The story appears on

Page A12

July 23, 2016

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Feature

A user-friendly restaurant guide for expat community

THREE years ago, Stone Shi, then a marketing manager, struggled to find good, recommendable restaurants in Shanghai and made up his mind to launch a catering app to benefit the ever-growing expat community here.

“Existing food apps annoy users with spams and ads, sometimes introducing fakes, and celebrities don’t necessarily guarantee the food they advertise is that good,” says Shi, 38.

He felt there was a great need for high-quality dining apps for foodies like himself who are willing to pay for fine dining. So he developed Bon App, initially called IndulgeSmart.

Born and raised in Sichuan Province, Shi went to the United States in 2000 and lived there for 10 years, earning a master’s degree from Texas A&M University, working briefly in Silicon Valley and receiving his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

While doing a summer internship in Shanghai in 2009, Shi decided to return to China to start his career. He was hired by CSR Plc in 2010 to work as a senior product marketing manager in Shanghai. Having acquired enough experiences and marketing strategies, he thought it’s time to start his own business.

The young man is amazed by the variety of food available in the city. “I think Shanghai is really a special city in China and a melting pot of different cultures. People here are from diverse backgrounds. They are more cosmopolitan and care more about the quality of living,” he says.

Since most dining apps, such as Dianping, provide restaurant information and reviews only in Chinese, Bon App fills the void with English content. Every restaurant included in Bon App has a Chinese sentence for the taxi driver: “Please take me to …,” which is very handy for expats who don’t speak Chinese.

Offline events

Shi hopes to create a community by organizing offline events through Bon App.

The “Meet” function in the app allows users to attend food events or hold their own food parties. Bon App organized the second Foodies Unite event in Shanghai last month, attracting around 4,800 participants.

“I can easily buy a ticket to an event I like via my phone and Alipay. I can find out who’s coming from the guest list. New people I meet there will have a tag ‘met through … event’ in Bon App. It helps you recall them. I go to these events a lot and have met many interesting people. We now get to know each other well,” he says.

In the future, Bon App users will be able to hold their own events without submitting a request first.

The algorithm for restaurant rating on Bon App is simple but powerful. If 20 people review a restaurant and 15 click “I like it,” a score of 75 percent can be seen immediately. Every restaurant needs at least five votes for either “I like it” or “I don’t” to obtain a score.

Bon App is carefully filtering out spam comments. If the comment is too short or useless, such as “haha,” it will not enter the database and will be hidden from other users. In the beginning, restaurants complained about bad reviews and requested to take them down. “Sometimes they (restaurants) got pissed off. But once we set the rules, they all had to follow,” Shi says.

Instead of being just a search engine for restaurants, Bon App also tries to be a promoter of good restaurants.

“As we like to go to a restaurant recommended by a friend on WeChat, Bon App wants to be your professional guide,” Shi adds.

Nick, from Australia, who works as a bartender in Shanghai, says he found Bon App great because “it not only introduces me to places I have never been to, but also shows me the map, the Metro stop and a printout for the taxi driver.”

Anna, a foreign student in Shanghai, is impressed with the easy use of Bon App but also hopes it can provide more affordable options. “I noticed the selection of restaurants on Bon App is based more on fine dining and Western food. It offers few small eateries where I can get a quick bite of inexpensive, local food.”

To get more people involved in the listing work, Bon App regularly selects “Power Users” to attend the monthly meet-up in a popular restaurant.

“It’s not easy to become a Power User. We are quite strict on this. But once you become one, you get invited to a free meal in a good restaurant every month,” says Shi. “We are building a community to share common interest in food and do things beyond food.”

Bon App will soon cover Beijing and Singapore. “Coming to Beijing is a great opportunity,” Shi says.

As the Chinese saying goes, “food is utmost important for people,” Bon App is driven by the need for quality food and fine dining as it spreads to other Chinese cities.

Foodies from different countries will benefit from its guide and help build its network and community.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend