A new app might save you from petty breakups, hangry arguments or just plain embarrassment if you select the wrong place for your dinner plans.
Lauren Malhoit and Josh Kramer co-founded ForkYes, an independently owned, swipe-based group decision app.
Malhoit, who works for a software developer and lives in Fountain Square, said the app helps friends and family follow through on the “Where should we eat?” group chat message.
Think Tinder meets Yelp, Calendly and Google Chrome. ForkYes allows users to choose from preferences and swipe through a deck of local restaurants. The app surfaces the spot the group agrees on.
When Malhoit did market research, she found her target demographic is 25 to 34 year olds. She and Kramer interviewed 50 people in the age range and 20 restaurant owners and managers.
“Group consensus is important to that demographic,” Malhoit said. “They told me in about a quarter of their group chats that they actually just don’t even end up going out because no one will pick a place to eat.”
Fork Yes — though in its second testing phase — is available to download on iOS and Android.
Malhoit and Kramer, who are both in their 40s, will officially launch the app with new features at the end of July.
For example, you’ll be able to select more filters like the type of cuisine, dietary restrictions or even dog-friendly patios. The app is not for writing restaurant reviews, however.
“A restaurant has a one-off night and one star affects them for the rest of time,” Malhoit said. “No one has the same taste palate.”
Malhoit said she believes the app will help people discover and support restaurants in Indianapolis.
In 2022, she created a list of restaurants in alphabetical order to help her and her partner decide where to go for dinner. They tried prioritizing restaurants owned by women and people of color.
“We discovered Lete’s Injera and a bunch of places that are comfort food to us and our weekly DoorDash order,” she said.
Last summer, Malhoit took a few entrepreneurial classes while finishing her MBA program at Butler University that sparked the idea of a “two-sided marketplace.”
Malhoit also used AI to create an app prototype. Next she recruited Kramer, a software engineer she worked with 15 years ago, to do the backend software development for ForkYes. They pay for data from Google and Yelp to help program the app.
Malhoit said ForkYes will remain free because she learned from her market research phase that users won’t pay for an app.
To make the app profitable, they might offer a subscription to restaurants. They would share marketing data to restaurants and allow them to customize their profiles on the app.
But Malhoit said they can’t monetize ForkYes until they increase their users. So far, ForkYes has 150 users. Their goal is to get 1,000 users in three months after the launch in July.
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Mirror Indy reporter Mesgana Waiss covers arts and culture. Contact her at 317-667-2643 or mesgana.waiss@mirrorindy.org.
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