How a Homeless Guy Inspired My Startup

therealkofi.com

2 points·kfrimpon··3 comments

Check out the inspiration behind my new startup MealTics.com. We allow restaurant customers to purchase meals that get donated to local soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Every month we give out cool prizes to random MealTic customers in our raffle.

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Hmmm ... I think you're onto something great here but I have another idea to pitch to you. I think it's great to allow the restaurant's customers to purchase meals, but I'm more of a bulk purchaser (yes ... I got the 50 pound bag of popcorn kernels).

At the end of each day, a restaurant has food that is perfectly good but hasn't been sold. What if you find a donor who's willing to pay the restaurant to package the left-over food into meals for delivery the next day.

The restaurant would earn at least a "processing fee" and the food wouldn't end up in the dumpster. I'm sure this idea could be further refined with input from your advising restaurants.

In any case, I hope you end up feeding a lot of people!

Scale is going to be critical here - it has to make sense for a shelter or a food bank to pick up whatever a restaurant is offering, and there's probably a threshold number of meals below which the cost of gas and travel time doesn't justify picking up the meals. Meanwhile, if the shelter collects and saves up its tickets, the restaurant has to be ready for bulk orders, so to speak.

Just FYI, something I learned from trying to sell a software product to restaurants - unless they said yes and paid, the answer is "no." When you hear "keep us updated...", that's a polite way of telling you to screw off, they have more important things to do. Take it as it is, my experience, but don't be surprised if after all, no one participates.

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