What brings you to Tech Cocktail?
Justin: Like minded people.

John: Well, the first thing was the free booze. But the second thing was meeting like minded people, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, marketing people.

Justin: Other start-ups.

John: Other start-ups.

What is your background in technology?
Justin: I'm in Chicago. John is in Seattle. I used to work at HP and John used to work at Microsoft. Back in February we quit our jobs and started Menuism.

John: We had one long brainstorming weekend, and at the end of the brainstorming weekend we came up with this idea for Menuism.com. The very next day at work, we both gave our two-week notices.

What is Menuism?
Justin: It's a website where you can rate what you ate, because everyone deserves to eat better. It's a completely community driven website where users can add restaurants, they can add menus, they can add related links to other reviews - totally user driven. Any city in the US; there can be restaurants for it.

John: We basically consider it the ultimate restaurant guide. As long . . .

Justin: Unbiased

John: Ultimate unbiased restaurant guide.

What makes you different from other sites?
John: Because the level of user contribution is far greater than any other site out there. We're unbiased, you know, and any other site out there - you do a search for any other restaurant - the first five, ten, I don't know how many how many listings out there - they're all paid for. You can't trust those sites to know that these are the restaurants taht people actually like the most. On our site, we don't have sponsored listings, so it's all based on the user's opinions. So whatever people felt about it: those are the ones that get listed first.

What are some tricks you have found to make people want to give reviews?
Justin: Well, we just launched last week, so we are still trying to figure that out.

John: Ask us in a month and we'll let you know.

Justin: We actually have a tip system where you can earn points by doing things on the site, and you can tip people for useful reviews. This sort of rewards quality reviews as opposed to just number of reviews like some other sites reward for.

What skills do you bring to this project?
Justin: We both have a computer science background. We both went to UC Berkeley and that's where we met.

John: Justin worked at HP for a while. I worked at Microsoft for a while. We both have development experience. We both have project management experience.

Justin: We both pretty balanced. A little of everything. It's a great opportunity to gain new experience in business aspects and to really grow as a full entrepreneur so we're excited about it.

John: Ultimately, this has been a dream for both of us for a really long time. Whether this succeeds or fails - and we're hoping it really succeeds - but whatever happens in the long run, we come out of it with a ton of experience. We've learned so much more than say working for another year at our large companies. And that's what we banked on.

What have you learned during the development process?
John: We learned that it's really hard to launch a site. It's really hard to launch a site. The initial estimates that we had in the beginning: wildly off. But we're happy where we are right now. We're now in the learning phase where we've launched our site - it's been about a week - and now we're working on the marketing, we're working on fleshing out the business plan, advertising, all that kind of stuff. This is the real learning phase, so if you ask us in a month we'll have a lot more to say.

How are you making money with Menuism?
Justin: What we actually plan to do is we plan to sell services back to restaurants that help them become better restaurants by serving better food. So by allowing you to actually rate the food you ate at the restaurant, this actually provides interesting data for the restaurants to see which dishes are doing well, which ones are doing worse, what are popular, what their competitors might be serving. This helps them increase their quality for customers and that's actually a better way to grow their business than advertising because if you're bad restaurant and you're advertising; that's not actually doing you much good.

John: Why waste all the money on advertising if you're selling really crappy food?

What was the motivation behind Menuism?
Justin: Not having the information we wanted about what might be offered at a restaurant, how good certain dishes were, because a restaurant could be 5-star but the dish you want could be rated very low at that restaurant. Having search results skewed advertising and sponsored listings was really frustrating. We really wanted a user-driven so it's all out in the open type website, and that's what we're going for.

John: We basically wanted to know what the world thinks. There are a lot of other sites out there that have salaried reviewers who say well this is what I think. But honestly, even if they're paid, even if they're professional, it's just one opinion. It's much better when you have a lot of opinions. And it's much better when you have a lot of opinions not just about the restaurant but about the food itself because it's really all about the food. It's not just about going to a restaurant but about what you're going to order as well.