Deliverect

Zhong Xu had deep domain expertise in restaurant technology from his previous co-founding venture that merged with Lightspeed (which IPO'd in 2019). He understood the core pain point: restaurants needed to connect multiple delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash to their point-of-sale systems, but integration was fragmented and expensive. Rather than building a traditional direct sales SaaS company, Zhong saw an opportunity to turn existing software companies into distribution partners—each with their own customer base of restaurants.

Deliverect launched with a radical approach: a Wizard of Oz MVP with zero lines of code. Zhong and his team signed up 100 restaurants and manually processed every order themselves, proving demand existed before investing in engineering. This wasn't just validation—it was a go-to-market strategy. By manually handling orders, they learned exactly what restaurants needed and built trust with early customers. Only after proving the concept did they build the actual product.

Instead of cold outreach, Zhong leveraged his 12+ years in restaurant tech to call partner CEOs—people he already knew. He convinced 10+ competing software companies to integrate Deliverect into their platforms and distribute it to their customers. Each partner brought roughly 100 restaurants monthly, and Zhong made a critical decision: always attribute leads to the distribution partner regardless of how the customer actually arrived. This eliminated the channel conflict that destroys most partnership-driven growth programs. Within reach, Deliverect had scaled to 80,000 restaurants across 50 countries.

The partnership model worked because it compressed what would have taken a direct sales team years into months. Rather than hiring expensive sales reps in each market, Deliverect became embedded in the software stack restaurants already used. The Wizard of Oz MVP proved another critical insight: non-paying users rarely provide honest feedback and feel guilty asking for help, while even customers paying $50/month actively engage and demand better product. Zhong also made an aggressive market entry decision—opening 10 offices in one quarter during COVID to establish #1 or #2 position before local incumbents could entrench themselves. The bet was that early dominance was cheaper than displacing established competitors later.

Deliverect is approaching $100M ARR and operates across 50 countries, but Zhong is focused on the next moat. He recognizes that pure connectivity—connecting restaurants to delivery platforms—is replicable and could become commodity infrastructure, especially with AI automation. His strategy is to build the intelligence layer above connectivity: AI-powered menu optimization and agent commerce that only Deliverect can offer because it owns the unique restaurant data. This shift from infrastructure to intelligence is his hedge against commoditization.