Show HN: Cilantro ("About.me for restaurants"). Feedback wanted.
http://cilantrosites.com
SHORT PITCH: About.me for restaurants
LONGER PITCH: Single-page websites for restaurants that don't suck. Instant setup. Hours, map, menu, contact/social, email list, mobile version. No Flash. No PDFs.
KNOWN ISSUES: (a) can add menu items but not edit/del. (b) additional settings (mainly domain mapping) are turned off (c) if you're editing colors, make sure to scroll to the top of the page, (d) many others
FEEDBACK WELCOME: I have tough skin. Also, I know much of the design is average. I have a better designer already working on updates.
GOOD NEWS: I started a small AdWords campaign Tuesday ($15/day). 3 restaurants have signed up so far. Also have a handful of local establishments working on sites.
ROADMAP: (1) bug fixes/known issues, (2) embedded twitter feed for food trucks, (3) sell your own Groupons with PayPal (and keep the money yourself!)
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WANT A T-SHIRT? Give me some really awesome, non-obvious feedback OR make a site for your favorite local restaurant. I'm doing a run of shirts soon. I will send you one.
51 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadsample site in case you don't want to make one: http://cilantro-92.clnt.me
If you make a site and need me to delete it, email me.
Start collecting takeout menus and writing the site so that you can reproduce all of them. Optionally, approach these restaurants and see if any of them are interested in learning how to use it in exchange for it being free for awhile/forever. I hope it takes off!
I've been pretty successful doing other niche websites and one thing I've notice is that, if you're not careful: CONTROL ∝ 1/EASE. I will try to work out a good balance but I'm being very mindful of not confusing people and/or causing a lot of support tickets.
You can make a narrative of the types, too. "A bunch of separate dishes," "a bunch of combinations of ingredients," "a bunch of dishes with the same optional choices," etc. There's probably some restaurant-specific jargon you can employ here to make it easier for your forthcoming customers if you talk to some managers or servers.
Kudos.
I think you have a promising product here and the experience is tight enough that with solid marketing, smaller restaurants will flock to this.
This maybe a temporary solution for restaurants while they wait to build their own.
There are services like Letseat.at & GrabMyTable that has more features and cheaper price.
It's a good service, so why would you not charge money for it? My guess is most restaurant owners would be happy to pay for a good website without the hassle.
It's easier to lower prices than raise them.
I can see some scenarios like showing decor, pictures for each menu item, banquet hall facilities etc where they would want more than a single page.
I have "event calendar" on the roadmap if a lot of people request it ... that could definitely warrant a separate page.
On the one hand that's a simple javascript when the opening times are machine readable, on the other hand handling holiday days would require manual intervention.
Else you risk telling people you're closed when you're not, or vice versa.
Much has been written about flash websites and how chefs want to do a show in their website. And now with social media they're happier having likes and tweets than something handsome.
About the website, my main critic is about the landing page. It's missing more magic. And I know that this could be very generic, but Cilantro is something amazing, something magic that you add to your recipes when they need that extra ingredient to be perfect. You need to get that love for Cilantro and show it in the website.
In fact, all the contents above the fold don't captivate. But when you go down to the gray area, I like the design better. Even when that's something that compliments the website. You need amazing examples, you need metrics. Teach restaurants about web metrics, about a A/B. Unbounced is trying for the rest of us, somebody could start doing niche markets.
Great project!
Minor feedback below.
1. Make the "Take the tour" button bigger. Rather than "get started" I wanted to poke around a little more and find out what you were doing.
2. Interrogate all of your copy. "Easy HTML Menus" means nothing to an LCD restauranteur. "PDF menus annoy your visitors. Cilantro lets you build and edit menus really fast" doesn't sell the reason this is great much better. PDF's take time to download, show your menu to your customers instantly.
3. Change your pricing Create three prices. Free, medium and expensive. Use one of these http://codecanyon.net/category/css/pricing-tables to make it easy to read and compare plans. I think you could have a $10/m plan that allowed you to put your menu on FB that no one would bat an eyelid at. A $30/m plan for multi-location which also gave you a FB like-gate.
If your designer doesn't work out drop me a line, I'd love to help out.
IMO, That sentence is too verbose, especially with the title above it. Since 'Risk' is in the title, I would change it to: "(It's free!)"
* I was actually pleasantly surprised by your design. Sold me, and I am usually pretty critical of many start-up designs.
