Essentially it’s a site that allows small restaurant owners to build their own site, without any technical skills. Think of it as about.me for restaurants. The issue is that if you own a restaurant and you want to communicate and interact with your online users, you need a website.
But the whole “building a website” scenario sucks. You’re stuck with having to contact professionals to build it, and you end up spending thousands of euros in the process. You end up with something that you basically have no control of, and every time you want to make specific changes to your menu or anything else, you have to waste time and energy to contact your “webmaster”.
Cibarsi gets rid of all this extra boilerplate and puts you in charge of everything. With a very basic interface you can edit your menu, change the color schema, add new images, etc. And in the end you get this very basic webpage where you can show off your restaurant and make it visible to your online clients.
Guys in your activation email replace 'attiva' with 'activate' in the url. Sorry am away from computer and can't push code changes right now. Yuk has to happen
This is great. I was in Paris a short while ago, and it was impossible to find anything on the restaurants online. I assume things like location and contact info will show up in Google results as well?
If I could make a suggestion, a checkbox for "vegetarian food" or "vegan food" upon creation would be great, so I'll know right out of the gate whether I'll be able to dine there.
Second this. Or allowing owners to denote certain menu items as vegan/vegetarian/gluten-free, etc. So people with dietary restrictions can quickly scan the menu. Looks great though!
Though I want to like the idea (restaurant websites are incredibly broken as a species), your onboarding flow is really messed up. The confirmation email was in italian, though everything else up to that point had been english. The confirmation link (http://www.cibarsi.com/attiva?token=gVngeWcA) results in an error page.
I like the idea of a website builder for restaurants because the majority of their websites suck - they're either flash OR they want you to download a PDF. However, there are a lot of competitors in this space such as:
However, I noticed that you actually launched on HN, 192 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483473 - which I'm assuming didn't give you a massive uptick in the signups that you wanted which is why I have a few suggestions:
First of all your website is a little bare, I would add more content etc onto the site, with additional pages etc. Likewise, I'd also make it clearer that you can click on the tablet etc to view the demo restaurant websites as well.
Have a look at your rivals (some of who I mentioned above) and you can see that they all have a considerable amount of content on their websites which encourage non-technical users (the ones with 100 toolbars on their browsers) to trust them more than you.
Likewise, you don't really have what I call an “Effective SEO” plan in place so you should start to get this going as quickly as possible - some of your rivals have been covered by high authority websites as well meaning, you need to get this started ASAP.
The “Effective SEO” plan goes back to the earlier point about lack of content on your website as well, which is something you definitely need to add. Once you have done that you need to focus on the following:
- Advertising & Partnerships With Sites In Your Niche
- Off-line Marketing (inc. word of mouth & traditional ads)
- Bloggers & Other Webmasters Within AND Outside Your Niche
I am currently, working on something that does that. We have a couple clients now and we do the full website that includes Donations, Photos, etc.
We are trying to avoid the hackernews traffic right now as we improve our product for our current customers. You can PM me on twitter for more info. https://twitter.com/cowholio4
Thanks for highlighting our product happytables, you're bang on with a lot of comments relating to SEO. We'd be doing a disservice to small businesses if all we did was give them the tools to create a website (as opposed to also helping them grow their business).
I'll try to get a post together in the next few days summarizing our latest iteration and lessons learned.
Thanks and I gotta say, all that competition wears me out a bit. But I think you're right, I need to look for a better niche. Maybe minimalism and cheapness can be my target audience? :-)
By the way, my email server was going crazy so I disabled it for now and activated all accounts by default, so you should be able to register fine if you were having problems earlier!
Seriously? Did the guy go surfing for those 6 months or what?
I mean, this thing lacks utterly basic features like the ability to buy your own domain, the ability to show a photo gallery of your restaurant, and some actual customizations so your site doesn't look like all the others.
The site is really cool for a proof of concept, not a relatively mature site.
This is a great idea, and I hadn't heard of any of the competitors others have pointed out (including UK-built happytables). It seems like penetration of these services isn't great yet, because I rarely come across a restaurant website that isn't terrible - PDF menus, contact details and little else. Hopefully that's a sign that this is a huge untapped market, and not that websites don't make much difference to restaurants' livelihoods.
My research shows that businesses, such as restaurants, are mostly focusing on social networks for their online presence. Reasons are obvious: direct interaction with regional client base, targeted advertising, free business page with photo gallery, and comments/likes, and other minor stuff. I do t see how services like these can compete with that. Due to how they always end up having social widgets integrated into it. For $10 a month (which is $120/year), the owner can simply buy targeted advertising and get real tangible results.
I think restaurants would be ok with just $10/mo for a website. Most restaurant owners aren't too web savvy but I doubt they have a social-media-only policy when it comes to web presence. How you reach restaurant owners at scale is the hard part of this business. Same for any idea targeting local businesses.
Reaching SMB owners at scale is not reay an issue. Has never been. Problem is most startups only care about online marketing. Which in this case, is not the right choice. Offline is the magic bullet here.
Plus $10 may not seem a lot, but a Facebook page is $0. It also allows them to directly market to their niche. Try and achieve that with a stand alone website.
