Meet Saku Tuominen and Kenneth Nars co-founders of World of Mouth
Saku Tuominen is a Finnish entrepreneur, a restaurateur, an author and a keynote speaker. At the moment he concentrates on World Of Mouth, a digital restaurant guide where he is the co-founder and ceo. He is also a chair of a global education nonprofit HundrED and a co-founder of Financier Group, a small, quality driven restaurant group based in Helsinki.
Based in Helsinki, Kenneth Nars is a co-founder and the creative director of the World of Mouth. He has a long food writing background and his writings have appeared in publications such as Gourmet Sweden, Lucky Peach and Monocle and he was the editor of the food and design magazine Leon.
Tell us about your experience prior to launching your business?
The whole concept started with a personal need of our founding team. It may be a ‘first world problem’ but still a real one. Our friends, knowing the foodies we are, were constantly asking for restaurant recommendations from us and we all used really clumsy solutions to share the information: word documents, whatsapp messages and so forth. Since there was not even one app solving this problem, sharing superb restaurant tips with likeminded friends, we decided to create one.
What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?
We, like many others, hate to be in a new city eating in an uninspiring, over-priced, average restaurant, without soul or passion. Culinary tourism is on a constant and fast rise. 60-70% of the people travelling to a new city are interested in where to eat and love to book their places in advance. As great as Tripadvisor is, we want to serve a niche audience, serious foodies who really care about where to eat and who plan their trips around restaurant reservations and often weeks in advance. We want to be the “go to” -service for this audience, a “Spotify of restaurant guides” for people who really care.
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
The list is long. First of all, we are not faceless and we don´t have only one voice. We are a global community of experts, everyone handpicked and none of them allowed to recommend their own place. We don´t concentrate only on fine dining - we cover everything from gourmet to street food, from hot new openings to traditional institutions. We are totally independent and ad-free. We are never negative, for us it is all about recommendations. We are truly global, having recommendations to over 1500 destinations.
What’s the single most important decision that you made, that contributed to your business?
If you would have to pick one, maybe the most important decision was to go niche instead of being mainstream. When people say to us that “hey, not everyone loves restaurants as much as you do”, our answer is simple: “yep, our service is not for them.” We are not for everyone, and never will be. Another one was our decision to be a rather expensive service. In order to stay independent and keeping the content unmanipulated, we decided to have an annual fee of 99€. We know it is not cheap but at the same probably less than the price of one disappointing dinner.
What would be your top marketing tip, to grow a business that is niche?
It is a simple one. You have to be genuinely loved. In our case this covers two groups of people, experts and members. At the moment we have over 500 experts and 70 000 members - both in all continents. Since experts are not being paid for writing the recommendations (we have a profit share model with them, instead) they have to love the service, appreciate what we do and share our values. The same goes for members. We all know foodies know foodies and they discuss with each other. If World of Mouth can create a genuine word of mouth, people recommending us to their likeminded friends, there is no better way to market our product. As Seth Godin often says. “it is not about what we tell to our customers, it is about what our customers tell to their friends.”
Thinking about the future, do you have any strategic partnerships or upgrades in the pipeline?
Yes, we have a huge amount of ideas in development for the future. We can see ourselves working with high profile businesses connected with eating well, travel and fashion and also cities, hotels and events. We can also imagine us creating different services for restaurants and the people working in them. And so on. But for us, at the moment it's all about focus, focus, focus. Taking one step at a time, concentrating on quality.
What’s the biggest risk to your business and why?
We feel that the need we are trying to solve is not disappearing anywhere – even if we would have new pandemics. But trying to build a truly high profile and global product with relatively small resources is always a challenge and some sort of gamble. This leads to the classic “death valley” - dilemma as so many other start ups know painfully well. We have expenses in order to keep the quality high and even though we already have paying customers, the amount is not sufficient to cover our expenses. So in the short term is all about staying alive and maintaining our drive, keeping the momentum.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
Every line of business is of course different but maybe there are few classic tips that are suitable for most of the cases.
Try to solve a real problem, fulfill a real need.
Question your own ideas, listen to your customers instead.
Always be improving, in every area.
Have a world class team and take good care of them.
Don´t try to make money, try to create something exceptional.
Remember to enjoy.
We feel that this list is a good beginning.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
Creating a world class company from scratch takes almost always a lot longer than one would expect – quarters become years and years become decades. It is a marathon, not a sprint even for the fastest growing companies and only a small amount of companies make it to some sort of exit. As an entrepreneur you have freedom to choose the challenge you are solving, so why not pick something that you could see yourself working for many years, even decades, even without an exit. That is the case with World of Mouth. We love the work we do, passionately and can see ourselves working here for a really long time.
What would be your top three tips to fellow entrepreneurs to look after their mental health?
No matter how driven you are, remember that most of the companies don't make it and that is not the end of the world. Do your best, learn from obstacles and appreciate what happens.
Have a few good mentors who are positive and make you grow.
Take good care of your recovery and sleep. If sleep goes, everything else follows – from physical health to creativity, from the ability to listen to resilience.
Where do you draw your inspiration from to continue pursuing and innovating in the tech space?
Many people are over-complicating the concept of innovation. For us the essence of innovation is a genuine will to improve. You can and you should improve everything – how to run your weekly meetings, how to choose and monitor your KPIs or OKRs, how to market and hire. So for us the key to innovation is to start with the dna of the company - a continuous passion, drive and growth mindset. Always be improving, always be growing and the magic happens, innovation follows automatically.
