Do you drive for food delivery companies? Have you been on YouTube browsing for tips on how to earn money with brands like DoorDash, UberEats, Postmates? Maybe you’ve seen other drivers’ paystubs and wonder how they make $1400 a week with food delivery apps.
Generally speaking, an average driver will bring about $500-600 a week if they do food delivery as a side hustle consistently throughout the week. Casual full-timers will probably show up at around $700-900. Then you’ll see the $1000-1200 folks. And then, the $1,400-1500 guys. These are the skilled drivers in the 40-60 hours a week range. And then the crazy folks who go 80 plus hours a week and net a cool $2,000.
You’ll find a lot of YouTube videos about food delivery apps. But when you break down all the common-sense advice you find there, you’ll see a few critical skills that all the elite drivers know and understand. If you want to learn how to make $1400 a week with food delivery apps, there are four crucial skills you need to master. And they all build upon each other.
Skill #1: Mapping
Most if not all elite food delivery drivers will have their city well memorized. They can have a database or have it mentally mapped out in their mind through experience. Elite drivers know where the restaurants that are quick and profitable are. They see where the clusters of restaurants are.
You can map out an area pretty quickly. Just go to the website of the platform you drive for, and look up the restaurants they partner with, and map out your city with pings.
Then do deliveries. After a while, instinct takes over, and you know where everything is. And that leads to the next skill.
Skill #2: Positioning
Once you have a clear understanding of where the clusters of restaurants are in your city for the specific platform you are delivering food for, it makes it easier to position yourself. Good positioning allows couriers to get a lot of orders.
Drivers who don’t learn how to position themselves properly will find it very hard to get to that $20 plus an hour benchmark.
Once you learn what good positioning is, your job is to stay in a good position. That leads us to the following skills.
Skill #3: Rejection Skills
To stay in a good spot, you must reject orders that will take you out of a good location.
This means that you must recognize if the drop-off or an order is short or if it will be at a location near a cluster of restaurants. You need good mapping skills to make this judgment call.
Also, to make good money, you need to reject orders that aren’t worth your time. Elite drivers know when an order isn’t worth their time. And the way they gauge this is with metrics like a dollar per mile or dollars per hour rate.
So when an order is offered, you need to be able to calculate the dollar per mile or dollar per hour in your head quickly and make a decision to accept or not. And that final call usually depends on if it takes you out of a good position.
Another part of rejection skills is knowing when you need to cancel and bail out an order that will not be worth your time.
The windows to make good money are narrow: 11 am to 2 pm, and 5 pm to 9 pm, give or take. Elite drivers do not wait around on slow merchants.
Once you have these previous three skills down, you can take your income to another level with the following skill.
Skill #4: Stacking
Elite drivers know how to stack. They understand how to stack orders within one platform. This means that accepting multiple jobs where the dollars per hour make sense (skill #3). And the final drop-off of the last order in the stack keeps them in a good position on the map (skill #1 and #2) to get more orders (stacks).
It allows them to complete batch orders and chained orders, manufacturing a boom-boom-boom. That’s where the money comes in.
Once you understand this about one platform, you can expand to others food delivery apps. This is known as multi-apping.
Conclusion
There’s a wealth of content on the internet on how to make money with food delivery apps. Most of the time, you’re getting a list of common-sense communication and customer service tips. But to make good money (or $1400 a week) with a food delivery app, you need to understand that those tips can be understood as these four skills: mapping, positioning, rejecting, and stacking. From there, you provide good customer service and earn tips. After that, you learn the fifth and most important skill: how to pay very little taxes.
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