Omnom's Edward Marsh, Sandra Buensalida and Justin Seely

Need pizza, chicken wings or lamb tikka masala delivered to your doorstep right now, but aren’t quite sure where to turn? Omnom may have the answer. The oddly-named Seattle startup (see more details on the moniker below) just launched a new Internet search service that connects consumers with restaurants that deliver.

Of course, there’s no shortage of competition in the online food delivery arena. In fact, one of our past Startup Spotlight companies, Seconds (formerly known as Order SM), is playing in this space.

The big kahuna, however, is Chicago-based GrubHub, which last September raised a massive $50 million venture capital round to do much the same thing.

Omnom has nowhere near that kind of cash in the bank, but the company still believes it can compete. We chatted with co-founder Justin Seely — a former employee at Swype who once held records for the fastest text messages — to find out what makes Omnom unique. Here’s more from our latest installment of Startup Spotlight.

Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “We’re the easiest way to order delivery food. You put in your address, browse only the restaurants that deliver to you, view menus and place an order.”

Inspiration hit me when: “The first was a college roommate who used to say: ‘I’ll pay for the pizza if you call.’ The process of ordering delivery was so outdated and painful that he would buy me dinner just to avoid it. I also was frustrated near the end of college when I discovered an amazing place called Brooklyn Pizza Co. that I didn’t know delivered to me. Restaurant discovery is a fun part of what we do and it’s great to see a person’s face when they say: ‘I didn’t know 45 places deliver to me!’

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “We took a small investment in November from eat24hours.com, a company we partnered with.”

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: “Simplicity. Hungry people are impatient people, so helping them find the food they want as quickly and easily as possible is something we work on every day.”

Road Trip. Photo: Eva Luedin

The smartest move we’ve made so far: “A roadtrip to San Francisco that lead to a partnership and database of over 15,000 menus.”

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “Not doing enough customer development early on. I wasn’t out in the trenches until we had an early version of the site. We had this mentality of ‘It’s free, a restaurant owner would be crazy to not work with us,’ but we, mostly I, ended up looking stupid because of it.”

Would you rather have Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “I’m reading the Jobs bio so it’s a hard decision, but I’ll go with Bezos because of our market. We could use his e-commerce skills and insight.”

Our world domination strategy starts when: “It’s already started? We feel like our product is capable of making lifetime customers out of college students. That’s a lot of pizza and Chinese food.”

Rivals should fear us because: “Other than our really intimidating team of three, our strategy for acquiring new restaurants is unique and much more scalable. Our rivals have a head start on us, but we are looking to attack the market from a different vertical as quickly as possible.”

We are truly unique because: “Our company name is based off of a cookie monster related meme.”

The biggest hurdle we’ve overcome is: “Bypassing the need to acquire new customers on the restaurant side through a partnership. We realized that door-to-door sales wasn’t our thing and found a workaround for the problem.”

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “I gave 11 back in September! I’ll add one quick story. Back in February I was struggling to find a co-founder and thought about quitting. The problem was I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea. Not only that, but one day someone came over and asked” ‘Who delivers here?’ I think if the problem you want to solve is the first thing you think about in the morning, what your mind always wanders towards in the shower, and the last thing you think about at night, you will be passionate enough to be successful.”

Previously on GeekWire: “Fifty gems for entrepreneurs thinking about making the leap.”

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