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Almost two weeks later and a lot has changed

tl;dr I'm looking for small restaurants, cafés, or pubs to use the platform for FREE - get in touch.

I've just shared an update to the Fussy Fork product page which comes just under two weeks since my first post which gained a lot of positive attention.

Updated landing page and media pack

Downing tools - stopping doing and starting promoting doesn't come easy but it's necessary. I have shared a PDF with prospective customers from the beginning and have kept it up to date after each interaction. Every question asked and conversation had was an opportunity to clarify. Today I've tidied up both the PDF and the landing page and will share it with the IH community.

I find it hard to take a step back and stop doing. I'm a software engineer and I like to code. Selling and promoting doesn't come naturally to me even after having held customer-facing roles across numerous industries in previous lives. It is something that I need to - and want to, do better at.

Not quite two weeks since my first post I've had quite a number of potential customers show interest and one actually start using the product. And now I'm looking for more! If you work for, own, or run a small restaurant, café, or pub, then I want you to use the platform for FREE! Get in touch.

on April 24, 2021
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    Sales is a broad subject. What particularly aren't you fond off?

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    Hi,
    a couple of years ago I developed a product that was quite similar to yours. I completely failed so that's not what I want to talk to you about; I just want to give you a piece of unrequested advice. 😄
    The "Create your menu" page that you have right now is not going to work, unless you are willing to personally create the menu yourself for every potential customer.

    The main problem is that the page is created by a software developer with a software developer mindset, your potential customers instead are people from the hospitality industry who have no knowledge of software development.

    Been there, done that. I've already made all possible mistakes regarding this so I'll list here some of the issues that I already see you will face:

    • The page is empty, non-developers don't understand empty pages. Instead of the empty page, when a user clicks on "Create your menu" you should already have a bunch of test dishes created in the menu. People have a surprising lack of creativity so they don't understand a blank page
    • You have the sentence "Put a short description here", but when you click there nothing happens. When you say "here" to a user, the user expects something to happen when they perform some action around there
    • "Edit header"; same problem, non-developers have no clue what a header is
    • "Add a new section"; again, section is a web development term. Restaurant people don't call the parts of their menus sections, because obviously they don't think of their menus as web pages. You have to ask them how they call the parts (categories, sets, everyone has their favorite word basically) and possibly re-develop this page from scratch together with one of your potential customers
    • I had the "View menu" thing as you have and I had problems with that as well; people commented "what does it mean view menu? I'm already viewing the menu!". Because again, for developers it is obvious to always have a "admin" or "edit" view, and then a "customer" view. So of course you will have a mode where you are editing the content and a mode where you are viewing the content. This concept is surprising difficult to grasp for non-developers

    Alright, I'm writing a whole book here so I guess I'm gonna stop, you're probably bored out of your mind already. You're probably very pissed at me as well because of the criticism; I was extremely pissed when I was developing the product and received this kind of feedback. On the other hand; it's better to be pissed at me, I'm just a random stranger on the internet, than to later be pissed at your friends/customers/yourself.

    Hope this helps you in any way.✌
    /Andy