We all know how mobile unfriendly restaurant websites tend to be. Many of them are done in Flash, and don't work at all on most phones. Others force you to download PDF menus which take forever to load and have an annoying tendency to lock up my phone.
The irony, of course, is that I'm most likely to be looking at restaurant websites on my phone, when I'm around town looking for an interesting place to eat. There's nothing more frustrating than pulling up a restaurant website, only to see a Flash page that doesn't work, or a desktop website that you have to pinch, zoom, and scroll your way around.
I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites.
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.
Instead of charging a flat setup or monthly fee, have you thought about pivoting your business model so that customers can order through your app, and you charge a percentage fee to the restaurant owner?
I think skeptical restaurant owners would choose that no-risk option, and you'd probably make more money. Restaurant owners who think it'll be successful in making sales would probably be willing to pay a decent sum per month.
I agree with the other commenter that you are probably not charging enough. I think this kind of service has high value if it can demonstrably increase sales.
We have been contemplating adding ordering for a while now. To do it well, it's a non trivial problem with a lot of different challenges.
Restaurant online ordering providers usually fall into two camps:
1) Simple ordering that goes to email, fax, or phone. There is no integration with the kitchen and restaurants have to reconcile their reporting at the end of the day.
2) Online ordering website integration directly with the restaurant's point of sale system. This works better for the restaurant cause the orders can go straight to the kitchen printers, the sales reports are all in the same place, and the orders pop up in the point of sale system that the restaurant is already using. This is a lot more work (and a lot more expensive), and first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.
Additionally, not all restaurants are interested in doing online ordering (it affects the workflow of the kitchen to have orders coming in 'out of band').
I wouldn't want to limit our service to only folks interested doing online ordering, but it might be an interesting add-on for us down the road.
> ...first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.
Or roll your own POS and blow the competition completely out of the water. :-) There is a huge opportunity here for the sorts of people that hang out on HN.
We'd like to do one in Python/HTML5, open-source, cloud-based server. Not sure about device interaction though, and can you imagine the sales cycle? Yikes. Are people on HN interested in being part of a project like that? We weren't sure (at ChompStack) that we could get enough developer interest, and it's a big project. We've written touchscreen software for restaurants before, for about 5 yrs.
The sales cycle may not be as bad as you think. The standard model in restaurant (and market) POS systems seems to be a large up-front cost of many thousands of dollars, followed by a yearly "support contract", which entitles the client to a "free" phone call to technical support as necessary. (Without an active "support contract", I've seen some pretty outrageous hourly rates for calls to tech support, and they will resolutely refuse to answer anything unless it's paid for.)
On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone.
...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.)
With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc.
One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell.
Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it.
But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-)
edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
I've heard the general POS term of existence is 2-5 years, so a lot of restaurants might be inclined to upgrade I would think. However, restaurant owners can be a suspicious lot, and they require more than proof-of-concept by early adopters (not even sure who those would be) to convince them.
We think it's worth the time and the money, and we agree that the current clunky, antiquated hardware and counterintuitive software is a disgrace. It's one of those ideas (upgrading restaurants) whose time is fast approaching.
In regards to #1:
sure there is. Assuming they are a sit down restaurant and have hosts/hostesses, put that fax machine at their stand where they wait for customers, if an order comes in via that, have them walk back and give the order to the expo guy or the guy in the "main window", they ring up the order as they do to-go stuff(at least where I worked at Mitchell's Fish Market) so receiving an order over the phone or via fax isn't too much of a difference. Perhaps some re-training.
I think maybe you are overthinking that aspect of it. I totally understand and likewise agree with doing POS integration with the kitchen(you can't automate it), but there are methods already present in every restaurant to getting an order to the kitchen, some are paper, some are DASH(Darden's system, microsoft stack) aloha system etc seems to be a pretty big one.
Forget online ordering, just sell lead generation. I could sell your service to my local clients but not easily for 15/month. If you tracked leads you could easily sell your service on commissions alone.
In this context it almost certainly means "We filled 68 tables for you this month. That has obvious monetary value to you. Pay us and we will continue delighting you."
Hmm, I'm not sure how we could directly correlate mobile website hits with actual customer visits. Although being able to record those metrics would be a great selling point.
OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
Eh. This is the sort of thing I would (and might) recommend to my restaurant-owning clients free-of-charge, which is why they call me when they have other trouble, and why they recommend me to other people, which is where I make money.
That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.
Sounds interesting. Can you give an example of how this might work? It hadn't occurred to me that you could do such a thing without physically exchanging money. Everything I can think of off the top of my head would involve tracking code that presumably the customer wouldn't be able to validate is legitimately tracking leads.
> I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.
I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side.
Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue.
Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up.
> Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling
Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.
+1 for this idea. Maybe you want to consider giving free service to some early adopters in return for the ability to analyze the impact on your business. Ideally, you would spread this out across a few different target demographics, like pizza joints, Chinese/ethnic, late-night, etc., so that your potential customers would identify with the results.
Even the most conservative restaurant owner is going to be swayed by a clear financial benefit.
Also, convincing potential customers to take the plunge is the kind of task that (good) salespeople excel at.
That whole vertical idea is brilliant: if we could convince a handful of pizza joints it would give other like restaurants a high level of motivation to join them. What type of restaurants do you think we should target? Who would most benefit from a mobile site?
-- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand.
-- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out.
-- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle)
A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).
Great suggestions, thank you. Would love to target the Chinese takeout market, that's spectacular, although the restaurants we've spoken to so far in that corner are somewhat frugal/take more convincing :)
I am extremely interested in this, but I wonder why you're doing mobile only? Existing sites are crappy because they don't know any better and doing all the good stuff is HARD. I mean, add in basic mail merge capacities and a place to put a few ambiance ahots of the restaurant and you'd have EVERYTHING my Dad wants me to do with his restaurant's website.
A restaurant desktop website builder is in our roadmap. The tricky bit is that most restaurants seem to want their own customized look and feel, which is more time consuming to put together.
With mobile websites you generally want something that loads quickly, displays all the restaurant information in an easy to access manner, and is somewhat customizable (colors, logo, etc) but doesn't go too far cause then you would lose usability.
I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites.
This is the most important piece of information that is missing from your site. As a restraint owner looking at your site I'm thinking "What is this, an app, or a service or what?" and "how will my customers find my restaurant on their phone with this service?". Given that most restaurants that you are targeting are probably not even aware that people might access access the restaurant's site on their phone, you definitely need to answer these questions.
(edit: for example, your uWink demo video in the first frame already starts with the app (or site or whatever it is) on the screen. You should demonstrate how a customer would find uWink on their phone in the first place)
It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website?
In terms of how customers are going to discover the restaurant, it really depends on the customer. A lot of folks search via the Google Maps app and then click through to the website.
I could start the demo video on a Google Maps search and take the user to the restaurant website from there...
> It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website?
It isn't. The biggest text you have up there is 'Mobile websites for Restaurants'. That might mean you do contract work for restaurants looking to create mobile websites. Which you aren't. May be interpreted both ways - I think your explanation in the post above was clearer.
Agree with Spuz - it's hard to recognize the screenshots as a 'website' (as the lines between app and website are a bit blurry on mobile devices). Let's say a restaurant has a normal website, and a potential customers google's them on his phone and browses to the normal website on his phone. How is he going to get on to the mobile version? Should the restaurant set up detection and a redirect?
I got the message that you were offering to create mobile sites for restaurants, but maybe it's because I'm already used to the idea. I think you may be overestimating how many people have and understand smartphones, though. According to slide 62 of the Morgan Stanley “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” you link on the front page, there's only a 25% percent penetration (est 40% by the end of the year). After a quick skim through the presentation, I don't see your 42% anywhere, but perhaps I don't know what I'm looking for.
Anyways, the point is that you're not marketing to the smartphone users. You're marketing to people that probably don't have a smartphone, and may not know how people would use one to discover their site. Showing the different paths in a video or chart would be a good idea. Better might be to set something up with an existing customer with a horrible, flash-filled, pdf-menu'd main site. Get them to agree to let you post a video of what it was like before they got you, and how unusable the site is, even if you somehow get a direct link to the pdf menu.
Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner.
> Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner.
This is key. stevenwei, you need to get your butt into some restaurants and test this idea out. I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Spend a day in as many of the restaurants in your area as possible and request a meeting with the owner. Most of the time you'll get turned down, but take what you can get.
