The Hardest Question EVER is “What’s for Lunch?”
Why and how I’m founding a startup to choose and push food to people.
The Origin
Every time I started to look at the delivery app, it almost always ended up with me not getting the food. Questions like “Where should I eat?”, “ What’s for lunch?”, “What to have for lunch?”, or a variation of these often blocked me from deciding further. Moreover, when I check out the food on a delivery app, it was because I am already hungry. And that’s already too late.
Out of desperation, I even tried the Great Lunch Wheel, surrender all my free will to the randomness. It was fun, but not helpful at all (Being told to hit the vending machine when you’re starving isn’t that funny). The randomness just most of the time gave me craps I didn’t want.
Then there’s this dilemma of deciding too late. I spent at least half an hour or more just to decide on a restaurant and then the food for myself. Once I got it nailed down and finishing my order, it turned out I had to wait for another 45–60 mins for the food to arrive. OMG, that’s when I normally tossed my phone on the couch and hit the kitchen and cook a quick egg foo young. Then I’m full in 10 minutes.
I was sitting on the couch thinking about all I have been done in my past. I am a mom of a 3-year-old. I’m a former doctor. Back in the heydays, I performed tens of surgeries a day. Now, I’m founding a startup. My life has been about making decisions, some of which were very important. But when it comes down to deciding what to eat or just where to have lunch, why am I so bad at it? I face this problem every day over and over. Yes, it's repetitive. I need to fix it.
This is the reason why I started Dilio. I believe we should think less about what's for lunch, what do I want for lunch, and want to get it decided faster.
I want to create something to help me decide on places to lunch near me and/or what should I have for lunch faster based on my personal preferences and the estimated time of arrival (ETA). My co-founder and I named it Dilio, which comes from “dilly” and “dealio”. Dilio is a smarter lunch wheel.
Smarter lunch wheel
We use machine learning to identify the category of food to match our customers. This way they will get freshly cooked food they love from local restaurants.
Our vision to “push” food decisions to people instead of having them “pull” and search whenever they’re hungry. That’s the way it’s been done since hunting and gathering. And to do that, we need to know each person much better than their friends.
We’re starting with food recommendations, but we will be able to build our backend for food ordering and building relationships with the producers/restaurants.
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Originally posted on Dilio’s blog.
