Failed Transit Ad Experiment

A story about Instacart's early failed marketing experiments trying to acquire customers.

"In the early days, we would try anything to get people to try Instacart for the first time. We bought a bunch of ice cream sandwiches and coolers, hired people from Craigslist to deliver ice cream sandwiches to offices if they would place an Instacart order. This failed miserably because people would just take the ice cream and then do nothing.

We also tried traditional advertising - we bought ads on buses and the Chicago transit system that said 'Instacart: a grocery store on your phone.' We tried to track who would go to our website when these ads were running and basically nobody did. I think we got like 6 orders from this ad. It cost thousands of dollars, so it would have been better to just give people money to order.

But we kept trying different ideas and eventually found things that worked. The first successful one was giving away delivery for free, which we did for a very long time. Another successful strategy was creating a referral program - if you're a customer and send a link to your friend, you both get $10 of free groceries. We found people were proud to be Instacart customers and with a little incentive, they would share it. That customer acquisition strategy is still one of our top performing channels today."