Dining Buddy

Problem we are solving — Finding the right restaurant for a specific moment — a first date, dinner with in-laws, a birthday where half the table is vegan — is harder than it should be. Google Maps (including Ask Maps), Yelp, and Instagram all surface the same crowd-favourite spots and can't hold real context, so people default to the 20 places everyone already knows or burn twenty minutes scrolling before giving up. In a city with thousands of restaurants worth discovering, the long tail stays starved while the same few stay overcrowded. Dining Buddy makes discovery feel like asking a friend who actually knows the city.

Current traction — Pre-revenue by design — we're running a small invite-only beta to validate retention before opening publicly and turning on monetization. Where we are today: - Live in production at diningbuddy.ca with full conversational search across the GTA. - ~25 active users in the current waitlist cohort. - About half of them returning twice a week — a strong retention shape for a consumer discovery product this early. - Hardening the product ahead of a public launch later this year. The retention signal is what I'm watching most closely, which is why we kept the beta small and gated instead of chasing top-of-funnel.

Founder: Shayon Pal · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayonpal/

Finding the right restaurant for a specific moment — a first date, dinner with in-laws, a birthday where half the table is vegan — is harder than it should be. Google Maps (including Ask Maps), Yelp, and Instagram all surface the same crowd-favourite spots and can't hold real context, so people default to the 20 places everyone already knows or burn twenty minutes scrolling before giving up. In a city with thousands of restaurants worth discovering, the long tail stays starved while the same few stay overcrowded. Dining Buddy makes discovery feel like asking a friend who actually knows the city.