Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola know the exact moment that they had a business model that resonated.
The pair of now 23-year-olds met on the first day of business school in 2011 at Philadelphia's Drexel University and quickly became friends. The following year they were living together with four other roommates, and Gola, the only one with a car, found himself always offering to run errands, especially since none of the on-demand platforms had what they wanted when it came to speed and price.
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They decided they could do better, and the following year launched goPuff, an on-demand delivery service that seeks to make the convenience store obsolete. The founders set up the beta version of the app, bought a 1999 Plymouth Voyager, and no sooner had they affixed the goPuff logo to the vehicle did they get their first order -- a good month before they were officially ready to be up and running.
Image credit: Courtesy of goPuff
Their fellow student ordered Gatorade, M&Ms and Cheetos. The pièce de résistance: their first customer's apartment shared a wall with a 7-Eleven.
"I asked him, why would you order from an app when you literally have 7-Eleven right next door?" Ilishayev said. "He said, 'why do I need to go to 7-Eleven when I can order from an app?' I ran back to the car and I said, 'Yakir, we have something here, we need to get to work."
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And get to work they did. They officially launched on Dec. 25, 2013. During the first six months, Ilishayev and Gola worked alone for 17 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week in their Philadelphia warehouse taking orders and making deliveries in between classes.
Maintaining their sanity was a challenge, but the duo say that their friendship is more than intact -- it's stronger because of the experience. Today, they have a staff of 80 and a presence in 12 cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Chicago. And while 85 percent of goPuff's customers were 18 to 24 when the company began, that cohort now makes up only 50 percent, they said.