The UBerk Eats Story

It only took 15 days for Berkeley to shut down my project.

With Caden Li, I found an arbitrage in Berkeley's dining plan, built a marketplace that made campus food 3x more affordable, grew 20% day over day, and got shut down while on track to hit 100k MRR.

Here's the full story:

Be aware of the problems around you

As a sophomore I was still used to my freshman eating habits when Berkeley gave me a meal plan. But without one this year, I realized paying for campus meals out of pocket ($17!) was simply too expensive.

This is around the time I met Caden Li, who told me about how many meal swipes he had left over every week.

The timing to build something couldn't have been better. In an earlier semester Berkeley had introduced campus food pickup via the Grubhub app, for which you could use meal swipes to pay. This was the perfect time for us to build something that bridged the gap between meal swipe supply and upperclassmen demand.

Assumptions will slow you down

Both of us fell in love with the idea because of how useful it seemed for our student community, and wanted to make the best product possible. That caused us to overthink countless edge cases, and pushed back general launch by far too long.

When we did launch, it gave us more information than we could've ever predicted. From genuine user feedback on UX, to realizing what bugs were priorities to fix, the amount of information from taking a step forwards—despite not knowing all the variables—made all the difference.

On co-founders

The journey of building and launching any product isn't easy, and who you have by your side defines the most important part of this experience.

I'm lucky to have built UBerk Eats with @cadenbuild. It's rare to find someone who genuinely infects you with an energy to do big things and work on problems that matter. And even though I had to wake him up on many of our operation days, this is something neither of us could have built alone.

On having conviction, and facing doubt

Berkeley has a lot of haters. Life has a lot of haters. It's vital that despite the hate, you're continuing to be inspired to create a better product for the community. We have a right to impart our perspective and worldview upon this community, and we mustn't let others discourage us from believing we can.

When we handed out flyers or talked to other students about our idea we inevitably got ghosted and hated on. On the second day post-launch (when we had less than 10 orders), someone tried DDoS-ing our database—and succeeded in slowing our app down by a whole 4 seconds before we stepped in.

But on those same days there were our customers and friends reaching out and offering feedback on the idea, commenting on its actual utility, and reposting our Instagram stories to help with marketing. It's those little notes and gestures that remind you who you're building for and why you did it in the first place.

On taking risks

Many people (especially those successful) have made their takes on how important it is to take risks in order to find high return. To leverage the beta, so to speak.

For spreading your wings to increase the surface area of having luck hit you, you also increase the surface area of having misfortune hit you.

Just as Icarus flew too close to the sun, we mustn't forget that his very act reflects an enduring aspect of humanity's curiosity and urge to always reach higher, further, and more. And that, in my opinion, is a noble enough cause to take risks—for that is what makes us distinctly human.

In the context of UBerk Eats, we knew it would be only a matter of time before it shut down. But we also knew that this was the same reason why UBerk Eats had never been built before. To impart our worldview and perspective unto Berkeley, we had to be willing to put our balls on the table. To be willing to share it with the community, and to take this risk.

What's next

Onto the next ventures. Looking forward to what's coming