* I tried to click on the picture above "take a tour". It didn't do anything. I assumed it would start a lightbox gallery or something.
* "Take a tour" didn't look like a button, and that entire line should be centered under the photo.
* I was scanning the page for the word "Demo" to see some sort of demo, but there wasn't one.
* Nice job emphasizing that the sites "Work on iPhones and smart phones." That is a big deal, and many restaurant sites are not compliant, or load very awkwardly on mobile.
* The resultant url is pretty ugly. Why doesn't it have the name of the restaurant in the url? http://cilantro-92.clnt.me/
Overall, pretty impressive! 8/10.
I think the urls need to look nicer if you want this go more widescale. clnt.me? Not sure about that.
Out of curiosity, how are you planning on monetizing?
>> I personally think your domain is somewhat subpar. If you owned cilantro.com, it would be incredibly brandable. CilantroSites.com is a bit awkward and long.
Yeah, I don't love it but I'm not trying to get too hung up on it for the time being. I own CILANTRO.ME as well and CLNT.ME is just intended for short URLs.
>> Out of curiosity, how are you planning on monetizing?
a. monthly fee for premium sites (multiple menus/locations) b. other plans in the works
At least that's my take on the strong way about this idea: cilantrosites.com might have a directory of their customers or something, but by far the main entry point will be through a link to the restaurant itself on Yelp or wherever. Worrying about the look of cilantrosites.com/bobs_pizza is probably a premature optimization.
One thing... *.clnt.me doesn't really say anything to me.
Part of the reason that many jumped to adopt about.me was the domain name, it made sense.
I note your company "2 Tablespoons" - that sounds better to me than "clnt.me" which, at first glance looks a bit weird.
I'm sure with a bit of thought and a site like domai.nr you can come up with a better domain hack for your user pages.
Best of luck with it!
But really. Nice job! :-)
Feedback: Your site looks unpolished. You disclaimed as much; I'm just confirming.
Concept is solid. And it sets you up for a premium model with additional features. Your menu handling looks interesting; it is a challenge I face with clients that we usually solve by embracing the devil and publishing a PDF. Grr. However I am going to be doing something very similar to what you have going on.
Your feature set and layouts/design/default copy are pretty solid. Covers the basics. Events is the piece I end up doing on all my clients' sites. Typically a simple event feature (like your menu editor) suffices. Event name, description, date, time.
For a restaurant site, I don't see a link to #top or home on your nav bar which would be handy.
The editor is nice. I like how it moves to the section you're editing and the ajax update is uber handy.
No clean way to exit the editor and go back to the admin dashboard. And now that I'm logged out I can't seem to log back in. No confirmation email either.
Would be handy to let the visitor print out the menu I think . Analytics needs to be there. If you could rig up page views and some simple actions (e.g. your menu was printed x number of times). throw in some widget like AddThis and you're good to go without tons of dev.
Crap. Nice work. Good thing your domain name stinks and is easily forgotten or else I'd be in trouble.
We have really different approaches (hosted vs self hosted, control over looks vs needs a designed theme) but we're both trying to make something bad better. Best of luck!
When the iPhone first came out, I jumped on it and created some simple pages/scripts that could be uploaded (along with some directions for detection/redirection). We sold a good amount of those for $79.
Now we just offer them as part of our overall website offering (and it's a full web app similar to cilantro here).
1) Logo text is a link to hompeage, but the image is not - I kept trying to click the image
2) Login link doesn't quite fit the design, needs a bit more pop
3) Plan comparison page doesn't do a good job of selling me on the paid version - something like a comparison table that makes the benefits of the paid version more obvious, or highlight of the additional features would be better. The simple lists of features you have for each plan type now doesn't cut it.
4)The tour is good, but a link to the live site in the tour (or another live site, maybe your first few customers?) wold be nice so I can actually see a live one in action.
5)An offer to sweeten your paid plans (or an additional package) would be to submit the restaurants to places like yelp, urbanspoon, yahoo directory, etc so they can get inbound links across the web and their page can be more discoverable.
LOVE the idea though, and the design rocks. Simple is better in this case. Good luck with Cilantro!
The simplicity is really good. Intuitive nav bar names would be helpful. And I don't think the 5 locations is really a selling point for most small businesses. Defnitely a great idea and if you need any help with marketing/social media I'd help.