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Thusenth Dhavaloganathan (BBA ’08) and Amina Gilani (BBA ’08) co-founded Sociavore, a tech startup that is reinventing restaurant websites.
We’ve all heard about the dishwasher who works their way to becoming a chef and eventually starts a restaurant — a dream come true!
This isn’t that story.
This is a story about a dishwasher who spent his teenage years working at his dad’s restaurant, married his Wilfrid Laurier University sweetheart and together with his wife started a company reinventing restaurant websites.
This digital-age twist on an old story resulted in Sociavore, a website builder and ecommerce platform focused on restaurants, and food and beverage businesses run by Thusenth Dhavaloganathan (BBA ’08) and Amina Gilani (BBA ’08). There are now hundreds of restaurants using Sociavore, including those of Michelin-Star chefs, James Beard winners, and many family-run restaurants.
Dhavaloganathan said his clients appreciate that he comes from their world — restaurants.
Thusenth’s dad, Tavon, and Nick in the 1980s.
“My dad came to Canada as a refugee from Sri Lanka in 1983,” Dhavaloganathan said. “He started as a dishwasher in Greek restaurants in Montreal before working in progressive positions and becoming a restaurant owner.”
The family eventually moved to Ontario and opened its own restaurant in Rockwood. At age 13, Dhavaloganathan started helping out. Over the next few years, he worked in the kitchen, the dining room, and took on other tasks, such as designing menus and programming the point-of-sale system.
Dhavaloganathan and Gilani attended Laurier’s business program and it was during that time the pair became life partners and business partners.
If Gilani was the most important person Dhavaloganathan knew at Laurier, Professor Steve Farlow was second. The entrepreneurship instructor instilled confidence in his students to take on real-world challenges.
"He talked about it from personal experience, not just textbooks,” Dhavaloganathan said. “I still think about that class.”
While Farlow fired up Dhavaloganathan’s entrepreneurial spirit during his time at Laurier, co-founding his own company was still years away. But, flashes of success were already apparent.
As students, Dhavaloganathan, Gilani and their friend, David Cameron (BBA, BSC ’09), took part in a LaunchPad 50K competition and came away with $10,000 and an office at the Schlegel Centre equipped with a fax machine. Dhavaloganathan went on to complete a co-op term at BlackBerry and was soon hired by the company, eventually becoming a Software Product Manager.
While Dhavaloganathan honed his skills at the tech giant, Gilani spent the next couple of years working in progressive roles at RBC and Manulife in Toronto and Kitchener. Then came 2012, a transformational year for the couple — they got married and together with other co-founders started MyLocal, a website builder for local businesses.
“A lot of our early clients were restaurants,” Gilani said.
It made sense, since people who run restaurants have a lot on the go and MyLocal was a platform meant to help busy people maintain their digital presence. By then, websites had become vital to restaurants as a gateway to discover more and to book reservations. They still are, with as many as 89 per cent of people now starting their restaurant experience online, according to Toast.
“There are restaurants that offer amazing in-person experiences, but have awful websites,” Dhavaloganathan said. “The broken website makes people feel like they don’t care about the guest experience, but they do.”
Their product was meant to show customers the restaurateur behind the website cared. It was simple enough for someone with a basic digital skillset to use. As more restaurants became interested in MyLocal, Dhavaloganathan surrendered to what he knew best.
“We decided to specialize in restaurants,” he said. “We wanted to be more than a website builder, we wanted it to also support front-of-house operations.”
Gilani said the decision to focus on restaurants was close to her heart, too. She saw first-hand the role that restaurants play in community building as co-chair of the Downtown Kitchener Action and Advisory Committee.
Cluny uses Sociavore to extend the guest experience online with their website (clunybistro.com).
“Local restaurants add so much to a community’s daily life,” she said. “A lively downtown is based on food and beverage. You can buy a pair of shoes online and you can order food in, but a restaurant is an experience you can’t get at home.”
With that new goal in mind, they launched Sociavore in January 2018. Sociavore is built around the realities of operating a restaurant and makes it easy to deliver an amazing online guest experience. Restaurants can build and customize their own websites using the Sociavore website builder and themes. The Sociavore platform includes every website feature a restaurant needs including a menu manager, reservations, events, guest messaging, online ordering and more.
Sociavore is completely cloud-based and hosted, which means restaurants don’t need to worry about upgrading software. When Sociavore adds new features, all restaurants on the platform have access to them.
Thusenth and Amina with their three children, Zain, Zara and Aziz.
As Sociavore grows as a business and attracts new restaurants, Dhavaloganathan and Gilani said they hope their clients feel like they’re dealing with a committed and passionate mission-focused business.
“We’re not your usual startup,” Gilani said. “We’re not single, we’re not young and we have three kids. For us, a big focus comes from his dad — we’ve seen what it takes to build something sustainable and we want to support our restaurant customers with the same commitment and for the long-haul.”