Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Kevin Leneway
“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone” – William James
Last week I was working checking Twitter when I saw the following message come through from fellow Seattle 2.0 contributor Danielle Morrill:
Later in the day, while I was working reading the latest issue of Wired, I saw the following entry for #3 on this month’s playlist:
Urbanspoon – Being the designated restaurant picker is a pain. Let this free iPhone app do the work for you. Find your location via GPS, lock in a cuisine and price range (or don’t), and shake the phone to spin the slot-machine-like wheels. An eatery’ll pop up, with reviews and maps. It’s not exactly democratic, but at least you can blame fate if Murray’s Curry doesn’t please every palate.
OK, universe, I can take a hint – apparently Urbanspoon should be the next startup to profile for the Seattle 2.0 blog. I put down the magazine, headed to my computer, and jumped online to shoot Danielle a mail asking for an intro to the Urbanspoon guys. Instead, I saw this:
Hi Kevin,
I’d like to introduce you to Patrick from Urbanspoon in the hopes that you two will connect and we’ll see a feature of Urbanspoon in the Seattle 2.0 blog in the future. Patrick gave a demo of the Urbanspoon iPhone app today at Mobile Northwest 2008 and, as usual, there were many “wow”s from the crowd.
http://www.urbanspoon.com
I’m sure the two of you can take it from there.
Best,
Danielle Morrill
“Fate, John, is a fickle bitch” – Benjamin Linus, Lost
A few days later, I met up with Patrick O’Donnell at Le Fournil on Eastlake (with directions pulled from Urbanspoon, of course). Patrick is one of the three founders of the site, along with friends and fellow ex-Jobster employees Ethan Lowry and Adam Doppelt, who came up with the idea back in 2006 to become a sort of “Rotten Tomatoes for Restaurants”. At it’s core, the site pulls in restaurant reviews from professional reviewers, food bloggers, and users to create a drop-dead simple restaurant search and discovery engine. During the first year and a half, the site grew at a steady pace, gradually expanding out to over 70 cities worldwide.
Then, in the spring of 2008, the team decided to take a shot at creating an app for the soon-to-launch iPhone store. After seeing the success of the initial wave of apps for the Facebook platform and predicting the vast amounts of marketing buzz that Apple would generate for this launch, the team started brainstorming during lunch one day and came up with the concept of shaking the phone so hard that a restaurant recommendation would pop out of it. The idea of a slot-machine-styled app that would use the GPS to find local restaurants by neighborhood, genre, and price started to come together, and after a few weeks of development they had their app ready in time for the launch.
“Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.” – Groucho Marx
As expected, the launch wave was huge and the Urbanspoon app was in a perfect position to take advantage of it. Following favorable reviews from Macworld, TechCrunch, and even the New York Times, the free app racked up 300,000 downloads and over 6,000,000 shakes within the first 10 days. As of last week, the app had been installed on over 800,000 devices. Which, for a three-man bootstrapped startup, begs the following question: Are you guys kicking yourselves for giving this thing away for free?
“Yeah, we think about that sometimes”, said Patrick with a smile, “but at the end of the day I think we made the right decision.”
