Sociavore
Startup helps boost restaurants’ online presence
WATERLOO REGION — Before handing over a freshly prepared plate of food to the servers, chef Dan McCowan snaps a photo with his smartphone and the image is quickly posted to the Instagram account of his Waterloo restaurant Red House.
At the same time, the restaurant’s website and other social media feeds are automatically updated with the same photo.
“So it is really easy to keep the website current,” says McCowan.
Frequent changes to the menu, reservations, photos of the day’s special, feedback from customers, it can all be done from his smartphone.
“The software is user friendly, I can go in and update the website no problem,” says McCowan. “To go in and add our New Year’s Eve menu and then take it off, stuff like that, is real easy.”
When he opened Red House, McCowan built his own website using popular do-ityourself software. That quickly changed when he learned about Kitchener-based startup Sociavore, which has a platform that helps restaurants set up Instagram-powered websites.
“There are feedback forms on there, so if someone goes to our website, clicks a link, they say whatever they want, and that goes straight to my phone,” says McCowan.
“If someone wants to make a reservation or has question about the menu, or wants to book an event, they can send an email and I get a notification on my phone within seconds,” he says.
After graduating from chef school at George Brown College in Toronto, McCowan worked his way up through the kitchens of the Charcoal Group. He opened Red House in April 2013.
That same year Sociavore was founded. Red House, Charcoal Group and the Berlin are among the more than 100 restaurants using the startup’s platform.
Sociavore chief executive officer and cofounder Thusenth Dhavaloganathan listened to the feedback and suggestions from those restaurant owners over the past five years. About a month ago, he launched a new website builder and customer management platform that builds on current trends in mobile and social media technology.
The new platform provides Instagrampowered restaurant websites, making it easy to keep sites current. Guestbox enables restaurant staff to develop and maintain online relationships with customers. Restaurants can also choose themes for a website’s look that Sociavore has developed, or Sociavore can support custom designs from third parties. Sociavore Reservations integrates with other platforms such as Tock, Resy, OpenTable and Yelp Reservations.
“When we initially got started making sure it was mobile responsive was really key because we were seeing the data was drifting heavily toward mobile,” says Dhavaloganathan.
In 2013, 30 to 40 per cent of the traffic to restaurant websites was mobile; now it is 65 to 70 per cent, he says.
Dhavaloganathan grew up in the restaurant business. He washed dishes in his parent’s restaurant, worked as a host and server, and helped out as a line cook. His sister still works in the kitchen. After leaving BlackBerry in 2013, where he worked as a software product manager, he co-founded Sociavore.
Most restaurant owners take a lot of pride in learning all aspects of their business, and doing it themselves. Sociavore is designed to complement that trait, says Dhavaloganathan.
“The new version of our platform lets them choose a template, tweak it as much as they want, and go live without us ever having to interact,” he says. “Restaurant owners can on-board themselves and try us.”
Sociavore collects a monthly fee from its clients. It takes a lot of money to open a restaurant, so it made sense to go with the softwareas-a-service model, says Dhavaloganathan.
“They can have a great looking, really functional restaurant website within 30 minutes,” he says. “We make it really easy for them to get their reservations going, get their online ordering going, all that sort of stuff.”
Following the launch of the new platform a month ago, Sociavore is now focused on getting more restaurants to use it.
“Right now we are totally focused on scaling and acquiring customers from anywhere in the world,” says Dhavaloganathan.