Between 2018 and 2021, I worked at Aiqfome, one of Brazil's first food delivery apps. When I joined, the platform had a few hundred thousand users. When I left, it had over 8 million registered users across more than 700 cities.
This article is about how that happened. Not the story version. The systems version.
What Aiqfome was
Aiqfome operated in a different market position from iFood or Rappi. It focused primarily on smaller and mid-sized Brazilian cities — markets where the dominant players had not yet saturated. That positioning shaped almost every growth decision we made.
When you are not competing in the same cities as your biggest competitors, the playbook looks different. Lower CPC, less brand noise, and customers who have fewer alternatives. But also thinner restaurant supply, lower search volumes, and a harder cold start problem in each new market.
The core acquisition model
We ran a multi-channel acquisition engine built on three things.
The first was paid performance marketing, primarily Google UAC (Universal App Campaigns) and Meta Ads. UAC was central because it optimised directly for app installs and in-app events. We could feed it conversion signals and let Google's algorithm find the right audiences at scale. Once we had enough data, it became a reliable growth engine.
The second was city-level SEO and content. For every city we operated in, we built location-specific pages targeting search intent around food delivery in that area. This compounded over time. It took 6 to 12 months for new pages to rank, but once they did, that traffic was essentially free.
The third was distribution through the restaurant network. Every restaurant on the platform was a distribution channel. We helped restaurants promote their presence on Aiqfome to their existing customers, which brought users onto the platform without paid spend.
The retention mechanics
Acquisition without retention is filling a leaking bucket. We invested in retention early.
The main tools were push notifications, email re-engagement flows, and loyalty mechanics within the app. We tracked cohort retention closely and treated drop-off points as product problems, not just marketing problems.
One of the most effective changes was improving the reorder experience. Most delivery app users have a short list of restaurants and orders they repeat. We optimised the experience for that behaviour specifically. Easier reorder meant higher frequency.
We also ran regular win-back campaigns for users who had been inactive for 30 or 60 days. Targeted discounts with a short expiry window consistently reactivated a percentage of lapsed users at a lower cost than acquiring new ones.
City expansion strategy
Scaling to 700+ cities required a repeatable playbook, not a custom approach for each market.
We built a city launch playbook that combined three things: a minimum viable restaurant supply (you need enough variety before you can acquire users), a paid acquisition burst in the first weeks, and early loyalty mechanics to establish habit.
The key metric for a successful city launch was not install volume. It was whether users were ordering more than once in the first 30 days. A city with 1,000 users at 40% retention was healthier than one with 5,000 users at 10%.
Cities that did not meet the retention threshold early rarely recovered. That told us the problem was usually restaurant supply, not marketing. We would pause acquisition spend and focus on supply-side growth before restarting.
What actually moved the numbers
Looking back at what genuinely drove growth versus what felt like it was working:
Google UAC at scale was the biggest lever on the acquisition side. Getting to the data threshold where the algorithm performed well was the hard part. Below that threshold, the results were inconsistent. Above it, it was reliable.
Restaurant supply density had a bigger impact on retention than almost any product feature. When users had good options near them, they came back. When supply was thin, no retention mechanic was going to fix that.
City-level SEO compounded slowly but became significant. It required patience and consistency, but the long-term payoff was meaningful organic traffic that grew without incremental spend.
The broader lesson
Scaling a marketplace is about solving both sides simultaneously. Supply creates retention. Acquisition creates the demand that makes supply growth worthwhile.
Most growth failures in marketplace businesses come from scaling one side too fast without the other keeping up. We got that balance reasonably right, and the numbers reflected it.
The systems thinking that underpinned this approach is something I carry into every growth project now. You can read more about how I approach growth on the About page.
