RollerBakers: My Time Delivering Cookies on Rollerblades

RollerBakers was born out of a need for spending money. My dorm room had a kitchen in it, and I loved to baked so I thought: Why not make the most of this. I created https://rollerbakers.com a cookie delivery service which delivers freshly baked cookies directly to your dorm room.

I wanted to get the site up as soon as possible, so I made the website as simple as possible. I quickly designing, and coding the frontend with a minimal design, and form validation. I also made a simple backend in Node.js which receives orders and forwards them to my email. This took me about 10 hours to finalize over 2 days.

The next day, I went to Walgreens on my longboard and purchased a Square credit card reader. I then created a Square account. Square reimburses you for buying a Square Reader, so I got my $10 back. I then went to Safeway and bought a few rolls of cookie dough. I wanted to end up making my own cookies from scratch, but I wanted to prove my idea worked before I went all in and bought ingredients in bulk. I also made a word document with crude advertisements printed it out, and spread them around different floors of my dorm. I was in business.

The first order came from a girl on one floor below me. She order 6 cookies. I grabbed 6 cookies, and my rollerblades (to keep up appearances) and delivered them. The girl who ordered the cookies and her friend were so surprised when I actually showed up. After talking for a bit about how my business works, I went on my way.

Lucky for me, the first weekend was Halloween, and everyone had a sweet tooth. With the profits from the first night, I purchased bulk ingredients which, if I made a batch of 18 cookies a day, will last me a week and a half before I need butter and eggs, and chocolate chips. I then made a batch Friday night, and tried a different strategy: rollerblading around selling cookies on the street. That worked well. At the end of Friday I had sold 35 cookies, done 4 deliveries, and collected $34.65.

I did this for 4 weeks and at the end of the quarter I had sold over 400 cookies. Over winter break, I created an updated version of https://rollerbakers.com, and will launch it on January 3rd, a day before school starts up again.

This version has a much more professional design and the backend is much more maintainable. The backend is written in Node.js, with Express for the web framework, and MongoDB to hold orders, cookie types, and customer info. I also integrated Braintree Payments in order to process credit cards online.