And next to the HN crowd rest. owners might not seem tech savy. But they can sure see the value in marketing where their customers spend about an hour of their lives every day. They will never get that kind of attention on a stand alone website. Plus you would be surprised how knowledgeable people in the restaurant business are when it comes to tech.
I just had someone not long ago ask me for a POS system with Facebook integration.
Great idea. The website is a little bare, so I don't have a great feel for how you're solving the problem, but it's a problem that definitely needs solving, so at the least you've got step 1 down. :)
One minor pain point for me with many restaurant websites (maybe you're addressing this already), is I look at the menu, decide what I want, and then I have to hunt down the telephone number. I guess it's never a deal breaker for me, but it's annoying. The telephone number should somehow be within clear reach at all times.
All the examples highlight how well a super-minimalist site works when you have very little content. What about restaurants with more than just a half dozen menu items though?
How do you plan to get the word out to restaurant owners? Businesses targeting local scare me - they seem hard to scale... You need to find 1,000 local business customers to get a steady income of $10k/mo. Somewhat daunting.
36 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 75.7 ms ] threadBut the whole “building a website” scenario sucks. You’re stuck with having to contact professionals to build it, and you end up spending thousands of euros in the process. You end up with something that you basically have no control of, and every time you want to make specific changes to your menu or anything else, you have to waste time and energy to contact your “webmaster”.
Cibarsi gets rid of all this extra boilerplate and puts you in charge of everything. With a very basic interface you can edit your menu, change the color schema, add new images, etc. And in the end you get this very basic webpage where you can show off your restaurant and make it visible to your online clients.
The way it knows how to format the menu is awesome btw... great job.
Just tried creating a sample test site. The test site is up but I am not able to login to the account.
I am getting a page not found msg when I click on the activate link.
One of your competitors will be http://www.happytables.com/ who are doing an amazing job with a Wordpress backend.
If I could make a suggestion, a checkbox for "vegetarian food" or "vegan food" upon creation would be great, so I'll know right out of the gate whether I'll be able to dine there.
http://www.happytables.com/ - who are using a Wordpress Backend which I'm pointing out because
http://en.wordpress.com/restaurants/ - Wordpress are offering designs for Restaurants as well
http://www.letseat.at/
http://www.bistrosquare.com/
http://www.restaurantors.com/
However, I noticed that you actually launched on HN, 192 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483473 - which I'm assuming didn't give you a massive uptick in the signups that you wanted which is why I have a few suggestions:
First of all your website is a little bare, I would add more content etc onto the site, with additional pages etc. Likewise, I'd also make it clearer that you can click on the tablet etc to view the demo restaurant websites as well.
Have a look at your rivals (some of who I mentioned above) and you can see that they all have a considerable amount of content on their websites which encourage non-technical users (the ones with 100 toolbars on their browsers) to trust them more than you.
Likewise, you don't really have what I call an “Effective SEO” plan in place so you should start to get this going as quickly as possible - some of your rivals have been covered by high authority websites as well meaning, you need to get this started ASAP.
The “Effective SEO” plan goes back to the earlier point about lack of content on your website as well, which is something you definitely need to add. Once you have done that you need to focus on the following:
- Advertising & Partnerships With Sites In Your Niche
- Off-line Marketing (inc. word of mouth & traditional ads)
- Bloggers & Other Webmasters Within AND Outside Your Niche
- Online Communities e.g. Relevant Forums etc
- Social Media Channels - Twitter, YouTube etc
- Capture Future Leads (Newsletter Subscribers etc)
- Effective Site Branding
For instance if your NGO's is a non-profit I would immediately go to: http://www.google.com/grants/ and apply for the $10,000 per month Adwords Grant.
After that I would start by reaching out to sites listed in: http://nonprofit.alltop.com/ and http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/05/08/the-worlds-best-non... I would reach out to them with the intention of getting a post written about the non-profit in them and/or offer them a guest post to post on their websites.
We are trying to avoid the hackernews traffic right now as we improve our product for our current customers. You can PM me on twitter for more info. https://twitter.com/cowholio4
I'll try to get a post together in the next few days summarizing our latest iteration and lessons learned.
Cheers, Noel
By the way, my email server was going crazy so I disabled it for now and activated all accounts by default, so you should be able to register fine if you were having problems earlier!
Seriously? Did the guy go surfing for those 6 months or what?
I mean, this thing lacks utterly basic features like the ability to buy your own domain, the ability to show a photo gallery of your restaurant, and some actual customizations so your site doesn't look like all the others.
The site is really cool for a proof of concept, not a relatively mature site.
Plus $10 may not seem a lot, but a Facebook page is $0. It also allows them to directly market to their niche. Try and achieve that with a stand alone website.
And next to the HN crowd rest. owners might not seem tech savy. But they can sure see the value in marketing where their customers spend about an hour of their lives every day. They will never get that kind of attention on a stand alone website. Plus you would be surprised how knowledgeable people in the restaurant business are when it comes to tech. I just had someone not long ago ask me for a POS system with Facebook integration.
One minor pain point for me with many restaurant websites (maybe you're addressing this already), is I look at the menu, decide what I want, and then I have to hunt down the telephone number. I guess it's never a deal breaker for me, but it's annoying. The telephone number should somehow be within clear reach at all times.