Introducing HungryBelly.

Our AngelHack-winning food ordering app.

As a prototypical bachelor just starting a new career, I don’t do much cooking. In fact, I moved back to downtown Toronto more than 3 months ago and — aside from the trusty microwave — I have yet to actually use the kitchen.

I’m not really a foodie. Most of the time, I just want to shove something in my grumbling stomach so it’ll quiet down and let me get back to doing stuff. Ordering online is my go-to solution, but there’s a problem with it.

Picture this: you’ve just gotten home from a 10-hour workday. Your mind is still racing from the day’s work, but your body is exhausted from the long walk home. It’s dinnertime and you’re overdue for a meal, so you go to an online food-ordering site. You plug in your address, and 202 restaurants pop up. You scroll through, opening every restaurant that seems half-decent in a new tab, and you wind up with a “short list” of 15 restaurants. 35 minutes later, you’ve scrutinized every restaurant review, you’ve made and thrown away a dozen tentative orders, your stomach has gone from grumbling to screaming, and you’re on the edge of saying ‘fuck it’ and taking a chance with those freezer-burned leftovers from last month.

I’m exaggerating a bit, but this is a situation that plays out for me at least once a week. Even though I’d be happy with just about any option, I still can’t help but vacillate for at least 10-15 minutes.

A solution built for me

My initial solution was to build an app that worked sort-of like an iPod’s shuffle. You’d be presented with a random restaurant and meal in your area. Don’t like it? Hit ‘shuffle’ and a new option would show up on your screen.

There are two things wrong with this idea. First, it already exists — UrbanSpoon’s app has a similar shuffle feature. Second, it doesn’t actually solve the decision-paralysis problem — I’d just keep hitting shuffle until I found something perfect, which could take just as long.

The solution I eventually went with is way more extreme; you tell the app what your budget is and, optionally, what cuisine(s) you like, and the app picks out a suitable meal. You pay for it upfront, but you don’t know what you’ve ordered until it shows up at your door.

This is a perfect solution for me. It takes 2 minutes to use, and there’s no hemming or hawing possible. It’s something I would definitely use. But, I figured I’d be the only one on the planet willing to gamble with their dinner to that degree.

AngelHack Toronto

I came up with this idea a few days before AngelHack, a 24-hour hackathon taking place in 30 cities around the world. Individuals were invited to pitch their ideas at the start of the event, and I decided almost at the last minute that I ought to pitch my ridiculous blind-ordering service idea.

To my surprise and delight, the idea was received pretty well, and within minutes of the pitches ending I had a maxed-out 5-person team, each of them passionate and enthusiastic about the idea.

We worked hard through the night, either not sleeping at all or only catching a nap for a couple hours. The submission deadline was at 1PM, and we were working hard right up to the end: Our final git commit was at 12:59PM.

I didn’t admit it to anyone at the time, but I was super nervous before the presentation. Partially because public speaking is naturally intimidating to me, but also because I felt a little silly presenting an app called HungryBelly to a panel of respected industry professionals. It seemed like such a niche idea, the kind of thing a kid might come up with as a joke.

We made it through the first round, which was surprising enough, and then we won 1st place. A week later, I’m still blown away. A few of the judges, and more than a few of my fellow AngelHack participants, told us that they would definitely use the app.

All told, this was an incredibly rewarding experience for me (and not just because of the prizes). I learned a valuable lesson about having confidence in my ideas. If it’s something that I would like, odds are there are others who would like it too, and your best bet is to build something you have personal experience with.

Huge thanks to my amazing team: Ramis Hassan, Ellen Lai, Sameer Noorani, and Jose Platero.

Play with HungryBelly

After a few days of fiddling with Heroku, I’m pleased to say that HungryBelly is online and ready to be played with! Check it out, but keep the following things in mind:

• This is just a prototype! It doesn’t work, there are no credit-card details, and no orders actually get placed.
• The API we’re using only works for US addresses. I’m hoping to find a Canadian solution ASAP.
• It works best in the afternoon/evenings. Not many restaurants deliver in the mornings/late at night, and the app assumes you want your food NOW.
• It’s very possible that there are massive bugs.
• It is not responsively designed. Use it on a laptop/desktop, but not a tablet/phone.
• You can cheat! Normally, you wouldn’t be able to see what you had ordered until it’s in your possession. But, because this is just a demo, you can click the ‘cheat’ button in the bottom right corner to see what kind of meal you would have received.

Now that I’ve gotten the disclaimers out of the way, check it out here!

You can also check out the source on the project’s GitHub. Just don’t be too judgmental; we engaged in quite a few bad coding practices to finish it in 24 hours.