EatStreet : One of the Most Successful Startups Not From the Silicon Valley

We can call it laziness or the extra money we have that we use to pay people to deliver things on our doorsteps. Today, a countless number of startups are providing the delivery services, and we just need to pay a small fee for that. But sometimes, these service providers charge an amount that is not justified, and we are only annoyed. This is the same case happened with the co-founders of EatStreet when they got the idea for their first and the most successful startup. Matt Howard, Eric Martell, and Alex Wyler, the students of the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the company when they had to pay extra fee for food delivery despite being college students.

Eric Martell and Alex Wyler were computer science students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One day during their internship, Martell felt hungry and ordered food through campusfood.com. As soon he placed the order, he received a call from the delivery guy telling him that it would have been way cheaper if he had simply ordered through the phone call. This made Martell frustrated as even he was a student, he paid extra money for the delivery.

Martell discussed the incident with Wyler and came to the conclusion that they should build a similar website, that would provide free deliveries. This way, there were high chances for their idea to work, and they would also get good points to add in their resume. They could make the website run by themselves, but they needed a marketer to reach out to the restaurants for promotions. So they decided to join Matt Howard in, who was studying economics and political science major at the university. He had also got some experience in selling cars. So he seemed to be the perfect fit for the promotions.

Finally, the three founded EatStreet as BadgerBites on 1 February 2010. Initially, it became difficult for them to convince the restaurants, but slowly the business came on track. In fact, in nine months, the company was making 100-200 deliveries every day, through about 70-80 restaurants in the city. In 2011, BadgerBites won the G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition and got a $10,000 prize as well as free office space in 2011. It also won the third prize in the NEST competition, held at the university. Winning those competitions not only helped the co-founders to get money to support their business but also access to some good entrepreneurs who have been mentoring them to date.

The success of the service encouraged the three to expand it to other cities as well. They built different websites for different cities, expanding the service to the cities that had more colleges or had universities. After running around 15 different websites for BadgerBites, the three co-founders launched a single website with the name EatStreet, and combined the services of the fifteen into one, on 21 January 2013. This way, they started to expand the service nationwide. By now, all three had to focus entirely on the service leaving other works behind. Matt Howard became the CEO of the company, Eric Martell held the position of COO, and Alex Wyler was appointed as the CTO of EatStreet.

The same year, in February, EatStreet hosted a series A funding led by and raised a sum of $2.45 million. The company was also named as #2 “Food Delivery Startup to Watch” in the U.S. by StrategyEye. The next year, the company became a part of the National Restaurant Association, in order to promote the digitalisation in the food industry. The company even partnered with Yelp, such that users could make orders through Yelp directly.

In April 2014, EatStreet raised another $8.4 million in a Series B investment round, Cornerstone Opportunity Partners LLC, Independence Equity, Great Oaks VC, CSA Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, being the major investors.

The three co-founders won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in the Midwest in 2015. By the C round of the funding, they were sure that the business is going to get real big, and they need to work on their data game.

In 2017, Howard and Wyler got featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology list. Martell stepped down from the post of COO to focus on his passion to help people build businesses in the same year. By the series C funding, the company had raised a sum of around $26 million. And at the same time, 200 corporate employees, as well as 800 delivery guys, had joined the company. The company processed around orders from 1.7 million customers in the year of 2017.

Today, the company has expanded to over 15,000 restaurants in over 150 cities in the U.S. The company, today, operates the orders and deliveries through its app, website, Facebook page as well as through the restaurants’ custom websites. EatStreet intends to reach around 350 to 400 cities across the U.S. by 2020.