Crave It 2021 Review: Building a Bold and Connected Community

2021 was a very exciting year for Crave It. We built a community and connected over 3,000 food lovers across the U.S and beyond. I’m excited to share with you where we started the year, our key learnings, wins, and where we’re going in 2022.

The food space today is disjointed and impersonal. To combat this, our focus at the beginning of 2021 was to lean into building a strong community of food lovers and a brand the food community trusted. We saw a massive untapped opportunity to create a space that connects people through the food they love in an authentic way.

Our mission of creating community through the shared love and celebration of food shaped the core of the community-driven platform we are today and helped tackle the central problem that we’re solving- creating a central hub to find what and where to eat all in a streamlined way.

Forming Our Community

At the beginning of 2021, our community consisted of an organic social following of 5,000 people that had no food app to play with but genuine curiosity for what we were building. As Crave It continued to build momentum across social and on-board food lovers to our invite-only beta we found our hypothesis was right. People that loved food were looking for a single place to connect with others who enjoyed sharing, chatting, and learning from other food lovers.

Outside of our invite-only beta app we also started to create more opportunities to connect through virtual events and in-person events as well. Throughout the year we hosted 5 themed virtual events that had a total number of 168 attendees and 220 rvsps that included cultural heritage month themes, restaurant owners, tastemakers, cultural icons, and our very own Mukbang featuring Crave Its’ Co-Founder Winston.

Our community not only showed up online but in-person as well. We also hosted 2 in-person events in our new HQ, Los Angeles. Our two events in LA drew a crowd of 181 attendees and 280 number of RSVPs. We ended the year with an organic social following of over 95,000. We made this happen with a $0 paid marketing budget and nothing but brand awareness, a community, word of mouth, and an authentic interest in food.

Our team also discovered whenever we held virtual or in-person events our platform saw massive jumps in our communities engagement before and after the event. As we continue to grow our community we see events being one of our key drivers to connect new and existing food lovers in our community.

Food Data is Insightful and Delicious

The power of a purpose-driven community dedicated to food has allowed us to build and launch our internal data tool Crave It Insights in October. Crave It Insights is our data tool that highlights our community’s interests and activity within our app. Some of our findings include our community favors savory dishes more than any other type of dish on a monthly basis with over 29% of our community tagging dishes as savory. We also saw in October the most-posted dish in LA was Carne Asada in our top city. Our insights tool is a fun and powerful way to help build a more personalized experience for our food lovers and food businesses. We see this as a way to connect our community on a deep- level through taste profiles, location, and experiences.

Building a Strong Foundation is Key

One of our key learnings throughout building and testing our product was building a strong foundation is key to our product’s success. While we were in an invite-only beta we continuously were making tweaks to our architecture based on testing, bugs, and feedback from our community. The lessons we’ve learned have allowed us to refine the foundation of our app, establish better internal processes, and understand what gaps we needed to fill before launching and scaling our business.

How Our Community Used Crave It

When we released our invite-only beta in late April we had no idea how our product was going to be used outside of capturing delicious food. It’s been incredibly touching to see how our food lovers are using Crave It as a place to document life’s events through food.

Whether it was college graduate celebrating their first job interview with a delectable curry dish, a homemade meal they were proud of, celebrating an engagement with cocktails, international travel memories, to birthdays and everything in between, our community went to Crave It time and time again. There have been over 5.5K dedicated posts to food and Crave It has been there to capture the moment. Food is such an integral part of lives and there are many stories behind the content that’s being captured we’ve been fortunate enough to help facilitate that dialogue.

Learnings from Our Community

Throughout testing, we have learned a lot about our food lovers. Funny enough the majority of our community isn’t made up of influencers or high-profile chefs. Our food lovers are the everyday person that loves food and wants a food-focused place to share, discusses, and connect around food. Almost 45% of our community is posting content and sharing their food experiences every time they’re on our platform. This participation is groundbreaking, When only 1% of users on purpose-driven apps such as LinkedIn post content, and 9% of users on entertainment apps such as TikTok post content. We’ve also consistently seen restaurant content (as we predicted) out preforms homemade content by 15%-25% each month. However, there is a strong showing of homemade content and cross-over between food lovers posting both restaurant and homemade.

While we were receiving feedback and conducting user interviews our team learned that our food lovers are very interested in discovering new places locally, connecting with like-minded food lovers, and value recommendations from community members.

In 2022 we will be doubling down on attracting more liked-minded food lovers in addition to welcoming other food lovers (e.g chefs, recipe creators, food critics, tastemakers, restaurants), to broaden our community, and create a more personalized experience based on our food lovers taste profiles.

Our “Cravers” Love to Share

One of the many things that has brought us joy has been our power users or as we like to call them “Cravers” sharing their Crave It posts across other social media platforms. Our early champions have been eager to share that they posted their food content on Crave It before any other social platform with phrases like @CraveIt saw it first or As Seen on @CraveIt to name a few.

In addition, some of our advocates have also done some guerrilla marketing around their cities and have told their friends to ask Crave It where the best food recommendations are in their city or when traveling. The Crave It team and I will continue to explore ways to highlight and encourage our “Cravers” to spread the word about our community.

What We’re Building Has Generated Buzz

As significant growth in our community-generated excitement, word spread and we were fortunate enough to land free PR placements. This allowed us the ability to amplify our message and to share our vision with listeners and readers across North America. If you’re interested in reading or listening to any of Crave Its’ featured you can find a few of our features below:

Inspiring Conversations with Bomani Mintz of Crave It — Voyage Austin

Crave It: The Tastiest Platform To Share the Food You Love — EatNom

Creating A Community Food App — Let’s Manifest

20 Tech Companies to Watch in 2021 — FoundersBeta

Our 2022 Priorities: Experience, Performance, and Scale

The Crave It team and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s in store for 2022. We think Crave It can be the best place for people that love food to connect. In 2022 we’re doubling down on content and engagement. We will provide a better experience for our food lovers that is more immersive, actionable, and valuable.

We plan to execute on creating a better experience by improving our app’s performance and releasing new features that help connect, create, save, and provide our food lovers with a more personalized experience to find what and where to eat. A key ingredient will be ensuring our platform’s performance is optimal for our community.

We’re also excited to double down on our mission through Web3. We believe food is the ultimate bridge that connects the online world to in-person experiences. There is so much white space in Web3 and we are confident that there is a massive opportunity for Crave It to be the industry leader in the food space.