ReservEat
Co-Founder
ReservEat is the brainchild of myself & Rohan Rayarikar. We found that making plans with a group of friends is often an arduous process. Figuring out who was available to join, what everyone wanted to eat (food is key), where everyone wanted to hang out, and when it was convenient to meet up took too much personal effort for a single person.
Consequentially, we decided that we wanted to build a platform that could automate all those steps for the lazy yet enterprising individual. ReservEat was manifested as a mobile app (on iOS) to serve just this purpose.
Here are some cool things that ReservEat empowered you to be able to do:
Select contacts & send them automated text invites to your plan. It was able to figure out their availability to join from their response to the text.
Gave you the option of selecting specific places to propose on a plan from options sourced from the Yelp API & our unofficial OpenTable catalog scraper (a delectable marriage of BeautifulSoup & NightmareJS).
Took your choices of cuisine (ex. Thai & Indian) combined with your preferred neighborhoods (ex. Tribeca or the East Village) & presented recommendations that fit the bill.
Allowed you to book your place at your preferred location for the confirmed party of people through a one-tap booking link directly to OpenTable.
Sent out automated reminders to everyone involved prior to the plan along with all the final details.
Throughout the process of bringing ReservEat to life, Rohan and I embarked on a wide array of activities not limited to engineering. In addition to writing code, we had to devise an overview of the competitive landscape, ascertain our value proposition, and identify our target markets. With that data in hand, we created and evaluated different business models to attain profitability, leveraged different marketing mediums to reach our customers (Facebook, Instagram, & others), partnered with OpenTable through their affiliate program, and gathered a myriad of learnings about building a B2C product.