Cusoy
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Cusoy was a restaurant meal planner and curated restaurant finder built for people with dietary restrictions, particularly food allergies and gluten-free needs. Founded by Melissa Tsang, it helped diners find restaurants that could accommodate their dietary requirements, relying on crowdsourced information from users.
02 / Cusoy FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Founder Melissa Tsang explained in her post-mortem that while Cusoy solved the initial problem, she saw no clear or predictable path to sustainability. Building it into a revenue-generating business would have required a full-time team, one to two years of funding and several more years of hard work, with very slim chances of generating revenue. Monetizing user-generated content proved extremely hard: because the service depended on users crowdsourcing restaurant information, charging them removed the incentive to contribute.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
AllTopStartups (1 Mar 2014) lists Cusoy among startups that shutdown; founder Melissa Tsang wrote she would not continue because generating revenue would require a full-time team, 1–2+ years of funding and years of work against slim chances of making money.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Cusoy shut down in 2014; the founder decided to wind it up rather than invest further years without a credible revenue path.
- 02
No bankruptcy filing, asset sale or creditor recovery was reported.
- 03
The company had no reported venture funding; with no reliable loss figure, loss subject, period or basis, no loss amount is recorded.