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The internet trend is simple: A friend or family member looks into the camera and tells viewers, in a slightly aggressive tone, that they are about to witness a presentation and that they better be nice. 

That’s what Kendall, the sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she stepped aside, her brother pitched his company, BiteSight, a food-delivery app that lets users watch videos of food before ordering. It also lets customers see what their friends have ordered and bookmark places to try out. The app plays on how young people engage with content — through short-form videos and recommendations from friends. 

McDaniel posted the video and went back to work. Fifteen minutes later, his sister texted him that their post was going viral. “We were at 20,000 views in 15 minutes,” McDaniel told TechCrunch. Excitement came, but then chaos ensued as “parts of our app started to break as we got more users.” 

The engineering team worked around the clock to keep BiteSight functional, while McDaniel took to making TikToks about the chaos, which ended up going viral, too. He said people loved the “authenticity” behind seeing what happens when “your app explodes overnight.” 

The video of McDaniel presenting this idea has since amassed almost 4 million likes on TikTok and a quarter of a million on Instagram, joining a trend of young entrepreneurs using TikTok and Instagram Reels to gain traction and deal flow. 

McDaniel told TechCrunch that the idea to make this video came after watching a friend partake in the same internet trend for his dating app. “It got over a million views, and he suggested I try it for BiteSight.”

McDaniel, who is 24, said he, like many young people, realized he was eating too much takeout, ordering from the same three places because he couldn’t discover new restaurants on delivery apps. “I’d hit this wall of identical-looking restaurants with stock photos, and somehow every place had 4.6 stars.” 

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He started keeping a spreadsheet of restaurants he’d found on Instagram and TikTok, tracking actual reviews, and seeing what his friends thought about said places. “When I realized other people were doing the exact same thing, my co-founder Zac and I decided to build something better: an app that actually reflects how we discover food today,” he said, referring to Zac Schulwolf, the company’s CTO. 

McDaniel is no stranger to the tech industry. He previously worked at General Atlantic, where one of his main focus areas was restaurant technology. He previously founded a payments company called Phly, led product for a recruitment software, and has even angel invested in a few companies, including the fintech Mercury. 

McDaniel and Schulwolf, 25, spent over a year building BiteSight, including participation in the Winter 2024 cohort of YCombinator. They then did a limited beta around New York University in April. In mid-May, the company launched an early version and did a bit of social media marketing. In June, they made their viral video.

“What made our video stand out was that what we are building resonates,” said McDaniel, who is BiteSight’s CEO (also known as chief eating officer). He added that “it’s clear that consumers, and especially Gen-Z, are ready for something that feels fresh and built for the way they engage.” 

After the video, BiteSight briefly became #2 in the App Store’s Food and Beverage category, bypassing Uber Eats, Starbucks, and even McDonald’s.

McDaniel said the app also gained more than 100,000 new users and, though the app is only available in New York at the moment, people in other cities started messaging for a nationwide release. On the restaurant side, McDaniel said everyone from small family-owned spots to chain restaurants has reached out to partner and, of course, “we’ve had a surge of investor interest from folks who see that this is where food delivery is going.” 

He declined to comment on the size of any upcoming funding deals, except to say he expects to have news to share soon.

Of course, BiteSight has a lot of big, well-funded competition like DoorDash and UberEats. McDaniel believes, however, that being a startup in the age of AI will be his advantage. For example, while most of its competitors needed hundreds of engineers in their early days, BiteSight can work with AI tools that perform 10x the work of a human for much less of the cost.

“By using AI to avoid massive overhead and infrastructure costs, we can do much more with much less and pass on the savings to the small business owners and customers who need it most while still maintaining healthy margins,” he said. 

What also differentiates BiteSight is its focus on food and video, rather than other categories at the moment. “We’re trying to be the go-to app for the generation that discovers everything through social recommendations and short-form video.”