I've been playing with Truffle for the past ~week, asking friends for restaurant recommendations. For example, you might ask your friend who lives in NY for their favorite date night restaurant before visiting the Big Apple.
The big difference IMO from discovering a restaurant in this way vs. Yelp or Foursquare, is that it feels more personal and gives friends and opportunity to talk about the experience pre and post-dining.
@brimer, @jonathan_swerdlin, @tomlimongello -- local discovery is a competitive space and your strongest competitor might be text messaging. Curious to hear more of the backstory and strategy with Truffle.
@rrhoover@brimer@jonathan_swerdlin Thanks Ryan!
We all know that our friends have been to way more places than they have published online, and unless there’s an easy way to set your preferences for each context - like what’s my favorite place for date night, pasta, sushi - then people are hard pressed to remember and usually fall back on old email lists, starred maps, custom lists of 100 coffee places, excel etc. What we wanted to create was a way to make curated lists automatically through conversations with friends. What we realized was that each friend has a slightly different perspective on the map, and they can teach us a lot about places to go not just when we're traveling, but just when we're trying to find new places in our own city. Now that ridesharing makes it super easy to get everywhere the idea of researching where to go eat has become a lot more daunting than it was back in the early web and mobile days.
Text messaging is definitely the biggest challenger in terms of behavior, but it's also a channel where we can acquire users. We feel that there’s a way to empower people with better tools both in the app and via text if you’ve set your preferences in Truffle and can use those as conversation starters wherever you’re chatting.
@eriktorenberg@brimer
Thanks, Erik!
Truffle will allow members of the Truffle community access to one-of-a-kind dining experiences at unique restaurants, produced and curated by Truffle in collaboration with restaurateurs and chefs. Longer term, Truffle will be able to provide restaurants with data and technology so they can know who their most loyal customers are, and who is referring their friends to their restaurant.
Nice going @tomlimongello and the rest of the Truffle team!! Glad to see you've released this to the world -- now there will be many more people I can request recommendations from -- something you can't do with Foursquare or Yelp ;)
Big fan of what the Truffle team is building. I use foursquare lists to keep track of restaurants and bars I want to try but I never remember which friend recommended the place. This is much more personal way to keep a list of places I want to try.
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