Getting Your First SaaS Customers

Zhong Xu, Deliverect

Why SaaS Distribution Matters More Than Your Product

Zhong Xu is the co-founder and CEO of Deliverect, an operating system for restaurants that connects digital sales channels like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub into one place. Zhong's father immigrated from China to Belgium with nothing. He washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant, saved enough to open his own, and taught himself C++ from a book so he could build his own point-of-sale system. He pushed Zhong into the business early. By 14, Zhong was helping run the restaurant. By 16, he was building websites for Chinese restaurants across Belgium. By 18, he'd built over 1,000 of them. He went on to study software engineering and built one of the first iPad POS systems. He coded the whole thing himself over nine months while working full-time with a three-and-a-half-hour daily commute. In 2014, that company merged with Lightspeed. Five years later, Lightspeed IPO'd. But Zhong wasn't done building. He kept hearing the same thing from restaurant owners. Delivery platforms were taking over. Orders were pouring in from five or six different apps, and nobody had a way to manage it all. So in 2017, he left and started Deliverect. This time, he didn't spend nine months coding before talking to customers. He went out and signed up 50 to 100 restaurants first. Behind the scenes, his team was processing orders manually. It looked automated. It wasn't. But it proved the demand was real before they wrote a single line of code. Then he figured out the SaaS distribution channel that would change everything. Instead of signing restaurants one by one, he partnered with POS companies. Ten partners each bringing in 100 restaurants a month beat doing it alone. When COVID hit and restaurants scrambled to go digital, Deliverect was exactly what they needed. They opened 10 new offices in a single quarter to get ahead of local incumbents. Today, Deliverect serves over 80,000 restaurants across 50 countries with 450 employees. They've processed over $25 billion in orders and are approaching $100 million in ARR. And now Zhong is racing to build an AI intelligence layer for restaurants before the whole industry gets commoditized. Because as he puts it, infrastructure alone is forgettable - the value is in the SaaS distribution channel that controls the intelligence.