Easy Eats: For the Students, by the Students
Introduction
Easy Eats is a campus and dormitory food delivery service developed by Ninjas Code and powered by Enatega. Easy Eats is specifically made for college students who want food delivered to their dorm rooms or within their college campuses.
It stands out from other food delivery services like UberEats and Grubhub by focusing on employing only student drivers and having more options available for college students than they would normally get on other similar services, while also emphasising student focused features.
EASY EATS: Getting Started
Easy Eats started out as a passion project by a few college students, looking to make their fellow academic’s life easier on campus. The pioneers of the project started out by entering the Greenlight Maine competition. The competition focuses on entrepreneurs and innovators from all industries, and also encourages college students to present their ideas in order to get funding and get their startup up and running.
Before that however, Easy Eats reached out to the Ninjas Code team in order to help set up a solution that would cater to college students while still providing all of the features that most competitors have in the same space. They needed an app that would get early investors interested while providing a unique user experience that couldn’t be found in any of the competing apps. Thanks to the customizability of the Enatega solution, the process of building the perfect college food delivery app was made a lot smoother. That isn’t to say that there weren’t a few hurdles along the way; that’s just how software development works!
The Development Journey
The Easy Eats team laid out the features and customizations that they needed for their unique food delivery application. As is standard with any development process, Ninjas Code began by gathering the requirements of the Easy Eats team and created a step by step process of implementing the required features. A clear roadmap was created in order to keep the development on track and to provide a clear vision of the timelines that the project was expected to follow.
Designing a User Friendly UI/UX
Student-Focused Features
Student Driver Onboarding
The riders for the Easy Eats app were all going to be other students. This was crucial to make quick deliveries directly to dorm rooms as student drivers were expected to be knowledgeable about the college’s locations and could deliver the student’s orders directly to their dorm room without getting lost.
The Ninjas Code team made sure that the rider onboarding process for students was easy and straight-forward so that Easy Eats could onboard as many riders as quickly as possible.
Automatic Payment for Riders and Restaurants
The development team added a wallet feature for riders and restaurants to make the payment function automated while being easily accessible. Both the restaurants and riders could get their funds transferred to their accounts directly from their wallets almost immediately whenever they wanted.
Launching the App
Once all of the requested features for version 1.0 were ready, the app was ready for launch. The Easy Eats pioneers joined the Greenlight Maine competition and presented their app to the judges. After presenting all of their apps unique features, the Easy Eats team won the competition along with $25,000 which went into expanding their operations.
Afterwards, they launched the app across their own College in Maine and expanded operations to other surrounding Universities as well.
Conclusion
