Benjamin Higginbotham: Hello I am Benjamin Higginbotham with technologyevangelist.com. Today we’ve got Justin and John from Menuism.com with us. Hello guys.

Justin Chen: Hi.

John Li: Hi.

Benjamin Higginbotham: How is it going?

Justin Chen: Pretty good, it’s pretty cold in Chicago.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well we are in Minnesota, so it’s not that much warmer. Tell me a little bit about Menuism.com. What the heck is it?

John Li: So, Menuism.com is a community based restaurant review guide, where users. Anyone can rate the restaurants and also the dishes themselves.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Alright, so I just go on the website and I find a restaurant and review it, do I add restaurants, go into a little bit of the process?

John Li: Yes, so we are totally user generated, user contributed. User can contribute an add, basically all aspects of a restaurant, the restaurant itself – Menu items, all kinds of dishes, tagging, related links, things like that and at the same time review and also add menu items within the review as well. They can also find friends and find other users at the very – that are good in reviewing and get customized recommendations based on with those users like.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, it’s like social menu site, almost?

Justin Chen: It’s like a…

John Li: Pretty quite like it.

Justin Chen: Social community for eating out .

Benjamin Higginbotham: Alright, what’s the response been to Menuism?

Justin Chen: It has done pretty good. We’ve been opened since October and we started to self launch at that time and the traffic has been growing pretty good month-over -months. We are actually launching a food contest this month to restart the publicity for the site and it’s called the Menuism Pancake Food Fight. So, we are asking users in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and New York to come to the site and rate pancakes and restaurants up there that helps finding the Top 10 Pancakes in each of those cities.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are you gonna expand the contest to other things, I know Ed here is on a like Breakfast Burrito Expose in Minnesota or you can be adding other items to the contest or it’s just pancakes, right now?

Justin Chen: Definitely, I love Breakfast Burritos also so when I saw Ed's review,  I was really excited, but we decided to start pancakes to coincide with national pancake week , which is in February. February 18^th to 24^th , so we figured, we'd start with that obviously, but what we plan to do is every month launch a different food, so February will be Pancakes, March could be Breakfast Burritos, April could BLT's and so basically every month take a different food and ask the users to go and find that best one in their respective cities. So, we can really come up with the democratic top 10 list for each of those foods.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, speaking the cities, what are the some of the best food cities? Where are you getting the best response from?

John Li: So, we’ve been getting really good response in Chicago and Seattle where we are based. We also have been getting pretty good reviews in San Francisco and couple of good reviews in New York as well, but we have users spread out all over the country.

Justin Chen: Well it’s been pretty amazing that, just watching users who find our site organically or through word of mouth and joining adding restaurants in cities that we’d never expect and writing reviews and even entering menus now and then, so it’s so great to see it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, word of mouth that would be part of this social aspect of the website I assume, so how is that side of the site going?

Justin Chen: Exactly.

John Li: Pretty good, we have users inviting their friends on to the site to share their restaurants, their reviews and their favorite restaurants, people are blogging about it. I mean it’s only been a couple of months and we haven’t really pushed that hard in terms of publicity up until now, so the growth that we’ve seen has been just really surprising for us, just in terms of word of mouth through online traffic.

Justin Chen: I think people are enjoying the aspect of being able to keep a personal food journal of worthy now and that’s we are able to share that with their friends, be able to see what their other friends are eating and get a sense for “okay, I am not eating with them necessarily, but I can see what they are doing or what they like”. The other aspect of the food contest is that we are not only rewarding the top reviewer, with the top Pancake reviewer, but also whoever referred them, so you don’t know pancakes or you don’t like to eat out for breakfast, you can find, if you have a friend who loves pancakes. refer them through the site and you could win the exact same prize, if they were to win . So, we are trying to adjust a little bit more about socialness with this contest as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what’s that really great meal that you otherwise would not have eaten, that you have since eaten because of your website?

John Li: Now, are you asking for an endorsement of specific restaurant?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, it doesn’t have to be specific restaurant, but how about just a meal itself?

Justin Chen : That’s a tough one

John Li:- that is a pretty tough one. There is a fine Italian deli back out in Seattle that I had totally not heard of before, even though I lived, may be just 5 miles away from it, but thanks to a couple of users reviews on Menuism, I found about this urban market that was just served fantastic Italian Sandwiches and lamb too really good.

Justin Chen: Yeah, when I visited Seattle, John took me out there and after a couple of views that people are saying “oh, thanks to Menuism”, we found it and we wrote reviews and another people said “oh, that’s sounds a great place” they went there as well and it sounds like, it’s being discovered through the site and that’s what is exciting to see.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That feel like there is a natural fit here between, at the Dodgeball.com service, that Google has aquired and what you guys are doing. In that Dodgeball.com kind of lets your friends, your social network know what restaurants you're at, but you can kind of sort add reviews, but you don’t have a full access to their menu or anything else. So, it feels like there is a natural link there, has been any talks along those lines or at least try to incorporate some Dodgeball.com like features or you are just two totally separate entities? I realize you are different entities, but have you not even gone down that path?

John Li: We know that the mobile space is definitely a huge opportunity for a concept like Menuism.com and we’ve just been really focused on getting our core website up to speed with the features that users really like, but we definitely see ourselves focusing a lot more in the mobile space as time goes on and as we have the resource developing

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are you looking to become, right now you are in select cities, you are looking to become a national network or you just kind of gonna focus on these larger cities?

Justin Chen: We definitely do have ambitions to be at the national network, we are planning to incrementally roll out different cities as we launch food contest every month so, it might just before this month by end, another month or two probably we will be rolling it out in more and more cities as we gain traction in the cities that were standing in . So, we are actually right now we are open to any city in US and Canada as well, so if users want to go and start add a restaurant or write reviews or whatever they want to do on the site, they can do that.in all of US and Canada , but we will be focusing our marketing efforts incrementally in different cities.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well guys we think it’s really fun website, where we first noticed it at Tech cocktail 2, last year. We’ve been following you a little bit even since we saw your contest that went up recently and so just wanted to touch base and do the interview and get that idea out there for the masses.

Justin Chen: Yeah, thanks for that…

John Li: Hey, we really appreciate it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, thank you guys so much for your time.

Justin Chen: Okay, thank you.

John Li: Thanks.