Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian’s unsuccessful first startup idea was called My Mobile Menu.
The proposed service was designed to let people order food by sending SMS text messages from their mobile phones. In 2005, this was before smartphones and app-based food delivery had become commonplace, so the concept depended on coordinating restaurants, menus, and text-message orders in a much less developed mobile market.
Huffman and Ohanian took the idea to Paul Graham after attending one of his lectures during spring break from the University of Virginia. Graham was not convinced that My Mobile Menu was the right business, but he encouraged the pair to develop another idea and invited them into Y Combinator’s first batch.
Their replacement concept became Reddit, which Huffman coded with Ohanian in 2005. A common mix-up is to call My Mobile Menu an early version of Reddit; it was actually a separate food-ordering proposal that failed before Reddit was created.