’s role in history is understated. The Age of Enlightenment propelled mankind forward in remarkable ways. At the core of that time period was the invention of the European coffee house. Caffeinated by imported goods and free of the dulls of Renaissance-era alcohols, academic and social ideas took shape in rooms dominated by men who spoke powerfully and dutifully as if it were their singular contribution to society.

The European coffee house, or the “penny university”, democratized information synthesis in ways once exclusive to universities. It promoted conversation, debate, and authorship among active participants and nosy listeners alike. Ideas were valuable. Imagine a ship with a minor leak near the bow. Only a fortified wooden board can provide the stability that the ship needs to endure the tests and rigors of sea. Like hardened planks of sea-worthy wood, Enlightenment-era ideas plugged the hulls of ships constructed by others. One person’s idea completed another’s. It was rarely the smartest person in the room who received the ultimate credit for the end creation. But if you were in that coffee house long enough, you’d likely leave with a creation of your own.

In theory, digital forums are this era’s coffee houses. Revelations once found in the “penny universities” of 18th Century London are digital communities of shared knowledge today. In Nick deWilde’s The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities, he explains:

Individuals typically “hire” communities to accomplish transitions that require human connection. A startup founder who wants to become a better leader applies to Leaders in Tech to get the type of honest feedback needed for professional growth.

This is partly why ideas are valuable: they can serve the function of community. Ideas can solidify into a hardened mass, capable of keeping another ship afloat. Yet, there are endless essays written anchored by the idea that “ideas don’t matter.” These wise writers will go on to explain that if you cannot execute on those ideas, your words or thoughts lack value. These authors espouse the value of execution. Make no mistake, hustle culture rode the same wave. So, I beg to differ.

Consider the late American paleontologist, biologist, and historian of science Stephen Gould:

My talent is making connections. That’s why I’m an essayist. It’s also why my technical work is structured the way it is. How do the parts of the snail shell interact? What are the rates of growth? Can you see a pattern? I’m always trying to see a pattern in this forest and I’m tickled that I can do that. … I can sit down on just about any subject and think of about 20 things that relate to it and they’re not hokey connections.

It took Gould years to realize that this was a skill. Sometimes, the smartest people in the room are ones who think through societal problems, industry shortcomings, or game-changing innovations. These ideas make their way to mainstream news outlets, sizable Twitter feeds, or to industry mavens who repeat soundbites with little need to cite where they’d heard it. And because of these ideas, news outlets earn more clicks, Twitter followings grow, and industry mavens collect compensation for their appearances. So why is it that some ideators need to execute to prove their worth, while others earn perceived value merely because they’ve found an audience?

The ability to harness ideas and turn them into inventions, infrastructure, products, or art is a rare skill that should be valued. This is certain. But the opportunity to do so is not always evenly distributed. Many of the best thinkers are builders in their own rights but for a myriad of reasons, their ideas aren’t always attributed to them.

The communication medium of the era plays a sizable role in how ideas are attributed.

The most notable Greeks were orators. Leaders of the American colonial era wrote voluminous treatises and letters. Alexander Hamilton, one of the most prolific creators in history, wrote 85 articles and essays between 1788 and 1789. The early 1900s saw the rise of radio. Franklin D. Roosevelt transcended the power of addresses made by most of the prior presidents by using the radio to instruct and inspire Americans. In the 1960s the television took center stage. A handsome John F. Kennedy ruled a televised debate while Richard Nixon was the winner to most who were tuned into the radio transmission.

The internet pioneered a new type of thought leader in the early 2000s. Today, we are in the midst of the rise of text-based media, whether by way of Twitter or newsletter. The same methods that once thrived in the coffee houses of Europe live on on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Substack, Slack, and private forums.

In the spirit of highlighting the smartest in the room, here are a number of business leaders, executives, and consultants within the 2PM ecosystem that have the ideas that move industries forward.

When Naj Austin made the bet on Ethel’s Club in 2018, she should have been able to easily raise money based on the idea that the marginalized deserved a community-minded place to congregate. That same year, The Wing raised $117 million to expand its services to its core demographic, while Austin was essentially scraping by to build on her collection of ideas.

What most impressed me about Austin was her ability to pivot to digital services for the Ethel’s Club community as the pandemic began to disrupt physical retail businesses like hers and The Wing in early 2020. Austin’s agility paid dividends and she is now currently raising for her next venture, Somewhere Good.

You can follow Naj’s ideas on Twitter.

