To help suburbanites get food delivered from downtown restaurants during the pandemic, a local startup quickly pivoted to coordinating mass delivery events.
DwellSocial, founded in 2017, started as an online platform that aggregated neighborhood demand for home services, like repairs and improvements. The platform would allow a group of people in a specific area to coordinate a contractor to service all of their homes on a specific day, saving individual customers money and contractors' time.
“Neighborhoods could go ahead and together hire contractors, which would save the contractors time and money because the time efficiencies of just doing work within one neighborhood, and not having to drive all over the place,” said co-founder and CEO Allen Shulman.
But when Covid-19 hit last year, Shulman saw an opportunity to pivot and use his platform to bring downtown restaurant food to the suburbs. Because many food delivery apps, like Grubhub or Doordash, have limits on how they far they will deliver, suburban customers were unable to order meals from popular downtown eateries.
“When Covid hit, it was like a whole new world, and we looked around and saw that our local restaurants were really, really struggling,” Shulman said. “We realized we could let restaurants use the efficiencies that we’re creating on our platform for home services for their use.”
DwellSocial allows users to place group orders that get delivered to one nearby place, like at a person’s house or a public parking lot. Orders on average have to be placed two days ahead of time, Shulman said.
Since pivoting last year, DwellSocial is organizing mass food deliveries for people in suburbs like Northbrook, Elgin and Deerfield, from Chicago restaurants, such as RPM, Girl & the Goat and Frontera. Beloved pizza parlor Pequod's was the first restaurant offered on the platform. Now, DwellSocial has grown to 25,000 users, and makes about 50-70 deliveries per week.
“We’re able to provide them with delivery of food that they couldn’t get otherwise,” Shulman said.
To place an order on DwellSocial, users pay a $5 reservation fee to the startup, which also takes a small percentage of each delivery transaction, but restaurants keep most of the revenue, Shulman said. Customers are also expected to tip the delivery driver at each pickup.
Because orders are typically traveling a significant distance, dishes are prepared in ways to maintain quality. That means meals are packaged to be reheated, and dressings and other sauces are usually packaged individually.
“People don’t expect to get hot food,” Shulman said. “We’re all about providing people an opportunity to get food, which has been prepared and cooked, but it’s intended to be finished cooked and reheated once the food gets to the house.”
DwellSocial isn’t Shulman’s first startup. In 2011, he co-founded BrightNest, a website that educated users on how to maintain their homes, which was acquired by Angie’s List in 2013. He then worked at Angie’s List for nearly four years before leaving to focus on DwellSocial full time.
The startup was in the 2019 class of Techstars Atlanta. To date, DwellSocial has raised $1.5 million to date and currently employs seven people.
To help out vulnerable communities during the pandemic, DwellSocial has also been regularly donating proceeds to nonprofits like the Chicago Food Depository, which the startup raised $9,000 for in December. DwellSocial is also raising money during April for International Autism Month.
Even though more people are receiving Covid-19 vaccines and restaurants are opening up again for indoor and outdoor dining, Shulman said he plans to continue offering restaurant delivery services through DwellSocial.
“I don’t think the demand for food from the city is going to go anywhere,” Shulman said.
