Burpy Crowd Sources Food Delivery With Twilio SMS

February 18, 2014
Written by

Burpy2

Waiting for your food to arrive while you’re out to dinner is one thing. Waiting for your food to arrive after you’ve already been waiting an hour for delivery is another. Five friends from Austin, TX founded a crowd-sourced food delivery business to cut down on wait times and refine the delivery workflow with Twilio SMS.

Burpy was founded by 5 native Texans, who alot have more than just a passion for startups in common. Two of the founders are cousins, and the whole gang has known each other since 4th grade.

The team founded Burpy in August of 2012, primarily to serve UT Austin students. They wanted to build a company that was a little different from your classic delivery food business. For starters, they built an SMS workflow for drivers that centered around geo-targeted delivery.

Here’s how it works. When you order your groceries, or your favorite sub from Burpy, they’ll send a text to all the drivers in your area. The driver closest to the restaurant your ordered from will get a notification via SMS first and reply to accept the job.

“We thought about using email to contact drivers, but we needed a way to automate the process that was also cut down on response time. SMS was a much easier and faster way to contact drivers,” says CTO and Co-Founder Sharez Prasla.

The small team comprised of 5 founders and 2 customer reps is expanding rapidly. While they’re already in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio the team has sights on its next cities: Oklahoma City and Kansas.  The next course of business is to find full-time drivers to service customers at all hours, reliably.

Learn more about Burpy and how they ship food delivery with SMS by visiting their website here