Ask them about their current website and if they have any issues. Talk to them about smartphones and try to understand how they perceive their problems. Take lots of notes. Then, use the words the restaurant people did on your site. It may seem unclear to us on HN, but if it speaks to restaurant people that's all that matters.
> I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Great advice, and that has been our experience as well.
Great idea, but like others said make it clear, with one sentence, what your service does (think like you're a restaurant owner who vaguely even knows what an iPhone is - just that a lot of your patrons use them in your restaurant).
Also, using the location-network effect you could also help promote their establishments. Build another app that allows you to search and view your client's mobile-friendly sites and open their location in Google Maps
So its like Urbanspoon, except you can actually see what the hell is on the menu. This helps your product sell more because not only are you making it easier for the restaurant to gain visibility through your promotion and marketing through the app (which is what you could technically charge them for - giving away the site for free), but you are also giving them an established mobile presence as well.
Interesting idea. But that would put us in direct competition with Yelp, Urbanspoon, CitySearch, etc, which already have massive market/mind share. Why would someone care about being listed in our directory?
Additionally, all of those directories already link to the restaurant's website. Our goal is simply to make sure that when the user clicks through to the website, they can actually find what they're looking for.
Edit: That said, explaining that all these existing directories point to your website, and when your customers click through, they want to be able to find your menu (or whatever else wasn't listed in the directory) is certainly valuable.
Why don't you have a very limited free version that lets them kick the tires without paying you anything?
Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)
We'll definitely consider doing something like that. I'm a bit wary of the freemium model given that we're selling to businesses. I'd hate for folks to sign up for a free account and then forget about the site (usually restaurant owners don't have that much time on their hands to follow through with these things).
But offering a way to clearly prove the value of the service before they buy would definitely be useful.
These things are annoying on a PC too. When I go to a restaurant website, I'm looking for some combination of location, hours, menu and specials. Cool visual design is a nice touch, but animations and sounds are just annoying.
Suggestion: expand your service to provide good desktop sites in addition to your mobile sites.
Although I completely agree with you, and I'm sure most HN-type people would. I doubt the restaurant owners would. The idea that a website has to be flashy and fancy is well ingrained by now.
See I think that statement is a fallacy. Restaurant owners began to believe in the power of websites when other restaurants began having them and HN-type people began using them, and they saw what a great tool the internet is to draw more business and promote themselves. HN-type people (love this hyphen) create the groundswell by which businesses recognize what direction to go in, and restaurant owners are no different, just a little later to the party because they've been cooking the meals.
I've read many 'Ask HN: Rate My Startup' posts and knew you guys gave great advice, but I didn't really expect to get this much feedback and encouragement.
A friend has been talking about doing this for along time, as it is consistently felt that most restaurants do a horrible job with websites.
However, I wonder if focusing only on the mobile side of things is the right way to go.
I agree you've got yourself a market, but should a restaurant need to be updating two websites? If the same info is valid on both, why not provide a different css for non-mobile and be a one stop shop for restuarants.
You may also be able to provide some other related services which may provide a network effect and possibly a slight barrier to entry for competitors.
Great observation. That is definitely on our roadmap.
Of course most restaurants already do have websites, so getting them to add a simple redirect to a mobile version might be an easier task than asking them to dump their entire existing website.
But I definitely agree, for new restaurants that don't already have a website, being able to build a desktop + mobile version with the same tool is very compelling.
I'm working on a similar project, and one thing I'd like to point out is that menus are not always simple databases. There are several menus that have paragraphs of information that relates to several menu items rather than just one. How are you planning on translating that information to a mobile application, if at all? I'm trying to find a good example of this "paragraph of extraneous info" from menus in a Google Search - I'll get back to you when I can.
Interesting observation. Do you have any examples of this?
In my experience, most restaurant menus do fit into a simple database format. After all, most major point of sale systems do use relational databases to store and track menu items. The menu item databases are usually highly configurable but I've usually seen them break down into:
1) Major categories: Entrees, Appetizers
2) Menu items: Cheeseburger, Grilled Salmon
3) Modifier categories: Steak Temperature, Salad Dressing
4) Modifiers: Rare, Medium, Well-Done, etc.
Of course you usually don't display the modifiers on the menu itself, that is a back end implementation detail. :)
I know what you're talking about, but do you think mobile sites could possibly get away with not displaying that 'extra' information? Especially considering screen real estate on mobile devices is fairly limited.
