Ex-Amazon designer delivers on Thai goal

A former lead designer in Amazon’s user-experience design team in the US returned to Thailand, her home country, in 2015 to set up a website and mobile application – Indie Dish – that supports rapidly rising demand from health-conscious consumers.
Her mission: “Healthy eating made simple and fun”.   
Co-founder and chief executive officer Darin Suthapong described https://Indiedish.co as a “healthy-dish website and mobile app that allows customers to discover more than 300 healthy menus from 50 top vendors and restaurants across Bangkok”. 
Following a period of research and development work, the online business commenced operations in the second half of last year.
The beauty of Indie Dish is that each dish is accompanied on the site by its calorie account and the price, which starts at Bt55, she said. 
The website also provides healthy-eating courses, such as a slim diet course covering five days and a deluxe diet course, to support customers trying to keep their weight under control. 
It offers a choice of four delivery rounds, from 11am to 6pm each day. 
Darin said that when she came back to Thailand a couple of years ago, she found it far from convenient to get healthy meals, with “most of the food options out there greasy or containing monosodium glutamate”. 
She later discovered that she was not alone, with countless other health-conscious consumers facing the same problem. 
Therefore, she decided to launch Indie Dish with the mission “to make healthy eating simple and fun”. 
Customers can order the food online from any vendor or restaurant signed up to the website and get it delivered the next day for a delivery charge of Bt60, anywhere in Bangkok. 
Before returning to Thailand, Darin spent more than 13 years in the US, working in the field of user experience. 
As the lead user-experience designer at Amazon in delivery and post-purchase experience, her job was to make sure that the US giant’s various media for offering its products – website, apps, television, and more – “make customers happy by effectively addressing their needs in the most delightful way”, she said. 
Her work included a wide range of responsibilities, such as research, strategy and design, and the key project she worked on was reimagining the entire Amazon online-delivery experience for both the US market and internationally, she explained. 
“I had to learn and gain experience from Amazon to help build and improve my existing business [skills]. Amazon has a very effective process for building innovative products. Every [marketing and delivery] product at Amazon always starts with a press release, outlining the problem that the product is trying to solve, the solution, and what customers would say when the product is launched.
“After that, we would develop the product and launch with A/B testing experiments, which is a fantastic method for figuring the best online promotional and marketing strategies for business, to validate our assumptions. 
“When I started Indie Dish, I took a similar approach to product development to figure out how to build an innovative healthy-food delivery service. I started by uncovering customer needs around consuming healthy food, and then created a big vision of what I wanted to make happen in both the short and long terms. Finally, I created a product to test out in the market and ran experiments to learn about customer behaviour,” the CEO said. 
In the initial stage, Darin is focusing the business on Bangkok, with the aim of becoming the No-1 online destination for customers who want to eat healthy food. 
She looks forward, however, to expanding the product to other countries in Southeast Asia and North America, where there is great demand for creative healthy-food options, as the next step. 
“I want to be a global start-up that has a business based in Bangkok, Thailand,” the entrepreneur said.