Photo by Kimery Williams
The Goodfynd team.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and for the three founders of the Goodfynd app — Kyle Miller, Lemaire Stewart and Sofiat Abdulrazaaq — that is certainly the case.
Miller got the inspiration to create an app that makes it easier to find food trucks after not being able to find a food truck that he loved. In 2018, he was in the process of switching his career to user experience (UX) design and needed to come up with a class project. The food truck app was just the right fit. Miller, teamed up with his friends and fellow Virginia Tech grads Stewart and Abdulrazaaq. Stewart was able to build the app, and Abdulrazaaq was a product lead and lawyer.
“That’s how it started, real scrappy,” said Abdulrazaaq with a laugh, while squeezing out time in her busy schedule to sit down with Alexandria Living Magazine.
The co-founders spent a year building and bootstrapping their way to their first product, before they were accepted into a Richmond-based accelerator program by Lighthouse Labs. The accelerator gave them $25,000 of equity-free financing, which allowed Stewart to leave his high-powered job and focus on developing Goodfynd full-time. They released their first product in January 2020.
“That Lighthouse Labs first check was super influential to us being able to build out a product that eventually caught on,” explained Abdulrazaaq.
Little did the team know they were about to face their biggest challenge yet – the COVID-19 pandemic. When everything shut down, they began to question all of their hard work. “Did we do the right thing? Did we invest out time in the right thing? Is this over? It was just very uncertain,” said Abdulrazaaq. “That’s how that felt and it was daunting and for two weeks, I don’t think I’ve ever cried that much, I just felt defeated.”
When pandemic regulations dropped weeks later, the team realized they might actually be ok and that the nature of the food truck industry fell within the new health and safety protocols. Food trucks were already used to take-out orders, no-contact transactions and outdoor venues.
“It all ended up well, but it was a very humbling time,” Abdulrazaaq said.
In addition to being one of their biggest challenges, the pandemic also brought Goodfynd one of its biggest opportunities. They partnered with ALX Community for its Alexandria Drive-in outdoor movie series. The project operated from August 2020 through July 2021 and raised thousands of dollars for local non-profits. Goodfynd was hired to coordinate food trucks for the event, after another provider was unable to keep up with the technological efficiencies needed for the event.
The drive-in pushed Goodfynd to flex their technical skills to make the app responsive to the particular needs of movie-goers. Despite a few hiccups here and there, the partnership was a success and allowed Goodfynd to demonstrate how their platform could adapt to different circumstances. The perfection of promo codes, notifications, payment security, UX design and technical developments helped propel the Goodfynd system forward.
Goodfynd continues to help individuals find food trucks, but the company also provides support to events and corporations. “If a person needs a food truck, we want to bring it to you. We want to empower you to invest in local business owners but we also want you to be able to do that through best-in-class technology,” said Abdulrazaaq.
Helping connect food trucks with people is especially important to the Goodfynd co-founders, all three of who are first-generation Americans. Because of lower start-up costs, food trucks are often started by people from more diverse backgrounds than brick-and-mortar restaurants. It’s a way for the team to support women, immigrants and minorities – people like them. Some of these food trucks find enough success to launch restaurants.
Goodfynd currently operates in the D.C. metro area but plans to expand to other areas depending on demand and the outcome of ongoing relationship-building efforts.
“It was important that we built it here, that we established community here, that we established relationships. This [area] is a lot of times our test kitchen. People are willing to let us make a mistake or two because they know us, they see us, they understand that our intentions for our business are pure,” explained Abdulrazaaq. Many of the companies 20+ employees are Alexandria residents.
At the end of the day, Abdulrazaaq knows that Goodfynd’s continued success depend on how it continues to add value to its end users. “Goodfynd will continue to build products and services that help support a community that we love and in turn we hope that they continue to choose us and to be loyal to the platform and the work that we do but we have to earn that trust, we have to earn that loyalty,” said Abdulrazaaq. Knowing this humbles and motivates her and the rest of the team every day.
Originally from Richmond, Abdulrazaaq lived in Alexandria for three years while she worked as a product lead for United Way and attended law school at American University at night. She then took a job in New York but found herself traveling to Alexandria a lot during the development of Goodfynd.
Abdulrazaaq now finds herself working as the outward facing branch of Goodfynd, meeting with stakeholders, analyzing data and looking at the bigger picture of where the company goes from here. Sometimes she finds herself missing the hands-on nature of the early days of the business, but she recognizes how lucky she is, particularly at her age and as the child of immigrants, to be leading a cutting-edge company that brings people together over something we all enjoy – good food.
