Many review websites, such as Yelp, are based on the premise that the wisdom of the crowds can help a user to select from anywhere and everywhere purely through wading through ratings and reviews. However, it can certainly be the case that when making a selection, the user is looking to specifically avoid crowds, harkening back to the day when recommendations were started with a friend saying “I know this great little place…”

Greatlittleplace.com focuses on identifying locations where “charming and individual is the order of the day.” The company originated as an idea on Facebook to share ideas for spots in the London area, and quickly grew to provide charming choices in close to 50 global cities with around 250,000 followers. The founders point to the viral nature of the concept, content creation, and the catchy name for the explosive growth through only a year and a half of existence. In fact, the company was literally founded on the backs of their users, as the company crowd-sourced funds to start operations rather than approaching VCs or private investors from the start. The users, seeing the value in not having to wade through seas of reviews to find memorable places, quickly responded. However, as they look to take their rebellion against chain restaurants from simple Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, blogs, and a newsletter into a money-making endeavor, they face many challenges, not the least of which is expanding the user base across new markets. The new website will include some new features (geo-location, communities, events), but the brand itself is the only true differentiator.

One of the fundamental issues in growing to scale is that the company relies on co-creation but exists on the strength of its brand. Currently, the company’s website is continuing its organic growth and focused solely on the London area. Around 1% of their base makes suggestions for the next great little place, and the founders work closely to edit suggestions and provide color commentary around each location to protect the brand they have founded. Though the website continues to gain users, it needs to expand its reach outside of the London area in order to hit a mass big enough to monetize.

The other 40+ cities with a “I know this great little place…” group on Facebook are being led by volunteers. Without extensive knowledge of many of the markets, the company’s founders are relying on these selected volunteers to carry on the same charming criteria used for the London site. Since Facebook communities do not expect the same level of editing as a formal website, this model has worked to grow followers. However, the company faces the risk of distilling the brand and knows that it needs to bring on the global communities when it launches the formal website in January. Thus, a key portion of the new website design will be centered on an algorithm to ensure that a highlighted location is indeed a great little place.

Rather than rely on the masses like Yelp, the company will continue to verify each location to match its branding and user expectations. Currently, only 40% of suggestions make it to the site, but the selection process is very manual and the selection criteria are very qualitative. The founders are looking to mechanize the process of capturing user sentiment instead of user ratings. Since their website will be very binary (either the location makes the cut or it doesn’t), they are shying away from a star rating system leveraged by many other sites. Similar to Digg, they envision a holding area for suggested locations wherein a spectrum based rating system will allow users to comment on how memorable and charming they have found the location. In order to make the cut, a location will have to pass some hard metrics (such as a view to review ratio), as well as softer metrics (such as the tone and diction used in the comments). They clearly understand that the website is only as good as the locations it includes, but without knowledge of the entire globe, their very emotional brand is going to rely heavily on a very functional algorithm.

I love to cook. When I graduated from college, my mother bought me a KitchenAid mixer in pistachio green that still resides in my kitchen (and is regularly used for cookies, bread and other treats). I’ve been a Food Network devotee for years. And, I proudly consider myself to be an early adopter in the robust food blog world.

However, even I have been blown away from the recent proliferation of food-related online businesses offering to do everything from sourcing ingredients (Foodzie , Gilt Taste) to suggesting recipes (Foodily, Gojee) to organizing your shopping lists (Tasty Planner) to preparing meals for you (cookitfor.us, Gooble).

Don’t get me wrong; I love searching many of these sites and finding new recipes. In fact, despite my collection of cookbooks ranging from my grandmother’s hand-written recipes to Ferran Adria’s recent book, “The Family Meal,” I rarely open them to use a recipe. I prefer the online process, with more beautiful photos and detailed instructions than any static cookbook (at least that I’ve found) has managed to provide.

However, as a business student, I’m perplexed by the business models of many of these startups. There are natural opportunities to partner with major food companies for sponsored content and other advertising. Allrecipes (a grandfather in the field, having been founded in 1997) has done a good job with sponsored content, weaving company sponsored recipes (e.g., Hunts Lemon Tomato Chicken Pasta) with user-generated recipes for a robust search and suggestion platform. However, Allrecipes, purchased by Reader’s Digest Association in 2006 for $66M was recently put up for sale. My hunch is that the owner, whose print business has struggled in recent years, has likely had trouble monetizing the site beyond limited advertising and sponsorship.

What about other monetization opportunities? There could be a natural affiliate sales commission in selling ingredients for recipes, but I have two problems with this. First, many ingredients are perishable and don’t easily lend themselves to online purchasing and shipping. Secondly, many of the non-perishable ingredients are spices where you pay for a jar that may last for several years.

