PennEats expands to peer schools as 'UniEats'

Students at Penn and Columbia and Northwestern universities are eating up the benefits of College senior Elizabeth Wessel’s start-up company, UniEats.

UniEats, which started as PennEats in 2010, is a card that students can buy to receive 10 percent off 16 different restaurants around Penn’s campus. But now UniEats is expanding to other campuses as well. On Sept. 1, UniEats launched at Columbia and Northwestern and on Jan. 1 it will reach Cornell University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although it’s too soon to judge UniEat’s success at Northwestern — classes don’t start until mid-September — the feedback at Columbia has been positive so far. “We got off to a slow start but things have picked up recently,” Will Stamatis, the vice president of business development at Columbia, wrote in an email. “I have had friends tell me their friends came up to them and said ‘Hey check out this sweet deal I got!’”

According to Wessel, her summer internship in the Rotational Associate Manager Program at Google helped with the expansion of UniEats. There, she was placed in the Google Offers department, a start-up similar to Groupon in which members are offered a daily deal based on the location of their phones. “I’m not sure if it was the HR department doing a great job or if it was a coincidence,” Wessel said of being placed in a department where her internship work was applicable to her entrepreneurship work.

For example, Google Offers was also working on expanding their market and Wessel could observe first-hand the tactics they used to grow. Wessel explained that she originally made the mistake of hiring UniEats staff “up the wa-zoo” so expansion could happen quickly instead of scaling back and approaching staffing more level-mindedly.

But perhaps where Google helped the most is with the early stages of development of a UniEats mobile app. Wessel had the idea before her internship but needed advice on how to best carry it out. She was able to get help on the development process after mustering up the courage to approach Marissa Mayer, the vice president of location and local services and Wessel’s role-model.

“I was literally sweating and shaking but I went up to her and pitched the idea really quickly,” said Wessel. Mayer then set up various meetings for Wessel to discuss her idea with other Google employees.

The mobile app version is still in preliminary screenshot mode and Wessel plans to work on it more in October after making sure that the initial physical expansion at Columbia and Northwestern is executed smoothly.

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