These ex-Googlers look to disrupt Google Maps’ food reviews

Pieter-Paul Walraven was working on Google’s GPay product when a vice president at Google Maps – a team he closely worked with – told him something surprising: Younger people don’t read or write restaurant reviews anymore.

Further research showed him that innovation “has almost completely stalled” since Yelp’s launch in 2004.

“Meanwhile, mobile phones happened. We evolved from text, to photos, to videos. Creators arrived. And now we’re witnessing the dawn of AI,” he tells Tech in Asia. “It’s baffling that we’ve been stuck in a vacuum of boringness 15 years after Foursquare left the stage.”

Walraven teamed up with GPay colleagues Meiwin Fu and Zihui Chen to found Drigmo, which Walraven describes as “the next social platform around restaurants.”

Founders Zihui Chen, Pieter-Paul Walraven, and Meiwin Fu / Photo credit: Drigmo

Fu and Chen were both engineers at Pie, a startup Walraven co-founded that Google acquired in 2016. In 2022, all three left Google and in March this year, they announced the launch of the Drigmo app through TikTok.

It promptly reached the top five in the Singapore App Store’s food & drinks category. Drigmo’s servers crashed.

“So far people have saved over 40,000 places and created over 15,000 tags,” says Walraven, who serves as CEO. “Our focus will continue to be on Singapore, where the majority of our users are from, but the app has gotten promising organic interest from other countries too.”

Friends don’t lie

Drigmo is an anagram of a Frenchman’s first name. Grimod de la Reynière was a lawyer from Napoleonic times who wrote L’Almanach des Gourmands, purportedly the world’s first restaurant guide.

That’s what the Drigmo team is recreating – except with 2023 sensibilities.

The team studied “hundreds” of restaurant lists created by amateur but passionate foodies. These lists are mainly in the form of Excel spreadsheets or notes, but others keep them as screenshots, in social media direct messages, or even in open tabs on a browser.

Some lists are shared widely – way beyond the original creator’s original social circle – while others are made collaboratively between couples, friends, or co-workers.

“We found that the personal and social aspect of list keeping makes people add mostly the places they love and recommend. This makes restaurant lists positive and truthful by default,” Walraven says. “This is how Drigmo’s tagline came about: ‘your Spotify playlist for your restaurants.’”

The app is relatively straightforward. Users can add specific restaurants to “to-try,” “been to,” and “favorite” lists. They can not only see the locations on a map, but also add tags, pictures, and videos. The app also comes with Pinterest-like features of checking and saving friends’ lists.

A niche product or something more?