Menu in Pictures
A crowdsourced map for restaurants/cafes/bars/bakeries menus
Tired of scrapping google places and foursquare comments pictures in the search for a menu, i decided to create a service that sole purpose would be to share those menu pictures
This project begun because many restaurants, cafes, bakeries and bars lack updated menu pricing, if they even have a menu on their websites.
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Here's a similar product, but I think there's room for a focused product like yours:
I think this product had me a little disheartened at my original idea that I mentioned.
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Yes rating services for restaurants like that are dime a dozen on the most specialised areas. Not really what i aim for but it is nice that some (as that example) have some restaurants with the prices displayed.
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6 Comments
Nice. I had a menu related site years ago. Didn’t take off but I’m pretty sure it was still a good idea. It was meal rating website so it naturally had menu items.
There’s been others who have done similar things but I haven’t seen anything that took off.
A menu only site I think would be pretty useful especially in places that don’t have a strong web presence.
That is correct, having a bit of a struggle to have more locations in the map. I think it might be a chicken-egg situation as in users will only interest in uploading content if there is already a big sample of content uploaded.
Not sure how to tackle this but will run the experience for at least one year and see how it goes. Maybe contracting users from different locations is a way to go if there is a budget.
Have you considered hiring virtual workers to do this? They can either download menus from as many places as they can and put them in a structured folder in Dropbox or upload directly to your site.
Considering but, not sure where to go about it neither on recruiting or budget wise
I struggle with this. For me it's tough to budget for side projects. I balk at a $5/mo bill. So I try to set up a number ahead of time. $100/mo set aside for a side project is not unreasonable. Your may be more or less depending on your circumstances. But if it's close to $100 you can do a lot with that money.
I'm currently looking for a full-time VA for my personal projects. I'm in the interview process right now. The service I went through is OnlineJobs.ph. It's heavy up front ($60-$100/mo while you post a job and contact candidates) and then hands off after.
There's also upwork. Which skims a percentage as long as you hire/pay through their platform.
Once you have found someone and have told them you want to hire them for a few hours a week, then you can set them on a task like this. See how it goes.
There's also services like Mechanical Turk that might be a bit more hands-off in terms of who you hire.
I'd then say you should try to get hyper-local, like target restaurants near a college. Preferably one that isn't super techy, but could benefit from a tool like this. Do some moderate advertising and really validate if this is useful.
Those services i know, some of them i use regularly as a freelancer but they do not seem the place to scout something like this, as i want in local pictures and not scrapped from around the web.
The hyper-local part you speak of makes many sense and totally what i aim for.
Also thought about talking to some travel streamers and try to partner them with them somehow