(Down to Lunch)
Joseph Lau, left, and Nikil Viswanathan of Down to Lunch.
When Nikil Viswanathan first saw the allegations rolling in on social media, he couldn't believe his eyes. Hundreds of people were accusing his app of being used for human trafficking and urging others to never download it.
Viswanathan is the cocreator of Down to Lunch, a simple meet-up app that has become wildly popular on college campuses. The app, which helps people spontaneously "lunch," "chill," or even "blaze" with friends, peaked at No. 2 on the iPhone download charts in the US in April (it has since settled into the 40-to-50 range).
The app's rapid rise to fame represents the Silicon Valley dream story. But a string of product woes and a bizarre social-media attack that branded the app a tool for people to kidnap teens show the double-edged sword of the internet "virality" driving today's tech boom.
The start
Stanford graduates Viswanathan and Joseph Lau built Down to Lunch last year to try to recreate the experience of living in their freshman-year dorms, where it seemed so easy to run into someone and get lunch, play basketball, or do whatever.
Viswanathan had tried five previous times to recreate this time of life (three times with Lau), but Down to Lunch was the one that finally started to stick, he tells Business Insider.
Here's how it works.
(Down to Lunch) Down to Lunch's simple interface.
The
app lets you declare you are "down" for a specific activity — lunch for
example — and then with a tap send a notification out to all your
friends nearby. They can join the "event" if they are free, and then you
can chat about the details. It's a way of spontaneously hanging out
when everyone has busy schedules, Viswanathan says.
When Viswanathan
began to work in tech after college, he noticed that he would
constantly run into old friends and they would swap the refrain, "Hey,
we should get lunch sometime." The problem was that "sometime" was in
the nebulous future, and it would never actually get done. And when
Viswanathan did have a free moment during work hours, he would start
texting friends to see who else was free only to give up after a few
"sorry, busy" rejections.
The theory behind Down to Lunch was that it might help Viswanathan actually have lunch with his non-work friends for a change.
The rise
After
being released to the public about a year ago, the app started to pick
up steam at colleges — starting at the University of Georgia.
At
first, Viswanathan acknowledges, he was surprised. He and Lau had built
the app in a day and hadn’t spent much time perfecting it.
"The
product was barely functional," Viswanathan says bluntly. He
acknowledges that even today the app can be a buggy mess. But college
kids loved the concept, and even with its hobbled utility it spread to
university after university. As their app gained popularity, the pair
thought about stopping new users from joining. The two-man team was
unprepared to scale the app and knew the product needed serious work.
One of their advisers told them to just ride the wave, so they hired a
small team to try to keep up and begin to improve it.
The human-trafficking attack
Then,
out of the blue, the human-trafficking accusations erupted. Viswanathan
says they started from a few App Store "reviews," which were
screenshotted and passed around by high-follower Twitter accounts. The
reviews were mainly made up of outlandish tales of people lured by
strangers using Down to Lunch.
Here's one:
I
tapped the [Down to Lunch] button and I was innocently going to Panera
Bread when I see a strange man with a trench coat and sunglasses right
in front of me in line. It was really strange. I sat down and expected a
few friends to show up. I examine this weirdo in the trench coat out of
the corner of my eye. He was sitting at a table with a middle aged
female, and two middle aged men …
This
particular review ends with the girl running away from these people
after they try to get her into a van using the promise of a "premium
edition" camera.
Viswanathan
doesn't know who started what he describes as a "smear campaign," but
he suspects a competitor paid thousands of dollars for it. The
accusations got a particular boost after being tweeted by parody
accounts like Dory, which can sometimes charge hundreds of dollars for a
single post
(Down to Lunch) The "Dory" account sharing a review.
When
Viswanathan saw these reviews, he thought Down to Lunch users would
immediately know they were fake. There are many places you can meet
anonymous strangers on the internet, but Down to Lunch isn't really one
of them. Down to Lunch lets you interact only with people whose phone
number you have in your address book and who have your phone number in
theirs, Viswanathan says. In fact, the inability to find friends from
places like your Facebook is actually a common complaint from users.
But
Viswanathan soon realized his initial assumption was wrong: People
didn't immediately conclude that the reviews were fake. The reviews
spread like wildfire on social media, and the app lost 90% of its user
growth in less than 48 hours.
When Viswanathan spoke with a crisis PR representative, she asked her daughter, a student at Dartmouth, about the app. "Oh yeah, it's used for human trafficking," the daughter replied.
Viswanathan
says he has been contacted by law enforcement in multiple states about
the posts. Kirsta Melton, the leader of the human-trafficking division
of the Texas attorney general's office, told The New York Times that she "looked into the app and found no evidence supporting the allegations."
As various organizations (including the myth debunker Snopes)
looked into it, Viswanathan and his team started to make some headway
against the accusations. Apple and Google took down many of the reviews,
and some of the Twitter accounts that had tweeted them began to
disappear.
The app surged in popularity again, reaching No. 2 in the App Store in mid-April.
The spam question
But
that didn't mean the end of Viswanathan's problems. As people began to
invite their friends to join that app, many on Twitter complained about
spam. In early April, Down to Lunch introduced a feature that let people
send invites to their entire address book. Viswanathan disabled it as
soon as he heard complaints.
But
people on social media still grumbled that they were getting unwanted
invites from their friends (though it was the friend's choice to send
the invite). A man named Matthew Warciak has even filed a class-action lawsuit against Down to Lunch in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reports.
"Nikil
obtained the recipient's phone numbers by scraping its users' contact
lists and sending unauthorized text messages to the phones of thousands
of consumers across the country," the lawsuit alleges.
Viswanathan gave Business Insider this statement about the lawsuit:
The
claim is wrong on multiple fronts, and we're really saddened to see
someone so upset about being invited to the app by friends. Users can
only invite friends one by one, and the invite action is completely user
initiated — there is absolutely no automated messaging. After getting
DTL, users loved the app, and wanted a super simple way to get all their
friends on the app so they could use it to hang out. The invite system
was built to only to do that.
Can't stop the buzz
But
these setbacks haven't stopped top Silicon Valley venture capitalists
from sniffing around. When Business Insider employees joined the app, we
noticed that most of our contacts who were already using it were
venture capitalists.
Indeed,
during a phone conversation with Business Insider, Viswanathan had to
step away for a few minutes. A venture capitalist had shown up
unannounced at his office, Viswanathan said.
The Down to Lunch team.
Viswanathan's
story shows the agony and ecstasy of going viral on the internet.
Viswanathan rushes to show me all the positive feedback he has gotten
from college students across the country (he has his own cellphone
number on the app, a decision he says has him receiving hundreds or even
thousands of texts a day).
But
the app's popularity (and notoriety) has made it slip out of his
control. Viswanathan is open about the technical shortcomings of the
app. His team is struggling to deal with the scale, and with how to fix a
prototype that can be buggy (sometimes to the point of annoying users).
And even though the app has become popular despite the
human-trafficking fiasco, the fake reviews keep popping up again and
again with a vengeance, he says.
What
Viswanathan hopes will save Down to Lunch is a winning concept. People
want an easy way to arrange a hangout on the fly, he says. That's why
the app has grown so much despite the failings in the product and the PR
nightmare.
Viswanathan,
as is typical in the tech industry, has grand ambitions for the app. He
wants it to become a platform to let you know what your friends are up
to in real-time. But for now, the problems of the moment are more
pressing. He says he has barely slept in three days. The team is just
trying to make sure Down to Lunch is in a place where it can capitalize
on the momentum, and not squander it
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