My Fab 5, an Ann-Arbor based restaurant guide that features only positive reviews, has grown almost 300 percent since last October.
“We’ve reinvented the restaurant review,” says Omeid Seirafi-Pour, co-founder and CEO of the app. “Instead of talking about places I hate, I like to talk about places I love.”
The app, which has more than 1.2 million rankings and photos from its own server, features restaurants from cities all over the world. Launching in August 2013, My Fab 5 allows users to sign up and create a profile with their Instagram account, Facebook account, or email address, and then rank up to five restaurants in any food or drink category, such as “Breakfast,” “Happy Hour,” “Burgers,” “Pie,” and more.
Each restaurant has a designated page that features all of its rankings and ranking activity, location, and a menu section with photos. Customers can then add restaurant pages to their “Bucket List,” a feature of the app that allows them to keep track of places they’d like to try.
Apart from featuring photos and reviews posted using the app, My Fab 5 is also integrated with Instagram, which allows the app to pull additional photos for restaurants already featured and those that may not be ranked.
“What makes us different is we’re a very photo-oriented app,” Seirafi-Pour says. “Let’s say you’re looking at a restaurant like Slows (in Detroit), you can actually see their entire menu through photos.”
My Fab 5 has participated in Tech Town’s Launch Detroit Accelerator and the University of Michigan’s TechArb Accelerator, which helped them secure various funds and grants. The app also recently gained funding of $100,000 from Macomb Community College and JPMorgan Chase’s Innovation Fund.
“We raise funding to help fuel our growth,” Seirafi-Pour says. “We want to be the place that people are going to talk about restaurants, the place where restaurants go to reach their audience online.”
My Fab 5 is available for both Android and iPhone. To learn more, visit myfab5.com.
