I built this for myself but here you are: The story of ConciergeGH

Would you walk into Movenpick Hotel with only 200 cedis on a hungry stomach? I'd like you to answer this question at the end of this article.

Chances are, before you step out into any restaurant in Accra, you would have done either one or more of these.

• Can't decide on a restaurant to visit.

• Inquire from friends about the Menu, price of drinks, jollof rice, or general pricing. Because you know if Jollof alone costs 150 cedis then you are in for hell.

• In rare cases switch restaurants when you arrive right after looking at the menu.

I experienced these things when navigating the culinary space in Accra, looking for the right restaurant. I once decided to visit a new restaurant every month with my partner—call it a monthly date. My cousin gave me a list of a little over 40 restaurants and spots in Accra.

Again the problem was deciding where to go each month. Why?

We selected the restaurants at random, but we were often forced to reshuffle for different restaurants because we didn't know what to expect.

We had no clue how expensive our budget would be. And we were also on a low budget.

It seemed every restaurant in Accra was too expensive to visit on a medium to low budget. Or was it?

I had a plan.

ConciergeGH 1.0

I had a list of about 40 restaurants. I also wasn't always on a low budget. I decided to rank each restaurant in 3 categories, Cheap, moderate, and expensive. Using this ranking I would develop a simple application to draw a random restaurant for me based on the category I specify (cheap, moderate, expensive). How do I determine if a restaurant is cheap or expensive- if people say it is. I decided to make this something other people could find useful, ergo, I wanted to feed this system with very accurate data by accepting people on restaurants from questionnaires. This soon proved very impractical. Not only the fact that handing out questionnaires online can be difficult, but most people can only give input on a few restaurants. This will lead to a lot of misses in questionnaires, making it hard to examine questionnaires.

ConciergeGH 2.0

Why not bring the restaurants to the people? Concierge 2.0 was built with a different perspective. Rather than relying on an ill-informed and inadequate population census from questionnaires about restaurant prices why not figure out the prices from the actual menus? Why not figure out all the prices from the Menu? Version 2.0 determines possible budget outcomes available to users and allows them to make easier choices. It became clear to me that people struggle to make decisions based on what they don't know– And most people don't know a lot about restaurants. People also struggle to make decisions when information isn't organized– and most information on restaurants and budgets isn't organized or is all over the internet on different pages and review sites. Information on restaurants are also not very grainy, and estimates are usually overarching.

What new things are we bringing to the table? (No pun intended)

We are bringing a whole new design and experience to you.

This will be a complete makeover of the current system and website to provide the best experience. We are not only providing the best experience for you navigating your way in Accra to find the best restaurant for your pocket, but we are providing the best experience for you to do that.

I'll keep this brief for now. I urge you to follow us on this journey and remember to ask your friend to subscribe and stay tuned to the latest updates and developments on ConciergeGH.