Wongnai: how Thailand’s Yelp is spending its series A investment

Back in May, we reported that Wongnai, a Thailand-based restaurant review startup, received a Series A financing round from Japan’s Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP), a subsidiary of Recruit Holding in Japan, although the amount was undisclosed.

Recently, Tech in Asia sat down with Wongnai CEO and co-founder Yod Chinsupakul and talked about how he has spent and plans to spend the investment. Yod commented:

We want to added more staffs. We currently have about 16 people in the team and plan to hire up to 23 by the end of this year. We’ve just also opened Wongnai Chiang Mai office. There are four people there at the beginning who mainly work on sales and marketing.

Besides Chiangmai, Wongnai is also looking for more locations. It’s considering Khonkae, Phuket, and Pattaya. But it wants to wait to see how Chiangmai goes first before expanding more.

So far, so good

Last time we talked to Yod, Wongmai boasted more than 500,000 downloads on the iTunes App Store and a database of 110,000 restaurants in Thailand. Three months passed, and it now has 700,000 members with around a 20 to 30 percent rate of active users per month. Now 120,000 restaurants are in the database.Yod expects Wongnai to reach 1 million users by the end of the year. He explained:

We collect stats on when users sign up. It shows that during festive times such as holidays, weekends, New Year, etc., more people sign up.

When asked about adding more revenue on the ad side, Yod commented:

Some of the restaurant owners are still into traditional media, so spending in this side is not their interest. It’s also not our goal to make money from them since our business model doesn’t support that many partners anyway. So we want to expand the foundation. The main goal now is to expand users and reviews.

Other types of partners

Thai Telco AIS offers AIS Guide and Go, an offline naviation app for AIS subscribers. It shows AIS customer loyalty perks nearby, current traffic, friends’ check-ins, etc. The new version, with Wongnai partnership, allows users to see restaurant reviews from Wongnai, which, in return, also uses the AIS Guide and Go to lead users to the restaurant location. They just extended the partnership contract to February of next year.

Besides AIS, Wongnai also works with Samsung Thailand. Wongnai created a white label app for Samsung. The Galaxy Eat Out app is preloaded onto each Galaxy S4 sold in Thailand and uses Wongnai’s database.

Gamification

Competitors

Wongnai’s future?