People like to eat and generally don’t like to cook. All of which means that food delivery is becoming all the rage among startups lately.* Anyway, there’s a whole new food delivery service called Fluc, opening up for service in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, that hopes to let people pick and choose all their favorite foods and have them delivered for a small fee.
Fluc, which stands for Food Lovers United Corp, began the way I imagine most food delivery services do: as a result of its founders feeling lazy and not wanting to cook. In this case, Fluc founders Tim Davis, Adam Ahmad, and Pako Magdaleno were all living together in a hacker house in Palo Alto. None of them wanted to use the kitchen, because it was generally messy all the time, and because, well, hackers.
So they started thinking about what they would want out of a food delivery service. They wanted something fast, of course, and they wanted something comprehensive — something with every menu item of every popular restaurant nearby. They wanted something where they could modify their orders and make sure that their cheeseburger didn’t come with pickles or that their Starbucks order came with an extra shot of espresso.
So they built all of this into the system.
Fluc is starting small, just making deliveries in select areas of Silicon Valley at first, and only launching with a select group of restaurants in those areas. The startup has a website of options available and also a mobile app for perusing choices.
Unlike services such as Seamless or Grubhub, it doesn’t start out work directly with the restaurants themselves, so the team is inputting menu options on its site and app. That said, it is talking to local businesses about the service as a way for them to provide delivery without paying for a “delivery guy” who sits idle most of the time.
The startup wants to differentiate itself mainly by the ability to customize your orders, and the fact that they do only food. There’s no writing special notes which get ignored by the restaurant — all orders are fully detailed. They also have nice branded boxes to keep food warm while en route and cup holders to keep drinks from spilling.
(There’s also the name, which inspires hilarious conversations like, “Let’s get Fluc’d” and “Fluc me? No, Fluc you.”)
Fluc charges a $5.95 flat rate for each delivery, and has inflated prices of menu items slightly within the app — about 5-10 percent to make a small margin on those sales.
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* Seriously, I’ve talked to like, a dozen of them over the past month.