Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
chompstack.com
chompstack.com
We all know how mobile unfriendly restaurant websites tend to be. Many of them are done in Flash, and don't work at all on most phones. Others force you to download PDF menus which take forever to load and have an annoying tendency to lock up my phone.
The irony, of course, is that I'm most likely to be looking at restaurant websites on my phone, when I'm around town looking for an interesting place to eat. There's nothing more frustrating than pulling up a restaurant website, only to see a Flash page that doesn't work, or a desktop website that you have to pinch, zoom, and scroll your way around.
I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites.
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.
I think skeptical restaurant owners would choose that no-risk option, and you'd probably make more money. Restaurant owners who think it'll be successful in making sales would probably be willing to pay a decent sum per month.
I agree with the other commenter that you are probably not charging enough. I think this kind of service has high value if it can demonstrably increase sales.
Restaurant online ordering providers usually fall into two camps:
1) Simple ordering that goes to email, fax, or phone. There is no integration with the kitchen and restaurants have to reconcile their reporting at the end of the day.
2) Online ordering website integration directly with the restaurant's point of sale system. This works better for the restaurant cause the orders can go straight to the kitchen printers, the sales reports are all in the same place, and the orders pop up in the point of sale system that the restaurant is already using. This is a lot more work (and a lot more expensive), and first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.
Additionally, not all restaurants are interested in doing online ordering (it affects the workflow of the kitchen to have orders coming in 'out of band').
I wouldn't want to limit our service to only folks interested doing online ordering, but it might be an interesting add-on for us down the road.
Or roll your own POS and blow the competition completely out of the water. :-) There is a huge opportunity here for the sorts of people that hang out on HN.
On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone.
...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.)
With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc.
One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell.
Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it.
But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-)
edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
We think it's worth the time and the money, and we agree that the current clunky, antiquated hardware and counterintuitive software is a disgrace. It's one of those ideas (upgrading restaurants) whose time is fast approaching.
I think maybe you are overthinking that aspect of it. I totally understand and likewise agree with doing POS integration with the kitchen(you can't automate it), but there are methods already present in every restaurant to getting an order to the kitchen, some are paper, some are DASH(Darden's system, microsoft stack) aloha system etc seems to be a pretty big one.
Or lead generation for restaurant customers?
OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.
I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side.
Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue.
Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up.
> Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling
Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.
Even the most conservative restaurant owner is going to be swayed by a clear financial benefit.
Also, convincing potential customers to take the plunge is the kind of task that (good) salespeople excel at.
-- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand.
-- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out.
-- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle)
A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).
With mobile websites you generally want something that loads quickly, displays all the restaurant information in an easy to access manner, and is somewhat customizable (colors, logo, etc) but doesn't go too far cause then you would lose usability.
This is the most important piece of information that is missing from your site. As a restraint owner looking at your site I'm thinking "What is this, an app, or a service or what?" and "how will my customers find my restaurant on their phone with this service?". Given that most restaurants that you are targeting are probably not even aware that people might access access the restaurant's site on their phone, you definitely need to answer these questions.
(edit: for example, your uWink demo video in the first frame already starts with the app (or site or whatever it is) on the screen. You should demonstrate how a customer would find uWink on their phone in the first place)
It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website?
In terms of how customers are going to discover the restaurant, it really depends on the customer. A lot of folks search via the Google Maps app and then click through to the website.
I could start the demo video on a Google Maps search and take the user to the restaurant website from there...
It isn't. The biggest text you have up there is 'Mobile websites for Restaurants'. That might mean you do contract work for restaurants looking to create mobile websites. Which you aren't. May be interpreted both ways - I think your explanation in the post above was clearer.
As far as getting restaurants set up, that can be a service we provide...
Anyways, the point is that you're not marketing to the smartphone users. You're marketing to people that probably don't have a smartphone, and may not know how people would use one to discover their site. Showing the different paths in a video or chart would be a good idea. Better might be to set something up with an existing customer with a horrible, flash-filled, pdf-menu'd main site. Get them to agree to let you post a video of what it was like before they got you, and how unusable the site is, even if you somehow get a direct link to the pdf menu.
Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner.
This is key. stevenwei, you need to get your butt into some restaurants and test this idea out. I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Spend a day in as many of the restaurants in your area as possible and request a meeting with the owner. Most of the time you'll get turned down, but take what you can get.
