Given the surge of interest in slow food, local food, farmers' markets and quality, independently-produced regional food, a killer app for this delicious corner of the apps market was inevitable. Mark Spofforth and Geoff Tidey founded Lovefre.sh to make good local food easier to find, promote and to share, making its iPhone app live on Valentine's Day this year.
28,000 downloads later, and several thousand more on their Blackberry, Android, Nokia and Windows Phone 7 compatible web app, Lovefre.sh is brewing some promising partnerships and, with some skillful promotion by Christian Payne, tackled SXSW as one of three startups out to promote good food.
Now with five staff and still entirely self-funded by Spofforth and Tidey, Lovefre.sh has comments, favourites and personal networks are all on the to-do list. Its mission, said Spofforth, is making food social. This time next year, Lovefre.sh is aiming for 1,000 paying subscribers, and he tells us how the site will make that happen.
• What's your pitch?
"Lovefre.sh is a location-based service which connects you with great local produce and the people behind it. Discover the food and drink around you, check-in and tell your local food story in pictures and audio, and share with friends on Twitter and Facebook. "We connect food producers with their communities and allow positive communication. We aim to create a network that sees the positive benefits of shopping locally and drives local food economies. You gain points for checking in at a producers premises, which can earn you rewards and which reflect your benefit to your community."
• How do you make money?
"Transparently. Organically. Honestly. We are soon to launch our PROducer package for farmers, vinters, artisans, producers and local food and drink businesses. They pay a £10 a month subscription for software as a service.
"We are strictly advert free and there are no additional charges. We do not get involved in sales, and we will not take money to promote businesses in any way.
We provide tools that encourage local food economies to grow, and using tools that will provide as much utility to users are they do to producers. We plan to develop a full API and will consider any appropriate, transparent and genuinely user-focused monetisation opportunities that may arise through it."
• How are you surviving the downturn?
"We're bootstrapped and have been building Lovefre.sh for seven months. We're used to living off our passionate belief in what we're doing... or rather, we're all really skint and very keen to talk to investors."
• What's your background?
"I have a degree in psychological science, followed up with 15 years negotiating in the London insurance market. Geoff is a computer science graduate, and has given up a career designing and building software for Satellite Information Services. He taught himself Ruby and Objective C from scratch, then built the iPhone and HTML5 web apps in less than 6 months."
• What makes your business unique?
"We're driven by real belief in our product - or rather, the great food and drink we hope to find with it. By rethinking the directory and choosing people power and simplicity over scraped data and novelty gaming mechanics, we think we're pretty unique. Data scraped directory based location services are fundamentally flawed and we think we have a better way."
• What has been your biggest achievement so far?
"Apple featuring us on iTunes on day 3 was heartening."
• Who in the tech business inspires you?
"Anyone who keeps things simple and puts users and usefulness first. We think 37 Signals are pretty cool and we manage our dispersed office via Basecamp."
• What is your biggest challenge?
"Building scale to provide a truly compelling almost live, rich media landscape of the world's food. We need users checking in with photos and audio - they make the service work at its potential, and we're not sure how quickly this will happen."
• What's the most important web tool that you use every day?
"Twitter, without a doubt. It connects us with such rich diversity, daily."
• Name your closest competitors
"TheCompanies like Foodspotting and Fiddme focus on located cooked food - a shared stream of photos - but take an unfocussed 'anyfood' approach. Gowalla and Foursquare have lots of location based bells and whistles - badges and mayorships, but frankly go over our heads as to usefulness."
• Where do you want to be in five years?
"On every single mobile phone, enabling positive food change and empowering communities towards sustainability and great local food and drink."
• Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google?
"Neither. Having started Lovefre.sh to do things 'our' way, selling to Google is not in prospect - besides, when we say ad free, we mean it, and that kind of talk gets you kicked out of Silicon Valley. It's Google's very size that makes them miss the mark so often these days."
