While apps like Seamless and Postmates have made it easier than ever to order food with almost no hassle, sometimes having to look through options is just too much of a pain. With Push For Pizza, five teens from Brooklyn have created an app that makes it simpler still to get sustenance delivered to your door.
After downloading the app and plugging in your address and payment information, you’re just a tap away from ordering from a local pizzeria. Instead of picking from a menu of options, you can choose from two staples: cheese or pepperoni. The pizza, delivery, and tip are all paid for before the delivery person arrives. It’s like the Yo of food delivery apps — it rips out the layers of fat that we assume “should” be there, leaving the bare essentials of what we actually want to do with it.
Push For Pizza sounds like something a stoned teenager would come up with while weighing the pros and cons of ordering food late at night: “I’m super hungry, but I don’t want to interact with people or decide between a bunch of options. If only there were another way…”
The team working on it has totally embraced the silliness of the idea. Their marketing video plays to its audience, featuring a couple of the app’s creators and their friend sitting around on couches complaining about their hunger. A quick puff and a tongue-in-cheek joke about Uber signal that they know the market they’re speaking to and don’t want to give off the impression that what they’re working on is anything more than a dumb but convenient service:
Simple as it may be, it took five months to develop the app for the team of teens. The idea started as a simple web app called “Pizza Button,” coded by Will Haack and Graham Carling. They brought in childhood friend Maximillian Hellerstein, who helped to shape the consumer-facing app with Cyrus Summerlin while the programmers (joined by another teen, Demitri Nava) completed the backend work, which is built on top of Ordr.in’s ordering APIs.
While it’s easy to scoff at the idea, these guys have turned a joke into a reasonable business model. They take a percentage of every order placed in their app, and have national reach on day one because the API they used is supported by pizzerias across the country.
The concept can also be applied to other kinds of food. In an email, Cyrus Summerlin told me, “Spinoffs are [definitely] in the pipeline, we always talk about an umbrella food button ordering system. Cookies, tacos, burgers, everything, you name it. To start however, we wanted to use everyone’s favorite food for a proof of concept, pizza.”