(L-R) Drigmo Co-Founders Zihui Chen, Pieter Walraven, and Meiwin Fu
While building GPay at Google, software veterans Piet Walraven, Meiwin Fu, and Zihui Chen looked into how people discovered restaurants. It struck them that almost everyone ‘liked’ to save places but dealt with severe discovery overload.
“We’d ask people to show us their places, and they’d often chuckle. Besides a select few diligent restaurant list keepers, most would start scrolling screenshots, notes, social apps, direct messages, or open tabs, scanning for discoveries that got buried by other things worth remembering,” Walraven says. “We realised that the discovery overload will only worsen as we spend more time online. That’s when we decided to quit our jobs to build Drigmo.”
Drigmo — an anagram of Grimod de la Reynière, who wrote the world’s first restaurant guide L’Almanach des Gourmands, during the reign of Napoleon in 1803 — is a new social food app for people to save their places.
The app was developed by Walraven, Meiwin Fu, and Zihui Chen — who built and sold their previous startup ‘Pie’ to Google before joining the search engine giant.
A social app built around people’s restaurant lists, Drigmo enables users to organise their places with custom tags and bring their lists to life by adding personal memories through notes, pictures, and videos.
As users grow their lists, their friends can see their activities and save discoveries from each other (like re-pinning on Pinterest). They can also explore their friends’ spots on a map to see what nearby places they visited or have on their ‘to-try’ list.
“When we studied hundreds of restaurant lists from passionate foodies, we found that the personal and social aspect of list-keeping makes people add mostly the places they love and recommend. This makes restaurant lists positive and truthful by default. We thought if restaurant lists are social, expressive, and positive, why not build an app around them? That’s how Drigmo happened,” Walraven says.
As the user base grew with the number of restaurants and memories saved on the platform, Drigmo evolved into a community of diners, helping other diners discover great places.
The app doesn’t offer a ‘restaurant ratings’ feature; instead, it shows ‘who has saved this place’ and highlights the memories of their friends. The users find it a more efficient way of deciding if a place is for them, Walraven says.
Since its soft launch in Singapore in March this year, over 45,000 places have been saved and 15,000 tags created on the platform.
The app also integrated AI into the platform to provide place summaries based on all available reviews on the web and structuring its own community-generated data to make it even more helpful.
While there are editorial sites like Daniel Food Diary or players like Grab Food that offer reviews, Walraven doesn’t see them as competitors. “GrabFood, GoJek, Chope, etc. are an opportunity as they rely on reviews and place data to improve conversion and average order size.”
Although Drigmo is currently free to use, the company is exploring several monetisation models — such as offering its rich places data as an API and enabling restaurants to offer their guests a loyalty program that integrates deeply with the app experience.
The co-founders have already managed to raise a strategic round of funding from a handful of Singapore’s most experienced and well-respected investors.
In Walraven’s opinion, although all the social media apps in the market were launched with tall promises of bringing the world closer together, it turned out to be one of tech’s biggest fallacies. If anything, these apps have divided people.
“The next wave of social will be different. It has to be positive by design and a healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. We believe food is a great vertical to build in not only because it’s the last thing you can’t download but also because food has always done what big social screwed up; it connects people,” Walraven concluded.
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Image Credit: Drigmo.
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