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Press one button to get lunch with friends.
Two friends built it in an afternoon. A year later it was the #1 social app in America.
Go on. Press it.
Joe Lau and I had moved to San Francisco and were working all the time. In college your friends were always down the hall. Now nobody knew who was free, who was where, or who could hang out. We had a couple of free hours on a Sunday, so we built the simplest thing we could think of: one button.
We shared a beta link on Facebook expecting maybe five friends to try it. Eight hours later, at a party, a girl we had never met had heard of it. Twenty-four hours later a ton of our friends were on it. Forty-eight hours later people around the world were using it to get lunch.
Version one was a single giant button. Press it and your friends got a text that you were free. If they were free too, you went. By 2016 the button had grown into a sentence.
I want towithat
Tap the blanks to change them.
You never had to ask anyone directly. You said you were down, and the people who were free showed up. A college paper put it best: “DTL removes you from the risk of being turned down.”
Custom lists for close friends or a study group, real campus spots, and a map of friends nearby who were free. One student reporter posted “down to study” and had five people show up.
A button in the app opened a text to Joe and me, on our personal phones. Thousands of students did. It was the best user research we ever did, and it eventually broke iMessage.
Over winter break, DTL spontaneously exploded across the country, campus by campus. 15% of Notre Dame downloaded it in 12 hours. BYU went from zero to everywhere in a single day, and the school paper wrote about it that evening. Every pin below is a new user. It’s only 20% of them.
It was the craziest month of our lives. Insane hours, and something incredible happening every single day.
One button. We shared a beta link on Facebook, expecting maybe five friends to try it.
Eight hours after the Facebook post, a stranger at a party had heard of it. In 24 hours a ton of our friends were on it. In 48 hours people around the world were using it.
“This One-Afternoon Project Could Change How You Meet Friends.” Still a side project. Read ›
A University of Georgia freshman read the TechCrunch story, downloaded it, and told his friends. Soon it was all over UGA. Read ›
Notre Dame, BYU, then everywhere. Two guys, #18 on the App Store.
“Press one button to get lunch with friends.” Read ›
A fake App Store review and paid parody accounts spread false rumors about DTL. Growth cratered overnight.
Ahead of Facebook in the US App Store.
“Down to Lunch Founders Pursue Less-Traveled Path to Success.” Read ›
Joe and I were awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 for Down To Lunch. Read ›
We started building in crypto. That became Alchemy. Read ›
Some behind the scenes views into the story!
Our real phone numbers were in the app. So students texted us: how they found it, what to build next, and how it changed their school.
“We were sitting at a table in our cafeteria and my friend sent me this text and then all of a sudden the whole place was just sending it to each other. Our school is roughly 3,800 kids so it spread like wildfire.”
“You are improving my way and my friends way and my schools way of communication. Thank you for helping me and my school!”
The most fun, ridiculous, sleep-deprived months of our lives.
So many texts poured in that iMessage stopped working on my phone. I emailed Tim Cook with that subject line. After talking with his executive staff we learned we were some of the top iMessage users in the world. They fixed it.
TechCrunch ›Marathon coding sessions to keep the servers up as campus after campus came online. Joe once stayed in the office six days straight.
A fake App Store review, boosted by paid parody Twitter accounts, spread false rumors about DTL. It was absurd and it worked: growth fell 90% in 48 hours. Two months later we were #2 in the App Store.
VCs were beating down the door with term sheets. One showed up unannounced at the office during a Business Insider interview. We turned most of them away and kept building.
Business Insider ›DTL blew up at BYU on a Friday. By that evening the student paper had a story out: “Students across campus are Down to Lunch.”
The Daily Universe ›People told us our life was the show, only more ridiculous. A hacker house, a press frenzy, and two guys answering texts from strangers all day long.
The cover of the New York Times business section. The front page of TechCrunch. Forbes 30 Under 30. And student papers on campuses across the country.
The creators of the popular app, which centers on meeting up with friends in person, refuse most interview requests and have turned away potential investors.
Read the story ›“Down to Lunch became a bit of a darling during its rise thanks to its dead-simple approach.”
Read the story ›Down to Lunch became a bit of a darling during its rise thanks to its dead-simple approach.
So the next time you find yourself bored and alone, just ask: ‘You DTL?’
It is quicker and simpler than texting a bunch of people because you just press a button.
“We’re committed to creating a world where your friends are in your daily life because it’s the world we want to live in!” I said that in 2016. I still believe it.
The product was barely functional. It was one button. It didn’t matter, because it solved a real problem the moment you pressed it.
Putting our own numbers in the app meant thousands of conversations a day. We knew what to build next because people told us.
We built DTL to see our own friends. The best products start with a problem you feel every day.
Down To Lunch was the start of everything that came after. Joe and I learned how to build, scale, and survive chaos together. A year later we started Alchemy.
