Start: Here’s an App to Help You Find a Local ‘Find’

Courtesy of NoChains Rich Winley: “It’s not that I dislike chains.”

Start

The adventure of new ventures.

In 2010 Rich Winley was running a marketing company in Greenville, S.C., when he decided to participate in a seven-week business exchange program to Australia through his local Rotary Club. The group traveled from the small town of Darwin in the north down to Sydney, visiting a different city every two or three days.

While in Darwin, Mr. Winley asked local residents to suggest their favorite restaurants so he wouldn’t get stuck eating at chains. “I ended up taking my group to a restaurant that looked like a house in the middle of a river. We had to take a boat to get there,” he said. “We had burgers made from local game, like kangaroo. They were probably some of the best burgers I’d ever had.”

When he got back to Greenville, Mr. Winley decided to create a business that would help people find the best local dishes wherever they were. “It’s not that I dislike chains, it’s just that you can eat at Applebee’s anywhere,” he said. “Why eat there when you’re traveling to someplace new?”

From that idea NoChains was born as a free app that allows users to look for the best independent, non-chain restaurants in an area. Mr. Winley started working on the app after being accepted into a 12-week program at a Greenville accelerator, The Iron Yard, part of the Global Accelerator Network. Through a friend of a friend he met Dan Mall, an expert in user interface who lived in Philadelphia. He became a partner in NoChains and, working remotely, designed the app’s interface.

NoChains works by allowing users to search for a specific dish. Rather than searching for “Best Thai food,” users can look for the best Pad Thai or Tom Kha Gai. The app was introduced first in Greenville, which happens to be Mr. Winley’s hometown, in February, and then in March it had a soft introduction at the South by Southwest conference. In June, NoChains debuted in New York City, with the app briefly hitting No. 50 in the iTunes store’s food and drink category.

Employees: None. Mr. Winley and Mr. Mall, partners in the business, use subcontractors as needed.

Location: Houston.

Pitch: No matter where you travel, there will always be a place that locals recommend for having the best particular kind of food or specific dish, whether it’s sushi, coq au vin or Pad Thai.

Traction: The app is being downloaded between 75 and 130 times a day.

Challenges: Getting a critical mass of users to “like” and review particular dishes at independent restaurants. “Once we get enough likes and have enough people using NoChains, the recommendations will be relevant. Now people are mostly using it to find local restaurants, and we have a fair amount of vegetarians and those that are gluten-free using it, because you can sort dishes that way,” Mr. Winley said.

Another challenge is building a solid team of developers, researchers and sales representatives on a limited budget. At this point Mr. Winley outsources development work to freelancers, as well as the tedious work of collecting and inputting restaurant information. “Because I’m a start-up I have learned how to delegate work very economically,” he said. “I use a mixture of Elance, Fiverr and Mechanical Turk, where you can hire on an hourly basis. And I do all the sales and marketing myself.”

Revenue: The revenue model Mr. Winley initially had in mind — restaurants paying NoChains for analytics — wasn’t tenable, because his research showed that half of smaller, independent restaurants don’t even have Web sites. Now Mr. Winley is developing a Web-site-creation platform — called The Foodture — for restaurants. He said it will include analytics, social media integration and point-of-sale integration for a small monthly fee.

 Financing: Mr. Winley has taken a small round of financing — less than $50,000 — from one angel investor in Charleston, S.C. He is now attempting to raise a bigger round — between $850,000 and $1 million in venture capital — and is hoping to close it by August. “I don’t want to raise it from just anyone that’s interested, I want to raise smart money from those that can be strategic partners,” he said.

Competition: There are plenty of apps that help diners find restaurants — UrbanSpoon, LocalEats, Where2Eat and Foodspotting — but few enable a user to search by dish. And most also drive revenue through advertising.

What’s Next? Within a year Mr. Winley hopes to be in 20 cities — rolling out next in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago. When the app reaches 300 to 400 downloads a day, he said, “we’ll essentially be a food search engine.”

What do you think?

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/heres-an-app-to-help-you-find-a-local-find/?partner=rss&emc=rss