The internet trend is simple: a friend or family member looks at the camera and tells viewers, on a somewhat aggressive tone, that they are about to witness a presentation and that they should be better.
That is what Kendall, the sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she stepped aside, her brother threw his company, BitesightAn app for supplying food with which users can watch videos of food before ordering. This allows customers to see what their friends have ordered and bookmarkplaces to try. The app plays about how young people deal with content-Via short videos and recommendations from friends.
McDaniel posted the video and went back to work. Fifteen minutes later, his sister sent him an SMS that their function went viral. “We had 20,000 views in 15 minutes,” McDaniel told Techcrunch. The excitement came, but then chaos followed “Sharing our app started breaking as we got more users.”
The engineering team worked around the clock to keep Bitesight functional, while McDaniel Tiktoks made about the chaos, which also went viral. He said that people loved the ‘authenticity’ behind seeing what happens when ‘your app explodes at night. ”
The video of McDaniel who presents this idea has since been collected Almost four million likes Tiktok and A quarter of a million on InstagramParticipate in a trend of YOUGN -Entrepreneurs who use Tiktok and Instagram Reels to get a grip and to handle the hand current.
McDaniel told Techcrunch that the idea of making this video came after watching a friend who participated in the same internet trend for his dating app. “It received more than a million views and he suggested that I try Bitesight.”
McDaniel, who is 24, said that, like many young people, he realized that he ordered too much collection, from the same three places because he could not discover new restaurants at Delivery apps. “I would touch this wall of identical -looking restaurants with stock photos, and somehow each place had 4.6 stars.”
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He started to keep a spreadsheet of restaurants that he had found on Instagram and Tiktok, following actual reviews and seeing what his friends thought about. “When I realized that other people did exactly the same thing, my co-founder Zac and I decided to build something better: an app that actually reflects how we discover food today,” he said, referring to Zac Schulwolf, the CTO of the company.
McDaniel is no stranger to the technical industry. He previously worked at General Atlantic, where one of his most important focus areas was restaurant technology. He previously focused a payment company on the name Phly, LED product for a recruitment software, and even invested Angel in a few companies, including the FinTech Mercury.
McDaniel and Schulwolf, 25, brought Bitesight for more than a year, including participation in the Winter 2024 cohort of Ycombinator. They then did a limited beta around the University of New York in April. In mid-May the company launched an early version and did a bit of social media marketing. In June they made their viral video.
“What our video noticed was what we resonate,” said McDaniel, who is the CEO of Bitesight (also known as Chief Eets Officer). He added that “it is clear that consumers, and especially Gen-Z, are ready for something that feels fresh and built for the way they are concerned.”
After the video Bitesight Kort #2 became in the Eating and Drinking of the App Store category, bypassing Uber Eats, Starbucks and even McDonald’s.
McDaniel said that the app has also received more than 100,000 new users and although the app is currently only available in New York, people in other cities began to report for a national release. On the restaurant side, McDaniel said that everyone, from small family businesses to chain restaurants, has contacted partner and, of course: “We have an increase in investors’ interests of people who see that this is where the supply of food goes.”
He refused to comment on the size of any upcoming financing agreements, except to say that he expects to share news soon.
Of course Bitesight has a lot of large, well -funded competition such as Doordash and UberEATS. McDaniel, however, believes that being a startup in the Ai era will be his advantage. Although most of his competitors, for example, needed hundreds of engineers in their early days, Bitesight can work with AI tools that do 10 times the work of a person for much less of the costs.
“By using AI to prevent huge overhead and infrastructure costs, we can do much more with much less and pass on the savings to the owners and customers of small companies that need the most while retaining healthy margins,” he said.
What also distinguishes Bitesight is the focus on food and video, instead of other categories at the moment.
“We try to be the go-to app for the generation that discovers everything through social recommendations and short videos.”
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