Ask them about their current website and if they have any issues. Talk to them about smartphones and try to understand how they perceive their problems. Take lots of notes. Then, use the words the restaurant people did on your site. It may seem unclear to us on HN, but if it speaks to restaurant people that's all that matters.
Great advice, and that has been our experience as well.
I'll add another citation. Although I would love to find more recent numbers, as I bet the percentage has jumped since then.
Great idea for the before and after videos...although on a Flash site the 'before' video won't be particularly exciting. :)
Also, using the location-network effect you could also help promote their establishments. Build another app that allows you to search and view your client's mobile-friendly sites and open their location in Google Maps
So its like Urbanspoon, except you can actually see what the hell is on the menu. This helps your product sell more because not only are you making it easier for the restaurant to gain visibility through your promotion and marketing through the app (which is what you could technically charge them for - giving away the site for free), but you are also giving them an established mobile presence as well.
One two punch.
Additionally, all of those directories already link to the restaurant's website. Our goal is simply to make sure that when the user clicks through to the website, they can actually find what they're looking for.
Edit: That said, explaining that all these existing directories point to your website, and when your customers click through, they want to be able to find your menu (or whatever else wasn't listed in the directory) is certainly valuable.
Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)
But offering a way to clearly prove the value of the service before they buy would definitely be useful.
Suggestion: expand your service to provide good desktop sites in addition to your mobile sites.
I just want to thank everyone for their feedback.
I've read many 'Ask HN: Rate My Startup' posts and knew you guys gave great advice, but I didn't really expect to get this much feedback and encouragement.
Thanks a lot guys!
We'll put up a HTML5 video version too.
Someone discussed online ordering as a possible revenue model, from my experiences with operators they weren't interested in this approach. Most orders they received over the phone would involve customization and the cost of handling order problems simply outweighed the benefit of not requiring their bartender to take an order over the phone. However, I could see this being big for chinese restaurants. Most customers order by number, and many chinese restaurants are carry out exclusively. Remove potential language barriers during order taking, increase total ordering, win-win.
Anyway, best of luck!
I agree, the biggest challenge is with operator awareness. Most restaurant owner's priorities look something like this:
1) Food 2) Service ... 9544) Website
My hope is that with the mobile internet growing as it is, more restaurant folks will begin to understand that their customers are using their phones to look up restaurants, and showing them an empty Flash page or making them download huge menu PDFs is immensely frustrating and delivers a poor customer experience.
Like the Chinese restaurant idea. Wonder how receptive they'd be to changing their phone order system.
Not so sure you're appealing to the right target market. It's hard to see this within the HN echo chamber but your site still comes across as very techie. It's clear how your service will help people like us, smartphone-wielding techies, but we don't run restaurants.
You should be targeting restaurant owners, executive chefs and general managers. These people are super busy and extremely tech-averse. They will shut off their brains instead of trying to understand anything even slightly technical about phones, Flash, web, etc. So get rid of that stuff. Instead show how they can get more customers by presenting their food and experience to people who are out in their neighborhood and hungry right now. And show how they can do this with near-zero hassle.
Messages like these might work: You're losing customers! X% of people are already out and about when they decide to eat. Y% of restaurant websites are broken on phones (use this instead of "Top 4 problems..."). Fancy phone = the income and connections to be prime customers.
Get rid of everything that doesn't clearly and directly support your main value proposition within the domain of your target market. For example the "Did you know?" section has only one relevant point ("14% of smartphone users look for restaurants...") and it hurts you because the number is small.
Test everything, including our comments. Good luck!
I agree that framing the problem more in terms of 'you're losing customers' could work better.
I suspect you have plans to move to the desktop web, too -- seems like it'd be great for restaurant owners to have a one-stop shop for all of their website needs.
Restaurant websites are definitely all over the place in terms of quality and accessibility -- seems like a solid market. Best of luck.
In order to prove or disprove the concept without actually building out any kind of CMS or infrastructure, I set up a marketing site and some demo restaurant mobile sites (really good looking stuff built on jQTouch). Next step was to build prospect lists with every OpenTable restaurant in a handful of Ohio cities (I live in SF now, but was in Cincinnati at the time) and do a ton of cold calling.
