The power of love
iPeen officially went online in 2006, initially just as a stunt on the part of founder Sky Ho to attract the attention of a young woman, Ye Huiting, who was then his coworker at Yahoo!Kimo.
Ho laughs as he recounts how growing up in the environs of Taipei’s Hulin Street, which has a mind-boggling array of fabulous foods for sale, had made Ye very picky about eating. Every date therefore had to include some kind of imaginative cuisine just to keep her interested.
While struggling to appease Ye’s epicurean cravings, it dawned on Ho that while Taiwan certainly had enough online food articles, they mostly just consisted of descriptions and pictures. There was not, however, a more practically oriented website dedicated to consumer reviews and detailed information like the American website Yelp or mainland China’s Dazhong Dianpingwang. He began to ponder the possibility of creating a platform specifically for Taiwanese diners.
He was initially reluctant to follow through on his idea, but his elementary-school classmate Zhang Jiaming, founder of the iPart dating site, inspired Ho with a version of the “if you build it, they will come” speech. Ho thus began drawing up his plans for the site, assisted by Huiting, her twin sister Huiqing, and an IT savvy friend, Chen Yicheng.
In the beginning they rented a tiny office space in a sheet-metal building in Tianmu. With no money for air conditioning, they used electric fans to keep the computers from overheating. It was rough going at first, but fortunately all four partners were still living at home with their parents and they were all in the habit of bringing their own lunches from home, enabling them to subsist on a meager NT$5000 per month.
Both Ho and Ye, who is now his wife, graduated from the Department of Library and Information Science at Fu Jen Catholic University. Putting their academic training to use, they set up searches on iPeen based on the “multiple key words” technique used for searching master’s and doctoral theses. They were thus able to structure and categorize what had been an undifferentiated mass of information, which quickly set iPeen apart from other dining websites and drew virtually all the traffic their way.
But how could they make a profit? Ho and Ye had no choice but to hit the pavement and go old-school on sales.
The first day, they chose a street in Xinzhuang (a district of New Taipei City) with many restaurants and shops and, taking a side of the street each, hit more than 100 storefronts before calling it quits. After an exhausting day, between them they had found only a single eatery willing to provide data for their website.
“We started out thinking we’d get data from restaurants, and they’d also pay us to provide extra services for them through the website. But we found it a real challenge just to get information, much less persuade owners to pay any fee. The only thing that kept us going in those days was that at least our Internet traffic was increasing over time. Then in the third year, when we had almost lost hope, Google came to us out of nowhere and said they wanted to form a strategic partnership,” says Ho. Yahoo!Kimo was not far behind with the same request. Then came investments from CyberAgent Ventures and NEC, and doors began to open one after another, culminating in the scale of operations we see today.
Sky Ho tells his iPeen team that their information should be localized and easy to use. The company logo, held by the young woman third from left, is certainly distinctive, and with its bright red coloring—auspicious to Chinese—you won’t have any trouble differentiating them from competitors!