Supporting Singapore's local F&B heroes with Saveournomnoms (powered by Tinvio)
Saveournomnoms is a movement that curates local F&B merchants in a single experience, allowing customers to easily search and browse for their favourite food outlets, and order directly from them.
The community initiative is powered by Tinvio, and the Refuel Team caught up with founder, Ajay, to find out more about the startup and its initiatives.
Powered by Tinvio
Many merchants still manage their orders with suppliers through calls and emails, which is generally a tedious and time-consuming process. Tinvio provides a chat-to-order mobile app that allows merchants to efficiently communicate with suppliers and manage their orders in a smarter way.
Ajay founded Tinvio in July 2019 while working with Rocket Internet's investment team. He evaluated a range of models in Europe that were trying to solve problems in traditional small-medium business procurement, and reflected that Asia probably had similar problems and would benefit from a lightweight solution. He designed and validated a few solutions with friends in the industry, and soon built Tinvio for Asia-Pacific. The company has since raised US$5.5 million in seed funding.
Prior to entrepreneurship, Ajay was an aspiring Astrophysicist, entering NUS with a double degree in Business and Physics. Though that changed when he was in Europe and noticed the popularity of city bicycle tours led by a mobile app. He loved the idea and decided to bring it back to Singapore. At just age 18, he learnt how to write a full business plan and pitched the idea to his father, who encouraged him to apply for startup competitions. He later went on to become one of the winners for the inaugural Young Entrepreneur Award by Canon and Mediacorp in 2010. He later pivoted from Physics to Business and Technology, and it has been a hybrid of finance, tech, and startups ever since.
Giving back to the community
The idea for Saveournomnoms was born when the team at Tinvio wanted to create something tangible to support local F&B merchants during the Circuit Breaker. They saw that merchants were facing difficulties sustaining their businesses, with most of their mainstream revenue transiting to purely takeout revenue. A significant proportion of their revenue also goes to food delivery service providers. The Tinvio team also recognised that it was hard for merchants to get visibility online, and they thus wanted to help the community of merchants to create an independent interaction with customers.
We were focused on growing as fast as possible but we decided to take a step back: let's not put all our team's effort into chasing growth. Now is the time to give back to our community.
One phone call and a weekend site-building marathon later, the first version of Saveournomnoms was released to the public and since then, the number of visitors has grown every day. The number of merchants on the platform has also grown steadily. The team is also constantly adding new features to the platform, such as the ability to directly order from the merchants and view menus directly on the site.
It is not our core product, but it is something we spend our nights and evenings working on, and every single day we implement new features to make it a better experience – for the community.
So, the next time you reach for a food delivery app to order food, perhaps try checking out Saveournomnoms, to support our Singaporean F&B heroes!
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