The food delivery app BiteSight, which participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, allows users to watch videos of food before ordering and see what their friends have ordered. This innovative approach has rapidly made the app popular among young users.
One of the app’s founders, 24-year-old Lucious McDaniel IV, and his sister Kendall leveraged a simple but creative internet trend by posting a video on TikTok. In the video, Kendall calls on viewers to “pay attention” and then hands the camera over to her brother, who pitches BiteSight. Within just 15 minutes, the video reached 20,000 views and quickly went viral.
McDaniel shared that the rapid growth caused technical challenges for the app. The team worked around the clock to keep the system stable. Interestingly, McDaniel documented this process on TikTok as well, drawing users’ attention and sparking further interest with videos showing the "overnight explosion" of their startup.
The app’s video has since gained 4 million likes on TikTok and 250,000 on Instagram. This exemplifies the growing trend of young entrepreneurs using TikTok and Instagram Reels to gain market traction and attract investor interest.
McDaniel explains, “Traditional apps present identical-looking restaurants with similar ratings, but in reality, we discover food through social networks, friends’ recommendations, and videos. We wanted to turn that experience into a real app.”
Together with Zac Schulwolf, the 25-year-old CTO, they spent over a year building the app. In April 2024, they ran a local beta around New York University. The initial version launched in May, followed by the viral video in June that brought massive attention.
Following the viral success, BiteSight climbed to No. 2 in the App Store’s Food & Beverage category, surpassing giants like Uber Eats, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. The app gained more than 100,000 new users and, while currently only available in New York, users from other cities are eagerly requesting expansion.
Restaurants — from small family-owned businesses to large chains — have reached out to partner with BiteSight. Investor interest is also strong, though McDaniel declined to share specific funding details at this time.
He highlighted a key competitive advantage against big players like DoorDash and Uber Eats: “By using AI tools, we can do more with fewer people, enabling cost savings and agile growth. This allows us to offer more affordable and transparent services to small businesses and customers alike.”
BiteSight currently focuses exclusively on food and short videos, aiming to connect with the new generation that discovers everything through social recommendations and visual content.
In McDaniel’s words, “We want to be the app built for this generation — designed around how they discover food.”
