The internet trend is simple: a friend or family member looks at the camera and tells viewers in a slightly aggressive tone that they are witnessing a presentation and that they are better.
That’s what Kendall, the sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she stepped aside, her brother beat her company, bitesight, a food delivery app that lets users watch videos of food before ordering. It also lets customers see what their friends have ordered and bookmark places to try. The app plays about how young people engage in content-through short-shaped videos and recommendations from friends.
McDaniel sent the video and went back to work. Fifteen minutes later, his sister texted him that their posts were viral. “We were at 20,000 views in 15 minutes,” McDaniel told TechCrunch. The excitement came, but then chaos followed when “Parts of our app started breaking when we got more users.”
The engineering team worked around the clock to keep the bitesight functional, while McDaniel went to make tikx about the chaos, which also ended up being viral. He said people loved the “authenticity” behind seeing what happens when “Your app explodes overnight.”
The video of McDaniel presenting this idea has since collected almost 4 million likes on Tiktok and a quarter of a million on Instagram, participating in a trend of young entrepreneurs using Tiktok and Instagram wheels to get traction and Deal Flow.
McDaniel told Techcrunch that the idea of getting this video came after watching a friend join the same internet trend for his dating app. “It got over a million views, and he suggested I try it for bitesight.”
Twenty-four-year-old McDaniel said that, like many young people, he realized that he ate too much take-out and ordered from the same three places because he couldn’t discover new restaurants on delivery apps. “I had hit this wall of identical looking restaurants with stock photos, and somehow had every place 4.6 stars.”
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He began to hold a spreadsheet with restaurants that he had found on Instagram and Tiktok, traced actual reviews and see what his friends thought of the places mentioned. “When I realized that other people did exactly the same thing, my co -founder Zac and I decided to build something better: an app that actually reflects how we discover food today,” he told Zac Schulwolf, the company’s CTO.
McDaniel is no stranger to the tech industry. He previously worked at General Atlantic, where one of his main focus areas was restaurant technology. He previously founded a payment company called PHLY, LED product for a recruitment software and has even invested in a couple of companies, including Fintech Mercury.
He and Schulwolf, 25, spent over a year building bitesight, including participation in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 co -short. They then made a limited beta around New York University in April. In mid -May, the company launched an early version and did a bit of marketing on social media. In June, they made their viral video.
“What made our video stand out was that what we build resonates,” said McDaniel, BiteSights CEO (also known as Chief Eating Officer). He added that “it is clear that consumers and especially Gen Z are ready for something that feels fresh and built to the way they engage.”
After the video, Bitesight was card # 2 in the App Store’s Food and Drinking Category, bypassing Uber Eats, Starbucks and even McDonald’s.
McDaniel said the app also got more than 100,000 new users, and although only available in New York at the moment, people in other cities began sending a message to a nationwide release. On the restaurant side, McDaniel said that everyone from small family -owned places to chain restaurants has reached a partner and of course “We have had an increase in investor interest from people who see that this is where food delivery goes.”
He refused to comment on the size of any upcoming financing agreements, except to say that he expects to have news soon to share.
Of course, Bitesight has a lot of big, well -financed competition like Doordash and Uber Eats. However, McDaniel believes that being a start -up in AI’s age will be in his favor. For example, while most of its competitors needed hundreds of engineers in their early days, Bitesight can work with AI tools that perform 10x work for a human for much less cost.
“By using AI to avoid massive costs and infrastructure costs, we can do much more with much less and pass on the savings to the small business owners and customers who need it most, while still maintaining healthy margins,” he said.
What also separates bitesight is its focus on food and video rather than other categories at the moment.
“We try to be the go-to app for the generation that discovers everything through social recommendations and short forms of video.”