Foodiebay, as the name suggests is a vertical local search player with focus on restaurant category (organized as a directory).
Started by IIT students/alumnis, Foodiebay’s core focus is on structured data collection and providing relevant restaurant info to users.
The product collates reviews from multiple sources like Times food guide, HT and what I really like about the site is the minimalistic UI – one can sort data, use additional filters (like price) and browse through scanned restaurant menus (which ensures healthy traffic from people who want to order food for home delivery) without being chugged to write reviews etc (not sure whether this is intended/design-choice or..)
As far as local players are concerned, there is a strong competition for foodiebay – right from HungryBangalore, YepMe to Burrp, to Google, Yahoo, Justdial etc.
The good thing is that food/lifestyle category serves close to ~80% of local queries and there is no single dominating player in the market (justdial is more of a local player, burrp is still not there and others don’t have a clear strategy).
Having said that, Foodiebay needs to have a core differentiation, a strong USP – most of the other players have a good UGC component (reviews etc), and merely providing data is of no use. The choice for them is to:
- Be into lifestyle category,
- Be a search player, or
- Be a city player (i.e. everything about the city – news/weather etc)
- Mix of all? [I am not sure this will ever work)
What’s your opinion on Foodiebay? If you are from Delhi region, do share your feedback/review.
Foodiebay is currently available only in Delhi region and plans to expand to other cities too. The bootstrapped startup is also looking for VC investment.
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