FireUp March 2017 — Meet the Hiring Partners: elmenus
We all grew up having this drawer or stack of menus that we used everytime we wanted to decide on what to eat. However, now we all tend to go online and type the restuarant name and “elmenus” to get the menu we are looking for! We are glad to have elmenus as one of our hiring partners, a startup that aspires to change the way we experience food.
Following our initiative to present our hiring partners for FireUp March 2017 as we mentioned here. We talked to elmenues to know more about their product and company and what kind of tech talents they are looking for
When did it all start?
2011
So what motivated you to start elmenus?
I wanted to solve a problem I was facing and affected all the people around me. Discovering great food. You always know a couple of familiar restaurants around you but not necessarily the best ones. When you get inspired to discover new food and places, it becomes a way of life and you stop settling for mundane options generally.
How did it start?
I started by leaving my previous corporate job, ran around collecting menus from restaurants and building the website which took around 9 months during the revolution period. We spread virally, hustled to get our first customer and now we’re at 1 Million monthly users.elmenus believes every dining decision should be a social, visual and personalized experience to discover and order the food you will love.
So what does the platform actually do?
We gather comprehensive information about restaurants, we collect menus and information about restaurants through our content team and on foot collection agents, we update this info on regular basis. Those menus get digitized to make all dishes searchable and enable users to rate specific dishes. The platform engages a foodie community to share photos and reviews of their best food finds. With all this data we are able to run machine learning algorithms to learn about users’ tastes and recommend food personalized to them. This is the foundation of our solution to keep the platform social, visual and personalized which we believe are cornerstones of any good dining decision.
Tell us more about your clients?
Our clients are restaurants of all sizes we help them accurately target their ads to the users who are most likely to order from them. We also provide them with data to help them make better decisions to improve their business and customer experience.
We have over 150 clients and 5000 restaurants listed. Some of our clients include: McDonalds, Burger King, Mori Sushi and Mince.
Tell us more about your team
We are 20, development team is 8. We are forecasting to reach 70+ employees at the end of the year as we are expanding rapidly in the coming period. We are looking to hire Full Stack Engineers, Backend, Frontend, Data Scientists and iOS/Android Engineers in the coming period.
Any words of advice to our soon to be Web Developers from FireUp?
To try out technologies they are learning in solving real world problems of their choosing (maybe some startup’s problem) and to always remember that technologies are used to create impact in the real world in a more efficient reliable manner, they’re not just additional tools to your arsenal.
There’s a huge difference between stating on your CV that you know 10+ technologies and that you actually used them to develop an app being used by millions of users and learned what actually works and what doesn’t in products targeted to solve real problems.
