The Launch.
We did some research. Here is what we learnt, and what we recommend.
Three parts. The problem, the solution, and the roadmap to get there.
Part one
01
The Problem
We did not guess. We went and counted, then we asked what the numbers were telling us. Three things came back, and all three are fixable.
Who lives here
2.4
people per household
Collier County averages 2.37 and a third of it is over 65. Every pizzeria here, ours included, builds its menu around a pie for four.
US Census QuickFacts, Collier County
28%
of people over 65 live alone
Rising to 42% of women over 75. One-person homes are 27.6% of all US households, up from 7.7% in 1940. Nobody is cooking for a crowd.
Administration for Community Living, 2023
Portion size
39.1%
wasted when you don’t pick the size
When people serve themselves, 3.3% of the food gets thrown out. When the portion is decided for them, 39.1% does. Twelve times the waste, from one decision.
Roe et al., PLOS ONE, 2018
The second meal
53%
of diners over 55 take the leftovers home
Against 45% of everyone else. Takeout already comes in a box, so the number itself is a dine-in habit. What it tells us is that our customer plans to eat it twice, which is why the reheat card in the box is product and not paper.
Lightspeed Commerce, n=1,500, 2024
When they eat
68%
of people over 65 eat dinner by 6:30 PM
Against 32% of under-30s. We closed at five, in a neighbourhood whose median age is 65.
YouGov, n=1,106, Jan 2025
58%
of adult pizza is eaten at dinner
Only 28% is eaten at lunch. Dinner is when pizza sells. Dinner is the meal we were closed for.
USDA ARS, NHANES, n=13,444
Where they order
$40.80
spent online, against $20.42 in person
The same pizza, ordered on a screen instead of at a counter. People spend twice as much when they can see the whole menu and nobody is waiting behind them.
Slice, State of Local Pizza, 2022
Getting found
6%
click the top search result
How close you are decides 44% of the choice and the star rating decides 38%. Ranking first is not the game. Looking right in a three-second glance is.
BrightLocal, n=1,227, 2026
What the apps cost
30%
commission when the app delivers
The same app charges 6% when the customer collects it themselves. Five times the price for the same food. The only difference is who ends up owning the customer.
DoorDash Merchant Pricing
What the Research Told Us
One. We sell the wrong size.
A third of Collier County is over 65 and the average household is 2.4 people. Every kitchen here, including ours, builds its menu around a pie for four. We are selling a family product to a neighbourhood of ones and twos.
US Census QuickFacts, Collier CountyTwo. We were closed when they eat.
68% of people over 65 eat dinner by 6:30, and 58% of all adult pizza is eaten at dinner. We closed at five. We were shut for dinner, and dinner is when pizza sells.
YouGov Jan 2025 · USDA ARS, NHANESThree. We rent our customers and never keep them.
The apps charge 30% to deliver and 6% to hand over. That is not a fee, it is what we pay for an introduction. Then we hand the customer back and pay for it again. Uber's own merchant terms forbid us keeping the customer's details at all, and the court that could have changed that struck the law down three weeks ago.
DoorDash published ratesAnd One More Thing the Research Found: Our Prices Are Wrong
We benchmarked every item against San Giuseppe, Joey D’s, Rosedale and Trulli. Twenty live prices need to change, and every single one comes down. Not one price goes up on day one. We have no reviews yet, so we have not earned the right to charge a premium. We earn it first, then we take it.
| Item | Live now | The market | New price | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiramisu | $22 | Rosedale $8.95 | $9 | Two and a half times the market. The largest single price error in the business. |
| Garlic knots | $8 for 3 | San G 5 for $6, Joey D’s 6 for $7.99 | $8 for 6 | Roughly double the market per knot. |
| Cheese 18″ | $28 | Joey D’s 16″ $19.99 | $24 | $28 against a $19 market is not a premium position. |
| Chicken Pesto BOSS 14″ | $32 | Joey D’s $26.99, Trulli $30 | $27 | The showpiece. A premium is allowed here. Not with zero reviews it is not. |
| Rigatoni Bolognese | $23 | Rosedale $16, Joey D’s $17.99 | $21 | We were top of market on pasta with nothing to justify it. |
Swipe sideways for the rest
The Day We Were Running
Every hour we were open, and every hour we were not. The shaded hours are the ones we closed for. They are also the hours this neighbourhood eats dinner.
