Toppings

What is Toppings?

In 2023 I joined Toppings, a food delivery app targeting college students in the Boston area. We were live in Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, Harvard & MIT. Our mission was to disrupt the existing food delivery model by creating a system that would save students money while charging restaurants lower fees compared to services like UberEats or DoorDash.

Toppings was born out of a pressing need in the restaurant industry. With the rapid evolution of restaurant technology and the rise of delivery giants, restaurants have seen their profit margins shrink dramatically. They now find themselves splitting revenue between food delivery companies, payment providers, and various other services just to stay afloat in an increasingly competitive landscape. Toppings tried to close that gap: a better deal for students, and better margins for restaurants.

As the lead product designer I was responsible for:

• defining product strategy
• creating design specs
• collaborating with the engineering team to ensure high shipping quality
• Running user research and interviews to discover problems, needs and opportunities.
• Iterate on product features based on user feedback

The Toppings concept

Toppings introduced a novel "food carpooling concept":

• Students pick up food for others while already visiting a restaurant and they bring it to them.
• Deliverers earn free food as a reward
• Restaurants pay lower fees compared to other services
• Customers enjoy lower prices (no delivery or service fees) and a social ordering experience.

Rapid user growth

On our first iterations of the app we achieved 30,000 users within weeks. We produced viral demand that resulted in long lines at popular Harvard Square Restaurants, and this initial traction helped us secure funding from investors.

Onboarding

One of our biggest challenges was explaining to people what the product did. We were training them on a new behavior so it was really important they understood how to use the product.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand and design the right incentive mechanisms to nudge people towards picking up food for others in exchange for free food. This required me to run frequent user interviews, both in-site and via SMS and email to better understand how people were using the product. This was vital to define our product positioning and to fine tune the product so that it achieved the virality it ended up having.

The main solutions for the onboarding required constant iteration with customers. Often running user interviews in tandem with product design to discover the best flows. We iterated a lot to come up with something that would improve the time from signup to first order, which was super long (3-4 days) to 1 day max as well as to reduce the amount of churned users (60% of sign ups) due to the poor onboarding explanations. Some of the changes we did included:

• Implementing contextual explanations for delivery/pickup options
• Building clear tutorials for core user actions
• New visual cues to showcase potential rewards
• Link-sharing mechanisms for social sharing

The home page

The home page was the front door to the product — where students browsed nearby restaurants and started or joined a group order.

Built around gems

Toppings was a reward economy. We were asking students to do unfamiliar things — order in groups, pick up food for strangers already heading their way — so we had to give them incentives for it. Gems were the in-app currency: you earned them for the behaviors we wanted and redeemed them for free food. Almost everything in the product was based on that idea.

It started the second you signed up. Instead of a dry tutorial, new users got a welcome — "You're in! Here's your welcome gift" — with two free gems and a seven-day expiry that nudged them toward that first order.

From there, the rewards page turned the behaviors we needed to teach into missions — create an account, do your first delivery, make your first pickup — each paying out gems. That way we nudged people to learn how toppings worked without shoving it down their throats.

Since our growth was entirely word-of-mouth, referrals also lived inside that same loop. Inviting friends was the fastest way to stack up gems, so people figured out on their own that sharing Toppings literally earned them free food.

Group order spec and the three sided marketplace coordination

As we scaled, coordinating our three-sided marketplace (restaurants, deliverers, customers) got hard. Two things became clear:

• People were hesitant to become runners, even with incentives
• Group orders with discounts showed more promise than individual deliveries

So we pivoted toward a group-ordering model, aimed at:

• Rewarding the most price-sensitive students
• Helping restaurants raise order volume without sacrificing margins
• Reaching students the big apps ignored

User Research in campus

To understand our users, we ran research a few different ways:

• On-campus interviews about meal habits, priorities, and psychographics
• SMS surveys with existing users, offering rewards for feedback
• Detailed user stories to guide what we built next

We'd reach out to customers with messages (tailored to particular goals) like this:

Hey [first name]

This is Ray, the founder of the toppings app. We're trying to get some feedback for the next update.

Will give u 1 gem/free food if u respond to some questions! Are u up for it?

Say Yes if ur down.

Do you know what a group order in Toppings is? Have you created a group order through Toppings? If not, why? What do you think would make it easier for you to do a group order? Would you be willing to deliver food to strangers in exchange of free food?

Replies were then tracked in a Notion file:

Which I presented to the entire team so we could create actionable steps. In other companies I've worked with, this work was also connected to ticket creation but we were moving so fast at Toppings that we'd just tell each other what needed fixing every day and we'd follow up relentlessly until it was fixed.

Pivot Hell

Despite the early traction, we couldn't find a sustainable business model. We explored pivots into luxury goods, mental health, and insurance, and eventually decided to shut the company down and part ways — there just wasn't a viable business there.