Plated's Apartment Operations

A story about how Plated, a meal kit company, started with two founders manually fulfilling orders from an apartment in 2012.

"We were broke AF - we met in business school and were both paying for it ourselves, meaning Citibank was paying for it. We had about a quarter million dollars in debt between the two of us.

We started with a terrible domain name, dineinfresh.com, because we had no money and wanted to test the concept before building a real brand. The site was ugly but fully functional, taking orders that we fulfilled ourselves. We were spending $5-10 a day on Facebook ads, getting about 100 visits daily which converted to tens of customers per week.

For the recipes, we were just finding them on recipe websites and hacking it together. When someone placed an order, we'd go to stores like Whole Foods, manually package all the ingredients, and take them to the post office. The packaging was comical - you'd get a refrigerator-sized delivery for a chicken breast, wrapped in tons of insulation with ice packs.

We ran everything out of my partner Nick's apartment for about 3 months. His wife was supporting us, and I ate all their food. We were funding everything on credit cards because we had no other options. We tried applying for small business loans but couldn't get any capital. Eventually, we moved into warehouse space because we knew the apartment setup wasn't scalable."