Technically they didn't have to make any pizzas at all.

I always felt like the story about the dough was embellished a little bit to avoid being charged with fraud.

They had to produce something that could legally be called a pizza to at least fulfill the purchase contract with DoorDash and avoid making themselves legally liable.

But what would probably have worked would be to pull this off with two restaurants, each ordering pizzas from the other, with them sending the same physical pizzas around all the time. Cold and old pizza is still legally a pizza, just a bad one.

That reminds me of the Raines sandwich. "Minimum viable sandwich"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich

So this is "Minimum viable pizza"

Before clicking on this I thought it was going to be about Cuomo's order in this summer that all restaurants offering drinks had to be served with food. I went to at least a couple outside bars that were serving half a piece of white bread with a slice of American cheese on it for your "meal"

They could simply make a single pizza, and then deliver it to themselves N times.

They have to claim that they made something that met the definition of pizza, but with the “buyer”, driver, and store colluding they could just lie.

The first buyer is DoorDash however, and if they somehow want to take vengeance on you after you managed draining their funds in an otherwise perfectly legal way, they might just use the non-fulfillment of their initial purchase contracts as a wedge to take you to court (of course this assumes they somehow learned about that detail of your plan). I don't know if they would have any luck with that, but it's easy to prevent this from happening by actually delivering something that's basically a minimally viable pizza.

Reading through the article again, it is strongly implied that a lot of stores may have a similar arbitrage issue and the DD os getting taken to the cleaners over it. That and I don't think there are any legal issues over this as there were no contracts signed. If anything DD is the one in legal trouble over it.

That makes more sense than someone just offering a free delivery.

How would is that ever going to work long term? Most pizza places I frequent offer free delivery, or very cheap delivery once you get pizza for two people. The “growth hack” will never work when you compete with your supplier.

Even if this was somehow going to work, once Doordash has pushed others out of the market, then they would need to raise the price significantly, pushing many to just do pickup themselfs.

More suprising, to me, is that it was ever legal to list resturants without and opt in.

Growth hacks are never about sustainably growing a business, they're just there to fatten it up before parading it in front of the VCs.

Of course by growth hacking, we're talking about the act of using unethical practices against users to boost certain metrics.