startupi

Don’t worry! I don’t think vegetarians are vegetables, and I would never say that I look like the experimental food I like to cook up. The old saying means food is an important part of our health, our lifestyle, and our routine. And when the weekend comes, we like to settle down with a good meal! And get to know new places.

But eating well is not as easy as it might seem. There are many criteria to consider. Nothing is better than stumbling upon a great new restaurant, but finding out about one from a friend, or recommending one you like - that’s pretty tasty, too! Saves time and money, narrowing down the choices. You are what you share says web 2.0. And now there’s a social network for sharing your recommendations for good tables: meet ComiAli, the “word of mouth community.”

The idea - At the beginning of 2008, Paulo Klien Vega and his friends noticed that they always ate at the same places in downtown Rio. He told me the story via skype on a recent rainy afternoon. “We were working there and wanted to discover some good new places to eat,” he said. That’s when Paulo, an internet professional, had an entrepreneurial moment with his two engineer friends: making a restaurant guide, not built just around gastronomy or good writing, but based on the opinions of people who liked to eat! “We saw that it wasn’t worth doing a version just about that region, nor would it be feasible to make an enormous printed guide for a larger area,” they realized.

Thus, the big idea: to make a national website which mixed the traditional gastronomic guide with a type of participation like that found on Orkut. “From the big idea to our launch on February 12, 2009, was five months of hard work. I was working with the internet, I had contacts, we contracted other professionals,” says Paulo, creator of other sites like Resultados Mega Sena.

The site - on ComiAli, anyone can create a profile with their preferences and eating habits, follow other users, be followed, join communities (that is, favorite restaurants), create new restaurant communities (evaluating the price, quality, service, etc.), leave comments, vote on comments, recommend places, and more.

Today, there are 2000 users from around Brazil, commenting and recommending places from sophisticated restaurants to popular ones, even favorite beach bars. The Rodelícia is a fun and useful feature of the site. In London, TrustedPlaces is a social network with a somewhat similar function.

The work - “My partners and I are still working full-time in other jobs, and dedicating the rest of our time to ComiAli. We’ve hired design freelancers when it’s necessary to do design changes; a friend of mine in London did the information architecture and interactive design, the developers are collaborators. We don’t have experience in any area of the food industry, we are just passionate about food. We are reaching for a dream, but with our feet on the floor”.

The business plan - “We don’t have our own offices and the profits from this project still don’t come close to paying off the investment we put in from our own pockets. It’s clear that money accelerates the work of an entrepreneur. It lets people really dedicate themselves to a project and hire more people. We are in the initial states, but we have everything planned. We are seeing the community grow and implementing new business ideas. We are looking for partnerships.”

The opportunity - Paul sees restaurants paying attention to what people say on ComiAli. “The Outback restaurant, for example, is doing a promotion: the most voted-on comments in the community get coupons for discounts on meals. They don’t want to interfere, but they want to stimulate participation. It’s the users themselves that decide which comments are best,” explains Paulo.

The future - “We are launching a premium profile for the restaurants themselves, where they can show their menus, potentialize their community, and open a dialogue. We have plans to do a 3.0 version that expands the business to other markets, other verticals. The idea is to invest everything that comes in back into the site, and only think about our own profits in the future.”

You can follow ComiAli on Twitter!