Nabeel Alamgir, co-creator of FoodFriends
Nabeel Alamgir, CEO of Lunchbox, an online ordering and guest engagement system, experiences one emotion nearly every time he gets on a plane after a work trip: regret.
“I travel every week, half the time to conferences. When I leave I think on the flight back home, crap, I should have looked up this person who lives in that area. I should have pinged that person before I left. But it’s hard to do. It’s hard to keep track of everyone,” he said in an interview. “That’s why we built FoodFriends, to bring the community together. With the app you can look up who in your network is in the area when you go somewhere. It’s easy and it’s free to sign up.”
It’s LinkedIn meets Meetup for the restaurant crowd. And so far, after just a short while of being live, it’s becoming popular.
“We have more than 300 executives on the site already,” Alamgir said. “Big-timers.”
Alamgir boasts that he and co-founder Shadman Rakib conceived and designed the platform in just 21 days, which he hopes sends a message to the industry that “not everything takes a year to build.”
It takes about 30 seconds to become part of the findable community. Just head over to FoodFriends. Create a profile. Be prepared to enter your name, photo, title, and city. And voila. You’re in. Next time you visit a city for an event, check the app and it will tell you who is there. The next step is up to you.
“This is just something fun for the community to stay connected, which is a real problem. Is it the biggest problem in the world? No. But it’s a problem. And we think this will help,” Alamgir said.
