Pizzatime
- Product
- Internal Venture
Pizzatime is a service that allows remote teams and virtual events to have real, freshly cooked food delivered to event attendees on-demand.
As more and more companies have gone fully- or even partially-remote, Pizzatime has provided a much needed means of team bonding and attendance improvement to virtual events.
Pizzatime launched in mid-2019 and has grown over 10x as of the end of 2021. It now offers four products: Pizzatime, Coffeetime, Lunchtime, and Drinktime.
5,000+
Events supported
100,000+
Orders delivered
75%+
Of Fortune 500 companies served
Our team concepted, designed, developed, and grew Pizzatime internally from the ground up.
We wanted to create a product for remote teams that encouraged team bonding and togetherness. As a remote team since inception at Planetary, we love finding new ways to improve the remote team experience, and bring folks together at a distance. Being able to share a meal together, virtually, seemed like a great opportunity.
We first experimented with this type of experience internally in 2015, and decided in 2019 to bring it to market as a product we could offer to other companies.
Our first launch was a “minimum viable product,” relying on no-code and low-code tooling to build the entirety of the product.
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Introducing a new product, especially in a new or young business vertical, meant that we needed to quickly grab a prospective customer’s attention and hold it for long enough that they understood the value of the product.
As part of the wireframing process, the design team worked to find a structure to the page that would hold a customer’s attention by using a ‘storytelling’ format. The content of the page was designed to flow naturally from top-to-bottom, allowing a user to unfold each aspect of the product as they scroll through the landing page.
We also considered that, while pizza was our first offering, we would likely be introducing additional offerings in the future. The landing page was designed to be modular enough that it could be easily copied and modified for future products, which worked successfully for the launches of our coffee, lunch, and drink offerings.
We approached the design of both the brand and website through the use of bold colors, heavy typography, and vibrant imagery that would garner attention of anyone that landed on the website.
The landing page focuses on driving a customer toward booking, where they are then guided step by step through the booking process. We selected Typeform as the (somewhat atypical) booking form, due to it’s simplicity and ease of use, allowing us to avoid overwhelming the customer with a long booking form, instead providing just one input at a time.
Due to the complexity of the “supply chain” involved in delivering a “just-in-time” fresh, locally-made product to thousands of customers, we decided to keep the technology behind the product as simple as possible.
We relied on extensive no-code and low-code tooling to build the initial product, using Webflow for the website, Typeform for booking and order placement, Airtable for our database and order management, Stripe for billing, and tied it all together using Zapier and Pipedream.
For the marketing site, we put Webflow to use.
Webflow is an excellent no-code platform that allows the design and development of marketing websites without any (or very minimal) code knowledge.
From Planetary’s experience with it from other client work, our team decided that it’s implementation here would allow our design team to fully execute and maintain the website, reducing the load and effort of the development team.
Our approach to the backend uses a series of no-code and low-code tools to build a complete booking and order management system.
Tying Typeform and Airtable together allows our team to very easily intake new bookings, and collect orders for each event. A small amount of code was written to tie Typeform to Stripe’s payment gateway, creating a smooth booking experience with under 100 lines of code written.
Once a booking is received, an email confirmation and receipt is sent to the host, and a notification was sent to Slack to notify the planning (ordering) team.
Finally, SendGrid was chosen to handle final event receipts, transactional, and marketing emails. Webhooks from Stripe were tied together using Pipedream, allowing the platform to automatically send off emails at the appropriate time, while allowing our growth team the ability to reach out to both previous and active customers.
