Grubhub Strategy versus UberEats and DoorDash

Say you’re CEO of Grubhub and you see new competitors distorting the economics, paying through the roof in customer acquisition costs. What would you do?

I think that’s what they’ve been grappling with. Matt Maloney said, “Hey, we’re investing a lot more in marketing, and number two, I love restaurants. I feel like the right thing to do is have a relationship, but you know what? We’re not going to let someone else eat our lunch. We’re going to add a lot of great restaurants in a premium model so all customers have the best possible selection.”

They’re going to go hard after that, really get their selection rounded out in the smaller markets. And then they’re going to double down on their loyalty programme. They bought Level Up, a company that has a restaurant-centric view of loyalty. You could be running lots of different loyalty programmes within your app, one for every single restaurant, and see how you’re tracking for getting free stuff from any restaurant you order from regularly. It’s a way for restaurants to get traction with you as a customer on a platform, instead of being one of many. I think they’re trying to engender more loyalty where consumers say, “Hey, I can go to Grubhub, I’m going to get credit for my purchases with a particular restaurant, and I can get free meals, but if I spread out my orders between the different platforms, I’m not going to get that.”