The kitchens on your street were never the problem.

We used to order lunch from a small kitchen near our office. Home food, same time every day. They knew who did not eat onion. Friday was always biryani.

It was good, so more people started ordering. Twenty meals became a hundred and fifty in a few months.

Their day started at four in the morning. Not with cooking. With the phone.

Ten messages had come in overnight. Someone travelling till Friday. Someone wanting one extra box. Someone who had shifted flats and mentioned it once, on a call. All of it had to be read, remembered and worked in while the cooking was already on.

Then the list. Every single morning, by hand. A hundred and fifty names, addresses and landmarks, written out again in the same notebook, then checked against the messages so nobody got a box they had cancelled.

By nine the delivery boy was calling. Which floor. She is not picking up. This address is wrong.

By two the complaints came. One person got nothing. One person got food they had cancelled and wanted their money back. Both of them were right.

Then the same thing again for dinner.

At night they sat down and tried to remember the day. Who took how many. Who had paused, and from when. Most of it went into the register. Some of it did not.

On the 1st, two days disappeared into working out the bills. Then a week of asking people to pay.

And there was never a day off. Not one. They could not fall ill. They could not go to a wedding. The whole business was in one person's head, so nobody could stand in for them, not even for a morning.

They shut down within the year. They still had a waiting list.

They did not run out of customers. They ran out of energy.

The cooking was never the hard part. We built NearSubs for everything around it.

Now look one floor up. Someone has just moved to the city for work. First job, or a transfer, or studying. They eat outside every day, and by Thursday they are tired of it.

They do not want a restaurant. They want simple home food at the same time each day. Milk in the morning. A water can when the old one is empty. Clothes back from the laundry, folded.

Finding it is pure luck. A number forwarded in the apartment group. A pamphlet in the lift. Asking the watchman, because the watchman always knows.

So there is a kitchen downstairs with more orders than it can manage, and a hundred people above it who would have subscribed the same day. They just never found each other.

For the kitchen: tomorrow's delivery list, ready before they wake up. A book that remembers who is paused. A bill for each customer, worked out from the days they actually got food.

For the person upstairs: a page they can read. What is cooked, which days, what a month costs, whether they deliver to that building. Subscribe in two taps. Pause it when you travel.

Customers pay the vendor directly by UPI, into the vendor's own account. We never hold it and we take no commission. Vendors pay us a flat monthly fee for the software. It is the same fee whether they have eight customers or eight hundred.

This is the harder way to run a business. Sitting between the customer and the vendor is where the money is. But a kitchen working on small margins should not pay a cut of every plate just to stay organised.

• Take a commission on what a vendor earns.
• Hold, route or settle a customer's payment.
• Invent ratings or subscriber numbers that nobody earned.
• Sell a customer's phone number or address to anybody.

We open one city at a time, and only when there are enough kitchens in it to be worth your time. If you run a kitchen, a dairy or a laundry somewhere we have not reached yet, tell us. We go where the vendors are first.