Editor’s note: Today’s article comes from Daniel Kohanof, Co-founder, Biter. Daniel shares how Biter is using Google Maps Platform to help foodies find great restaurants based on recommendations from friends and food influencers.
The omnivore’s dilemma
If you’re a foodie like me, when your stomach starts to growl, the question you ask isn’t whether to go out to eat, but where. We developed Biter to make it easier to find a great restaurant — wherever you are, no matter what type of food you’re hankering for. And we used Google Maps Platform to make it easier and faster to build an accurate, trustworthy app.
Biter centralizes restaurant recommendations from your friends and favorite food influencers, and lets you record and share your own reviews of the places where you’ve eaten. If an article, photo, or video about food can be shared from its native location — whether that’s TikTok, YouTube, The Infatuation, or The New York Times — you can add it to your Biter hitlist or favorites. Then click a button, and Google Maps tells you how to find the restaurant, when it’s open, and how to reserve a table. You can even browse restaurants by neighborhood and cuisine and find out what the food’s like from people you follow and trust.
Users can select recommended restaurants from the map within the Biter app
Either way, Biter puts good food at your fingertips — even if you’re eating with a fork, knife, and spoon — by curating information about a restaurant from disparate sources automatically. No more hopping between social channels and food websites, hunting for bookmarks, or searching through texts from your foodie friends. When you’re really hungry, every minute counts, and Biter gets you to the perfect restaurant faster.
Technology, tools, and services for a two-man startup
As a small startup, we needed a platform with a powerful, geolocation-enabled search engine and maps that are accurate and serve up-to-date multimedia content so we didn’t have to build out that functionality ourselves. Google Maps Platform ticks all the boxes. It enabled us to develop and launch Biter in just four months because many of the baseline features the app requires already exist through Google Maps Platform.
The Places API powers the fundamental Biter user experience. That includes searching for nearby restaurants, displaying publicly available information about them, locating them on a map, and serving up the content on Biter about them. The network of restaurants available through the Places data is far more comprehensive than any we could purchase or develop ourselves, and Google Maps is updating in near real time because most restaurant owners actively manage their Google profiles.
To save time and cost, we wanted technology that would let us get up and running quickly, without building out a software development infrastructure. Biter’s backend is built exclusively on Google Cloud. The application’s code runs on Cloud Run, which provides automatic scaling, and its database and APIs are hosted on Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. After Biter users upload photos and share content from their favorite restaurants, they reside in Cloud Storage. This managed infrastructure has enabled us to focus on developing the app itself.
The community of Google partners has been key to Biter’s success. The app uses Google reCAPTCHA to reduce SMS fraud and pumping. When we discovered that reCAPTCHA tokens were being spoofed, we were able to turn to Google Premier Partner Woolpert Digital Innovations for help. There’s an art to leveraging Places API and other Google Cloud technologies, so it’s great to be able to reach out to them for expert advice as we continue to develop the app.
Offloading these backend services to Google has allowed me to focus entirely on developing the best user interface and user experience for the app, which maintains a 4.7 (out of 5.0) rating on the Apple App Store.
Users can view restaurant details, ratings, and recommendations
More than 100,000 downloads… and counting
Future Biter releases will incorporate in-app navigation so users can get directions to a restaurant without requiring them to leave the app to get directions. We’re also looking at a way to integrate Biter with other leading apps and services, so you could have the features no matter which app you’re in.
We’ll also be adding more food types, so you can find great bakeries, hole-in-the-wall take-out-only coffee shops, the hottest taco trucks, or even the bodega with the best deli counter in town. Because Google Maps Platform powers Biter, adding these features will involve straightforward refiltering programming for the Places API.
In the first six months after launch we logged over 100,000 downloads, with a 14-day retention rate of over 40% — far above industry standards. And Biter has already attracted more than half of the 25 largest food influencers and content creators, whose content appears automatically on Biter. We’re hoping to add even more in the coming months.
Whether you’re looking for Korean BBQ in San Francisco or Seoul, or the best paella in Pamplona or Pittsburgh, Biter can help you find the restaurant your friends and favorite influencers like the best. Without the comprehensive data included in Google Maps Platform and the speed with which we were able to integrate the platform into Biter, the app wouldn’t even be on the menu.
