# Uber Eats for catering, a marketplace prototype

> A month of full-time product design for a start-up building an Uber Eats for food catering: the screens, the flows and the prototype. The client never paid, and the lesson about capped, paid discovery has shaped every engagement since.

- Client: A food-catering start-up (Food catering)
- Role: Product designer and consultant, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Delivered. At neap.co
- Capabilities: Product design, Prototyping, Marketplaces
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/food-delivery-prototype/

## Outcomes

- A clickable prototype of a three-sided marketplace: the people ordering, the caterers and the drivers.
- A month of design iterations, delivered in full.
- The rule we've worked by ever since: discovery is capped, and paid.

## The situation

A start-up wanted to build an Uber Eats for one market only: food catering. Ordering catering for an office lunch or an event is a different job from ordering dinner: bigger orders, booked days ahead, set menus, dietary requirements, a delivery window that can't slip. The marketplace serves three customers at once, the people ordering, the caterers and the drivers, and each needs its own flows. Before writing code, the founders wanted to see it.

## What we did

A month of full-time product design. We designed the catering marketplace end to end and delivered a prototype that walked through it, iterating on the design again and again to get it right. No code was written: it was a design phase, by intent.

## How it ended

The client never paid. They were in breach of the contract, and we decided not to sue. It cost [neap.co](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/neap-co/index.md) about $20,000 of work.

## What it taught me

We were eager to win the client and passionate about doing a great job, so we went far beyond what we'd been paid for, on promises. Looking back, we should have capped the free work at a few thousand dollars: that alone would have shown us the client wasn't serious.

The lesson is about cash flow, and it's simple: get paid upfront, or if you want to build trust first, do a small piece of work for free and stop there. Never let an unpaid bill grow. A business with healthy cash flow can afford to build trust and experiment. One with tight cash flow makes desperate decisions, and we did.

## Why it matters to you

It's why our engagements today start with a small, paid, clearly bounded discovery: you know what you'll get and what it costs before anything bigger starts, and so do we. Both sides find out early whether we work well together.

## Built with

- Prototyping
- UX design

## Related

- [A property marketplace for homes that aren't for sale yet](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/property-marketplace/index.md): a related project
- [A second-hand fashion platform, prototyped with Lin Wong](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/fashion-marketplace-prototype/index.md): a related project
- [Crypto inside superannuation, a regulated proof of concept](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/crypto-super-prototype/index.md): a related project
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