Launching Foody

The first job was simpler than the pitch

Foody began in Cyprus in 2015 with five people. The problem looked ordinary: people wanted food, restaurants wanted orders, and the telephone sat between them. That ordinariness was useful. We did not have to teach anyone why delivery mattered. We only had to make the existing transaction less awkward.

The marketplace language came later. At the beginning, customers needed enough restaurants to make the site useful and restaurants needed enough orders to make it worth their time. Our unfinished product had to earn both at once.

Our first version accepted phone orders and cash. It was narrow, but it completed a real transaction. That mattered more than describing a larger platform we had not built.

We did work the software could not do yet

The first version included manual work, exceptions and conversations that later disappeared into software. Doing it ourselves showed us which details mattered and which had only looked important from a distance.

Manual work can also become a habit. Each repeated exception forces a decision: put it in the product, put it in a process, or refuse it.

Cyprus gave us less room to hide a weak product behind a large pool of new users. Reputation travelled quickly. The service had to become dependable before it could look impressive.

What I would preserve

I would keep the closeness to customers, the willingness to handle edge cases ourselves, and the short distance between seeing a problem and changing the product. I would write down more decisions. Memory has made the early uncertainty much neater than it really was.

Foody did not begin as the company it became. It began with a small team completing enough real orders for customers and restaurants to try it again.