Ask HN: How should we go about marketing our app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should we go about marketing our app?

16 pointsShinyCyril14 comments

So I'm not looking to be spoon-fed an entire marketing strategy - we are doing lots of reading on the topic at the moment. Rather, after having worked on the app so long we've lost a certain sense of clarity, and would appreciate some fresh eyes and outside opinions.

The app itself (http://www.getchowderapp.com) is a collaborative restaurant finder, and came about after many frustrating incidents trying to decide where to eat with my girlfriend (usually something along the lines of "What do you want to eat?" – I don't mind – "Do you want pizza?" – No – "How about seafood?" – No – "Then pick somewhere!!"). A friend and I had some fun developing an app to try and ease the friction of making food decisions when out in a group. It's a little like Tinder for food, only you're matching restaurants, not people, with your friends.

When we initially did our market research, we were aiming solely at indecisive couples who had troubles picking places to eat because they were overwhelmed with options, but later realised that there was a much wider audience and shifted our focus to groups of friends. However, while we've had plenty of people respond with "Huh, neat idea" when we pitched it as an app for groups, I feel like it resonates much more strongly with people when pitched as an app to 'help couples decide where to eat'. When pitched as the latter, we got responses where people explicitly mentioned having this problem with their SOs, as opposed to the former where it was maybe more like 'Cool idea, I could see people using this'.

Given our incredibly limited budget and lack of funding, I'm beginning to think it might make more sense to focus on couples first and expand from there. I'd be very interested in hearing other people's thoughts!

Ultimately we're both just looking forward to the opportunity to launch something in the first place - the experience gained thus far has been very beneficial, and we've had a blast developing it.

Many thanks in advance.

I have been watching the app/food space for many years. The idea you describe has been tried many times over.

It's one of those problems that everyone faces one evening, but the hassle of using an app is usually higher than actually having a 2-minute conversation about where to go.

That being said, you never know what will work, so don't give up just because of random Internet advice.

It looks like your app doesn't need to have network effects to be useful. That's a good thing. So you'd be fine with even 10 people using this every week. That would be a sign that your app is useful. Once you reach that stage, you can focus on scaling. But just even getting 10 couples to use this weekly is a tough challenge. Do you use it? Does any of your friends actually use it?

Looking at your website, if you are disappointed by the conversion rate, target a smaller niche first and see if the conversions increase. Right now it sounds like a generic "restaurant recommendation". The couples angle is not there. You go with more punchy headlines: "no more arguing Friday night about where to take your SO".

Bottom line: go from 0 to 10 users by sheer force of persuasion. Then come back here and we can chat some more :-)

I don't think the Tinder model and/or Tinder UI is a good fit for your case.

I'm hesitant to "like" a restaurant suggestion because if I was to match, then I'm stuck going to that restaurant for dinner when there is possibly a better match that just had yet to be suggested to me. The original Tinder model works because there is no risk of being locked-in (lol).

That being said, I think this is a great idea and IMO your initial use-case and test users should be startups trying to decide what to order the team on Seamless. Print out some flyers that say "Team can't decide what to order for lunch?" and post them around co-working spaces.

If I was building this app my first iteration would have been to show the users a list of the top 10 nearby restaurants weighted by stars on yelp and filtered by price/distance. Let them give a 1-5 thumbs-up rating of as many restaurants on that list as they want and total up the number of upvotes for each option.

Goodluck!

Is anyone using it right now?

If so, what are their pain points and how are they being addressed?

If not, then getting one user is more important than a marketing strategy, and harder. People using the app validates the beliefs:

  1. the app solves an actual problem

  2. there might be a profitable product

Most importantly, it provides feedback to iterate upon and word of mouth advertising.

Good luck.

Thanks for your feedback. Both myself and my girlfriend, and my business partner and his girlfriend use the app regularly. Occasionally we use it with family too. We launched a beta recently and got some users, but didn't get much engagement - I think partially because we pitched it for groups of friends.

Why don't groups of friends have a high level of engagement?

The app requires each person of the group to have the app. Like messaging apps, no-one will use it unless all of their friends use it too. We're currently implementing a 'hot-seat' feature to mitigate this and make it even easier for couples to use.

If I were you I'd switch the main focus. I use iMessage to chat about where to eat. If we're in a place we don't really know then yelp is my to-go app. It has more info that I need and it works well. In zero case I'd need to download another app just to show me pictures of food or names of restaurants nearby. Do you get that one? So since you already have everything, your app is out, coded, showcase-able, etc. "All" you need to do is to tweak the use case a little bit in order to make it essential for someone who's looking for a place to eat. Bring value on top of what's out there. That's why an app with coupons would go viral before a scheduling app for example. Make it a game where the app picks everything for you based on people's tastes and in only one click you can book a spot and pre-order a meal. All you have to do is to get to that place and that's it. The app would be a personal assistant with an actual first name and it would be smart enough to do all the research for you in order to present a meal you and your girlfriend would like, different from what you guys had previously. It would give you price details, what people think about that meal and place, etc. Again, based on some settings/profile you would have to setup at the beginning in the app. It would also learn about where you went, liked and disliked and re-ajust the future choices. So your new use case would be something like: "Hey Siri-for-restaurant, what should we have today? I'm with Kate". "Hey Bob, how are you today? You guys should try that pineapple fried rice chicken at the new place called the Hipster Asian-fusion-Mexican Temple located on market and washington st. It would cost you guys $40 with desert and a beer. Do you want me to book it for 2 at 1pm today?". YES/NO. Done.

Facebook ads targeting mobile users sounds like the best place to start. Try a bunch of mobile ad networks and see which work the best. 15-second video ads tend to be a good way to drive installs on mobile.

Also try pitching food blogs and technology/lifestyle blogs to review. Write up some stories like "My wife and I kept ordering gross pizza because we couldn't decide where to eat -- here's how we saved our relationship!" Make them entertaining and relatable, and offer them as content for food and restaurant blogs. Find some quality food blogs or youtube foodies, offer to pay for their dinner if they will use your app to decide where to go.

Find larger food/restaurant apps and sites, ideally ones that complement and not compete with your concept, and look for ways to cross-promote. e.g. they make a post or ad or something to drive users to your app, and in return you put a prominent button on in your app for six months that says "View this in BigFoodApp" and opens their product.

I like the approach suggested by the book "Traction", which boils down to try a bunch of things a little bit to see which one works, then focus on the channel that gets you the most return.

FB/IG video ads have been doing very well for apps. You can target people in relationships.

I would try a basic video that just is informative showing off your app.

I would also see If you could get a short video made that is somewhat humorous involving a couple arguing over dinner and then using your app, it could have potential.

I'd love to have something that does a good job of recommending restaurants, but this seems like a thin wrapper around yelp... which is what I already use to solve this problem.

How do you plan to make money from it?

Currently it costs us practically nothing to run, so we're just focused on getting users.

Monetisation will come primarily from providing analytics to restaurants. Because of the way the app works, we can go to a restaurant and give them info like "x number of people were interested in going to your restaurant, but they went across the road to your competitor instead". In addition to analytics, we planned to do the usual promoted results and coupons etc.

Think about the sheer number of users you'd need to have to make this useful to a random restaurant in a random city (or even a popular one).

Now think about Foursquare and how even they have not been successful in offering something similar to local companies.

I'd quit before I'd waste any time on this venture.

Unless you view this as a learning experience or side project.

You make a good point. I hadn't heard about Foursquare in a very long time, so I had no idea that they were trying to do something similar to monetise it.

Like I said though, it costs us practically nothing to run and it's been a great learning experience so far - I don't see any reason to give up just yet.

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