Vancouver natives Nathan Pryor and David Shireman were tired of spending precious lunchtime minutes trying to decide where to dine. Trying to coordinate several peoples’ tastes and schedules was tiresome and downright boring.
The friends met in 2000 working at Vancouver-based HOSTS Learning Corp., and to solve their near-daily dilemma, Pryor developed a simple, web-based program to do the work for them.
“We thought, ‘Couldn’t we have someone just decide for us?’” Shireman said. “The Internet does everything else for you.”
The site, which they’ve since refined and made available to public at NIBLZ.com, allows one user to invite friends out to eat electronically.
The user chooses several local restaurants from a database, sets a date and time, then the site emails selected lunch pals, who vote on where they’d like to dine.
The event planner also gets a vote, and when voting closes, the site tallies the votes and emails each attendee the “winning” restaurant.
Voila! A lunch date.
Pryor and Shireman designed the site to be extremely intuitive and filled it with humorous, down-to-earth dialogue and direction.
“The whole idea is to make it easier than doing it yourself,” Shireman said. “It’s like Myspace for people who actually want to do things in the real world.”
To be sure of its workability, the men tested it on Shireman’s 76-year-old mother, who found immediate success.
“We thought we were developing the site for people who use the Internet to schedule their lives anyway,” Shireman said. “But we’re finding that everyone who uses the site or who we talk to thinks we designed it for them and their group of people.”
Both men have since left HOSTS Learning. Pryor runs his own design studio, Vancouver-based YellowHat Studios, and Shireman is an independent education consultant now living in Clackamas, but most of his work is in the Vancouver area.
It would have been just as easy to launch the site directed at Portland, a seemingly endless wealth of restaurants, but the men opted against it.
“Vancouver is what we know,” Pryor said. “It’s where we work, where we eat, so this way is much more useful for us.”
After years of talking about making the site public, they officially launched the site on April Fool’s Day. They have invested less than $10,000 in the venture, not including their time.
Pryor and Shireman have not been keeping track of the number of hits the site has received.
They have, however, been getting plenty of positive feedback, as well as many suggestions for improvement, and much of that feedback is being incorporated into the site.
Plans for the near future include user reviews of restaurants and letting dining invitees vote on the day and time of an event.
The site isn’t profit-driven — Pryor and Shireman have kept their day jobs for now — but they are hoping to offer advertising to restaurants in a way that is useful to users. But advertising most likely will not be in the form of traditional banner ads across the top of a page.
Restaurants may be able to buy placement on a list, logos or a link to their sites.
“We totally don’t mind profits at all, we just don’t want anything to get in the way of the user experience,” Shireman said. “If it becomes a hassle to use, the whole purpose is defeated.”
Shireman said the target marketing will be ideal for restaurants.
“Once you’re at that voting site, users are more than likely going to eat at one of those places,” he said.
The men also said they hope to give local restaurants feedback from data on the site that could be useful. For instance, if Pryor and Shireman notice that Restaurant A is constantly losing out in the voting to Restaurant B, that could be particularly useful to both restaurants in terms of their own advertising, they said.
Neither would mind if the site becomes a full-time job, but for now, they’re focusing on creating a presence in Vancouver.
And believe it or not, Pryor and Shireman said they are having trouble keeping it local.
The way it is designed, the site spreads itself.
Friends and acquaintances across the river and across the state have started using it, but Pryor and Shireman said they’re not ready for expansion at this point.
They are still adding restaurants to Vancouver’s database, and haven’t yet started looking at other areas.
“We want this to be the right site for the people using it,” Pryor said. “We want it to get really strong locally and then branch out.”
And what about the name?
It took Pryor and Shireman months to find a web address that isn’t already in use.
They tried every real-word combination relating to food they could think of, then one night NIBLZ.com struck Pryor.
“I called David and said, ‘I found something that’s not taken!’”
The rest is history.
