Brands often rely on scraping the web and monitoring social media to understand what customers are saying about them and get insights for product development. However, this method may not provide accurate or real-time feedback from customers.
Cafeteria is a startup that connects teens with brands they are interested in so they can provide feedback about strategy and product development. The company’s iOS app allows teens to share their opinions on various topics, including fashion, music, and food.
How Cafeteria Works
Once a teen joins the app, they will select the brands they are interested in. Cafeteria will then invite them to participate in surveys called Tables. Teens can provide answers via text or voice. They get paid anywhere between $5 and $20 for their insights, and they can transfer their balance to Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or a bank account through Cafeteria’s integration with Dots.
The Benefits of Using Cafeteria
Cafeteria collates insights from teens and puts them into a dashboard called Albums, organized by category. These Albums have insights with titles like ‘Edikted, Zara, Adidas and Skims are breaking through as brands that teen girls want to try next’ and ‘On average, teens say $314 is what they would pay to see their favorite artist.’
How Brands Can Benefit from Cafeteria
Cafeteria offers a basic plan for brands to access lifestyle Album insights and cohort competitor insights. For an additional cost, brands can create Tables with at least eight questions across a minimum of eight users.
The Founding Team Behind Cafeteria
Rishi Malhotra is the CEO of Cafeteria. He was co-founder and former CTO of JioSaavn, one of India’s largest music streaming services. The company has completed over 2,200 Tables with over 50,000 insights.
Cafeteria’s Core Strength
Cafeteria thinks that its core strength is in collecting unstructured data and creating insights out of it. ‘We are building large language models that put the insight data in context. We are training different models that help us make sense of a lot of data,’ Malhotra said.
Future Plans for Cafeteria
Cafeteria wants to make the brand engage better with teens and also offer a store credit or a percentage discount. The company is also building out the capacity for brands to run prompts against insight albums and search for different metrics.
