Forget restaurants, find great food in Bangalore with HungerDrift

How many times do you go to an eat joint for the food that you get there? Yes, there are those who many argue that ambience, location, service etc matter a lot. But, what is the corner house without its death by chocolate? What is Pecos without its signature chicken steak? What is the Taste of Tibet without their juicy momos?

By and large, most of us go to a restaurant because for their signature dishes and that what HungerDrift is trying to work on. It is a food discovery platform, which lists of interesting food items in your locality. The content on the site is completely user generated and users can log into the platform using their Facebook ID.

HungerDrift is a 1985 product, which also made movie discovery platform, Couchpotato.be. I spoke with Prakash Raman, who shared some insights on the idea behind the product and where he wishes to take this from hereon -

A pivot... in a way

This isn't Prakash's first tryst with food. A few years ago, Prakash co-founded a food delivery service GrubSupply, which is no longer operational now, because it was operationally unfeasible. He says, "You could say we in a way pivoted this delivery idea to a food discovery platform, to build HungerDrift."

"There's so much food in Bangalore. It's a vast city and you possibly cannot find out all the food that is available to eat here. This is essentially the idea behind HungerDrift. We're restricting to Bangalore, because it's easier to scale in a locality you're in. We want people to see food and get them to vouch for it."

The platform is currently a listing of food items posted by the members of the platform. There are tags on the right hand side with which you can find foods - these are essentially categories like breakfast, lunch and also the kind of food, like soups, appitizers etc.

Here's a video describing the product -

Revenue model

With their previous idea, Couchpotato, Prakash shared that the product couldn't find sustainable revenue models without changing the intention of the product. This time around, Prakash is wary of this fact and shared that HungerDrift will be following an ad based revenue model. He says, "We'll be working on different kind of ad models, like on site or newsletter based."

Of course, such a model would require a large userbase and traffic, but Prakash remains optimistic about the initial response from the public beta the HungerDrift is currently running. It is still early days, but it will be interesting to see how users adopt this different solution to solving the same problem - finding great food.

There are some updates in the pipeline for HungerDrift, and we'll keep you posted. For now, try it out and tell us what you think.