The founder of bootstrapped Singapore-based social meetup app Lunch Kaki is willing to put everything on the line to turn his startup idea into a regional player — even if it means driving for Uber to make a few extra bucks.
Uber is popular in Singapore, but then so is Lunch Kaki. With just $85,000 in angel funding to date, the social app launched in November last year and has already clocked up close to 3,000 monthly active users.
That’s based on more than 15,000 downloads across iOS and Android with just one developer, and founder Melvin Tiff holding down a full-time job at an ecommerce payments gateway company in Singapore.
Prior to starting Lunch Kaki, Tiff was a stock broker and relationship manager at United Overseas Bank (UOB) in Singapore. But after a very brief spell at Credit Suisse, he ended up ditching a more-than eight year banking career to work in the ecommerce payments space, where he remains today.
But turning his baby Lunch Kaki into a full-time opportunity remains his real dream. The app continues to do well on both Android and iOS, and he recently rolled out group lunches whereby six people get the chance to meet up for food and make new friends.
Most of his users are in Singapore, Malaysia (where “kaki” means buddy), and Indonesia, though he’d like to expand into new markets like Taiwan. He also insists Lunch Kaki is not a dating app, and despite its very modest financial backing to date it’s managed to outperform some venture capital-backed players in the region (it’s racked up more downloads than VC-backed Noonwoon, for example).
Above: Lunch Kaki trending on Google Play (Android)
The way Lunch Kaki works is simple: browsing users in your area and sending the ones you like a lunch request. You can also send them a coffee or cake, though this is like a “poke” with cute and addictive on-screen animations (which do great with users in Asia) than a request. Once a lunch request is accepted, the two users move into a chat from where they can organise a time and location to grab lunch.
Tiff says the app is now seeing close to 20,000 lunch requests per month, with about 20 percent of those converting into chats. He says the final numbers that make it to an actual meeting are hard to know, because it’s still organised within a chat environment. But then a dating apps like Tinder work the same way.
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Monetization remains a hurdle. So far, Tiff has rolled out a premium model for $2.99 per month that allows users to double their requests to 20 a day, specify their preferred location (Tinder also offers this for premium users) so if you’re not in a country you can still search and contact users there, and enjoy unlimited searches (free users only get 10 searches per day).
Local restaurants in Singapore, such as The Soup Spoon, are currently placing adverts on Lunch Kaki in return for 10-20 percent discounts for the app’s users if they choose to grab lunch there. Tiff would like to further build out a viable monetization model by exploring bigger opportunities with restaurants and cafes as the app gains more users. He also has some other ideas, but they’re still early
Whether he manages to raise that round before he has to start driving for Uber part time, who knows. A good founder will do whatever it takes, and I think Tiff has some serious fire in him that won’t see him give up without a fight. Uber would also win, because they’d be getting a damn cool new driver.
But I don’t see him having to take the Uber option. What Lunch Kaki has achieved on a shoestring budget in the 12 months since launch with a single developer is impressive. I expect it will continue to do well, and investors could do a lot worse than checking it out.
If Lunch Kaki can’t bring people together over lunch in Southeast Asia, its founder will drive for Uber
from VentureBeat » Social Media Companies | Social Network News | VentureBeat http://ift.tt/1P56p8O
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