Click here to read the Spanish version.
Miguel Romay (La Coruña, 1997) studied Business Administration and Management, is Galician and likes to go out and try restaurants as much as he likes to imagine new forms of entrepreneurship. Merging the former, which he does for pleasure, and the latter, which he does for vocation, less than a year ago he decided to create Flambea from the business accelerator Lanzadera, in Valencia. Flambea is an application that works as a social network where you can find restaurants based on the opinions of people in your close circle. Your friends can also find restaurants thanks to the information you generate. We talked to him in the Tapas editorial office to tell us about his project and, incidentally, to give us his valuable opinion about his gastronomic tastes.
What is Flambea?
It is a social network for foodies, and what we want is that you can search for the ideal restaurant based on the opinions of friends. Those opinions that were lost in word of mouth are now collected. We seek to digitize that word of mouth so that we have that information of weight to decide the restaurant to go to eat.
How did the idea of creating this social network come up?
I saw an increase in gastronomic interest at a national level, people are very interested in chefs and food critics and I saw that there was a bias of reviews from strangers and, by not knowing these people, you lose that valuable information. The issue of fake reviews is also on everyone’s lips and I wanted to solve that problem by connecting to a network of foodies nearby.
Nowadays we invest a lot of money and time in getting to know restaurants, talking about them and giving our opinion. Are there many frustrated food critics?
I think so, and we all carry it a little inside us. This tool encourages that review, that valuation, which until now we have kept to ourselves, now we can put it in this application so that it reaches a circle of friends, family and be able to demonstrate the gastronomic knowledge we have.
How is the process of creating an application? What is your strategy?
There are more and more no code tools, which means that you can make a design without knowing how to code and with this, what you can do is start to see the reaction of the users and if they are interested in this type of tools before making the investment to start programming the application itself. That’s how we started, doing designs in tools like Sigma where we could walk a potential user through the flow of the application to see if they found it engaging and interesting. I think that with AI and all the technological advances we are experiencing, it is becoming easier and easier to develop those first betas that we can use to get started.
What resources do you have?
We have already developed the application and we have a developer that is necessary to carry out a project like this, but the team is very small and the resources are the minimum to be able to grow. Now the step we want to take is to be known and promote our tool in networks, advertising, and that the ordinary user begins to know Flambea, understand the utility and begin to be able to register and meet the community we have.
How do you monetize a technology company?
It is complicated to define the monetization model that we are going to have because in this topic you always see many possibilities and many ways of income. I think the key is to decide the monetization model that least affects the user experience, in the case of Flambea, that it is a free App and that advertising, which is something very recurrent especially at the beginning, is in the least aggressive way possible. To solve this we are partnering with Cover manager and other less invasive advertising models, such as the sponsorship of the application with load flows, which are sponsored by a brand linked to the hospitality industry, but that are not restaurants to avoid generating dissonance between the review that we want to give value and that the restaurant has interests.
How do restaurants intervene with Flambea?
We want to go hand in hand with restaurants, but we want to avoid what happens on other platforms where restaurants promote themselves and gain influence within Flambea, because the focus is lost. We want whoever enters Flambea to find the restaurant based on the opinions of their friends or close circle. That is the information that really has value in Flambea, not that one restaurant appears above another because it has been promoted. I think it is also in the restaurant’s interest that the diners who come to their restaurant come from a close recommendation and not from an advertisement, because then you find that dissonance when the diner arrives at the table and does not have what he expected.
You were talking about fake reviews earlier, how are you going to control it?
Part of the reason for fake reviews comes from anonymity. A person who hides their identity is more likely to leave a fake review because they won’t feel the consequences of generating that discord. But on Flambea you are connected to a community or friends. Someone in this situation has no interest in generating that fake review, because it will be seen by close circles and you are not going to bring them that value that the application really gives.
Do you have a system to control the contents that are published?
Yes, we have a reporting system within the community itself that warns you if there are any comments that are harmful to users and we remove them. But, for the moment, being a community very focused on the foodie theme, on the restaurant’s dishes, it is difficult for such content to generate discord. In other social networks, where the content is more open, I understand that it might have more problems.
Flambea has been around since September, how many users does it already have?
We are focused mainly in Madrid and we have about 5000 users and a constant traffic of 50% of them to the application on a monthly basis. We see that they start to understand the value of the application, that they start to generate these small communities among themselves and receive these recommendations among friends and family. That translates into reservations at the restaurant they recommend.
