Client Spotlight: Social Belly is the Airbnb of Dinner Parties

Back in September 2014, we announced the winner of our #GetStarted2014 startup competition – Social Belly. The startup was chosen by voters and a panel of judges to receive £50,000 worth of support including web development from Simpleweb, a marketing plan from Onboardly and a year’s worth of hosting from Rackspace.

London-based Social Belly is probably easiest to describe as “Airbnb for dinner parties”. With Social Belly, users can advertise dinner parties they wish to host, or select dinner parties they’d like to attend.

“Our mission is to bring Social Belly to foodies everywhere, reshape society and reinvent ‘dining.”” says Social Belly Founder, Dimple Lalwani. “That’s a big vision, so we’re going to be #verybusy for the near future…”

Dimple got the idea for Social Belly after visiting her first supper club, a pop-up restaurant in someone’s home where diners can come for home cooked food in a dinner-party style setting instead of going to a typical restaurant. She fell in love with the social aspect of supper clubs and began working on a platform for connecting people with a passion for unique dining experiences.

Once Dimple started chatting with other aspiring entrepreneurs she realised that diving straight into development would be a mistake, and decided that the first step was to figure out if there was a market for her idea.

When we first met with Dimple last year, we were impressed to see she’d set up a working MVP using Squarespace for just £500 and was busy testing and gathering data to support that there was indeed a market for the platform.

After our initial meeting, it was decided that Dimple should spend the next month to six weeks testing her MVP and gathering data that would help us build an awesome product. We introduced her to A/B testing software Optimizely and recommended testing copy and calls to action on her homepage to make sure that together, we could create an application that users would really love.

We started development on Social Belly at the end of last year and it won’t be long until the release. Meanwhile, Dimple is just about to leave her job to focus full-time on her startup…

“Reality is that quitting my full time job in the corporate world was the easiest decision I ever took.” says Dimple. “I had made the decision the day Simpleweb announced that Social Belly won the #GetStarted2014 startup competition. I was just waiting for the right moment and here it is.”

Dimple has been a joy to work with these last few months and we really believe she has what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of Social Belly here. In the meantime, if you’re interested in attending a Social Belly dinner party, check out the website now.