May 4, 2026
Roomdrop
My college roommate found a cockroach in our living room and tweaked out, he texted me asking to go grab his DoorDash downstairs (we live on the 4th floor btw). For a quick second, I thought he was just messing with me. Then I quickly realized he most definitely was not, and he was deadly afraid of the cockroach, with a little bit of laziness mixed in there as well, being a freshman in college.
So, being the great roommate I am, I walked down four flights of stairs to go get the food and then picked up the food from the Dasher who wasn’t even there yet. I then walked back up four flights of stairs and handed him his food.
Now, why do I bring up this story? It’s because right away after I handed him his food, I said, “You owe me five bucks,” as a joke, saying this is kind of the delivery fee. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, I would actually pay that,” and I was like, “No way.” Then I went back to my room and I posted on the social media app that the school has called Fizz, asking students if they would actually pay for a service like this.
And to my surprise, 2,000 people voted that they actually would pay for something like this, and that kind of sparked my initial interest with this concept. Then a few days later I asked how many times people doordash to campus, and once again a few thousand people responded. Depending on how many times a week they do it is what the specific poll asked, and the math came out that around 300 orders come through a day To Chapman University alone through delivery services.
I thought that was pretty interesting, considering the size of Chapman, only being around 8,000 students, and what this would look like at a large campus like UCLA or USC. And then I also started thinking this should definitely be an app where someone can hire a student who goes to your school to correspond with the DoorDash or Uber Eats driver to actually bring the food directly to your room. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but the logistics of getting a student that won’t steal food, like Yogi Bear, is rocket science for some reason. Also handling the logistics of who can pick up which order for what buildings and what key cards open what buildings ended up being a little bit more complicated than I thought.
Long story short, I ended up developing Roomdrop, which is a last-mile delivery service for college campuses. It’s now live on the App Store, and you should go try it. It’s pretty cool. It only works on specific college campuses. When I say specific, it’s launched at Chapman University, and we’re hoping to launch at UCLA in fall of 2026.
I would talk more about it here, but you can just read more on the Roomdrop website.