At the beginning it was very difficult to generate those first users and downloads, but as soon as we reached 2023, in February, we started to understand how to connect more with advertising and from networks and we started to have a more constant flow of downloads. We got 50 or 60% of the users in the last two months.
Looking at the app, it reminds a bit of Instagram and using it also reminds TripAdvisor or The Fork. What does the Flambea user find that they don’t have in these apps?
We are merging the social part of Instagram and purely gastro that TripAdvisor might have. Another thing that our users really like are the lists, like Spotify. By having a large number of restaurants, they can create or have lists by type of cuisine, city, etc. They are ready-made lists for when you want to make a decision.
How would you like the user experience in Flambea to be?
The ideal is that it continues as a form of inspiration for the user, that based on the recommendations of other friends you can scroll, as if you were on Instagram, and see the restaurants that your friends and family have visited, and that this is finally channeled into the decision making process, into the reservation. We want to integrate AI and e-learning tools so that each user receives recommendations that are more adapted to him and tools like the shuffle that Netflix has: when the user doesn’t know what he wants to watch, it recommends you based on your preferences. This can be a tool that we can add and, ultimately, translate into a better experience in the restaurant because the recommendations have been more reliable, more valuable and that the flow of the application itself will lead you to that.
Do you have videos, stories…?
No, at the moment it has only photos and we do plan to include video with vertical format. An experience with this format can be very attractive for our users. A video recorded by someone close to me, showing me each dish, will help me decide where to go for lunch or dinner.
It is an application for reviews and opinions, but the personal profile has a lot of weight, so I see possibilities that certain influencer profiles will start to be generated.
We’re seeing it. Many Instagram influencers are joining Flambea because they see a new opportunity to generate a community much more focused on the interests of foodies. There are many users who are starting to generate a significant amount of followers starting from that number of users we have, which at the moment are 5000, but they already have 500, 1000 followers.
What is the scenario in which you imagine Flambea in the medium term?
I am very interested that those people that I trust in their gastronomic tastes are inside. We are now going to integrate the map, an interactive map, where I can see where my close circle has been. We want to make sure that wherever I am, there is always a restaurant with a rating from someone close to me. So that I never have to decide a restaurant based on strangers or people I don’t trust.
Do you consider yourself a foodie?
I’m not a friend of anglicisms, but I do like to go out to dinner, enjoy experiences of all kinds, from a bar with a beer, some olives and torreznos and patatas bravas to more elaborate experiences. I love those kinds of experiences.
What kind of restaurants are the most successful in Flambea?
Mediterranean and Italian cuisine. It is no surprise, but even in small towns, although we are focused on Madrid, there are always reviews of Italian restaurants. They are a success and I would even say that they have a higher average than other types of cuisine. Also Asian cuisine, but I would say that Italian is the most popular along with Mediterranean.
You mentioned that you enjoy a lot in bars and taverns, are they, for you, the most successful in your evaluations?
This is one of the focuses we want to put on Flambea. I think other platforms are more focused on more chic and sophisticated restaurants, with a higher average ticket, and they are forgetting about those traditional bars, where you can have delicious tapas at a very good price. And I am noticing that in Flambea we are seeing a lot of reviews of that type of establishment.
How do you choose the restaurant you want to try?
Personally, I choose by a scroll within the social part, I see where my friends have been and then I always go to the restaurants part, when I click on each of the restaurants I get a breakdown with the ratings of my friends. I think that if five of my friends have been to one of these restaurants, which for example in Madrid are becoming fashionable, and all five of them have left a very good review, I click on the button to make a reservation. Even when the average of that restaurant on other platforms is lower, if I see that my friends have left a good review, I will trust the opinion of my friends more than the rest.
When you talk about your friends, are you talking about people you follow on the app, but don’t know personally, or are you talking about friends from non-digital life?
That is a part that we want to start integrating. Generate “soul mates” within the application, people who have the same tastes and start following each other because their ratings are going to be very useful for each of them. However, for the moment, we are focusing more on real-life, day-to-day friends, who we do know their gastronomic tastes. Each person who registers in the application synchronizes their cell phone contacts to follow their friends who are already in Flambea so that they can follow those valuable reviews from the very first moment.
You can love your friends very much and they can have lousy taste…
It is also useful to use it as a contrast. For example, you do not match the tastes of a friend who is also in the application and if he rates it badly you know a little that maybe you will like it or vice versa. Although it is normal to put the focus on those people who do have very good gastronomic taste and always go to see their publications to follow their experience in those restaurants.