If it is absolutely necessary, it seems like it would be fairly easy to have that show up when you select a section. That could get complicated if there are multiple paragraphs within a section (i.e. one for burgers and one for chicken sandwiches, but both of those are under "sandwiches"). You could just limit it to one description per category, though.
This is one menu that presents the type of problem I'm talking about. The line that worries me is "All entrees come with salad bar," which reflects on every entree. From my perspective, the easiest way to incorporate data like this would be to include it underneath the extended explanation of the menu item.
PS Steven - I want to set up a phone call with you or something. I'm working on something that is literally one step away from what you are. follow me on Twitter (@nate) or e-mail me at nchastain at gmail.com and let me know if you've got some time free some time next week. I'm still in the development stage and won't have a product out for at least a month.
I like it, but I hate your logo. Who takes a bite out of just the bun? Also, by showing a hamburger, you made me think of fast food and I could see conventional restaurants balking at that.
I created that logo and I hate it too. Any other ideas? I'm a horrendous graphic designer but I'm down to try again, and I agree with your points entirely. We were sort of pushing to get it done at the time. We could consider 99designs.com at this point I suppose.
Tough to figure out a menu icon: how can you immediately know what a menu looks like, maybe a rectangle with some fake lines of "text" and a wine glass pic? I've seen that somewhere...personally I think maybe the bite was my mistake (despite our chosen name) because it doesn't scale down well.
That was my original plan but I needed something for Twitter, etc. Maybe I could do what HN does (along with many others) and just use the first letter in a box when I need a smaller graphic. Thanks for the suggestion!
I very much like the Apple bite idea with the C, and you're right, I've already made our site so Web 2.0 that what's a little nudge further? :) I'll get in touch with you, thanks.
Holy crap icons are apparently affordable from iconshock, as are logos! I was imagining like $1000+ for a logo, never having commissioned one myself. Thanks!
At the risk of getting beat down I totally disagree. I think the logo is awesome. The branding hit me in the face hard. "Chomp"? Yep, that looks like a chomp. :) I wouldn't change a thing. It's colorful and communicates the food message quick and cleanly. Having just the logo text by itself would be too plain IMO. As for higher scale restaurants, I don't think that's a problem either. The site won't be seen by their customers, yet it's fun branding any restaurant owner can remember.
True, and you can always change your logo later if you change your mind. Many companies alter their logo down the line, but my first impression of your site was very positive.
Looks really well executed. I would definitely do some legwork on the operator front. I tackled this same problem about 2 years ago and found that operators simply aren't able to understand the need for this type of service (maybe it was the timing). Keep in mind that many don't have a website and some don't even use email, so explaining why they need a "mobile" website makes for a potentially hard sale.
Someone discussed online ordering as a possible revenue model, from my experiences with operators they weren't interested in this approach. Most orders they received over the phone would involve customization and the cost of handling order problems simply outweighed the benefit of not requiring their bartender to take an order over the phone. However, I could see this being big for chinese restaurants. Most customers order by number, and many chinese restaurants are carry out exclusively. Remove potential language barriers during order taking, increase total ordering, win-win.
I agree, the biggest challenge is with operator awareness. Most restaurant owner's priorities look something like this:
1) Food
2) Service
...
9544) Website
My hope is that with the mobile internet growing as it is, more restaurant folks will begin to understand that their customers are using their phones to look up restaurants, and showing them an empty Flash page or making them download huge menu PDFs is immensely frustrating and delivers a poor customer experience.
Great points, and we agree wholeheartedly. Most of our cold calls to restaurants have terminated in "We're just not interested" or "We have a website." Wish there was a way to take all of this feedback and channel it directly to them (or perhaps we need to work on our sales pitches? :) )
Like the Chinese restaurant idea. Wonder how receptive they'd be to changing their phone order system.
I really like this idea! I don't have a smartphone, but I would like to support you if I could. Do you have a page listing all of your customers, so I could go to them and tell them it was because of your site?
Speaking of which, how are normal people supposed to find these mobile sites? Maybe you could have restaurants pay you to list them in foursquare or equivalent.
Do you provide the option to opt-out of the mobile version? I get really, really frustrated by mobile versions that are forced on me with no option to say "no thanks, give me the real thing".
Well, the way I find local restaurants (on my iPhone) is:
1) Pull up Google maps and search for restaurants.
