Brands often rely on web scraping and social media monitoring to understand what customers are saying about the brand and gain insights for product development. Cafeteria connects teens with the brands they are interested in and allows them to provide feedback on strategy and product development.
The startup plans to release an iOS app on Thursday. Ahead of Thursday's launch, the startup tested a beta version of the app for three months with teenagers in 60 U.S. cities.
Cafeteria's CEO is Rishi Malhotra, co-founder of India-based music streaming service Saavn (now JioSaavn) (acquired by Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio in 2019) and former CEO of Luminary Podcasts. It's Mr. The founding team also includes Chief Business Officer Mark Silverstein, who previously served as Chief Content Officer at Luminary, and Chief Design Officer Leeann Sheely, who served as VP of Design at both Luminary and JioSaavn. .
Rishi Malhotra. Image credit: Chris Callaway
The company has raised $3 million led by Collaborative Fund and Imaginary Ventures, with additional participation from Bertelsmann and Guy O'Seary, a veteran music industry executive who has worked with Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“Cafeteria operates in the consumer insights and market research industry with a unique focus on real-time, authentic feedback from teenagers. Zero-party data collection, customizable analytics, and CEO Rishi. “The partnership is characterized by strong leadership under Malhotra, providing brands with actionable and timely insights tailored to the ‘teen generation,’” Collaborative Fund partner Andrew Montgomery told TechCrunch via email. Ta.
Montgomery added that Cafeteria has an excellent product-market fit in the consumer insights market because it provides authentic, actionable insights into brands directly from teenagers.
How does the app work?
When teens join the app, they select brands that interest them. Cafeteria invites you to participate in a survey called Tables. Teens can respond by text or voice.
Teens receive rewards ranging from $5 to $20 for their insights and can transfer their balances to Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or bank accounts through Cafeteria's integration with Dots, a payment API. Users must have at least $10 in their Cafeteria wallet to transfer their balance.
The company says these Table sessions last an average of five minutes. Cafeteria covers everything from which celebrities Nike should work with (apparently Adam Sandler is as popular as Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter) to how to spend $100 at the mall. He said the teenagers offer a variety of insights.
Cafeteria currently has thousands of users who use the app through referrals and word of mouth. All users will be placed on a waiting list before being onboarded.
During onboarding, teens go to a lifestyle table and are asked 20 to 25 questions about retail, shoes, food, music, first cars, banking, and more. You can also choose 8 of your favorite brands.
The company also limits the number of surveys and forms that teens receive per month to three to five. Malhotra believes this activity is more valuable to teens than scrolling through social media, but the company doesn't want them to become daily or weekly active users.
Cafeteria points out that all user identity information, including name and email, is hidden from the company. Brands can only verify gender, age, and postal code.
The company has an optional feature for users under 18 to include a parent's email when signing up for the service, but it is not mandatory.
The startup has a human and AI moderation policy. We monitor comments for misinformation and harmful content and flag users if we see such input.
The company says in its privacy policy that the service is not intended for use by children under 14. If the Company discovers a user is underage, the data will be deleted.
How will brands benefit from it?
Cafeteria collates insights from teens and organizes them into dashboards called albums, organized by category. These albums include things like “Educated, Zara, Adidas and Skims are emerging as the next brands teen girls want to try” and “Teens, on average, watch their favorite artists Includes insights with titles such as “Said people say they would pay $314 for a job.''
Image credit: cafeteria
The startup has a basic plan for $5,000 per month that allows brands to access insights in their lifestyle albums and also see competitor insights in their cohorts. For $8,000 per month, brands can create two tables with at least eight questions for at least eight users. For additional research, brands must pay $2,500 per month.
Malhotra said the cafeteria is hiring top brands in the early stages, but he did not name any of them. He said the company has completed more than 2,200 tables containing more than 50,000 insights.
The company believes its strength lies in collecting unstructured data and generating insights from it. “We're building large-scale language models that put insight data into context. We're training different models to help make sense of a lot of data,” Malhotra said. .
In the future, Cafeteria would like to see the brand engage more with teens and also offer store credits and percentage discounts. The company is also building the ability for brands to run prompts against the Insights album and search for various metrics.