BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — YoRipe
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to Xinyan, the co-founder of YoRipe, Asia’s first social mobile app for smart food management.
- What is YoRipe’s secret sauce?
YoRipe is different thanks to its receipt scanning capability which allows users to take a picture of their receipt to log items into their account. They get an inventory list and expiry date for each item on their phone as well as receive reminders before the food goes bad. We also believe that food is inherently social and brings people together, so we use crowd-sourcing for shoppers to discover the best deals and a platform for you to share your food surplus. Ultimately, we want to make households’ lives easier and help families to reduce food waste naturally.
2. What are some of the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
YoRipe is halfway through its beta-testing and we’ve been working really hard to determine the next features to test and how to build them in the most time and cost efficient way. We started off as a smart food management app to help families reduce food waste easily, but we realized that simply providing information on food inventory and shelf life reminder are not enough. We want to do more and use food to bring people together and do something good for the community. So we thought about integrating chat function where users can exchange information and build trust before they start to share food surplus. I immediately went to speak to our neighbor in the office, Vouch, which builds chatbots. The co-founders gave me great advice and showed me their chat widget that I could integrate to YoRipe mobile app. This would save us precious time from building the chat function from scratch.
3. What’s next for YoRipe?
YoRipe’s next milestone is to raise funds and I was introduced to the NUS Enterprise investment team. We’re also looking for a tech co-founder with data science background, hopefully we’ll meet someone in the eco-system!
YoRipe is building its team and continuing beta testing. The beta app is available on the Google Play Store and App Store. Please download it and try it today!
Watch the full interview with Xinyan from YoRipe here:
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If you are inspired by this story and have a start-up idea of your own, you can also apply to join the BLOCK71 ecosystem at http://bit.ly/BLOCK71SGApply !