2) Pull up Yelp/Urbanspoon and search for restaurants.
Then I often find myself wanting more information than Google/Yelp/Urbanspoon provides, so I end up going to the restaurant's listed website on my phone. 99% of the time, the website isn't in a format that I can easily use on my phone.
It might be nice to allow the customers to mark the foods that interest them so they can remember what they want to order when they get to the restaurant.
Strangely enough my friend was pitching me on this idea about 6 months ago. It just goes to shows, ideas truly are a commodity, and execution is everything.
So many websites I goto have menus that are PDFs of their actual menus.
It seems like the biggest hurdle to face is getting all the information in initially(those menus can get pretty long) and then having the getting the restaurant owners keeping them updated in terms of pricing/selection. To me, $15 a month is nothing, as long as there is minimal effort in maintaining the mobile sites.
All in all - really happy someone is going after this market. Restauranteurs have no idea where to look for a website. They just ask for the coolest possible website without wanting to pay too much so they end up with all the bells and whistles but done really quickly and badly.
You should wonder why restaurants think they should have a "fancy" website, as opposed to a Facebook business listing with a menu and some pics. A fancy restaurant will want something dark and elegant to communicate that they're not a diner or a fast food joint. Think about this.
I like this idea a lot. In fact, I like the idea so much that I started toying around with a similar idea a few nights ago while contemplating whether or not I had time to go through with the project or not. I decided to hold off a bit as I've got another project I am trying to launch first.
Nice site but it has multiple HTML errors viewable at http://validator.w3.org - especially the blog portion.
It's best to have 100% validated HTML especially when offering to build sites for other people. Some times restaurant owners can be technologically inclined and may check these things out.
Thanks for the input, I'll validate our blog tonight. We do extensive testing and validation of our mobile sites on many mobile platforms but obviously were sadly neglectful of our Wordpress blog. Doh!
A problem with this service's model just occurred to me: The way that you get users onto your "new mobile" version of the restaurant is by re-directing them when they go to the restaurant's home page from a phone browser.
What if the users are like me, though, and just avoid going to the restaurant Web site from the phone because we are aware how bad the "usual" experience is.
I'm not expressing this clearly, but consider this analogy: If for ten years a neighborhood in town is "bad", has a high crime rate, routinely plays host to gang wars, et cetera, building a state-of-the-art gated community and community playground in that area won't attract new visitors for a LONG time until that old reputation runs its course.
One of your selling points is that there's "no marketing required." I don't know how you feel about this, but I think that's a losing strategy for a project like this.
I'm not sure if there's any way around that, though. Part of the point of the service is that you don't give up your branding by making customers go through an external site. They go to your site, and if they're on a mobile phone, they get shown a mobile friendly version.
I think the key word here is "required". Most of the restaurants we've spoken to are averse to the idea of having to promote a new piece of technology because of the time and effort that involves. This gives them the opportunity to make the decision about promoting it--restaurant websites deemed "bad neighborhoods" might choose otherwise :)
looks great. both the idea and the UI of the website and what is shown in the the demo.
some of the comments like creating a website, not just a mobile site, are great too.
but i wonder, what is your target for # of clients?
I would think you would need at least 1000 clients at $15 a month. is that realistic?
according to some results from a google query there are hundred of thousands of restaurants.
i also wonder, were these numbers on your mind when you created the service?
We've got a lot of numbers in our minds, that's for sure. We do believe that 1000 clients is a possibility in a landscape of potentially millions worldwide, but a lot of that depends on how much traction we can acquire in the restaurant community.
Ha. I gotta laugh. I've seen so many websites that look like this, I have a hard time differentiating some of these startups.
I know it's a proven navigational scheme and sound UI that studies show converts at a higher blah blah blah, but when is some one going to do something new with landing pages? Sheesh.
Okay, on the count of 3, everyone click the down arrow on my comment!
Well I've got to give you credit for saying it to our faces, considering I designed that site. Now on the count of 3, tell me how a software engineer with no design experience can figure out in under a month how to put together a full-featured web application with a frontend, user control panel and admin interface and still worry about the uniqueness of the landing page graphic design? My real concern was that it worked and it communicated our message.
Edit: I should mention that I totally agree with your comment. Can't wait to hire a graphic designer :)
Do you know who cares about "originality" in landing page design? People who design landing pages...
