Representatives from the Push for Pizza app are planning to return to the UConn during their spring entrepreneurship tour to continue promoting the app and, hopefully, hire some on-campus student ambassadors.
“We’re really going to assess what we’ve done and look into the best ways to reach out to the campuses that we’ve been to once the fall tour is over,” Cyrus Summerlin, one of the Push for Pizza app creators, said. “We’re still formulating but we know that UConn was one of our favorite campuses, and we’re definitely going to look into hiring some ambassadors on campus.”
The Push for Pizza app is a mobile app that provides people with the easiest way to order a pizza from a local pizzeria – by simply pushing a button, at no extra cost.
“With this handy dandy app, you just have to push one button to order pizza, there’s no more picking up the phone and giving credit card information and addresses,” Summerlin said.
(Courtesy/Push for Pizza)
Twenty-year-old Summerlin said that during the fall tour, he and a few of the app’s co-founders from MIT traveled to almost every major college on the East Coast to speak about what start-up life is like at a young age.
“In terms of awareness (the tour) has been super successful. All of our social media is up and everything and its been great. Pretty much everyone at each campus, about 60 in total, knows that we’re there now,” Summerlin said. “Now it’s just about marketing it to the students that we’ve reached out to in an effective way to use the app more, but it’s definitely been pretty successful in the grand scheme of things.”
Summerlin said that he and his friends initially received funding from angel investors and venture capital funds to create the app. They were then able to fund their tour in five months with the revenue that they received from those who used the app to order pizza.
UConn was one of the first campuses that was offered the first-50-orders-are-free deal with the Push for Pizza app, and Summerlin said that it started at 7 p.m. and sold out in only four minutes.
“We delivered all of them ourselves and that was really fun and awesome,” Summerlin said. “We got a lot of love there and that’s why we wanted to reach back out to you guys.”
Summerlin added that students can use the promo code “UCONN” to receive 10 percent off their first pizza orders with the app.
Kayla Ahmed, third-semester political science and human rights major, was one of the first 50 at UConn to download the app and get free pizza.
“(The app) was really cool and convenient,” Ahmed said. “It made it way easier to order food and, honestly, what’s better than free pizza?”
Maggie McEvilly is a staff writer for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at maggie.mcevilly@uconn.edu.
