Editor’s Note: This SFNewTech demo-highlights post is from our July 20th 2010 Event. Please bear with us while we play “catch up” on our shiny new blog
CEO JR Johnson described Lunch.com as “like Yelp or Trip Advisor, where the common bond is your common interest”. It’s a members-driven site that facilitates building communities of like minded passionate people to share and discover relevant knowledge and opinion. Using what they call their “Similarity Network“, they match you to other users whose interests most closely align with yours, sharing your likes, dislikes, and interests.
At the July 20th SFNewTech event, Johnson guided the audience through steps on building a community on the site.
Using the “What’s hot?” now feature, which highlights the site’s most active section, Johnson found a book community of about 1000 people centered around a passion for books, to be the site’s hottest community at that moment. This was followed by a quick walk-through on how to register, create new interest areas and build the knowledge based communities at the center of Lunch.com‘s user model. He highlighted the point based reward system, where users can create a badge representative of their community passion, with criteria on how members earn the badge. For example, in the book community, a user could earn the badge after having read a specified number of books.
Lunch.com has an ad-network based business model for generating revenue. Johnson noted the key to success is “generating relevant content, quality content, which drives people to search for the site.†And he should know a little about success. Before starting Lunch.com, J.R. was founder and CEO of VirtualTourist.com and OneTime. Under his leadership, VirtualTourist.com grew to a one million+ site and earned honors from a range of media including Time magazine, Newsweek, and Travel+Leisure magazine and more. The three-time entrepreneur sold VirtualTourist.com to Expedia in 2008.