Your customers won't know that this layout is well-worn territory for paid web apps. They will just see a beautiful, easy to understand website. Which it is...
Nice work.
You can design something to impress the HN crowd once you get traction. In other words, pay for the fluff with profits.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadWe all know how mobile unfriendly restaurant websites tend to be. Many of them are done in Flash, and don't work at all on most phones. Others force you to download PDF menus which take forever to load and have an annoying tendency to lock up my phone.
The irony, of course, is that I'm most likely to be looking at restaurant websites on my phone, when I'm around town looking for an interesting place to eat. There's nothing more frustrating than pulling up a restaurant website, only to see a Flash page that doesn't work, or a desktop website that you have to pinch, zoom, and scroll your way around.
I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites.
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.
I think skeptical restaurant owners would choose that no-risk option, and you'd probably make more money. Restaurant owners who think it'll be successful in making sales would probably be willing to pay a decent sum per month.
I agree with the other commenter that you are probably not charging enough. I think this kind of service has high value if it can demonstrably increase sales.
Restaurant online ordering providers usually fall into two camps:
1) Simple ordering that goes to email, fax, or phone. There is no integration with the kitchen and restaurants have to reconcile their reporting at the end of the day.
2) Online ordering website integration directly with the restaurant's point of sale system. This works better for the restaurant cause the orders can go straight to the kitchen printers, the sales reports are all in the same place, and the orders pop up in the point of sale system that the restaurant is already using. This is a lot more work (and a lot more expensive), and first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.
Additionally, not all restaurants are interested in doing online ordering (it affects the workflow of the kitchen to have orders coming in 'out of band').
I wouldn't want to limit our service to only folks interested doing online ordering, but it might be an interesting add-on for us down the road.
Or roll your own POS and blow the competition completely out of the water. :-) There is a huge opportunity here for the sorts of people that hang out on HN.
On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone.
...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.)
With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc.
One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell.
Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it.
But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-)
edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
We think it's worth the time and the money, and we agree that the current clunky, antiquated hardware and counterintuitive software is a disgrace. It's one of those ideas (upgrading restaurants) whose time is fast approaching.
I think maybe you are overthinking that aspect of it. I totally understand and likewise agree with doing POS integration with the kitchen(you can't automate it), but there are methods already present in every restaurant to getting an order to the kitchen, some are paper, some are DASH(Darden's system, microsoft stack) aloha system etc seems to be a pretty big one.
Or lead generation for restaurant customers?
OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.
I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side.
Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue.
Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up.
> Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling
Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.
Even the most conservative restaurant owner is going to be swayed by a clear financial benefit.
Also, convincing potential customers to take the plunge is the kind of task that (good) salespeople excel at.
-- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand.
-- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out.
-- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle)
A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).
With mobile websites you generally want something that loads quickly, displays all the restaurant information in an easy to access manner, and is somewhat customizable (colors, logo, etc) but doesn't go too far cause then you would lose usability.
This is the most important piece of information that is missing from your site. As a restraint owner looking at your site I'm thinking "What is this, an app, or a service or what?" and "how will my customers find my restaurant on their phone with this service?". Given that most restaurants that you are targeting are probably not even aware that people might access access the restaurant's site on their phone, you definitely need to answer these questions.
(edit: for example, your uWink demo video in the first frame already starts with the app (or site or whatever it is) on the screen. You should demonstrate how a customer would find uWink on their phone in the first place)
It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website?
In terms of how customers are going to discover the restaurant, it really depends on the customer. A lot of folks search via the Google Maps app and then click through to the website.
I could start the demo video on a Google Maps search and take the user to the restaurant website from there...
It isn't. The biggest text you have up there is 'Mobile websites for Restaurants'. That might mean you do contract work for restaurants looking to create mobile websites. Which you aren't. May be interpreted both ways - I think your explanation in the post above was clearer.
As far as getting restaurants set up, that can be a service we provide...
Anyways, the point is that you're not marketing to the smartphone users. You're marketing to people that probably don't have a smartphone, and may not know how people would use one to discover their site. Showing the different paths in a video or chart would be a good idea. Better might be to set something up with an existing customer with a horrible, flash-filled, pdf-menu'd main site. Get them to agree to let you post a video of what it was like before they got you, and how unusable the site is, even if you somehow get a direct link to the pdf menu.
Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner.
This is key. stevenwei, you need to get your butt into some restaurants and test this idea out. I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Spend a day in as many of the restaurants in your area as possible and request a meeting with the owner. Most of the time you'll get turned down, but take what you can get.
Ask them about their current website and if they have any issues. Talk to them about smartphones and try to understand how they perceive their problems. Take lots of notes. Then, use the words the restaurant people did on your site. It may seem unclear to us on HN, but if it speaks to restaurant people that's all that matters.
Great advice, and that has been our experience as well.
I'll add another citation. Although I would love to find more recent numbers, as I bet the percentage has jumped since then.
Great idea for the before and after videos...although on a Flash site the 'before' video won't be particularly exciting. :)
Also, using the location-network effect you could also help promote their establishments. Build another app that allows you to search and view your client's mobile-friendly sites and open their location in Google Maps
So its like Urbanspoon, except you can actually see what the hell is on the menu. This helps your product sell more because not only are you making it easier for the restaurant to gain visibility through your promotion and marketing through the app (which is what you could technically charge them for - giving away the site for free), but you are also giving them an established mobile presence as well.
One two punch.
Additionally, all of those directories already link to the restaurant's website. Our goal is simply to make sure that when the user clicks through to the website, they can actually find what they're looking for.
Edit: That said, explaining that all these existing directories point to your website, and when your customers click through, they want to be able to find your menu (or whatever else wasn't listed in the directory) is certainly valuable.
Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)
But offering a way to clearly prove the value of the service before they buy would definitely be useful.
Suggestion: expand your service to provide good desktop sites in addition to your mobile sites.
I just want to thank everyone for their feedback.
I've read many 'Ask HN: Rate My Startup' posts and knew you guys gave great advice, but I didn't really expect to get this much feedback and encouragement.
Thanks a lot guys!
Looks fantastic. I really like your UI -- very informative, yet clean.
I think that your prices seem pretty low, I am not sure how much feedback you have gotten from restaurants, this seems like a no-brainer for them...
Good luck!
A friend has been talking about doing this for along time, as it is consistently felt that most restaurants do a horrible job with websites.
However, I wonder if focusing only on the mobile side of things is the right way to go.
I agree you've got yourself a market, but should a restaurant need to be updating two websites? If the same info is valid on both, why not provide a different css for non-mobile and be a one stop shop for restuarants.
You may also be able to provide some other related services which may provide a network effect and possibly a slight barrier to entry for competitors.
Of course most restaurants already do have websites, so getting them to add a simple redirect to a mobile version might be an easier task than asking them to dump their entire existing website.
But I definitely agree, for new restaurants that don't already have a website, being able to build a desktop + mobile version with the same tool is very compelling.
I'm working on a similar project, and one thing I'd like to point out is that menus are not always simple databases. There are several menus that have paragraphs of information that relates to several menu items rather than just one. How are you planning on translating that information to a mobile application, if at all? I'm trying to find a good example of this "paragraph of extraneous info" from menus in a Google Search - I'll get back to you when I can.
In my experience, most restaurant menus do fit into a simple database format. After all, most major point of sale systems do use relational databases to store and track menu items. The menu item databases are usually highly configurable but I've usually seen them break down into:
1) Major categories: Entrees, Appetizers 2) Menu items: Cheeseburger, Grilled Salmon 3) Modifier categories: Steak Temperature, Salad Dressing 4) Modifiers: Rare, Medium, Well-Done, etc.
Of course you usually don't display the modifiers on the menu itself, that is a back end implementation detail. :)
If it is absolutely necessary, it seems like it would be fairly easy to have that show up when you select a section. That could get complicated if there are multiple paragraphs within a section (i.e. one for burgers and one for chicken sandwiches, but both of those are under "sandwiches"). You could just limit it to one description per category, though.
This is one menu that presents the type of problem I'm talking about. The line that worries me is "All entrees come with salad bar," which reflects on every entree. From my perspective, the easiest way to incorporate data like this would be to include it underneath the extended explanation of the menu item.
PS Steven - I want to set up a phone call with you or something. I'm working on something that is literally one step away from what you are. follow me on Twitter (@nate) or e-mail me at nchastain at gmail.com and let me know if you've got some time free some time next week. I'm still in the development stage and won't have a product out for at least a month.
http://www.cultofmac.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/apple-...
