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Ask HN: Any Hackers Appreciate The Importance Food Has On Feeling Good?

15 points by bksenior ↗ HN
I'm Brandon. (BKSenior on the web)

I founded a company and built an app that allows you to walk into almost any restaurant in the US to find exactly what you're looking for. You can view the menu sorted by the popularity of each dish and filterable by all diets (vegan, paleo, gluten-free, veggie), allergies (nut-free, lactose-free), and ingredients.

We are even a stone's throw away from being able to determine calorie-count for each dish. One of the best parts? All menus update (410,000 restaurants and 21 million dishes) every 24 hours.

I just parted ways with my technical co-founder, and now I'm looking to bring someone aboard who embodies the app's ideals: eating right and living a healthy lifestyle. Someone who knows that nutrition is going to be a massive growth market for everyone -- not just the wealthy.

Around 5,000 people are already signed up to be the first invitees to our product. To add to the marketing fire, we have a weekly food column on a major news outlet AND have three diet-related books coming out in the next month.

The overall vision is even bigger, and it's definitely not just a better version of YELP. There is something very different about what we are trying to do. (Also, we have a GREAT product name and own the name on all popular platforms.)

We raised a non-trivial sum of money to get the product built, and I've been slaving on this, sans-salary full-time, for 12 months.

I have a pretty prestigious marketing/business resume. I've run global strategy at the largest ad agency on the West Coast as well as my own profitable business for four years before that. I have a litany of specific examples of my marketing and business acumen in practice.

If you are a hacker that thrives in a chaotic environment and feel as strongly as I do about making people healthy, shoot me a note at Brandon@whatsgood.com and lets talk food.

9 comments

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johnbansson
Literally any restaurant in the US? You know the handwritten, daily changing menu of the family run place in my small home town? And you will soon be able to work out how many calories are in the dish they just made up from what was in the days fish catch. Not sure I believe you.
bksenior
We cover about 81% of all restaurants restaurants which equates to low 90% of the top 500 restaurants in the major metros. So literally we dont cover ALL restaurants, but we cover enough where it kind of seems like magic. (Edit: Changed text to almost)
johnbansson
You know what I would absolutely love? If you could send me notifications of daily specials! I've been to a lot of restaurants in SF, but if I got notified when they had interesting specials I would be motivated to go out when I might not have been planning on it. I could tell you I live here and love scallops, and then you notify me on sone random day hey this restaurant near you is doing this scallop risotto tonight. Fun spontaneous activity for me without having to trawl, extra customer for restaurant.
palidanx
That's a really cool idea. I think this would work in really dense cities (sf, ny, portland, etc).
mattymess
Yelp is filled with so many terrible reviews that I'm often disappointed when I go out based on their recommendations.

The food space definitely needs something that is USEFUL and I'm hopeful this is it! Good luck Brandon!

palidanx
I'm a little curious. In order to get calorie count for every dish, don't you have to get the ingredient formulation from the restaurant for every dish on the menu?

And in your definition of restaurants, are you counting multiple restaurants in one franchise as a number in your 410,000 restaurant count?

bksenior
1. We are doing ranges for calories. 2. We count each individual location once.
Sagat
Good luck to you and your endeavors. However I don't think promoting pseudo scientific diets such as the paleo and the gluten-free is very ethical, although it will certainly net you some extra dough.
pdenya
Gluten free is not a diet choice for everyone. There are several people I go out to eat with regularly who have gluten allergies and being able to check in advance whether restaurants server anything they can eat is important to me.

Also, how is helping people find foods that fit into their existing diets in any way unethical?