Before Brittany Chavez had a sustainable eCommerce platform to build her marketplace on, she’d already taken her idea of a resource for her community “Shop Latinx” and built an audience around it with her Co-Founder Miles Montes. Their Instagram account has reached over 60,000 fans and customers of what the media calls “Etsy for Latinos.” Halie LeSavage of Morning Brew explained why her Techstars-backed venture could work:

As 2020 keeps reminding us, Gen Z and millennials are adamant about shopping their values. And Latinx shoppers are a powerful consumer group: They’ll drive $1.9+ trillion of U.S. spending by 2023, per Nielsen. [2]

If there is one thing that I have learned about Chavez, it’s that: she’s resilient, she doesn’t stop until her ideas take shape, she welcomes the ideas of others, and she gives the credit where its due. Her collective of 60,000+ consumers and fans will agree.

You can follow Brittany’s ideas on Twitter (and here until Twitter fixes her original account).

I first met Sherrell at the National Association of Black Journalists in Miami, Florida in 2018. Seated with Trapital’s Dan Runcie, we each explained our ideas and what we hoped for our independent media companies to a small room of attendees. At the time, her latest venture The Plug was in its infancy. Today, it is one of the most depended upon industry resources in technology. Consider this report by the Seattle Times from August 2020.

She didn’t see her newsletter becoming a media business unto itself, but The Plug — which takes its name from a colloquial term for someone who knows everyone and “has the hookup on everything,” Dorsey says — took off.

She earned a master’s degree in data journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, focusing on how data can help “tell better stories about underrepresented groups in technology,” Dorsey says, explaining her thesis. [3]

Sherrell is building one of the most pivotal companies in human resources. And though every technology firm now wants to hire her away from her idea-turned-creation, I suspect she will have more impact independently.

You can follow Sherrell’s ideas on Twitter.

Credited with launching the profitable content division at the famed Derris PR agency, Grace Garcia Clarke is one of the most curious and free thinkers in the space where agency and media intersects. Our first interaction was a December 2019 debate within Paul Munford’s Lean Luxe community on the merits of the botched Peloton advertisement and what it would mean for the company’s fortunes.

Formerly an operative at Derris, she’s now independent and highly coveted. Brands tap her for communications, industry research, and her eye for understanding what stodgy businessmen do not. An example of this is her well-researched product rundown for New York Magazine’s The Strategist where she wrangled the opinions of dozens of Generation Z TikTok users to publish one of the publication’s best converting articles.

No products sell faster on TikTok than beauty products, whether it’s a DIY eyebrow lamination kit, men’s shaving powder, or a shower jelly that costs exactly $1. And because the app is dominated by teens, many of these things are easy on the wallet (or the allowance, as it were). To find out what lives up to the hype, we spent hours exchanging hundreds of DMs with TikTok influencers. [4]

When given the autonomy to make decisions for companies that she partners with, they benefit. I should know; she is a frequent collaborator at 2PM.

You can follow Grace’s ideas on Twitter.

Andrea Hernández is a consumer packaged goods oracle. Her work with Snaxshot is the fruits of an idea that she’s long held: an editorialization of the data behind food and CPG trends. A native of San Pedro Sula, Cortés, Honduras, I have watched her audience around Snaxshot begin to transcend its niche. Hernández is also the founder of Mood Food Snacks, so she has a keen insight into the larger market. A recent report by Morning Brew featured her ideas around CPG and distribution through the pandemic and beyond:

We will see the rise of “dark stores” like Amazon, which recently launched their first online only Whole Foods in Brooklyn that will only focus on fulfilling grocery orders made online, and DoorDash, which launched DashMart. [5]

When she writes about CPG, I listen. Her ideas have been incredibly valuable and Snaxshot will grow because of them.

You can follow Andrea’s ideas on Twitter.

This list could go on. The idea of ideas is misunderstood. Whereas the largest audiences of the early-internet era were the victors with the spoils, the newsletter era is surfacing new ideas at the core. The convention of pattern matching is slowly giving way to the merit of the thinker.

Of course, great and monetizable ideas are still filtered and featured by mainstream sources. CNBC, Vogue and the LA Times will continue to get the credit for the work of smaller audiences. But if there’s one thing that I’ve noticed, it’s that this era has begun to shorten the distance between the originators of keen thoughts and the grand audiences that want to hear them.

In this way, ideas have never been more valuable, because it’s no longer thought to be binary – it never was. There aren’t ideators and executors. Rather, ideas exist along a spectrum where novel thoughts can lead to opportunity. These intangible assets are a currency, now more than ever. And it’s time that we begin to recognize the smartest in the room while they’re still inching along. They won’t be for long.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes | Art: Alex Remy | About 2PM