LetsDine - Social networking for real, over food

In the era of facebook and twitter, people often crib about real interactions waning down. LetsDine is a new startup in the ‘social networking’ space, that tries to address this issue and arranges themed dining events for different groups of bloggers, poets, foodies, entrepreneurs and random socials where absolute strangers come and meet, interact and make friends over great food and coffee!

LetsDine was founded in April this year by two engineers from REC Trichy, Akhilesh Kumar(Chief Diner) and Prashant Angyan (Tech Guru). Akhilesh with his strong work experience in supply chain and operations management handles the logistics of the organization, while Prashant, with his experience in UI/UX development and web technologies forms the technical backbone of the company.

They have already covered over 30 theme dinners, and dined more than 200 people in Hyderabad alone. Talking to us about his motivation behind this startup, Akhilesh tells us that it is an attempt to get people to meet, talk to each other and make new friends; far away from the mundane social networks where a bright broad smile is diminished to this - :)

LetsDine hand picks from a list of A grade restaurants with clear differentiation in cuisine specialty, coffee shops and specialty restaurants at 5 star hotels based on the theme and the type of crowd that they are expecting such as Italian Cooking Classes, Dinner & Cocktails etc. What follows is a lot of people mingling and interacting with each other over a five course dinner.

Akhilesh is currently Hyderabad's chief diner - the guy who is responsible for all the logistics and marketing that is to be done in the city. They plan to have one chief diner per city once they start expanding.

They have chalked out deals with restaurants wherein they get a set amount for every customer they get , thereby generating a constant revenue stream to keep the startup up and running. The customers have a predetermined amount that they pay for their entire meal. Having a predetermined menu also give people more time to interact among themselves; time that would otherwise have been wasted on deciding what to order.

Capitalizing on the early mover’s advantage in India they plan to expand to other cities where they see both potential and foodies. Cities like Ahmedabad, Bombay and Bangalore feature on top of the list.

Website: LetsDine