#idea-validation #product-feedback-request
http://www.foodcratic.com
#idea-validation #product-feedback-request
I built another restaurant review app, but I simplified the review system to an upvote/downvote system. So you can rate up/down menu items if the food was good or not and rate up/down restaurants if you'd come back. The intention is to strip out long, unreliable, yet influential reviews and instead promote restaurants by the total count of upvotes and downvotes that reflect mainly the goodness of the food.
Does my idea have legs to stand on? Would love to hear you guys' feedback or thoughts. Thanks!!
Here's the website if you're interested: www.foodcratic.com
I would strongly suggest having a web version of your application. Most people looking for reviews do so via search engines and wouldn't be interested in downloading an app just for that purpose when they have Yelp and TripAdvisor available in plain sight.
It's all about making it as low effort as possible.
Yea.. this is the optimal path, but I only know how to write Swift right now. But thanks for the advice.
I'm not sure if the idea has legs in general. Just speaking for myself as a potential user, I like being able to read reviews sometimes. Maybe someone rates it well, or rates it poorly, but not for reasons I care about, so I can ignore their review.
I don't have an iphone, so it looks like I can't test out the app (is there a webapp version?), but there are strong network effects here. I'm not likely to spend much time using the app if there aren't already a bunch of reviews on it. (Though it sounds like maybe it's hooked into Foursquare somehow? If you could prepopulate a bunch of ratings, that would help.)
The only real complaint I have about Yelp is that I know it's possible for businesses to game the system, e.g. by paying third parties to write a bunch of fake reviews. But I have to imagine that Yelp at least makes some effort to catch and remove these attempts. Any new review app won't (yet) have the ability to do this effectively, so I'd tend to distrust reviews from a new app even more than I distrust yelp reviews.
Foodcratic does have the ability to add a message along with a photo/video. So you can get a limited review/context (ideally, focused on food) by viewing photos/videos. Not sure if this would satisfy your requirement. [Speaking from my ideals, I understand the usefulness of a review, but sometimes, I feel we are heavily dependent and influenced to do what other thinks versus what I feel like.]
My apologies -- there's no version other than iOS. Don't know how to program for other mediums at the moment.
Yep. I am facing the chicken and egg problem. I am using Foursquare but since I am limited on the number of API calls, I'm trying to find a balance on what I need from Foursquare. I will consider prepopulating from Foursquare.
One thing I can do to bring more trust into the "rating" is 1) add phone verification, 2) location-based limiter; so you would have to be near the restaurant to rate or add photos/videos.
Thanks for your response! It definitely helps to know the audience.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
I wholeheartedly agree. There's been times where I went to a 3-star-rated place where I thought it was good and a 5-star-rated place where it was the opposite. I'm thinking with the upvote/downvote system is that the law of averages would eventually reflect how much good a restaurant is. The more difference (upvote-downvote) you have, the better.
I haven't thought that far ahead yet on using the data to recommend restaurants/menu items but that's good insight. Thanks!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago