Round Menu helps users discover restaurants and guides them to dining destinations that are trending or are recommended by social media stats.
The three main features it offers are a list of new restaurants, dine and delivery options while allowing you to share your personal experiences.
RoundMenu mobile app, is available for free download on iPhone & Android. Saudi Gazette caught up with the founders Zaid Jawad and Ali Sinaei to learn more about the app. They said RoundMenu has an average rate of 200-400 app downloads a day from Jeddah and Riyadh.
SG: What services does the app provide to users?
Zaid: The app that you can download from our website www.roundmenu.com, allows you to ‘Discover. Dine. Share'.
Discover: basically find restaurants by many means whether they are currently trending, top 10s, or our new feature of discovery by ‘Dish' image (it is like an Instagram just for food).
Dine: helps you select a restaurant you want to order in from or dine at. At a click of a button you can call the restaurant. No more looking for numbers. Of course we have many of the popular menus and adding many more regularly. In the UAE we also offer online booking and promotions, which we are looking at for KSA as soon as we hit a certain threshold and start talking to some of the big restaurants.
Share: to write reviews or post photos so other users can also benefit from it, in their discovery phase.
SG: How has the response been in KSA?
Ali: KSA has been on our radar for a while, but we got serious about it when we relaunched our app in December, starting with Riyadh and then Jeddah in mid March. We had always anticipated a good response but we were pleasantly surprised by the user adoption. We now have over 200-400 app downloads a day from KSA alone and that's just two cities with a very small marketing spend. In March and April our app sessions and site traffic in Saudi tripled month on month, which shows that we have a sticky product that users are loving and returning to.
SG: What are the exclusive elements of RoundMenu?
Ali: Promotions are something we differentiate ourselves with. We have the UAE's biggest promotion database and they are free. So whether you are a resident or tourist you can use this and benefit from it. As we have just launched our Saudi cities we are looking into this and trying to find the best way to launch promotions into KSA within a few months. Our social signals are also something unique to us. For instance ‘Social Rank' is a proprietary tool we developed. The tool ‘listens' to a restaurant's social buzz from many of the social media platforms and determines a restaurant's popularity. Other social tools we provide is the ability to see which of your friends have dined at a particular restaurant and at a press of a button send them a whatsapp message to ask how their experience was. Besides our own unique user content, we also plug in photos from Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare as well as reviews from the latter two.
SG: Tell us about our journey.
Zaid: My background is engineering. I got into the digital world back in 2000 when my partners and I launched Zawya.com. On our exit to Thompson Reuters in 2011, the same founding partners set up HoneyBee Tech Ventures as an incubator for digital start ups.
Ali: I started my career in banking, but found myself working for AOL, UK in sales and strategy. I moved to Dubai in 2007 to join Bayt.com as head of ad sales, and in 2012 I joined Zaid to take RoundMenu to the next step.
SG: What created the need for RoundMenu?
Zaid: RoundMenu started as a side project while I was at Zawya. I felt restaurants were under represented on the digital front so I started experimenting with certain services and angles I can provide to restaurants that helps connect them to users searching for dining. Initially the platform started as a promotion tool offering diners a discount at a specific set of restaurants, but soon after I discovered more insights about the importance of restaurant discovery as a whole and not just for promotions. So the last three years have seen quite a number of changes each helping shape the platform to what it is today. Our latest major upgrade was in December and we believe we have reached a sweet spot that allows us to scale faster now. The app is many things to many people. For some it is about menus and calling for delivery, for others it is about getting discounts, for tourists/travelers it is about finding the best restaurants in town, and we are always getting great feedback from users on how to improve the experience and help them reach what they want faster and in a better way.
SG: Future plans?
Zaid: We definitely need to keep innovating and trying new things. For KSA as we mentioned, we are looking at promotions and bookings. For all the countries in our platform we are looking at some great value add services. Our aim is to become the one-stop platform for anything related to your dining needs.
