DabbaBox

A dabba is a home-cooked lunch, delivered. In London that means something.

The founder wanted to build a home-cooked meal delivery service in London. Not restaurant delivery. Dabba, which is the thing you eat when you want food that tastes like somebody’s kitchen instead of a menu.

There was nothing when we started. No platform, no team, no technical structure at all.

We came in as CTO.

Why this one was harder than it looks

It reads like a delivery app. It is three products.

There is a customer app for ordering. There is a dashboard for the kitchens, who are usually small operations without a tech person. There is a dispatch system for drivers, who are moving and need to be told where to go next without thinking about it.

All three have to work on day one, because a marketplace with two of the three sides is not a business. And the driver side needs routing that actually holds up, which we built on Google Maps Distance Matrix, Directions, and Geocoding rather than using something off the shelf.

How the work actually ran

The technical side and the business side moved at the same time, not one after the other.

That is the part worth explaining, because most projects do not run this way. The usual pattern is that someone builds for six months and then goes looking for customers. Here, pilots and users were being lined up while the platform was being built, and what we learned from those conversations changed what got built next.

It meant shipping things that were not finished, to people who were real, and fixing them fast. It is uncomfortable and it is why four months was possible.

We also built the team. Six people, recruited into a company that had no engineering structure to hire them into.

Where it landed

Live and taking orders on launch day. Four months from nothing to revenue. It grew to more than 200 orders a day across 15 or more kitchen partners.