Restaurants network. Destroy my business idea
Hi
Currently I am learning web developing and identified that in my city there are too many restaurants but there are no good sources of information about them online. I am considering selling the service of publicity to the businesses in my web page to make a network of them so people find it easier to visit new places with their favorite food.
I am dying to read your opinions.
Thanks in advance.
It is harder than you think.
a) even big cos like Foursquare and Google and Yelp rely on third parties like Locu and Yext for menu information and operating hours. Those services are not cheap and provide huge benefit to each of those applications.
b) deciding on restaurants is a mobile-first decision. "Selling the service of publicity on your web page" is likely not enticing to the restaurants or effective, as most people use mobile to decide what to eat near them
c) restaurants HATE Yelp especially, as Yelp is notorious for extorting money to keep restaurants in good ranking on the site and app. You will find restaurants gunshy to buy any publicity service unless you can demonstrate fairness and results
d) restaurants have razor-thin margins and are hard clients to get any cash out of that can't be directly tied to increased revenue
You would have to do something really different that provides new additional value to both patrons and restaurants for this to work in my opinion. Possible, certainly, but I am not seeing it in your short description above.
Thanks for your comments.
As our market is just our city, we think that we can handle the info.
We try to move to an app too, but to begin fast decided to go for the web page first.
A good point to validate is to find out if restaurants will pay, one point in our favor is that we found that some restaurants pay flyers, ads on Facebook, or in extreme cases ads on the street.
I think it could work really well, especially if you can position yourself well for "{{your town}} restaurants" in Google.
Your business model could also include having certain restaurants pay a fee to appear at the top of the listings or be "highlighted" in other ways as well.
Your obvious competitors are Foursquare and TripAdvisor, but perhaps you could target a different customer segment that is less likely to already be invested in those ecosystems.
You can build early traction by writing editorial style reviews (or getting others to write reviews) and if they're positive, the restaurants themselves will likely want to share them on their social networks.
All in all, I think it could be a great side-project if executed well!
Thanks for the reply and the ideas!
We work in this as a side project while work a full time job so definitely our plan is directed to something simple as you suggest.
I think it could work really well, especially if you can position yourself well for "{{your town}} restaurants" in Google.
Your business model could also include having certain restaurants pay a fee to appear at the top of the listings or be "highlighted" in other ways as well.
Your obvious competitors are Foursquare and TripAdvisor, but perhaps you could target a different customer segment that is less likely to already be invested in those ecosystems.
You can build early traction by writing editorial style reviews (or getting others to write reviews) and if they're positive, the restaurants themselves will likely want to share them on their social networks.
All in all, I think it could be a great side-project if executed well!
There are zero local blogs or websites that cover restaurants in your city? Is your city big enough support such a business?
Well there are blogs and groups dedicated to that but they are not updated, sometimes the business is not working anymore but in the group there is not sign of that, the menus change, locations change etc. Even the official restaurant sites or accounts have that problem. That is the problem we want to attack
I'm using Foursquare app exactly for this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foursquare-city-guide/id306934924?mt=8
As someone who travels a lot (30 countries), I can say that this works even in obscure small cities.
How do you plan to make your app better?
Thanks for the feedback,
Well it is not so much as better but different.
Instead of basing the page in recommendations from the users we intend to be publicity directly from the restaurants, so the final user can find updated and organized info.