USC startup EnvoyNow makes delivering Chipotle to your dorm a reality

Kara Sherrer | Vanderbilt University

During their first year at the University of Southern California (USC), roommates Anthony Zhang and Chad Massura often found themselves with a common college student urge: the late night munchies. USC closes its gates at 9 p.m., though, so if the two ordered food after that, they had to stop what they were doing and physically track down the deliverer.

Which kind of defeats the purpose of delivery.

Since their student IDs gave them late night access to campus, Zhang and Massura decided to cut out the middle man and start delivering food to fellow Trojans themselves. Their premise was simple: deliver food from the most popular restaurants to anywhere on campus — and by anywhere, they meant anywhere, from a dorm room to a seat number in a big lecture hall.

Zhang and Massura plastered their freshman dorm with posters proclaiming “Do you want Chipotle delivered to your room? Text this number,” with Zhang’s personal cell phone listed.

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Soon, the two were fielding more than 100 texts a night from students wanting on-demand burritos, and began recruiting other students to help them deliver the meals.

The posters attracted the attention of a pair of roommates in the same dorm -- Nick Wang and Gabe Quintela -- who wanted to get involved. Wang and Quintela quickly became an integral part of the team, and Zhang and Massura eventually gave them equity and made them co-founders.

The four freshman officially launched their student food delivery company, which they named EnvoyNow, in April 2014. (A fifth co-founder, Parker Seagren, was brought in as Chief Technology Officer in 2015.) Before school let out for the summer, they had received enough orders to confirm that the idea could be a great one.

All four co-founders worked at major delivery companies that summer to gain experience and see if EnvoyNow could actually become a viable business.

That summer work allowed them to understand "the pain points from [the deliverers’] side” and not just the students’, says Zhang, a finance major and the CEO of EnvoyNow.

EnvoyNow’s advantage was its ability to bring food to incredibly specific locations.

“[Other companies] just don’t work because...no one is able to get into the buildings, the dorms and the libraries. The only reason I was able to do that is because I was a student,” Zhang says.

Quintela, a public relations major and EnvoyNow COO, says other food delivery companies were largely unsuccessful because they were “removed” from campus.

“They were older people who had already graduated and didn’t know what students wanted,” he says. “[But] there hasn’t been anyone over 21 years old who has ever worked on [EnvoyNow], which is pretty exciting and I think very unique to our space...No one else is actually trying to involve students and figure this problem out.”

EnvoyNow’s combination of convenience and speed quickly caught on at USC.

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Massura, a Business of Cinematic Arts major and the president of EnvoyNow, says that “students are unique because they are both more time-sensitive and price-sensitive than the average consumer” and that EnvoyNow is has appeal because it’s both quick and cheap.

The company charges a flat fee of $2.99 per order for delivery, and the average order is delivered in 28 minutes. Students can order food from almost any local restaurant within the EnvoyNow app, though deliveries are faster if they come from from partner restaurants, which give EnvoyNow priority checkout.

Once an order is placed, an Envoy (aka student deliverer) will receive a notification about the order, go to the restaurant, place the order, pay for the freshly-made food, and deliver it anywhere on campus.

Envoys get to keep 100% of the $2.99 delivery fee as well as any tips. Quintela says that Envoys make an average of about $14 an hour. The company makes money by taking a cut of the orders made with the partner restaurants, as an exchange for bringing them more business.

EnvoyNow expanded to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Indiana University-Bloomington, but was relatively unknown until March of this year, when Inc.named it one of North America’s Coolest Student Startups of 2015.

That publicity gave the EnvoyNow team the opportunity to put the concept in front of billionaire investor Mark Cuban and Shark Tank TV show producer Mark Burnett when the pair came to speak at USC.

Burnett offered them $100,000 in funding and that investment led to EnvoyNow being accepted to the summer program of the 500 Startups Accelerator.

“If not for [that story in Inc.], we probably wouldn’t have had had all the success that we’ve had,” reflects Zhang.

As EnvoyNow’s popularity grew, so did its demands, and Quintela acknowledges that they have all missed out on other experiences because of their commitment to EnvoyNow.

They believe it will pay off in the end.

“Obviously you have to sacrifice a bit of a social life or sometimes not be able to go out or whatever that may be, but we find that the experience is extremely rewarding,” he says. “The five of us, I believe, have gotten to this point [because] we’ve been able to drop those other things and just been able to work on Envoy.”

The team plans to expand to 15 more schools in the next six months and the five co-founders -- who are all rising juniors at USC -- intend to keep taking night and online classes at the university. But the business is definitely the co-founders’ main priority.

“We’re definitely going to be putting Envoy before school...all five of us feel this way,” says Zhang. “It doesn’t really make sense to balance it and juggle it with being a full-time student as well. We realize that [EnvoyNow] is something that could really take off in the next six months, and we want to be there for it and put everything we have into it.”



Kara Sherrer is a student at Vanderbilt University and a summer 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.