The Solution: Stay Open for Dinner
Phase one takes the doors to 6 PM. Phase two takes them to 9 PM, once the early table has proved itself. The cost of that first extra hour is $36: two people, one hour. At eight orders and a $43 dinner ticket it returns about $344 a day. There is no ad, no promo and no discount in this plan that returns anything close to that.
Part two
02
The Solution
Three problems, three answers. None of them needs a new building, a new brand, or a new idea. All three are a menu change, a door staying open, and a card in a box.
Sell the size the neighbourhood is.
Today the smallest pie we sell is fourteen inches, so somebody eating alone either overpays and throws half of it away, or orders somewhere else. We put four sizes on all ten pizzas and let the customer choose: Solo 10″, Small 12″, Medium 14″, Large 18″. Nothing is made until it is ordered, so a smaller pie is not lost revenue and it is not waste. It is a sale we were turning away.
Open for dinner.
To 6 PM in the first phase, to 9 PM in the second, once the early table has proved itself. The hours everybody else ignores are the hours our customer actually eats.
Keep the customer after the app introduces them.
A card in every box. Not a coupon, an invitation: order direct next time and it is here in thirty minutes instead of forty-five. A direct order is not a bigger order, it is the same order without the 30% commission, which on a $28 ticket is $8.40 straight to contribution.
Intouch Insight, 300+ consumers, 2025: direct $26.28, app $26.72What It Does to the Money
A sauce costs us 13% of its price, a drink about 20%, a pizza 28%. Commission is charged on the whole ticket; food cost is not. So every attachment lifts the margin on the entire order. A $17 ticket becomes $28 and breakeven falls from 75 orders a day to 35.
| Window | What sells | Orders | Average | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 – 11:00 | Pre-orders and catering drops | 2 | $79 | $158 |
| 11:00 – 2:00 | Personal pizzas and lunch combos | 30 | $19 | $570 |
| 2:00 – 4:00 | Solos, sauces, fries | 8 | $20 | $160 |
| 4:00 – 6:00 | Combos for two and family | 15 | $43 | $645 |
| The day | 55 | $1,533 |
Swipe sideways for the rest
That is $1,533 in a day, and the two hours we used to be closed for do 42% of it in 22% of the hours. We are not projecting a miracle. We are itemising a Tuesday.
Part three
03
The Roadmap
Three phases. We call them Alpha, Beta and RC, which is only borrowed software language for prove it, then scale it, then take the upside. $1,500 a day is not 54 orders, it is about 700 repeat customers. That is what the three phases are actually building, and it is why the marketing spend in Alpha is not buying the $1,500. It is buying the base that makes $1,500 survivable once we stop paying 30% for it. Each phase has a start date, a length, a budget, and one thing that has to be true before the next one starts. A phase does not end because the calendar says so. It ends when its number is hit. Miss it and the fallback is already written: hours, then menu, then channel spend, in that order.
AlphaProve it
Sep 1 · About five weeks
Open the doors right.
- All ten pies live in four sizes, Solo through Large. No slices at lunch, because a slice means cutting a large pie and binning what does not sell
- Every new price live. Twenty of them come down, none go up
- Nine combos loaded. Sauce and drink asked on every single pizza, because a $3.50 sauce returns 57% against a pizza’s 42%
- Doors open to 6 PM
- Live on all four platforms: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and Slice. Curated menu on the big three, full menu on Slice. Pickup pushed everywhere, because pickup is 6% on DoorDash against 30% to deliver
- Slice from day one. It is the only one of the four that gives us the customer. Uber’s merchant terms forbid us keeping their details at all, and the court that could have changed that struck the law down three weeks ago
- Offers live: DoorDash Spend $30 Get $8, which qualifies us for their Boosted Promotions where they fund the uplift. Uber BOGO on the Solo only. Happy Hour on the 2 to 4 lull
- The printed takeout menu, the reheat card and the order-direct card, in hand for opening day. $1,010, three press runs. Nobody orders from a menu they cannot see
- A unique QR on the card for every channel. The shift rate from app to our own channel is not published by anybody. Thirty days of our own codes answers it
- Google Business Profile created, then TripAdvisor and Yelp claimed and filled. Every item photographed in one style
- Facebook-weighted paid, $1,050. Not Instagram. Facebook reaches 68% of over-65s here and 45% of them daily. Instagram reaches 19%. Google runs as brand defence only, because at $25 a conversion it loses money on a first order
- One EDDM drop, 5,000 pieces, $1,800. The only offline channel that can beat our contribution margin, and it needs 2% to do it
- The 5,000 names we already have, emailed in tranches, not one blast. A single send to all 5,000 permanently marks us a bulk sender to Gmail, and fifteen complaints would put the domain in trouble. Six tranches, most engaged first, worth about 50 orders
- The online ordering build starts week one and runs through Alpha. It will not be finished before we open. It is not meant to be.
