Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the kind of experiences and the kind of people who started gravitating towards your platform, making this a financially viable business. 

Mareza Larizadeh: We started partnering with mom-and-pop shops to drive customers their way. We would structure offers. A dinner offer or a brunch offer for example, which we would then sell on our platform with an added perk which generally was a discount for the price.

We were driving business to these merchants and we would pay them for that business. We were the point of sale. A lot of the mom-and-pop restaurants owners have friends and as their business grew, the bigger hospitality business started hearing about us and wanted to learn more. On the consumer side, our target audience is people in their mid-20’s to mid to late 30’s.

We had a customer send us an email a couple of years ago. This lady’s manicure and pedicure voucher expired and she wanted an extension because no one from the nursing home would take her to use it. The lady was 91 years old. It runs a gamut, but generally the core audience is mid 20’s to early 40’s.

Sramana Mitra: In that audience and in that model of generally starting with the mom- and-pop restaurants to broadening to general restaurants, is the driver purely price? Were you doing anything else that was more experiential like meeting other people? Was there any other nuance to it? 

Mareza Larizadeh: A big driver was price and that is why we are here, enabling people to experience the city for less. That was definitely a big driver but what we would also do is we would curate experiences unlike a lot of delivery platforms. It was something you could get on your own but you had to do the work and you’d be paying more.

We’re definitely adding value through price but we also curate experiences. Instead of just going to a restaurant and ordering, we would curate a set three course meal. Sometimes we would work with restaurant to put together five to seven course tasting dinners that are exclusive to us. More items are available on the menu, but we build the structure and add-ons. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the customer acquisition strategy?

Mareza Larizadeh: The great majority early on was organic. It continues to be that way today. We actually bootstrapped this business, so we don’t have endless bags of money to feed either side of the market place. We have started advertising on regular online platforms.

We do Facebook and Instagram ads for more general targeted New York city customer based acquisition. On the event side, for example, we do July 4^th, Cinco De Mayo, Halloween, New Year’s Eve, and the Super Bowl. We do targeted advertising on Google. We tried some print advertising, but for us it hasn’t been successful. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh
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