Chews was a project I worked on while I was just starting out as an Associate Product Manager at Flipp in 2017. I was learning a ton from my peers and product mentors within the company, but I didn’t have the responsibility to actually implement a lot of the things I’ve learned from a product development perspective.
This is why I started Chews to put in practice some of the things I’ve learned at Flipp but also to learn some more iOS development.
chews (2017)
Have you ever craved a dish but didn’t know where you could find the best places that would serve it?
Or have you had a hard time deciding which dishes are popular at a restaurant?
Chews was meant to solve those problems through surfacing reviews on menus and dishes from restaurants.
It was my first time rallying together a cross functional team of developers and designers to actually build a product.
The entire idea was formulated based on the assumption that people are interested in discovering restaurants based on their cravings and popular dishes, but also that people trusted user generated reviews and ratings. We actually got together a group of University of Toronto students in a research study to understand how they discovered restaurants and verified some of the problems that aren’t currently solved well with today’s products: such as information overload from some web sources, but limited information from other sources such as friends or the street itself. We saw this as an opportunity.
To validate these hypothesis and problems, building a MVP that was desirable was a challenge. For a platform like this to work, you require both content on menus and dishes as well as user generate content such as reviews and ratings.
Since we can’t get user generated content initially, we had to find a different value prop: is having restaurant menus enough? This is where I spend countless hours collecting restaurant menus and translating them into text so we had data to work with. We focused on collecting data within the University of Toronto area where we were expecting to launch.
I ended up re-learning how to do iOS development and actually built out a native iOS app.
In the process of development I found myself making a ton of decisions on similar things I would worry about today for work, some examples: should the rating system be 5 star based or up votes and downvotes? What are the pros and cons of that? What are the major flows that people would use to discover dishes/restaurants?
Building it
I built it with a ton of help from some friends and hours of YouTube videos, we even had a backend service running to serve content to the app as well as collecting UGC.
We actually didn’t release it or try to grow it. Too many doubts/risks/unknowns crept up in my mind:
Why would people use an app just for restaurant menus? There are apps out there already, Google & Yelp were slowly starting to do it back then
The answer to that is most probably not, but could I have done enough marketing in the beginning that would’ve generated enough UGC to be useful to users?
Would people spent time actually reviewing dishes they’ve had? How could we enforce that? How could we verify that?
Are there already too many sources of information that this is just too much work?
Collecting menus manually doesn’t seem like a scalable solution
I didn’t believe this was a complete blocker, we underestimate manpower in today’s technological world.
Should we have tested out our hypothesis more through interviews? Mocks ups?
I never thought monetization would have been a challenge as long as we could have owned the consumer and eventually partner with restaurants around delivery/pickup since we already had their content.
In the end
Life got in the way, work got more busy, my friends weren’t as bought in. It eventually became more of a pet project that helped me learn iOS development. There is actually a live version on the app store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/chews-discover-dishes/id1376361697.
It might’ve been a good experience to have just launched it more openly within the University with some marketing to understand the market more.
There definitely could have been more upfront research being done around specifically defining the problems of the users and defining the right user segments to solve for. Chews a project where I honed some of my execution skills around feature development, UX, strategic thinking, and rallying a team behind a vision.
Though I hoped for this to have been a business, in reality it was more of a project where I just wanted to build something for fun with some friends.