I think instead, what we focused on is just continued improvement on our product velocity, product quality and execution. And I think that the dynamic changes we make in our product can outweigh many of the macro factors that may be at play.
Ravi Inukonda: Ross, on your third question around grocery. I mean, look, we are really pleased with the performance of the grocery business. Our focus over the last couple of years has been how do we increase the usage? How do we increase the adoption of not just our grocery business, but really, in fact, the entire new verticals, all of the categories that we operate in? What we are seeing in the business today is a couple of things, right? One is more number of users are ordering from both restaurants as well as new verticals. And that’s driving two things. We are seeing the new verticals business overall accelerate from the prior quarter. As well as when you look at the grocery business itself on the GOV to the specific question you asked, our GOV has doubled year-on-year.
If you look at that paired with the efficiency that we’ve seen in the business, we’ve driven a ton of efficiency across the business. In fact, when I look at the unit economics, there’s been a dramatic improvement in unit economics. You have to realize we have a strategic advantage because we have a network of consumers. We have a network of Dashers already built out, and that’s allowing us to improve unit economics at a much faster pace. For us, the way we operate the business is we look at signals around retention. We look at signals around order frequency. We look at signals around unit economics. We continue to be very pleased with the improvement across all three. Our goal is to continue to invest behind improving selection, improving the product quality because our strong belief is that this is going to be a strong long-term ROI generating business for us.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Deepak Mathivanan: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to ask a couple of ones. So first, I wanted to ask about the product initiatives for 2024. You entered into a lot of categories and new markets in 2022. And 2023 was more of a year of execution and sort of like a refinement that helped profitability, obviously, as an incremental driver. What are the big business opportunities for ’24? Or should we view it as another year of execution and refinement of existing businesses? That’s the first question. And then second one, the acceleration in the order frequency at this scale in the core restaurant business is pretty impressive. Are you seeing some of the maybe less common use cases, I don’t know, maybe breakfast orders or corporate orders or anything that’s helping incrementally in the recent quarters? Can you help unpack the trends in use cases a little bit?
Tony Xu: Sure. Deepak, maybe I can start and take the questions and then Ravi, feel free to chime in. The first question, which stems on ’24 and some of the initiatives that we are thinking about. First, our goal is to grow and to empower local economies. So we are always looking for problems to solve and jobs to be done. And obviously, we want to make sure that we have a strong point of view where we can do it at least 10x better than, however, the problem is currently being solved. And so when we looked at, if we rewound the clock for instance to 2019, we were thinking quite a lot about what other problems we could solve. And many of the problems that we actually heard came from our customers directly. I’ll give a few examples.
When I came to consumers, a lot of the challenges that we had heard were really making sure that we can help solve their other problems. Again, because we started in the restaurants category, which has the highest frequency of activity and the fact that we would show up to many consumers’ doors many times a week, I think consumers started asking the question, well, what else can you do for me? And similarly for merchants, I think there were many questions that they wanted our help with, this is even well before the pandemic of how can they become an omni-channel business. And that’s why we certainly made further investments into products like DoorDash Drive, but also started the creation of DoorDash Storefront, which has continued to serve various merchant cohorts and segments.
And we continue to build further services as we think about how can we help a merchant build their first-party channel as much as we help build their third-party channel of DoorDash. And as I kind of keep thinking along the years, I mean, advertising came in that way as well. Many merchants as well as advertisers that are new to our ecosystem kind of approached us and said, hey, it looks like you have a high frequency setup with the largest number of local commerce business where you can measure everything very, very closely and directly. Is there a way in which you can be more useful, I think, to all of the audiences? And that’s kind of how we thought about all of the different problems. When I think about ’24 or ’25 or ’26, that’s generally how we think about things, too, where we start with certainly our core set of businesses, which today is five businesses, where in 2019, it was closer to one business.
And so it’s a little bit more varied now and complicated in terms of thinking about all the different opportunities because we believe each one of these five businesses are still actually in their earliest innings, even the U.S. restaurants business. But we are also looking at opportunities to always solve more problems. And I hope that as we listen to our audiences more deeply and can get and operate at a lower level of detail, we will actually be able to pick up new problems to solve. Now we always do this in a fairly disciplined way. Again, I think at DoorDash, we really believe in investing appropriately towards the stage of the project. And so usually, when we are solving these problems and we have many of these experiments going on, we tend to take fairly small bets.
And it’s only until we believe that we’ve nailed product market fit as well as finding an efficient way to grow, do we actually concentrate behind that bet and go all in for it. And so that’s how we are thinking about ’24 in that way, too. I think your second question was around the continued growth in engagement and frequency of our customer base in restaurants even at our current scale. Well, I think there’s a lot of things that drive this. I think sometimes when we think about businesses like our oldest business, the U.S. restaurants business, we tend to think that perhaps it’s closer to the ninth inning of progress versus the third inning of progress. And I tend to think, at least when I talk to our customers, that we are way closer towards the third inning than the ninth inning.
And we just have a lot more work to do in terms of making improvements to the product. There isn’t one single thing that we’re doing that’s yielding, I think, some of the improvements that you’re seeing in the results. But really, it’s years of working on the selection, the quality of service, the affordability of the program, the added value to our DashPass members as well as improved customer support, that’s producing some of the results today. It will be really hard candidly to look backwards and say, “hey, in which year did the product work actually lead to the results that led to this quarter’s efforts”. But I think instead, what we do is, we are always trying to make continued improvement. And I think whenever we’ve taken that focus, we’ve surprised ourselves to the upside of how much more there is to go as well as the compounding effects that can happen over time.
Ravi Inukonda: Yes, Deepak, maybe just to add a couple of thoughts to what Tony talked about. Look, I mean we’ve had a phenomenal year so far, what we are seeing both on the top line as well as the bottom line. Part of that is, in fact, being driven by all the investments we made, whether it’s on the product side or investments in new verticals as well as the investments we’ve made in international over the last couple of years. What we are seeing is we are seeing really strong growth across all lines of business that we operate in. These categories that we operate in are large. There’s really lots of customer problems, as Tony talked about, that we need to continue to work on and improve. Our goal and philosophy is we will continue to invest as long as we see good signal on both volume as well as unit economics, because this is the blueprint for us to drive really strong free cash flow in the many years to come in our business.
Deepak Mathivanan: Got it. Thank you so much.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi. Please go ahead.
