Have you ever sat in your dorm, hungry as can be, with nothing left to eat? Sure, you could head to the dining hall, but maybe it’s raining, or too cold, or you’re in a rhythm with your homework and don’t want to break your progress. You can also order food on Uber Eats or GrubHub, but your food will likely be cold, overpriced, and delivered to the wrong dorm.
Bradley Harrington and Tyler Wasserman, both CSOM ’27, knew this feeling all too well. The two students put their heads together to create GrubSwap, an on-campus service that guarantees food delivery from the Rat’s late-night dining right to students’ dorms in 20 minutes or less.
“The biggest issue that we’re solving is on-campus delivery sucks,” Harrington said. “It’s time-consuming, it’s expensive, and it’s not optimized for college campuses. We’re solving the dining dollars crisis as well. We’re able to give students cash back for dining dollars that are soon to expire.”
Currently, students can order food to be delivered to their dorm from late night through a Google Form. Harrington or Wasserman will purchase the order with their dining dollars and deliver it within 20 minutes, guaranteed. The student who orders the food pays through Venmo only after their meal is delivered. There are no delivery fees, no tips, and no extra charges, so GrubSwap charges the same as the dining hall.
“We plan to expand by having feeders, we call them, which are people who are just sitting in the halls, who have extra dining dollars, and we’ll use their cards because we’re gonna run out soon,” Wasserman said. “We can use their excess dining dollars and then pay them a cut of the total.”
GrubSwap also plans on taking advantage of dining plan surpluses. By the end of each semester, many students have an abundance of unspent dining dollars—funds that are not refunded if they go unused. Harrington refers to these dining dollars as “monopoly money.”
“Pretend like it’s May,” said Harrington. “You have $1,500 remaining in your account. That’s Monopoly money to you. It’s useless. It’s gonna all expire. You might as well spend it.”
“Feeders,” or students with excess dining dollars, will turn their “monopoly money” into real money by getting paid by GrubSwap for their services.
This wasn’t GrubSwap’s initial business model. Harrington and Wasserman set out to create GrubSwap last October, and their original idea consisted of an app that would match a student with no dining dollars to a student with extra dining dollars.
“The student that has extra money would swipe their card to pay with their extra dining dollars for the other person’s meal, and then the other person would pay them back half price in cash, in Venmo,” Harrington said. “So the student who has extra money spends $20 and gets paid back $10 US dollars from the other person who gets their $20 salmon at $10 in cash.”
Harrington and Wasserman spent almost five months learning app development to build this initial version of GrubSwap and put it on the Apple App Store. But their first crack the project didn’t work out how they hoped it would.
“I think a little over 400 people downloaded it, but no one used it,” said Wasserman. “We thought that meeting up in person was a difficult thing to get over. It’s an awkward situation, so that’s when we transitioned. We spent the whole summer transitioning from that business model to this one.”
Transitioning business models wasn’t an easy feat. It took a lot of brain-storming and resilience, Wasserman said, but this duo was ready for the challenge.
As an avid stock trader, Wasserman said he learned the importance of being willing to adapt and learn from failures, and he applied this mindset to GrubSwap’s evolution.
“You’re going to run into times where you’ve spent two months working on a single project or on a single idea, and you realize this is not worth any more time,” Wasserman said. “You can look at that as a defeat … or you can look at that as you spent two months learning what not to do—now you have this much more [of an] idea of what to do.”
Harrington and Wasserman were accepted into the SSC Summer Accelerator program, a 12-week program that provides selected student entrepreneurs with monetary investments and mentorship in exchange for equity.
Here, the two were taken under the wings of several mentors who met with them weekly to identify gaps in their business model and discuss new developments in their research.
Matt Giovanniello, BC ’18, was one of Wasserman and Harrington’s mentors this summer. GrubSwap’s evolution through SSC has been inspiring to witness, he said.
“It’s very cool to see the full circle come through and hear about the early successes of their new business model,” said Giovanniello. “Seeing them actually going through and executing with a launch, as opposed to the iteration cycle too many startups, ourselves included, get caught up in.”
Wasserman noted that the duo was accepted into the Summer Accelerator program not just for their business idea, but because of their work ethic and proactive approach to entrepreneurship as well.
“The folks at SSC … knew they’re going to be successful, whether it’s with this company or another company,” Giovanniello said. “In choosing them, they were saying, ‘We are in full support of the way that they think and the ideas that they’re coming up with, whether it’s for GrubSwap or otherwise. And we want to have our hands like in that pot.’”
Although the two have not had previous experience in entrepreneurship, they proved themselves capable of executing their goals, Giovanniello said. As a high school student, Harrington organized a week-long computer camp where he taught students how to build computers. Wasserman, on the other hand, is well-versed in trading algorithms—he uses one of his own every day.
The two are encouraging all students with surplus dining dollars to reach out to GrubSwap and become a part of their business model—they are ready to find more “feeders” to accommodate the high demand they anticipate. They are also looking to hire tech interns who are interested in learning about app development, web development, and Instagram marketing, while also helping GrubSwap deliver food.
So far, GrubSwap has received a lot of support from the BC community, Wasserman said, which motivates the pair to continue building their product.
“When we were tabling, and we would explain [GrubSwap], people would be like, ‘Oh my god, this is awesome,’” Wasserman said. “That feeling is also amazing because you’re creating something that doesn’t exist, that other people appreciate and value. You’re creating something new, you’re making value, and you’re improving people’s lives.”
