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Help me launch my business

I recently set up a small side hustle that would allow restaurants, pubs and cafes to have a menu and ordering system that can be linked to NFC tags on tables in their shops.

I built a website and got a demonstration set up in 4 days and it's at a point where I have started promoting it.

https://restaurant.toppocketmedia.com

I started with some Twitter ads which didn't net much engagement but did allow me to reach nearly 250 followers quite quickly. With the target audience I'm trying to reach having a big following wouldn't really mean much anyway.

I also promoted the product on my personal and business Facebook pages but that only netted me 24 website visits with a really high bounce rate.

Through my personal Facebook page I got one pub interested who are contacting me next week about it. My neighbour also runs a pub so I'm hoping to get his opinion on it and maybe get him as a customer.

I would just like to ask for some feedback on the business (be harsh) and some ideas / help with promoting the business.

I understand that going into restaurants, pubs and cafes would probably be the best way to get these clients but I have such bad anxiety introducing myself to people both on the phone and in-person which is annoying because after the initial meeting I love talking to and getting to know people.

Help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you 🙏

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    At some point someone still have to bring that coffee or cookies and interact with clients, so riding the coronavirus trends is not effective here.
    Demo would be nice so people here can see what is already done and give the proper feedback.

    One of the pain points in this NFC/QR menu's is that there is many small details that customers want to say to waiter but they can't if you remove the human interaction from the ordering process. Just one example - coffee with milk, ok, but maybe customer want more or less milk, hot or cold milk, soy milk or regular milk, etc, and you can't cover all variants with nfc chips. On the page can be set "Custom note" text field but then they need to type or select some options and it can be frustrating at the end, it's much easier to just say what you want.

    Sometimes some of the items on the menu are not available, and going through canceling the order and making new one is not straightforward process in the most situations, while waiter would apologize and offer another drink or food or whatever.

    Even if you manage to set the menu with mass-production straightforward items with little to none customization needs, barrier to entry is close to zero, you would have many competitors quickly. It's trivial task to set nfc chip with a link to the web page with items and basic shopping cart.

    Think also about

    • security (someone can rewrite your chip if is not locked or put another nfc chip over your chip and set malicious link to phish the user, take payment details etc) ,
    • fake ordering (since is online, how you will prevent random people to set orders and never show up? Are you going to charge first and then send the order to the kitchen/bar?),
    • processing the order - barista or the chef (or both) need some screen where new orders are displayed, or person that is monitoring new orders and give instructions to kitchen and bar stuff. Either way its added expense, which is not a thrill to the owners.
    • who is receiving the order? Do you have option to put table number or client's name?
    • pricing variables - many restaurants have their privileged customers or loyalty program in place, so pricing need to be adjusted for them. Can you do it? They also have more or less advanced systems for managing clients, and POS (point of sale) software/hardware integrated specifically for their needs. How you would integrate your web-orders to their systems? Do you have some API where their POS can fetch the order so they can see if all items are available and adjust new stock values, set the correct price for specific customers, etc?
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      I think the ordering system is something that might just be too much to set up especially with integration into restaurants current POS systems. I'm thinking I can just set up a hosted menu on the NFC tags and before a customer can access the menu they have to enter in their contact information which is now a requirement of restaurants in the UK.

      I can also lock NFC tags so they can't be rewritten. But on the other points, you mentioned thank you, I hadn't fully considered the ordering side of this.

      I'm hoping that this will just be a cheap menu for restaurants and wouldn't have the risk of staff and customers all touching one menu. Even if Coronavirus wasn't an issue I still believe that this could still be a good replacement for physical menus as they can be altered so easily with no cost compared to a physical menu that would need to be reprinted

  2. 1

    Hey Benjamin, I talked with one of my friends who works as a Senior Manager in a restaurant group (owns many restaurants).

    I asked them about their appetite to implement new tools to help them with things like check-in (lobbly.com) & social distancing.

    This is what he said:
    "Yes, something like that would be helpful. Problem is that all these delivery platforms have their own computer systems that they give you to communicate. Becomes too much and too many.

    If you can link them, it would help. Maybe have menu options too".

    So the objection is that they already have too many systems to deal with, so adding even more systems, would complicate things even more.

    Even if your app doesn't overlap with issues related to delivery/pick-up, I would suspect it would encounter similar objections -- it's yet another single function app.

    If your idea is based on taking a photo of a QR code and pulling up a menu, you may want to do a Google search to see what other products are being built that do something similar.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=qr+code+menu+for+restaurants

    Regarding menus & ordering -- I would expect that most coffee shops & restaurants have their own POS system already (that has the menu), so one question would be how using your app would facilitate getting orders into their existing POS.

    If it doesn't, and it is simply a way to pull up a digital menu, seems like a tough sell to bring in yet another app for that purpose alone.

    Maybe if your app could be the source-of-truth for the menu, then push the menu to the other systems like Google My Business, Yelp, UberEats, DoorDash, Postmates, GrubHub, etc, AND make it easy for people to pull up on their phone, that might be compelling.

    Combine it with a check-in app like Lobbly, and it might be enough of a killer app to convince coffee shops & restaurants to want to use it.

    Thoughts?

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      I have a feeling by the time I can combine all these ideas and systems together I'll be to late for the current need.

      What you've said about the POS systems and current ordering systems really brought up something that in my ineptitude I completely forgot which was how the restaurant would even get the orders from the app.

      I think moving forward the product would just be the NFC tags on the table. Restaurants already spend money getting numbered stickers on tables so potentially my tags could have that function with the added benefit that you can also pull up the menu by hovering over them the tags themselves are only £0.30 - £0.60 so I wouldn't charge much more and instead would charge a small monthly fee to host a menu that can be altered with a google sheets document or backend system I could make.

      The menu would also force the user to enter their email in before accessing it because restaurants now have to get contact information of customers in the UK and that's something that could easily be forgotten without a system like this.

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        It's fun brainstorming like this, so happy to offer a pov.

        I think you're going to run into a couple of issues related to adoption based on your latest reply.

        1. I would suspect a good number of restaurants/coffee shops already have to maintain their menu in at least 2-3 systems. Adding yet another system would likely be met with some resistance, unless you added something of value (like automatically updating menus on other systems like GMB, Yelp, or something equivalent in your area)

        2. Asking consumers for an email address just to view a menu would be product-suicide if you ask me. Consumers are paying to buy food from the establishment, and they don't want to be asked for personal information before they even can order.

        If restaurants in the UK are now required to get contact information, it might be better to do that after the order is placed, and before the food is provided.

        Just a few other thoughts :)

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