Nom nom nom...

When I wake up (around noon like the typical college student), the first thing that I usually ask myself is "What should I eat?" Living in the bay area as opposed to rural Urbana-Champaign, IL, a college town where some of my friends live, I have lots of choices when it comes to food. However, as a universal food-lover, it sometimes becomes quite difficult to actually make a decision. Sometimes the food is really good, but too far to walk to for the price that I have to pay. It's a difficult decision process to go through to find the restaurant that costs appropriately for the time it takes to get there and for the quality of the food.

However, a local startup that I've been working on called Munch On Me, will hopefully be launching very soon to help me with this decision. I personally describe it as a fusion of the best of Groupon, Yelp, and Foursquare. Every week, Munch On Me features up to 4 dishes / appetizers / drinks / desserts / etc. from certain featured merchants often at greatly reduced prices. Munch On Me aims to connect good food with great people while keeping everyone happy. Initially, the restaurants that are featured are also typically higher rated on Yelp so that users can be introduced to the best dishes of the best restaurants around them. Unlike many group-buying sites, there is no "tipping-point," and you can redeem your featured offer instantly with just a code, email, or name presented to the merchant! Merchants will also be able to push deals out on a deal feed that will be constantly updated with new deals for users to take advantage of when they are craving some pho, sushi, boba, etc. To keep up with all the "gaming" that is out there, Munch On Me also has an established achievements system for users to level up and gain badges in a competition to become the top Muncher. Who knew eating food could be a combination of cheap, fun, and yummy all at the same time??

I've been one of the original developers on the team since the startup idea was started by the CEO Jason Wang, a Berkeley alumnus, and it's always exciting to be working on a project like this that could impact how we go about our everyday lives. This semester has been crazy working on my Bounty Hunter game that I mentioned in my last blog as well as Munch On Me. I really hope it all pays off in the end. It's even more interesting taking College Writing 108 simultaneously and seeing how Munch On Me applies many of the same things we talked about in class in order to promote the business. Munch On Me has a Facebook page as well as a Twitter page that it's been trying to use to spread the word as a hyper-marketing technique. Munch On Me also incorporated some gaming elements to hopefully make the experience more addicting (although inexpensive food itself can already be quite addicting to many college students).

Although the current site at www.munchonme.com is still just a coming soon page, I really can't wait for the launch of this site. I hope that a lot of people give the service a go, hopefully not being too harsh on one of my first attempts at creating a new business. Just like our catch-phrase says, it's time to "get your nom on!"