Ask HN: Feedback on a couple of startup ideas
1) Online gift certificates for restaurants: Currently, very few restaurants sell online gift certificates. Many sell gift cards at the restaurants but if you need to order one online, they need you to fill a payment form, fax the form to them, after which they mail out the gift card. In todays world of instant gratification, this is missing out on potential revenue. The way this idea will work is to have a link on the restaurant's website to the site which will handle the payment and fulfillment of the gift certificates. Being an aggregator is not the goal in this idea.
I have talked to several restaurant owners and most seemed very excited and interested in the concept
2) Build an iphone app that will become a visual menu for restaurants: Currently, restaurant menus are boring. They hardly include any visual images of the menu dishes. Visual aesthetics / plating are a major component of the high end restaurant dishes. They way this idea will work is to have an iphone app and then build a catalog of restaurants and the photos of their menu dishes. When a diner visits a restaurant, they can fire up the app and see the photos of the various dishes.
The biggest hurdle that I see with the above ideas is selling to restaurants. Restaurant owners are a busy bunch - and simply getting in touch with them can be a challenge. Selling to them is a totally different beast.
I'd like to get the feedback of the HN community on these ideas. What do you think ? If you want to get in touch to discuss any of these ideas further, my contact email is in my profile.
20 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadThere is potential to do cool stuff with the data you would collect like A/B testing different plating styles of the same dish.
On the other hand, my wife says she is grossed out by restaurants that have pictures of their dishes (maybe this speaks to the need for better presentation).
I have a friend that has been doing a startup very similar to #1 (with a nice online menu, as well, though not quite #2).
The biggest hurdle seems to be the sales process to get in to each and every restaurant. Many restaurants owners already do advertising/gift certificates in all the standard magazines, Entertainment Book, etc.
Over time, he has accumulated a great list of restaurants in his hometown, but it has taken a great deal of time (i.e. multiple years) and pounding the pavement to get to that point.
And after all of the sales process, I'm not sure about his take, but how many gift certificates does a specific restaurant have to sell to make the sales process profitable? I don't think you get quite the mass numbers of something like Groupon.
On the positive side, he has eaten very well over the past few years !
Number 2. I would take a look at http://www.foodspotting.com for a potential source for an initial image database. Providing a professional photographer would also help.
They both will require quite a bit of footwork to get enough restaurants to buy in on the idea. Good luck if you decide to do either of them.
a) Restaurants are responsive to the idea.
b) You can bundle your fees into transactions, rolling the product out at zero cost to the restaurants.
c) Once you build the core platform, integrating new clients is dirt cheap, eg add a logo / description, it's live.
d) You can build an overarching brand HUB as a connector to all the different clients.
e) Build in a viral component - instead of building for specific restaurants give restaurants a directory on "dinnerdiscounts.com/restaurantname/" and give restaurant a stack of cards to include in their diner's checks, or charge $10 - 15 to do a custom card.
f) Build a model around breakage where you require $100 in account accrual before you issue a check to the restaurant. This makes for incredible cash flow and margins.
For instance you could print ~5,000 GENERIC, but tastefully designed business cards for $50 - 100.
EG - "Thank you for dining with us - we'd like to thank you with 10% off a gift certificate for your next visit. Just visit RestaurantDeals.com and search for us right away."
Once you run out of the 5,000 cards, reprint with updated messaging based on what you learn.
Then that messaging works for ALL the clients you sign up, and you give restaurants a stack of 100 cards that they can include in the receipts or checks they hand out to patrons.
Direct respons rates on cards targeted properly can drive up to say 3 - 5% which more than covers the cost of you handing out the cards, and helps you go viral since customers will also realize they can get discounts on other restaurants :)
Make sense?
Then offer as a premium service to restaurants cards printed with their own specific URL / messaging if they don't like the generic model.
To sell this vision work closely with a half-dozen restaurants, get them extraordinary results, and use their testimonials as your sales pitch.
Think idea number one is the better one.
- Hours of Operation
- Menu with Prices and Pictures of the main dishes (if not every), in HTML, not a freaking PDF
- Phone number and address with easy way to find and print directions from my location
- Pictures of the restaurant in an easy to use, standardized slideshow (lightbox or other similar solution)
optional:
- Reviews from yelp and other services
- Ability to make a reservation online
- Backstory of the restaurant
I think there's huge startup potential in this space, but I imagine the difficult part is getting the restaurant owners on board. I'm surprised a CMS hasn't been popularized that allows restaurant owners to create sites that meet these specifications easily and uniformly. I suppose you wouldn't even need the restaurant's approval, though, because you could just set it up for them like Yelp and other services do and have users upload the pics, menu details, etc (like a wiki).
Anybody know if this has been attempted before?
I plan to post the site on HN when it is ready. It is called Orange Dish.
http://photocritic.org/food-photo-tricks/
I think hiring an artist to make a drawing of the food may be cheaper :-)
Idea #1: You need to ask yourself why people buy gift cards in the first place. They buy them as gifts for other people, gifts to be given at a later date. Instant gratification is far less of a factor when it comes to gift-giving, which is inherently non-instant. The only reason anyone would ever need to print off a gift card would be if they totally forgot the need for it, with like 15 minutes to spare. While that may seem like a niche you can fill, it probably isn't. There are formal-ish standards for gift-giving, and the appearance of forgetting till the last minute is always, always, always avoided; the implication being that you didn't care enough about the recipient to remember to get the gift ahead of time.
Go for #2, and play around with the idea some more.
Idea number two discribes a problem that customers might have, but you are trying to sell it to the restaurant owners.
If you go with option 2, you must think how the fact that the menues are boring and lack visuals affect the business. Maybe customers ask the waiter too many questions, maybe they spend too much time thinking what to order, maybe they return the dish or they simply leave unhappy because they didn't get what they wanted. In short, if you want to sell your solution to the owner - describe the owner's problem.
On a side note, I am looking for feedback on some of my ideas. would you mind recommending me something at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435 ?