The App That Is Taking Over Delivery Is Coming To LA

Get ready Los Angeles, delivery app Postmates is coming to a store near you. And to celebrate, they're giving you free donuts!

Starting today, LA residents will be able to have anything they want delivered via the Postmates app. This means that if your favorite restaurant doesn't deliver, you can pay Postmates to bring it to you. You can even get them to pick up a prescription for you from the pharmacy.

To promote the new launch, Postmates partnered with Stan's Doughnuts to deliver free donuts to LA users while supplies last, starting at 9 a.m. PT. All you need to do is download the app and order one regular and one gourmet donut, and the entire order including delivery will be free. And if that's not enough incentive, the first 500 LA residents who download the app will receive $50 of delivery credit in the app.

According to Postmates, there is a key demand for the app in LA since Seamless only delivers from 874 restaurants in LA. Postmates, on the other hand, will deliver from more than 10,000 restaurants and supermarkets in LA.

"If you think about it [Los Angeles] is a city that loves convenience," Postmates' founder/CEO Bastian Lehmann told Business Insider. "The people that we talked to say postmates is so LA because it is the city of valet parking, the city of convenience and what's really missing here is an easy way and convenient way to have things delivered to you in under an hour."

Postmates is already doing 15,000 deliveries a week in five U.S. cities-San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago-but it is now expanding to Los Angeles. The initial launch will include Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Westwood, with more areas to come soon. According to Lehmann, Postmates will return to the East Coast for its next launches.

To date, Postmates has driven over $12 million in revenue to local businesses that previously didn't deliver their goods, and it has paid over $5 million in income to couriers. On the flipside, it has raised a total of $22 million in investment funding.

Postmates has come a long way since 2005, when Lehmann first had an idea to create some sort of delivery service. At the time, he was moving form Munich to London for a new job and needed a way to ship over his snowboard. After struggling to find a decently priced service, he ended up sending it with a friend who happened to be driving to London.

Fast forward a few years, and Postmates employs 56 people full time, with more than 3,000 contract-based couriers who function similarly to Uber and Lyft Drivers. The couriers make 80% of the delivery fee and 100% of the tip, which comes down to about $11.80 per delivery.

The app is available for free in Apple's App Store and Google Play, with deliveries starting at $5.

You can browse through thousands of restaurants and stores and select items you want delivered. Then a courier will be assigned to you, and you can track their progress in real-time. Postmates is open for business 24/7 and claims it can deliver anything in around an hour.

And when they say anything, they mean anything. Users have ordered a dozen quail eggs, 100 feet of Ethernet cord, a bottle of Grey Goose and whole salami at 7 a.m., and even a refill for a parking meter. Lehmann recalls one of the most memorable orders he's seen on Postmates: a pregnancy test and a bottle of champagne.