🍔 Eatasy.com (2015 - 2017 Dead)

I started working on Eatasy after shutting down AudiencePi in 2015. I wanted to build a B2C app that people around me could relate.

The concept of Eatasy is simple. Food reviews sites like Yelp rates restaurants as a whole. But as a foodie, often we want to search for the best dishes like burgers, pasta, fries, within a city.

The difference with Eatasy is that reviewers can also rate individual dish. On top of that, they can search for the best specific dish in each city.

How I generate content?

For initial eatery listing profile details, I scrape from sites like Tripadvisor, OpenRice, Foursquare, Yelp, HungryGoWhere.
I also use Google Place API to look for food listings. At that time, Google Map was super generous with it's API limits and IIRC, allowed like 100k requests within a single day.
Google Place API at that time also allows us to retrieve excerpts of reviews. I combined it sentiment analysis to extract pros and cons of each food listing.
Food listing photos used was the one provided by Google Place API.
For initial reviews content, I actually did the manual hard work and went to hawker centers around Singapore to try all different popular hawker spots. In total, I went to more than 50+ different hawker centers.

https://www.facebook.com/eatasy/

Tech Stack

Django and Postgres for Backend
jQuery, Handlebars and SASS for Frontend
Java and Android for Mobile App
Algolia for Search Filtering
Apify for Web Scraping
Ansible for Devops

Source code is still available.

Why I shut it down?

I can't figure a good way to make it a profitable business.

Even today, there isn't good revenue model for food reviews or many other reviews sites. Most revenue comes from restaurants, which means there is always an unsettling relationship due to conflicts of interest when it comes to posting of negative reviews.