AKASH SHRIVASTAVA, ABHISHEK KUMAR, RAVI SHRIVAS, VINOD C, Founders, EveningFlavors

Weekend night and unsure of where to go? First make your way to www.eveningflavors.com, a lifestyle portal completely dedicated to help you find the best place to hangout for food or beverages. 

Started by IIT graduates Akash Shriastava and Abhishek Kumar alongwith Ravi Srivas of SJIT Bhilai and Vinod, an ex employee at Yahoo, the website was established in November 2008 under WebAffinity Technologies and is based out of Bangalore. 

It is true that people living in metros usually have several options to choose from when it comes to eating or drinking out. Ambience, cuisines, locality, parking availability, value for money and other factors come into play when deciding on a place to go. EveningFlavors tapped into that very uncertainty to create a platform where people can log on to check well categorized options through restaurants, lounges, pubs and others. 

“We at Eveningflavors believe that each evening is special and we want to be the people who can add a flavor to it by our exhaustive content and flavor gurus – our planners. Our focus remains on passionate about pleasure - city dwellers, tourists, corporates and every individual who thinks of dining or partying out” explains Akash. 

Their business model is a combination of lead and advertising and the team believes what will hold them in good stead is their attention to detail and their know-how of what goes in to make the planning of a party or evening out successful. 

For a company just a few months old, they seem to be doing well. “we are already recording 17000 page views and are in the list of top 10 dining guides in the world as projected by Alexa” informs Vinod who looks after the financial and legal operations of the company. 

The team believes that they were fortunate to have received the much crucial support from their respective families especially given the fact that they were all going to leave well paying jobs yet had few savings having worked only for a year or two before starting out.

So how did they fund the venture? Says Abhishek, the team’s tech expert “A group of people from a large online company believed in us at the right time and invested in us. These are yet early days. For now we have our eyes set on being as comprehensively present in all metros of India as possible and aim to have atleast half a million registered users.

Adds Ravi, the sales head “We want to create an ecosystem where people involved with the F&B industry and customers can interact to know what is needed and available. Ours is also a great platform to show the world what India can offer in terms of culinary, cuisine and beverages from the very own Gujarati Thali to the Italian Pizzas.” 

On their taking up entrepreneurship, Akash has an interesting take “In India, being successfully big means either being an actor, a politician or an entrepreneur. Acting was ruled out since neither of us possesses the looks and being a politician requires too much patience and tolerance, hence the only choice was to be an entrepreneur”.

Any regrets then?

“There are these Sundays or holidays when everyone around you is relaxing and you realize that your start up needs you to be at it; those are occasional moments when the thought of leaving it all for the far lesser demanding job comes to mind but it goes away as quickly.” Eventually the group says that “There is no single way to succeed or to be a successful entrepreneur; believe in yourself, keep your eyes, ears open and network with as many people as you can.” Which is also the advise they have for other entrepreneurs out there.