The desire to provide Perth foodies with more informative restaurant reviews drove Joel Hubble to establish his online restaurant guide, eatingWA, four years ago.
The desire to provide Perth foodies with more informative restaurant reviews drove Joel Hubble to establish his online restaurant guide, eatingWA, four years ago.
Now, with more than 20,000 members and counting, eatingWA publishes information on nearly all 3,000 Perth restaurants and allows the restaurants themselves to make regular updates to their profiles.
About 30 reviews, both good and bad, are added to the site each day from either first time or regular reviewers, with restaurateurs able to publicly respond to reviews on the site.
Starting the online business aged 21 for a bit of fun, Mr Hubble, a former marketing coordinator at a major food company, left his fulltime job shortly after to dedicate himself full time to the business.
Beginning with a text-only version, the website has since undergone a number of upgrades, and now receives between 1,500 and 2,000 visitors each day from Google alone.
Mr Hubble said he felt the local market was being under-serviced in this area.
He believes some online restaurant guides avoid public reviews to protect their commercial interests and relationships with some of the restaurants, which influenced the types of reviews that were being published.
“We do read the reviews before we approve them. We make sure nothing over the top goes on the site,” Mr Hubble said.
In keeping with the noncommercial model of the business, the site has no paid advertising.
Instead, it has a series of preferred suppliers, including a national beverage company, and corporate partners, such as the RAC.
Mr Hubble believes the growth of the site has come through its practice of building a strong community base before leveraging off the member base and relationships with restaurateurs.
The strategy has paid off, with the relationship building over the past four years having allowed eatingWA to branch out into other revenue-generating areas, including events and a VIP card, which allows members to benefit from discounts at certain restaurants.
The website has also garnered strong backing from the restaurateurs themselves, who have thrown their support behind its various initiatives.
“Build community base first. Don’t try and cash in too early. Major companies want to see numbers and members,” Mr Hubble said.
“Build popularity first and make sure you’re helping the public.” Building on the success of the eatingWA site, the business is now preparing to go Australia-wide with the launch its national website in the next couple of weeks.
With a customised site for each state, the phased national rollout will eventually lead to the absorption of the eatingWA.com.au site into a centralised portal under the domain name Ozeating .com.au.
The site will maintain its look and feel, as well as its business model, with a different site for each state.
The business is looking to further expand into online bookings later on for the Australian site.
The business is also eyeing the UK as its first foray into the international market, and is looking at the prospect of starting up a similar site to service the UK.
Mr Hubble said the business would probably launch into that market with a focus on online bookings, a concept that’s more established overseas than in Australia.
