Singapore’s Buffet Mania Ranked 2nd in App Store After 10 Days

Ravesquare, the brains behind Buffet Mania

I love food. I especially love Japanese buffets. So when I came across the Ravesquare team exhibiting at our StartUp Asia Singapore event last week, I had to find out more about their first product, Buffet Mania.

Buffet Mania, as the name suggests, aggregates all the buffets you can find in Singapore and lists them according to the type of cuisine — international, seafood, Japanese, etc. When you select a particular restaurant, it will then list all the relevant information such as the description, opening hours, pricing, and the current promotions that the restaurants are running.

Apart from listing the restaurants, they also have partner promotions running too. So instead of having to print out vouchers (which is environmentally-unfriendly), you just need to flash the promotion on your phone and instantly get the privileges. At present, they already have two merchants on board, Holiday Inn and Shin Tokyo, offering 50 and 55 percent for their buffets respectively.

The Ravesquare team was started by three NUS Overseas Colleges alumnus, Bryan, Henry and Meng Kiat. In the short chat we had, they also shared that within 10 days of their launch last December, they were ranked second in the Singapore App Store and first in the lifestyle section within their fourth day of launching Buffet Mania. They have clocked 31,000 downloads in the first 10 days and are well on the way to 100,000 downloads.

Meng Kiat, who is in charge of business development, humbly chalks it up to luck. He also added that they took advantage of the year-end festive season, the period where most people would gather and reminisce on good old times over food, to launch Buffet Mania. If you know Singaporeans, we tend bond well over food and enjoy buffets. So it is no wonder their servers crashed when they were hit by an overwhelming surge of downloads (don’t worry, they assured us they are constantly upgrading their servers).

One feature I appreciate is that the app recommends restaurants to visit when you’re spoilt for choice. All you need to do, is to shake your mobile phone and the Hungry Gorilla will randomly pick a restaurant for you. The Ravesquare team tells me that girls especially love this feature, I guess it’s because we girls tend to get a little indecisive sometimes — or at least, I do!

The app is still pretty new (just two months old), and in my opinion it lacks certain functionalities. Maybe it would be good to throw in search and location-based services, so people would be able to find restaurants that can fit according to their budget, cravings, and location. They could also allow more customization, such as allowing me to place the Japanese buffet places at the top row, so I can easily access the listings upon launching the app. But it’s certainly a great start, and a useful application.