One area where I think there could be an opportunity is in moving these recipes from online to offline. There are many food bloggers who, having generated a strong following online, are creating an offline persona. Most notably, “Pioneer Woman,” Ree Drummond, turned her Oklahoma-based home cooking blog into a multiline business: her cookbook was at number one on Amazon’s Cooking, Food & Wine category before it debuted, her life story is being made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, and she now stars in a Food Network show. Tastebook has tried to systemize the blog to cookbook movement by selling make-your-own cookbooks based on compiling recipes from numerous food blogs and sites. However, as far as I can tell, their business hasn’t done extremely well, with traffic peaking at ~2M monthly visits to fewer than 250K this year.

Tech Cocktail recently suggested that 2011 might be the “year of the recipe.” But even if I wanted home-cooked meals three times a day every day of the year, this would still be only 1,095 meals. Allrecipes.com alone has recipes numbering into the millions. While I’m really interested in this market, unless I go viral as a food blogger, I don’t know exactly what the larger business opportunity means for me. However, it is an area that interests and continues to intrigue me as sites seem to be cloned repeatedly. How many recipes for Chicken Cacciatore do I really need?

Monday, October 3^rd I woke up to a distressing email: “Did you hear the news? We couldn’t be happier to announce that Menupages is becoming part of… Seamless!” As a loyal Menupages user, my first thought was panic – are they going to change my go-to restaurant site?

For a cool $15 million, on September 26^th Seamless, a leader in online food ordering, acquired Menupages, including its proprietary menu transcription technology and database of 35,000 restaurants and 175,000 reviews. Seamless + Menupages may make sense to Seamless, but what about me?!?

I thought about all of the things I loved about Menupages – the ability to find a restaurant in a specific neighborhood, using “find-a-food” to search for exactly what I’m craving, but the most important feature for me is vetting the restaurant by looking at user reviews.

I became hooked on Menupages while living in New York City. There are so many great restaurants to try, but I decided life was too short to waste dinner on a dinner that was less than fabulous. As a result, whenever I would make dinner plans with a friend, finding a restaurant would become my project… and mild distraction from work.

The process requires a balancing of standard variables, such as price and location, but also of more subjective measures, like how interesting is the menu (brie, goat cheese, fig preserve & caramelized onions on a pizza? Yes, please!) and do the reviews describe a place I want to go.

Yes, I pay attention to the number of stars – I like the granularity of the Menupages rating system between food, service, value and atmosphere – but I know that the rating alone will not always tell the whole story. If someone tried a restaurant hoping for a romantic evening but I’m in the mood for a fun night out with a group, a poor review might actually be a positive sign.

Which brings me to my current frustration with Menupages… Though I am clearly a big fan, outside of New York, the review feature hasn’t taken off. Sorting by number of reviews, a search for Italian restaurants in New York yields a restaurant with 198 reviews – more than 10 times the number for Los Angeles (15), Boston (18) and South Florida (18). As I’m currently living in Boston for school, the lack of inputs has severely limited my manual search algorithm.

 By combining the Seamless and Menupages networks, eventually I can tap into a bigger – and therefore better – community of reviewers. My momentary panic has been replaced by cautious optimism.

My caution stems from a note Jonathan Zabusky, CEO of Seamless, sent to his employees announcing the merger and espousing the grand opportunity it presents:

•  Greater breadth, depth and number of cities (and neighborhoods) will allow us to maintain and expand the most complete network of all-things-food that exists to more than 50 cities worldwide. The pairing of two great brands that are already intertwined into the fabric of urban life will create one premium brand: Seamless.
  

Ignoring the intense rhetoric, I still caution you, Mr. Zabusky, to think carefully about what you are providing and where you are providing it. One assertion in particular is troubling: 

• Full completion and closed-loop customer experience: Seamless was already the leader in online and mobile food delivery and pickup, but we were thinking even bigger—we wanted to be relevant for all restaurant meals. People use MenuPages to not only find restaurants for delivery or pickup, but also for sit-down dining experiences, a meal historically out-of-scope on Seamless. Now, Seamless can extend our offering and value-add to new and existing customers, clients and restaurant partners even further.

To me, this is treading into dangerous territory by mixing your customer groups… You must balance the legacy Seamless population – who only want to see restaurants that deliver in their area – with the legacy Menupages population – who often want a sit-down dining experience and don’t care about delivery speed. Without careful sorting mechanisms, these populations may frustrate each other and drive down the usefulness of the site.

Combining these two double sided networks arguably is a can’t miss opportunity: there are by definition more restaurants and more users than their were before. But, digging deeper, the profiles of the restaurants and users of Seamless and Menupages may be different enough that it can never become “the most complete network of all-things-food.”