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There’s nothing more disappointing during lunchtime than going to the cafe around the corner from your office - only to find that they’re not serving your favorite soup that day. Of course this frustration could be mitigated by bringing your lunch or opting for items off the fixed menu, but who wants to do that?
Fortunately, a startup coming out of Northeastern is going to help you out when it comes to daily food offerings near your places of work. The Lunch Report, launching in January, will send you an email update on all of the specials available in your office neighborhood.
And it all started with the tomato soup at Flour.
Solving real life problems
According to Larissa Weinstein, a student at Northeastern and The Lunch Report’s Founder, she was fed up with never knowing whether her favorite soup at the Boston cafe was on the menu on any given day.
“I love the tomato soup at Flour,” Weinstein said. “I was sad I didn’t have a way to know when they had it. I had to keep going all the way down there to see if they did.”
“I knew there had to be a better way to find out specials,” she continued. “There should be a centralized place for you to look at the menu items that change daily. What if there were all in one place based on neighborhood?”
So Weinstein decided to take this project on herself. Starting in a month or so, you’ll be able to have a list of specials sent directly to your inbox for eateries in areas that are most condensed with office buildings. For right now, The Lunch Report will be covering daily options in Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, Seaport and Financial Districts. That includes food trucks, as the newsletter will let you know when different ones are making stops near your work.
“There’s not a lot of hard data on the places with the most restaurants, but I went with choices based on my knowledge of the city,” Weinstein told me. “I also talked to my friends who are older, figuring out which neighborhoods are full of restaurants and also have offices near by.”
Going it alone
On top of picking the perfect places in Boston to feature in The Lunch Report, Weinstein had make several other strategic choices for this venture. She’s been involved in the startup world since she was in high school, helping run a handbag company in New York when she was just 16, but this is the first time she’s going solo with a startup. So when it came to launching her own venture, she had to devise a way to get it off the ground without help.
“I had been toying with idea of making The Lunch Report an app, but I decided to do email, so I don’t have to bring on a technical co-founder.”
“I wanted to do this completely on my own this time,” she added.
Additionally, keeping it email has allowed her to eliminate most of the overhead that other startups often face. It was important for Weinstein to carry out her vision without having to depend on investors.
“I’m definitely planning on bootstrapping,” she stated. “I’ve made it so I have no reason to bring investors into it at all. I can focus on continuing to grow subscribers, restaurants and food trucks - not on securing funding.”
Once The Lunch Report has gained some traction, Weinstein is intending on expanding it to include exclusive offers at a small cost for subscribers, as well as ad space for different eateries. But for now, the student founder is keeping her expectations realistic and putting one foot in front of the other.
“People ask me, ‘How do you know this is going to work?’ I tell them that I don’t,” Weinstein started. “I’m a college student with lots of time.”
“At least I’m not pumping millions of dollars into it without knowing if it’ll work,” she laughed.
