Down to Lunch Founders Pursue Less-Traveled Path to App Success - Th...

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TECHNOLOGY

Down to Lunch Founders Pursue

Less-Traveled Path to App Success
By VINDU GOEL APRIL 20, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau have built the hottest new
social app in America. Now the young men have to keep it from getting crushed by an
anonymous slander campaign, overwhelmed servers and their urge to personally
respond to thousands of messages from users.
The app, called Down to Lunch, is shockingly old-fashioned: Its all about
meeting up with your friends in person. You send a message to some or all of your
buddies saying that you have free time and are looking for company for a meal, a gym
workout, even a church service. Whoever is interested responds and you arrange to
meet.
Were trying to make it feel like you live with your friends again in your
freshman dorm, said Mr. Viswanathan, a Texas native who graduated from
Stanford University in 2012 with a masters in computer science.
The concept is so simple that the first version was built in a day last spring. By
last week, Down to Lunch, also known as DTL, was the No. 1 free social networking
app for the iPhone and the No. 2 free iPhone app over all. (It doesnt rank quite as
high on Android.)

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But keeping a prime position on crowded smartphone screens isnt easy. Just
ask Foursquare, which debuted with a splash in 2009 but has drifted into near
irrelevance, or Yo, an app that lets you send the word yo to your friends, which
momentarily topped the charts in 2014.
Mr. Viswanathan, a mile-a-minute talker, and Mr. Lau, who is more laid-back,
meet one fundamental requirement for success: a stubborn belief that they have a
great idea. Mr. Viswanathan worked on five previous services that tried to connect
people, three of them with Mr. Lau, but Down to Lunch was the first to catch on.
The San Francisco start-up has needed little capital so far, and the founders
have turned away dozens of potential investors. However, the men, both Stanford
alumni, have not been shy about seeking advice from their array of Silicon Valley
connections, including senior tech executives, venture capitalists and other company
founders.
As thousands of app developers have discovered, attention spans are short, especially
among the college and high school students that Down to Lunch is targeting. Dozens
of competitors are vying to help people organize spontaneous gatherings, including
Hangster, Shortnotice, Down to Hang and a Google app called Whos Down.
And a lot of things can go wrong on the road to becoming the next Snapchat.
Down to Lunchs servers went down last week after hitting limits imposed by
their cloud computing provider, forcing the start-up to devise a work-around. A
human error derailed sign-ups for six hours on Monday.
In addition to typical start-up problems lack of sleep, inadequate staffing,
technical malfunctions Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau have also been battling an
anonymous social media campaign claiming that Down to Lunch is used for sex
trafficking.
The assertions, some describing encounters with suspicious strangers, are
dubious. Down to Lunch is designed to allow communications only between people
who know each other and have each others phone number.
Kirsta Melton, who heads the human trafficking division of the Texas attorney

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generals office, said that she looked into the app and found no evidence supporting
the allegations.
Unless you have random strangers in your address book or someone stole your
phone, its unlikely that this app could be used for human trafficking, she said.
Its not clear who is behind the smear campaign, although Mr. Viswanathan and
Mr. Lau believe it might be a competitor. They traced the accusations back to several
Twitter accounts. Twitter temporarily suspended one account and appears to have
blocked offending tweets from others. Apple and Google have also removed app-store
reviews that mention the trafficking allegations.
But that has not stopped worried users from contacting Mr. Viswanathan or Mr.
Lau or simply deleting the app. Mr. Viswanathan said one school administrator even
called him about it.
Despite the damage the trafficking accusations have caused, there is no question
that Down to Lunch has struck a chord with young people. After the app appeared on
the University of Notre Dames campus, for example, 15 percent of the student body
downloaded it within 12 hours, Mr. Viswanathan said.
Aakash Malhotra, a freshman at the University of Georgia who downloaded the
app last September, said it helped him build friendships on campus. We have
enough apps on our phone that give us information or entertain us, he said. Wed
rather have an app to help us connect in person.
Until February, Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau were the only employees. The
six-person company still operates from the loft-style apartment that the founders
share in San Franciscos South of Market neighborhood.
Whiteboards cover one wall, laying out the top tasks for the day and week. Mash
notes from fans are posted as inspiration. Leaky takeout containers have colonized
the kitchen, and Mr. Lau often stashes McDonalds breakfast burritos in the
refrigerator to fuel marathon coding sessions.
Mr. Viswanathan, 28, interned at Microsoft, Google and Facebook, where he sat
right outside the glass-walled office of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief

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executive, and occasionally played chess with him.

Mr. Lau, 26, was an engineering intern at LinkedIn. When the job wound down,
LinkedIns chairman and co-founder, Reid Hoffman, personally implored him to
stay. Mr. Lau declined and later went to Pinterest.
While the pair has not been shy about tapping their networks for help, they have
eschewed most of the usual marketing tactics for a start-up.
They have avoided publicity, refusing most interview requests. When Product
Hunt, a service that highlights new apps, opened a discussion about Down to Lunch
two months ago, Mr. Viswanathan quickly posted a note saying, Haha what how is
this on product hunt can we take this down?
And in an industry where an investment from a top venture capitalist confers
immediate credibility, theyve been pushing everyone away, even the whos who of
investing, said Cameron Teitelman, the chief executive of StartX, a nonprofit for
Stanford entrepreneurs that has helped the company.
Mr. Lau explained, If we take time out to raise money, thats time were not
working on the product. Thats time that users cant talk to us. Thats time that were
not keeping servers up.
The founders and their small team have instead focused on improving the app.
When they have a new version to test, they drive across the Bay Bridge to the
University of California, Berkeley, to get feedback from students.
They try to respond personally to the thousands of messages they get from users
every week. At one point, Mr. Viswanathan was getting so many texts that his
iPhones messaging app froze. The problem stumped even Apples V.I.P. support
team, which got involved after Mr. Viswanathan emailed Apples chief executive,
Timothy D. Cook, for help.
The founders are also wrestling with a question faced by developers everywhere:
How hard do you push your users to recruit friends to download your app?
Last week, they added a button that allowed people to invite all of their contacts

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with one click. But many people consider such requests to be spam, and Twitter was
already filled with complaints from people who received unwanted Down to Lunch
invitations.
After a couple of days, the pair decided to disable the mass-invitation feature.
Although their lives are stressful, the founders say they are having a blast.
We know we can build something that improves the lives for every single person
on the planet, Mr. Viswanathan said. It sounds kind of crazy, but were going to do
it.
A version of this article appears in print on April 21, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Bringing Up Baby.

2016 The New York Times Company

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