
ZeroCater (YC W11): Lunch At The Office Doesn’t Have To Be A Complete Pain - abstractbill
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/zerocater-because-lunch-at-the-office-doesnt-have-to-be-a-complete-pain/
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patio11
I honestly love startups which do more business/process innovation than cool
technical stuff with no actual utility. There exist hungry workers _and_ slack
kitchen capacity at restaurants in every major metropolitan area, every single
day. There exist catering companies but they all have to maintain their own
kitchens for sourcing.

Connecting the kitchens and the workers leads to eliminating expensive waste.
Yay. Predictable incremental revenue streams for restaurants on weekdays are
_amazing_ from their perspective. After having customers and data, a couple
iterations down the line I think they can probably offer something as
compelling to the food customer -- e.g., fixed pricing, which could make this
very competitive with business catering. That is almost certainly a 9 figure a
year business in NYC alone.

[Edit: Someday, I want to hear the story of the early days of this company.
I'm having visions of the MVP involving 0 lines of code, one cell phone, one
inbox, and a whole lot of hustling. "Hiya skeptical restaurant manager, I'm
calling to place $1,800 worth of food orders for next Thursday. Also, I want
to do it twice a week for the next six months. Do I have your attention?
Great, here's what we're going to do..." Repeat a couple of times while
becoming the Official Food Logistics guy for the YC mafia, and suddenly you
have side of the two-sided market bootstrapped from zero to "You are their
favorite person ever", plus you've got a very good understanding of what sucks
about ordering food for a large number of people. _Then_ you start coding.]

~~~
smanek
IIRC, it started as one of the admins at Justin.tv spending a bunch of time
arranging food for them, and then deciding that other startups had the same
problem and spinning out Zero Cater.

The YC connection is a great way to get started (incidentally, the YC company
I'm currently at (Greplin) has been using them for a few months, and I have no
complaints).

~~~
zasz
Yup. And then he ran it on his own for a year or so before getting into YC.

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abstractbill
We're hiring, by the way!

Previous to ZeroCater, I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV:
<http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup>

If that sounds like the kind of experience you would enjoy, email me
(bill@zerocater.com) - we're currently looking for our first engineering hire.

~~~
justin
If that sounds like the kind of experience you would enjoy, you should also
consider joining us at Justin.tv :)

<http://www.justin.tv/jobs/jobs>

<http://socialcam.com/jobs>

(Sorry, Bill, I just couldn't help myself)

~~~
abstractbill
Heh, this is an _awesome_ time to be a smart hacker looking for a startup job
;)

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pg
These guys had IMO the best slide of the whole W11 Demo Day.

Arram, do you have your Wave of Food image handy?

~~~
arram
<http://i.imgur.com/umToE.jpg>

Illustration by Julie Kang. Email me if you'd like an introduction.

~~~
arctangent
What a fantastic picture! Props to the illustrator :-)

~~~
zackattack
Can someone please explain why this is a fantastic picture? I would like to
encourage future commissioned designers to adhere to such standards

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michaelfairley
We used ZeroCater for the first time today. Could not have been a better
experience, especially because we signed up last night at 8pm.

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mrspeaker
Totally off topic (well, it's about lunch) - but do all tech companies in the
US order in lunch every day? In Australia at most companies we'd "go out" for
lunch - even if it was just wandering down to the sushi takeout place to
stretch the legs.

I've moved to Paris now where (in the traditional parisian style, I guess) at
least a few times a week it's group meals at nearby restaurants.

Nowhere I've been do people "order in" food - unless it's a late night pizza
run. What's the reason that it's so common in the US that it can support a
(cool looking) service to do so?

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markbao
Thank goodness this is coming to NYC. Can't wait to stop having to pick and
order lunch for the team.

Saw this in action in SF. It's like set it and forget it.

~~~
jonursenbach
We were actually with them for a month or two and the variety of food that we
were getting was terrible. We were seriously getting hordes of rice every day.
I love me some rice, but not every day for every meal.

~~~
avree
I had the same experience at the start of my use of ZeroCater.

The great thing was, though, that I was able to just tell ZeroCater that we
didn't want as much rice, and they fixed it. They're super responsive. We've
been using them for about 2 months now, and are pretty happy.

~~~
jonursenbach
We tried that, but I think that we were one of their first customers and they
weren't really adept at making changes yet. Things must've changed after we
stopped being a customer.

~~~
earbitscom
Maybe they just thought you needed more starch in your diet.

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memset
This is one of the coolest and most useful new companies I have seen. I love
how I, uh, have _no freaking clue_ what their technology stack is because
their business doesn't depend on selling to other geeks. (Though that would of
course be interesting.) Props!

RTP (where I work) has a huge set of companies who collectively do tons of
team lunches, etc. We all get pretty tired of going to the same places in the
vicinity every day, so please, add us to your queue!

(Incidentally, I feel like so many interesting startups are optimized for
their locality - Bay Area or NYC. What opportunities are there for the rest of
us to convince these services to come to our towns?)

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djm
It looks good. I've seen a few startups trying to use restaurant kitchens like
this for home delivery meals and I had wondered whether the economics would
really work out for them since they would be requiring restaurants to make
small deliveries to lots of people.

Bigger deliveries to larger groups is the obvious solution to that. Good luck
:)

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mp3jeep01
Had my first experience with ZeroCater today -- late last night I told a
friend I'd be coming by to work out of their office, and somehow between last
night and lunch today they were able to add an 'extra' order on to the
delivery and had a sandwich for me at lunch today -- +1 for food in my stomach

~~~
zallarak
Glad you liked it

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justin_vanw
EDIT: ok, I'm was just being a whiny brat.

Zerocater: remove the option to log in with facebook. When people use it, they
do log in, but they aren't connected with the account their company admin set
up, and if they're as bad as me, they just give up and end up with food they
don't really like.

~~~
arram
Hi Justin,

Done. We've removed it. Thanks for the feedback.

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arctangent
What would be really cool is a generic way for businesses in cities anywhere
in the world to opt in to such a scheme. I wish I lived over in Hackerville
but my talents are currently required in Leeds, England and the food here
sucks :-)

~~~
smiler
Are you from the US or have you been in the US / Bay Area much? Compared to
the UK I find the eating out for lunch / catered lunch culture huge. Where
I've been at a clients, I cannot believe how busy some of the restaurants are.

I wish the UK was more like this

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rs
Any plans on bringing this across the pond to the UK/EU ?

~~~
johnyzee
Sounds like a business opportunity.

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kordless
We've been using ZeroCater at Loggly for many months now. They've always been
great to work with, and keep the menu interesting. Two thumbs up guys!

~~~
lanstein
I was going to say... "wow, this sounds _exactly_ like what we do at work!"

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gnemeth
Their food is DELICIOUS!!

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rokhayakebe
I wouldn't be surprise if someday this company sees 1M/day going through its
service.

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staunch
I'd be way more excited if they got me awesome deals and charged a flat fee.
Also If they only dealt with restaurants with an "A" health code rating and
good Yelp reviews.

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chaitanya
I couldn't help but draw comparisons to what a dabbawala does in India. Is
this a rarely seen business in the US?