Done when: $1,500 a day by the end of the five weeks, and at least 150 people on a list we own. $400 a day by week two and $700 by week four are the early alarms. Marketing spend: $4,654.
BetaScale it
Oct 6 · About six weeks
Open the whole evening.
- Hours go 9 to 9, buying the entire dinner window. The first extra hour costs $36 and returns about $344
- The ordering site we built in Alpha goes live on our own domain. This is where the customer the apps introduced us to comes back
- Loyalty enrolment becomes the number we run on. 41% of first-party orders come from loyalty members against 3% on the apps. That gap is the whole game
- Every channel re-budgeted off Alpha’s measured cost per order, not off a benchmark. The ones that earned their money get funded. The ones that did not get switched off
- The card gets its second version, built on whatever the Alpha QR data says. If speed did not convert, we test a code
- The reheat show on Facebook and the Naples community groups. TikTok comes off the plan: it reaches 8% of over-65s
- Retargeting from our own site traffic. The cheapest clicks we will ever buy
- A second EDDM drop only if the first cleared 2%. $1,800 on hope is $36 a customer against $11.80 of contribution
Done when: $1,500 a day held four straight weeks, with the owned channel growing every week. That second clause is the real test: holding $1,500 on 30% commission is not a business. Marketing spend: $4,084, or $5,884 with the second drop.
RCTake the upside
Nov 17 · Through the season
Take the upside.
- Keep only what earned its place in the phase before. No channel carries forward on faith
- Prices up a notch in the middle of the menu. Never the entry items. The Solo stays $13
- Season creative for the Midwest and Northeast snowbird, which is 52% of the 849,000 visitors Collier took in the first quarter
- One paid print insertion, or none. $2,900 for a Gulfshore Life half page. It does not clear on acquisition maths, so it is a season statement or it is nothing
- Frozen take-home, only if take-and-bake proved people want it
- Nothing new that has not already paid rent
Done when: The season takes the day past the held number. Hold it through December and the second Sauce Lady brand gets its green light. Marketing spend: the Beta baseline, plus $390 without the print insertion or $3,290 with it.
Opening Day Is a Checklist, Not a Feeling
| The box |
|---|
| List the 10" Solo, all ten pies |
| List the salads |
| Load the ten combos |
| Sauce and drink required on every pizza |
| Prices set: tiramisu $9, knots 6 for $8 |
| Entrees and soup off, no held items |
| Every item photographed, one style |
| Reheat card in the box |
| Open until six |
| Google Business Profile live |
Swipe sideways for the rest
Ten boxes. When they are checked, we open. Last time we opened on optimism. Owners get named in the room, not on a slide.
What We Need from This Room
Everything above is ours to execute. Three things are not, and none of them needs capital.
The Second Meal Guarantee.
Follow the card, and if it is not good tomorrow the next Solo Pizza is on us. About $3.60 a claim. Two-way, stoppable any week. Nobody else in this market promises anything at all about day two.
The call: yes or noThe award behind the recipes.
The recipes have won something and we cannot say so until somebody names it. An unnamed award is not a credential, it is a liability.
The call: name it and the yearLaunch week free sauce.
One week, a free sauce with every pizza. It trains the exact behaviour the whole margin machine runs on, at the one moment people are paying attention to us.
The call: yes or noAnd One Number to Argue About
We set the first phase’s exit at $1,500 a day. Two things about that number. Our own funding work says once real overhead and the nine-to-nine hours are counted, the number that actually clears is nearer $1,855. And $1,500 a day means about 700 repeat customers, which we will not have five weeks after opening. The marketplaces carry the opening volume. The marketing spend builds the base. We would rather argue about that here than discover it in November.