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(L-R) Drigmo Co-Founders Zihui Chen, Pieter Walraven, and Meiwin Fu
Whereas constructing GPay at Google, software program veterans Piet Walraven, Meiwin Fu, and Zihui Chen regarded into how folks found eating places. It struck them that just about everybody ‘preferred’ to save lots of locations however handled extreme discovery overload.
“We’d ask folks to indicate us their locations, they usually’d usually chuckle. Apart from a choose few diligent restaurant checklist keepers, most would begin scrolling screenshots, notes, social apps, direct messages, or open tabs, scanning for discoveries that acquired buried by different issues value remembering,” Walraven says. “We realised that the invention overload will solely worsen as we spend extra time on-line. That’s after we determined to give up our jobs to construct Drigmo.”
Drigmo — an anagram of Grimod de la Reynière, who wrote the world’s first restaurant information L’Almanach des Gourmands, throughout the reign of Napoleon in 1803 — is a brand new social meals app for folks to save lots of their locations.
The app was developed by Walraven, Meiwin Fu, and Zihui Chen — who constructed and bought their earlier startup ‘Pie’ to Google earlier than becoming a member of the search engine large.
A social app constructed round folks’s restaurant lists, Drigmo allows customers to organise their locations with customized tags and produce their lists to life by including private reminiscences by way of notes, photos, and movies.
As customers develop their lists, their buddies can see their actions and save discoveries from one another (like re-pinning on Pinterest). They’ll additionally discover their buddies’ spots on a map to see what close by locations they visited or have on their ‘to-try’ checklist.
“After we studied tons of of restaurant lists from passionate foodies, we discovered that the private and social side of list-keeping makes folks add largely the locations they love and suggest. This makes restaurant lists constructive and truthful by default. We thought if restaurant lists are social, expressive, and constructive, why not construct an app round them? That’s how Drigmo occurred,” Walraven says.
Because the consumer base grew with the variety of eating places and reminiscences saved on the platform, Drigmo developed right into a neighborhood of diners, serving to different diners uncover nice locations.
The app doesn’t provide a ‘restaurant scores’ characteristic; as an alternative, it reveals ‘who has saved this place’ and highlights the reminiscences of their buddies. The customers discover it a extra environment friendly approach of deciding if a spot is for them, Walraven says.
Since its mushy launch in Singapore in March this 12 months, over 45,000 locations have been saved and 15,000 tags created on the platform.
The app additionally built-in AI into the platform to supply place summaries primarily based on all out there evaluations on the net and structuring its personal community-generated information to make it much more useful.
Whereas there are editorial websites like Daniel Meals Diary or gamers like Seize Meals that provide evaluations, Walraven doesn’t see them as rivals. “GrabFood, GoJek, Chope, and so forth. are a chance as they depend on evaluations and place information to enhance conversion and common order measurement.”
Though Drigmo is at the moment free to make use of, the corporate is exploring a number of monetisation fashions — equivalent to providing its wealthy locations information as an API and enabling eating places to supply their friends a loyalty program that integrates deeply with the app expertise.
The co-founders have already managed to boost a strategic spherical of funding from a handful of Singapore’s most skilled and well-respected buyers.
In Walraven’s opinion, though all of the social media apps out there have been launched with tall guarantees of bringing the world nearer collectively, it turned out to be one among tech’s largest fallacies. If something, these apps have divided folks.
“The subsequent wave of social might be completely different. It must be constructive by design and a wholesome, worthwhile place to hang around. We imagine meals is a superb vertical to construct in not solely as a result of it’s the very last thing you possibly can’t obtain but in addition as a result of meals has all the time finished what large social screwed up; it connects folks,” Walraven concluded.
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Picture Credit score: Drigmo.
The put up Social meals app Drigmo seems to revolutionise restaurant discovery, connection appeared first on e27.
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