Shoot me an email if you like. I'd be happy to put something together at a reasonable price if you're pushed for time :)
We'll put up a HTML5 video version too.
Someone discussed online ordering as a possible revenue model, from my experiences with operators they weren't interested in this approach. Most orders they received over the phone would involve customization and the cost of handling order problems simply outweighed the benefit of not requiring their bartender to take an order over the phone. However, I could see this being big for chinese restaurants. Most customers order by number, and many chinese restaurants are carry out exclusively. Remove potential language barriers during order taking, increase total ordering, win-win.
Anyway, best of luck!
I agree, the biggest challenge is with operator awareness. Most restaurant owner's priorities look something like this:
1) Food 2) Service ... 9544) Website
My hope is that with the mobile internet growing as it is, more restaurant folks will begin to understand that their customers are using their phones to look up restaurants, and showing them an empty Flash page or making them download huge menu PDFs is immensely frustrating and delivers a poor customer experience.
Like the Chinese restaurant idea. Wonder how receptive they'd be to changing their phone order system.
Speaking of which, how are normal people supposed to find these mobile sites? Maybe you could have restaurants pay you to list them in foursquare or equivalent.
1) Pull up Google maps and search for restaurants. 2) Pull up Yelp/Urbanspoon and search for restaurants.
Then I often find myself wanting more information than Google/Yelp/Urbanspoon provides, so I end up going to the restaurant's listed website on my phone. 99% of the time, the website isn't in a format that I can easily use on my phone.
In particular, the graphic of the two iPhones on the right side made it _immediately_ and _compellingly_ clear what you're selling. Nice work.
The simple shadow immediately beneath the phones is plenty.
On your "Features" tab you do a great job actually focusing on "Benefits" (most people just list the features!).
I'd propose that you change that menu title to "Why Do I Need Chompstack?" or just "Why ChompStack?" and then retitle the headline to:
"ChompStack generates more customers by making your site accessible to mobile visitors."
Then rather than opening up with "Why go mobile?" - find some real data illustrating the "pain" for restaurant owners:
"72% of restaurant websites don’t work on mobile phones . . .”
Or
“Your website is broken for up to 50% of your visitors!
Support those stats by doing a quick restaurant survey from your local listings and I bet the number is crazy!
So many websites I goto have menus that are PDFs of their actual menus.
It seems like the biggest hurdle to face is getting all the information in initially(those menus can get pretty long) and then having the getting the restaurant owners keeping them updated in terms of pricing/selection. To me, $15 a month is nothing, as long as there is minimal effort in maintaining the mobile sites.
You should wonder why restaurants think they should have a "fancy" website, as opposed to a Facebook business listing with a menu and some pics. A fancy restaurant will want something dark and elegant to communicate that they're not a diner or a fast food joint. Think about this.
Best of luck to you.
It's best to have 100% validated HTML especially when offering to build sites for other people. Some times restaurant owners can be technologically inclined and may check these things out.
What if the users are like me, though, and just avoid going to the restaurant Web site from the phone because we are aware how bad the "usual" experience is.
I'm not expressing this clearly, but consider this analogy: If for ten years a neighborhood in town is "bad", has a high crime rate, routinely plays host to gang wars, et cetera, building a state-of-the-art gated community and community playground in that area won't attract new visitors for a LONG time until that old reputation runs its course.
One of your selling points is that there's "no marketing required." I don't know how you feel about this, but I think that's a losing strategy for a project like this.
some of the comments like creating a website, not just a mobile site, are great too.
but i wonder, what is your target for # of clients? I would think you would need at least 1000 clients at $15 a month. is that realistic?
according to some results from a google query there are hundred of thousands of restaurants. i also wonder, were these numbers on your mind when you created the service?
I know it's a proven navigational scheme and sound UI that studies show converts at a higher blah blah blah, but when is some one going to do something new with landing pages? Sheesh.
Okay, on the count of 3, everyone click the down arrow on my comment!
Edit: I should mention that I totally agree with your comment. Can't wait to hire a graphic designer :)
Your customers won't know that this layout is well-worn territory for paid web apps. They will just see a beautiful, easy to understand website. Which it is...
Nice work.
You can design something to impress the HN crowd once you get traction. In other words, pay for the fluff with profits.