HelloFriend is changing the way students socialize offline.
Salman and Shaban Habib started HelloFriend in 2017, when Salman was attending Harvard University and Shaban was at Virginia Commonwealth University. After first launching in Boston, the two looked to expand to another college city with a high concentration of restaurants around campus and ultimately settled on Richmond.
“The fundamental idea at the time was to create a platform where students could connect in offline settings,” Salman, co-founder and CEO, told Inno. “Over the course of a few months, we thought about ways to incentivize students to meet in person and have face-to-face communication. That’s where we came up for the idea of HelloFriend.”
Together with his co-founder and brother, Shaban, the two created a platform built around the idea of “social ordering,” combining online ordering with socialization.
Participating restaurants offer users discounts if they order through the app, and if they invite friends to order as well, their discount will increase.
Users can also see where their friends are when they place orders and can meet up based on their ordering movements.
“On your friends’ feed you can see where your friends are headed, see which coffee shops or restaurants they are at, so next time you leave class, you know where you're headed,” Salman said.
The company has raised around $735,000 in funding, which included a pre-seed round from Reflective Venture Partners in Seattle and a VC round from Right Side Capital Management in San Francisco.
After launching in Richmond in November, HelloFriend onboarded many of the restaurants in the VCU area, including Thai Top 10, Crazy Thai, Greenbriar Cafe and Koconut Grill. Salman said that by the end of December they had nearly 4,000 students signed up to use the app and were helping restaurants increase their sales by 20 to 30 percent on a monthly basis.
And then in February, the full breadth of the Covid-19 crisis was acknowledged and VCU and the surrounding restaurants had to close.
“Spring semester is generally the biggest driver of traffic for us,” Salman said. “With Covid, not only did students leave VCU, but a lot of our partner restaurants got shut down. The conversation went from HelloFriend driving traffic to local businesses and restaurants to, 'What are we going to do now?' Both sides of the market disappeared in a manner of days.”
So the team adapted.
Using their current ordering platform, HelloFriend created a new platform that allowed a restaurant to offer contactless ordering. By scanning a QR code, customers could see the menu, place an order and pay for their meal without ever interacting with another person.
“I have been a Hellofriend partner for about a month, and I am delighted with their service,” True-Asia Daniels, owner of Richmond's True’s Cultural Kitchen, said about her experience using the platform. “Our focus has been on the safety of our staff and the community, and I am very grateful for their diligence in making sure that I am satisfied, as well as my customers.”
The Habib brothers' goal was always to expand beyond Richmond and Boston, and with the development of their online ordering platform, they've received interest from restaurants in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago. In response to this increased interest, the HelloFriend team created a “toolkit” that allows any restaurant, anywhere, to get set up on the contactless ordering platform in just a day.
Salman said 15 new Richmond restaurants have begun using the contactless platform since its launch last month.
“We’ve faced less resistance in pitching to restaurants since switching to the focus on contactless ordering," he said. "[Restaurants] know they have to adapt and get support. We went from wondering how we would survive the economic fallout of the pandemic to onboarding a couple new restaurants every day.”