Grub With Us

Grub With Us was Eddy Lu and Daishen’s group-dinner marketplace before GOAT. In Eddy Lu on GOAT, Grub With Us, and Marketplace Friction, the product let individuals buy tickets to group dinners with strangers at restaurants, reflecting the founders’ own difficulty meeting people after college in a new city.

The source turns Grub With Us into a cautionary marketplace case. It reached Y Combinator Winter 2011 and raised about $7 million, but did not reach product-market fit because users had to decide meal type, dietary fit, location, timing, who else would attend, and whether they were willing to show up alone. The failure becomes the negative template for GOAT and Marketplace Friction Reduction.

Key Claims

• Grub With Us was the founders’ third or fourth YC application.
• Before YC interviews, the founders asked existing YC founders to host Grub With Us dinners for YC hopefuls, using the product itself to create visibility inside YC.
• Some users made friends, dated, and even got married through the product.
• The company raised about $7 million but did not reach product-market fit.
• The later pivot into GOAT happened under the same corporate entity after the founders offered major investors the chance to take back remaining money.

Connections

• Eddy Lu, Daishen, Grub Tonight, and GOAT - founder and pivot context.
• Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, and Carolyn Levy - Social Radars and YC context.
• Marketplace Friction Reduction, Scaling Broken Product, Founder Product Fit, Customer Pull, and Category Focus Before Expansion - concepts connected to the source’s failure analysis.
• Homejoy, Prim, Airbnb, and DoorDash - adjacent marketplace and service cases.