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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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...
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.