Lemkin: Slice Grows Over $100M ARR by In-Person Pizzeria Sales
“And he's even at a hundred and something million at Slice, it's all going into the pizzerias. It's all walking in and building relationships with these single owner establishments”
Padelford: US independent pizzerias outnumber major pizza chains 2 to 1
“There are somewhere between 30 and 40,000 independent pizza shops in the United States. If you combine Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's together, there's about 20,000 shops. So independent pizza is a larger market than like big pizza.”
Padelford: US independent pizzerias generate $50B in annual order flow
“In those pizzerias is fifty billion dollars a year worth of order flow and spend. So when people are like, oh, pizza can't be that big of a market, that's fifty billion dollars worth of TAM in a single vertical in the United States alone.”
Padelford: Slice exceeds $100M revenue across tens of thousands of pizzerias
“We're over a hundred million dollars in revenue. We're growing. We've got tens of thousands of customers in the platform and we're extremely early.”
Padelford: At $100M revenue, Slice prioritizes growth over gross margin optimization
“We're too early to run the business on a margin profile. When there's so much growth opportunity.”
Padelford: Last year set a record for pizza shop openings
“Last year as a fun fact was the top year for pizza shops growing sorry, pizza shops opening ever.”
Padelford: Slice deploys outside sales reps walking directly into pizzerias
“So we have outside sales reps who are just walking into shops.”
Padelford: Vertical SaaS must sequence products by customer problems over short-term revenue
“We are led by the customer's problem set is the kind of only way I've ever seen it really work. You can lead by what makes you money. I think the challenge with that sometimes is that can run out on you. It's like eventually It's if it's not a valuable enough …”
Ilir Sela: Small business ownership is lonely due to endless unexpected problems
“The biggest takeaway is that building a small business is an incredibly lonely journey. It's lonely because you kind of start off this business trying to solve one problem, and then you inherit an infinite amount of other problems that you suddenly have to be …”
Slice reached $250,000 in monthly profit during its 2015 bootstrapping phase
“When I was bootstrapping the company in 2015, I want to say February of 2015. I look at my spreadsheet. One day I was tracking my company on an Excel sheet, not even on QuickBooks. And in one month we profited about 250,000 dollars.”
Ilir Sela turned down an $18 million acquisition offer for MyPizza
“I had just gotten my first acquisition offer. You know, the offer to sell the company for eighteen million dollars would have been awesome. Sole owner. No debt. Eighteen million dollars would have been great. And I turned it down.”
Slice had 3,000 restaurant partner locations when bootstrapped in 2015
“We're working with about 3000 locations.”
Sela: Slice raised venture capital to recruit talent, not for money
“One of the reasons why I ended up raising money was because that was the way to get them involved in the business. And so that's really how my bootstrap company became venture backed. It was almost like not for that purpose as a primary reason. It was to get t…”
Sela: Capital constraints yield hard-to-replicate operational advantages
“Capital constraints create some Incredible solutions that are very hard to replicate by other companies who may not have the same constraints.”
Slice employs roughly 650 people in Macedonia
“Today we have about 650 people in Macedonia. We're one of the largest employers in the country.”
Slice operated with only one engineer for five years
“I mean, I had one engineer his name is Sam Kennedy. He's incredible. He's the only engineer and product person and tech person. He's the only tech person we had in the company for five years.”
Ilir Sela: 'Hire great people and get out of the way' is bullshit advice
“It's complete bullshit. I mean, I used to feel like, okay, hire great people, get out of the way, and I've done that. I've done that many times, and every time I've done that, things have failed.”
Sela: Running a company by consensus is a terrible management strategy
“I used to really try to run companies the company with consensus, right? It was like, go into these exec meetings and say, okay, what do you think? And what do you think? And everyone had a say, and we had to like all get on the same page eventually. And it wo…”
Sela: Single-niche software startups face instant TAM skepticism during growth slowdowns
“And so because of our very clear focus on one segment, pizza shops, Any moment where Slice's performance hasn't been best in class, immediately the assumption is you're TAM constrained.”
Sela: Series B founders cannot step back while still figuring out product and GTM
“This is a series B company that's still figuring out what exactly is the go to, what are the go to market motions? What is the product? We are hiring people like crazy. Like, I don't think you can get out of the way at that point.”
Sela: Horizontal software like Owner.com cannot successfully vertically integrate across restaurant types
“A restaurant that sells a different product and maybe has table service is a very different business than a pizza shop, which is a very different business than a coffee shop. Now, They may all have the similar need of commerce, which is what a company like own…”
Micro business owners struggle to adopt multiple software products simultaneously
“I've found it very challenging to have small business owners, especially these like micro business owners, To adopt more than one product at a time.”
Slice charges pizzerias seven to eight percent of generated revenue
“You know, all in all, Slices products cost about seven or eight percent of the revenue that we create for the merchant.”
Slice earns $100,000 net revenue from a $1.5M GMV New Jersey pizzeria
“There's a shop in New Jersey that is managing over a million and a half dollars a year through the Slice platform. For that merchant, our revenue is about a 100,000 dollars a year, net to Slice.”
Sela: Slice gives partner pizzerias full transparency into customer data
“While slice has access to the customer data, all the customer data is completely transparent to every merchant. We're not an intermediary. We're not a third party. So all the customer data, we have an owner's app. Every pizza shop knows exactly who the custome…”
Ilir Sela: US pizza market was $35B across 60k shops at Slice's launch
“At the time that I launched the pizza industry in the US was a thirty five billion dollar industry. That was the revenue that was passing through at the time about 60,000 pizza shops. And two thirds of that was independent.”
Sela: Slice created illusion of scale using only two leased cars
“And the best way to do that in a very hyper local way was to buy cars. I leased them, put my brand on these cars, but I can send you the picture if you want to tweet it when the episode comes out, but put the brand on these cars. And then I would park them in …”
Sela: Slice is deliberately constraining focus to pizzerias before category expansion
“I think that our model has the right to win in many categories, but we are deliberately continuing to constrain our focus so that we can be the best in class partner for these independents.”
Puri: Slice reached a $1B valuation arming independent pizzerias against Domino's
“And what slice did was slice went to every indie poppy indie pizza shop. It basically gave them an app that was the Domino's mobile ordering experience and said, Hey, now you can compete against that. So let's just compete on the basis of whose pizza is the be…”
Ali: Adscend Acquired Slice App Users for a $2 CPA
“So we just finished up a really big campaign with a company called slice and they do like, they're basically like a shopping assistant and package tracker app top rated on the, on, on the app market. And we were acquiring users for them that were linking their…”