After hundreds of pitches at different price points, I only managed to sell a few at $49/year and decided not to pursue any further. Having little prior sales experience (sold CUTCO as a high schooler) was a problem for me. Timing is crucial and being too early was another likely inhibitor. Figuring out the best sales channel is may be your biggest challenge. Along with how best to pitch the restaurants, who are not traditional early adopters.
I'll be keeping an eye on you guys. Best of luck!!
You could also offer to store a contact for the restaurant.
Google voice is free, each restaurant could use a call to GV as a way to track leads generated by your app.
My thought: your target market likely maintains both a nice printed menu and potentially a leaner "take-out" menu. The reason for the PDF menu is (I'm guessing) that's what they got back from their designer for the printer, and it's going onto good stock, getting laminated, etc.
One stumbling block might be that it's yet another place to have to maintain their menu/prices. If ChompStack could spit out a simplified take-out menu (or the daily special insert in the menu) they could print, that might reduce some of that effort. Or maybe a "patchfile" they can send off when they update their prices.
A friend has been talking about doing this for along time, as it is consistently felt that most restaurants do a horrible job with websites.
However, I wonder if focusing only on the mobile side of things is the right way to go.
I agree you've got yourself a market, but should a restaurant need to be updating two websites? If the same info is valid on both, why not provide a different css for non-mobile and be a one stop shop for restuarants.
You may also be able to provide some other related services which may provide a network effect and possibly a slight barrier to entry for competitors.
Of course most restaurants already do have websites, so getting them to add a simple redirect to a mobile version might be an easier task than asking them to dump their entire existing website.
But I definitely agree, for new restaurants that don't already have a website, being able to build a desktop + mobile version with the same tool is very compelling.
I'm working on a similar project, and one thing I'd like to point out is that menus are not always simple databases. There are several menus that have paragraphs of information that relates to several menu items rather than just one. How are you planning on translating that information to a mobile application, if at all? I'm trying to find a good example of this "paragraph of extraneous info" from menus in a Google Search - I'll get back to you when I can.
In my experience, most restaurant menus do fit into a simple database format. After all, most major point of sale systems do use relational databases to store and track menu items. The menu item databases are usually highly configurable but I've usually seen them break down into:
1) Major categories: Entrees, Appetizers 2) Menu items: Cheeseburger, Grilled Salmon 3) Modifier categories: Steak Temperature, Salad Dressing 4) Modifiers: Rare, Medium, Well-Done, etc.
Of course you usually don't display the modifiers on the menu itself, that is a back end implementation detail. :)
If it is absolutely necessary, it seems like it would be fairly easy to have that show up when you select a section. That could get complicated if there are multiple paragraphs within a section (i.e. one for burgers and one for chicken sandwiches, but both of those are under "sandwiches"). You could just limit it to one description per category, though.
This is one menu that presents the type of problem I'm talking about. The line that worries me is "All entrees come with salad bar," which reflects on every entree. From my perspective, the easiest way to incorporate data like this would be to include it underneath the extended explanation of the menu item.
PS Steven - I want to set up a phone call with you or something. I'm working on something that is literally one step away from what you are. follow me on Twitter (@nate) or e-mail me at nchastain at gmail.com and let me know if you've got some time free some time next week. I'm still in the development stage and won't have a product out for at least a month.
Two things, though: if I were a restaurant owner, the burger in your logo would probably irritate me. After all, few restaurant owners see themselves in the fast food business, I assume.
Second, if you want to go international, ChompStack is probably a bad name. The "Globish dictionary" doesn't contain the words chomp and stack.
I was slightly confused whether this was only mobile or if there was a possibility of building a full website + mobile version. It might help you convince restaurants to use this service if it can handle all of their restaurants website needs in one place.
What if the users are like me, though, and just avoid going to the restaurant Web site from the phone because we are aware how bad the "usual" experience is.
I'm not expressing this clearly, but consider this analogy: If for ten years a neighborhood in town is "bad", has a high crime rate, routinely plays host to gang wars, et cetera, building a state-of-the-art gated community and community playground in that area won't attract new visitors for a LONG time until that old reputation runs its course.
One of your selling points is that there's "no marketing required." I don't know how you feel about this, but I think that's a losing strategy for a project like this.
