WU Campus Menüs

When the new WU Wien campus was opened, students had a simple problem: Where are the best lunch menu deals on campus?

Marco Hans, Maximilian Schöberl, Alexander Hofbauer and I (and some more folks) set out to help students decide what to eat. We built an iOS and Android app and a website featuring all lunch menu deals from the surrounding restaurants.

As scraping the web back then was tedious (and we may not have had the right skills to do it in an efficient manner), we created a backend for restaurant to input their weekly menus. The backend was well received, because it was easy to use. After a few months its features were expanded with repeating and copying existing records for the next weeks and days. Businesses had to pay a small monthly fee in order to access the backend.

When the semester started, WU Campus Menüs quickly rose to first place in the local App Store charts and students and professors alike loved the easy native applications. Hell we even made it to the universities official web page.

But we were young and inexperienced. If we don’t get the lunch menu data, our app would be worthless. Soon the few biggest player would conspire against us. They simply didn’t want to pay us anymore.

This was the end for WU Campus Menüs (or was it?). Fortunately this project quickly shifted and paved the way for the next adventure, UniPocket.