Us food lovers we have our cravings ! When I want to eat pani puri, I want to know the best place in my city where I can get that. A lot of times, I rely on the advice of my close friends but I always end up wondering what if there is a better place in town that even my friends aren’t aware of ! Apparently, a lot of people were faced the same question as me and that is what led Sahil Khan and Hrishikesh Rajpathak to come up with Quinto, a dish discovery app.
Quinto is crowdsourced dish discovery app for iOS & Android that helps you search for and rate the best dishes around you. Whenever you need any information about what is the best place to eat a certain dish, you can login to the app and rely on the reviews of your community to find a right place. Also, when you are at a particular restaurant, you can look for reviews of a particular dish before ordering it.Dish discovery usually happens on 3 different levels. Discovering dishes by following various food bloggers, discovering dishes by relying on the recommendations of your community and discovering dishes through recommendations of your friends. The Quinto app currently provides recommendations based on information available from the community at large. The company soon plans to include algorithm that will allow their users to see what their friends are suggesting.
Hrishikesh and Sahil started working on this idea 1.5 years ago. Prior to starting Quinto, Sahil while writing his blog, The Tossed Salad realized that many people were asking 2 questions. 1. I want to eat a certain food where should I go ? 2. I am at a certain place what should I eat ? Hrishikesh also realized that these two were the main questions people were asking while he was working on his venture, Seven Labs Limited where he was creating data mining application to find out who were the people who were wanting to go out and eat. Both Sahil and Hrishikesh were working on the dish discovery idea independently when they were introduced by a common friend and thus Quinto was born. Both Sahil and Hrishikesh have been restaurant owners in the past.
Quinto app went live only by the beginning on September 2014. The response to this app has been very good. The app is now live in Pune and has 3000 restaurants including street food joints and food carts registered on them. The app has ratings for about 2000 dishes. Building a crowdsourced model is allowing the company to scale very quickly.
Like most other niche products, the biggest challenge for Quinto right now is to create awareness among people about their differentiation.The founders are relying heavily on content marketing for the same. They also plan on building and incorporating analytics engine into this product to provide personalized recommendations. After Pune the company plans to make the app available in Mumbai and are looking for funding for expanding their operations.