Looks fantastic. I really like your UI -- very informative, yet clean.
I think that your prices seem pretty low, I am not sure how much feedback you have gotten from restaurants, this seems like a no-brainer for them...
Good luck!
You should wonder why restaurants think they should have a "fancy" website, as opposed to a Facebook business listing with a menu and some pics. A fancy restaurant will want something dark and elegant to communicate that they're not a diner or a fast food joint. Think about this.
So many websites I goto have menus that are PDFs of their actual menus.
It seems like the biggest hurdle to face is getting all the information in initially(those menus can get pretty long) and then having the getting the restaurant owners keeping them updated in terms of pricing/selection. To me, $15 a month is nothing, as long as there is minimal effort in maintaining the mobile sites.
Also, as a Nokia employee, I hope that your pages are compatible with our phones....
http://www.cultofmac.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/apple-...
Shoot me an email if you like. I'd be happy to put something together at a reasonable price if you're pushed for time :)
In particular, the graphic of the two iPhones on the right side made it _immediately_ and _compellingly_ clear what you're selling. Nice work.
The simple shadow immediately beneath the phones is plenty.
Regarding this line: "14% of smartphone users look for restaurants on their phones." I don't know about you, but 14% seems not worth it from a restaurants perspective. If I were you I'd say "One in seven smartphone users look for restaurants in their phone, and that number is only increasing!"
Best of luck, your features page looks great.
What you could do for restaurants that are not interested, is built something quickly for them so that you can actually show them "look this is what you could do!" - actions move people more than words, in your case your product will convince the customers more directly!
I suspect that the majority of restos don't even have a site and making it super easy for them to customize, upload menus, sell unique resto themes, etc., provides great value. Perhaps even tie into reviews around the web and pics via apis.
Speaking of which, how are normal people supposed to find these mobile sites? Maybe you could have restaurants pay you to list them in foursquare or equivalent.
1) Pull up Google maps and search for restaurants. 2) Pull up Yelp/Urbanspoon and search for restaurants.
Then I often find myself wanting more information than Google/Yelp/Urbanspoon provides, so I end up going to the restaurant's listed website on my phone. 99% of the time, the website isn't in a format that I can easily use on my phone.
It's best to have 100% validated HTML especially when offering to build sites for other people. Some times restaurant owners can be technologically inclined and may check these things out.
On your "Features" tab you do a great job actually focusing on "Benefits" (most people just list the features!).
I'd propose that you change that menu title to "Why Do I Need Chompstack?" or just "Why ChompStack?" and then retitle the headline to:
"ChompStack generates more customers by making your site accessible to mobile visitors."
Then rather than opening up with "Why go mobile?" - find some real data illustrating the "pain" for restaurant owners:
"72% of restaurant websites don’t work on mobile phones . . .”
Or
“Your website is broken for up to 50% of your visitors!
Support those stats by doing a quick restaurant survey from your local listings and I bet the number is crazy!
Best of luck to you.
some of the comments like creating a website, not just a mobile site, are great too.
but i wonder, what is your target for # of clients? I would think you would need at least 1000 clients at $15 a month. is that realistic?
according to some results from a google query there are hundred of thousands of restaurants. i also wonder, were these numbers on your mind when you created the service?
Did you guys use a template for ToS and Privacy. If you have, could you pls share the link?
thanks
http://agentpronto.com/privacy
It's not vetted by a lawyer, but as far as I know privacy policies are for visitors and not for the courts.
The challenge for us, I think, is not in the existence of competitors, but the ability to convince a meaningful amount of restaurants that their existing websites are difficult to use on phones, and that they need to do something about it. After all, there are still tons of poorly designed restaurant websites out there.
I know it's a proven navigational scheme and sound UI that studies show converts at a higher blah blah blah, but when is some one going to do something new with landing pages? Sheesh.
Okay, on the count of 3, everyone click the down arrow on my comment!
Edit: I should mention that I totally agree with your comment. Can't wait to hire a graphic designer :)
Your customers won't know that this layout is well-worn territory for paid web apps. They will just see a beautiful, easy to understand website. Which it is...
Nice work.
You can design something to impress the HN crowd once you get traction. In other words, pay for the fluff with profits.