Matt Maloney and Mike Evans were software developers in Chicago. They were working late again, ordering take out again, and tired of shuffling through old restaurant menus, calling, and reading their credit cards again. As software developers for Apartments.com, they were in the business of using software to simplify common, everyday problems like this one. So the moment of Eureka came.

While seemingly unrelated, Maloney tied realized the similarities between their current project (geographic lookup searches for rental real estate) and a database of local restaurants and their menus. They thought that restaurants would be willing to pay for a subscription to being featured on the website, but because the internet had been an underutilized and expensive tool thus far in the restaurant industry, managers were not interested. When Maloney and Evans instead offered to simply take a percentage commission of sales, business started moving.

Maloney and Evans realized this was a scalable operation, and their next agenda was to expand into a second city. Because they weren’t locals to a different city, breaking into that market probed more difficult. They wanted to provide a local-feeling service without paying rent in every city. Eventually, they determined that having a manager in their top cities and a team in Chicago.

The next challenge was steep competition. Seamless was finding great success in doing almost the exact thing that Grubhub was trying to do, and in some areas they were better. Maloney and Evans were of the belief that they needed to either beat them or join them; so the merged. They chose to keep both brands in their respective cities so as to save money on rebranding since both had a following in different cities.

Finally, keeping order wait times to under an hour poses difficulty because there is very little room for margin. Today, if an order isn’t confirmed quickly or out the door soon enough, someone from the Chicago sales team is calling the restaurant to confirm the order. The process and application for delivery drivers is also under constant refinement.

Every part of this service needs to work correctly for Grubhub/Seamless to be able to deliver on their purpose, so constant reiterations are innate to this company. Customer services, market responsiveness, and consistency are the lifeblood of this entrepreneurial endeavor.