Omeid Seirafi-Pour
When Omeid Seirafi-Pour lived in Chicago, all he wanted was to find the best slice of thin-crust pizza in the Windy City. Little did he know that desire would lead to launching his own startup,
MyFab5.
Seirafi-Pour had recently graduated from the
University of Michigan's Ross School of Business with a bachelor's degree in business administration when he went to work consulting. His job centered on helping Sam’s Club increase its customer base.
"At the same time I was looking for a great thin-crust pizza place," Seirafi-Pour says, adding he became frustrated with leveraging social media to find it. "It was that inefficiency that inspired me to start
MyFab5."
MyFab5 is a social media startup that lets users rank their top five things when it comes to reviewing businesses. For instance, users can pick their top five places to order Chinese food in their region. The 1-year-old startup recently pivoted to become a layer of Instagram so foodies can use photos of their top five favorite dishes.
"It was purely a response to demand," Seirafi-Pour says. "We had all of these requests around photos. That was really interesting to us. Our biggest users were foodies who were always using Instagram."
Seirafi-Pour and his team noticed a lot of review-oriented Internet companies relied more on the written word than photos. They also noticed that millions of people consistently took photos of their food on Instagram, but a lot of them weren’t into writing extensive reviews.
"We looked at this aspect and realized these foodies didn’t have a community," Seirafi-Pour says.
MyFab5 is now trying to become that community. That pivot is happening because the startup team saw an opportunity and is working to take advantage of it.
"Anything that needs improvement is an opportunity," Seirafi-Pour says. "The other one is underserved demand."
- Written by Jon Zemke