This story originally appeared on September 23, 2019.
There are plenty of food delivery apps out there: Seamless, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, goPuff, Delivery.com, Munchery, Eat 24, Favor Delivery, Saucey, Eaze, Deliv, and OrderUp. But DoorDash ($PRIVATE:DOORDASH) is growing at a scale that should intimidate them all.
Hiring
The first thing we look when going into the alternative data is how companies hire and fire employees over time. It's a little simplistic and obvious to take the approach of "growing staff is good, laying off is bad", but in this case, we can see an interesting development in the battle of the delivery apps.
In October 2018, Grubhub ($GRUB) had 333 job openings, and in the span of a week, that number dropped to 181 and hasn't really climbed back since (that's a decrease by 45%). The opposite happened with Doordash, which saw a doubling from 176 to 355 over the course of 2019, and is now hiring well more than its competitors.
And with total employee counts based on LinkedIn data, Doordash more than doubled total headcount this year, and that's with Postmates ($PRIVATE:POSTMATES) and Grubhub growing as well. A lot of people want to deliver food, and we 100% approve of this because it's conveinent and a wonderful concept.
Social media
The remarkable thing about all of this Doordash expanding (size is up, revenue is up, and its doing great in our alternative data metrics) is how it's able to do all this while not having that big of a social media presence. It pales in comparison to its main competition on Twitter, for example.
Yet it's still able to top them all when it comes to Facebook shares, Facebook comments, Pinterest shares, Google+ shares, and LinkedIn shares.
In March, Doordash surpassed Postmates in both Facebook likes and followers - and that could be a very telling statistic, because so many younger consumers are increasingly eager to interact with the brand.
App data
And finally, the thing that matters most for delivery apps: app data. For iPhones and iPads, Doordash has done the impossible in getting literally millions of new user reviews since October 2018, something nobody else has been able to pull off. The number is almost at four million, and could get there by the end of the year if they keep offering coupons or discounts for writing a review.
And the best news for them, they still have the best average rating on the App Store.
Maybe there was a big marketing push, possibly a flood of new users who really wanted to write a review for Doordash. Year over year, Doordash has seen the user reviews go from a 306% increase from 2016 to 2017, to an additional 185% on top of that the next year, to 381% from 2018 to now.
The trajectory of people reviewing Doordash for Android is scoring hundreds of thousands of reviews. But half a million reviews is still a lot of feedback to improve the app, since obviously a lot of people use it and have some thoughts.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.