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Ask HN: What is my company doing wrong?

11 pointsrsbrown37 comments

My startup, MarksMenus.com, has been growing a product in beta for about a year now. It started as a side project, but I've devoted myself to it full-time for the past 5 months.

I submitted a "Rate my startup" entry yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693274) and got some good feedback, but very little criticism.

This is pretty typical of the feedback I've received all along (i.e., "nice. great idea!") but despite this I feel like our product has been very slow to get traction. I'm looking for critical feedback on why.

Possible reasons, in my mind:

1) It just takes a lot of time. We're on the right track and simply need to patiently move forward.

2) Poor execution (please point out specific deficiencies).

3) Memphis (our location and current target market) is too small.

4) Missing market (we're simply wrong in thinking there's a need for this).

Other ideas?

http://marksmenus.com

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After glancing at the site:

1. It doesn't look particularly good, visually.

2. It's not immediately clear what it does. I just saw a list of recipes, so I assume it's yet another recipe site (there are 1000s).

3. After making the effort to dive in further, the "restaurants tab" seems to give me a random map with some random restaurants. I don't get it: what does the site do for me?

4. This is a startup about local restaurants, right? Local is very, very hard. And restaurant reviews just aren't very compelling, particularly because the few reviews I looked at where pretty meh, not really worth reading, quite honestly. "Seven dollar lunches -- including soda and tax -- served in about seven minutes have made Celtic Crossing an incredibly popular Memphis lunch stop." -> booooring, and not different from restaurant reviews I can read in 100 other places. I think you're on the wrong track. Sorry to be harsh.

Don't be sorry! Looking for honest feedback.

Re: the reviews, we're actually trying to differentiate from other websites by offering "recommendations" instead of "reviews". For example, when I'm simply looking for a place to eat lunch today I don't necessarily want to read pages and pages of long-winded exposition (i.e., reviews) -- I simply want those in the know (local foodies) to point me in the right direction.

What do you think of that approach?

Sounds good in theory, but it's not there right now. I'd work hard on the UI and the content. As per your theory, I would expect to do a search, and then see: "JoeX says 'the burgerbarx is great because of y'." Ie. show the people recommending (the foodies) and show what they say. And make it look less like a databasedump (being harsh again) ;)

I appreciate it. We'll post a follow-up after we clean up the UI and get a second round of opinions.

The team currently consists of tech/business talent -- no designers. And it shows.

This reminds me of menupages.com. Looks wise, your site is better, but menupages has lot more data (which is understandable, as they are serving much bigger cities). According to compete, they had half a million visitors last month. I think that is proof enough, the concept works.

Some things that you could try:

1. Add more data (restaurant phone numbers, email, do they have take aways, do they have a delivery service, do they have kid friendly menus etc)

2. Why not categorize the restaurants by the food type? (Italian, Indian, Chinese etc)

3. More photographs - why not contact the restaurant owners and get photos of their restaurants, foods etc?

4. Promotions - Sign up with restaurants and promote one restaurant (or even one dish from a particular restaurant) a day. A coupon that gives big discount (50% +). You get more visitors to your site and the restaurant gets more biz

Good luck.

We're actually in the process of working on several of these exact things. Thanks for the feedback.

I don't see a benefit to using this site over Google. So, there are a lot of restaurant review sites. But if I am actually looking for a specific restaurant on a specific site, it might have nothing. So it makes more sense for me to search in Google and let it pull up the site with the most or most relevant reviews. Sometimes it pulls up citysearch, sometimes yelp, sometimes b4-u-eat, etc.

For me to ever actually come to this site specifically (and risk missing out on good info from another site), I would need a strong reason to do so. An example would be, a blog where you guys go "undercover" and review restaurants. Or where you have a funny twist of some sort, or maybe take a strong POV.

Or maybe something like: I'm a vegetarian, so maybe every reviewer enters their dietary constraints or preferences, so I can search for people "like me" and see where they are eating and what they like.

Lastly, until I read the reviews her, I wasn't even clear that this was providing searchable menus, it looks like another review site. The primary point to use Google still applies. If the restaurant has a main website, I'd rather go there. If they host their menu with you, Google should fine it.

Sounds like we may not be doing a very good job getting our message across.

Good suggestions re: SEO and social features. Thanks!

Where is your traffic coming from?

Have you figured out yet why menupages.com and allmenus.com have a lot of traffic, but your website don't.

Their websites rock on search engines, but your website is nowhere to be found.

I search for restaurants a lot and I never saw your website before this thread. Mostly, I go to Google and search for "$cityName restaurants" or "$restaurantName menu". This is where you want your website to rank, and this is what is going to bring you tons of free traffic.

I went through your website, and figured that search engines can not crawl 99% of your website's content.

Your website has a nice idea, product and content; but inefficient design in terms of SEO. I see that with a lot of startups. SEO is not something that you can just get it done from a consultant at a later stage. It has to be built right in to the product, your product/website should have a Search Engine friendly structure and design.

I have years of experience building SEO friendly websites and web applications. We leverage search engines to get traction and tons of free traffic. I can help you with SEO. Contact me at ravish at realgeek.com

It does take time. You say you have spent the last 5 months full time. How much of that has been in development vs marketing? How are you reaching out to restaurants to populate the site? You have the chicken and egg problem, people don't use it because there is not enough content, there is not enough content because people don't use it.

I'd focus on a few major markets and work hard to get as many menus up as possible. People are always looking for free advertisements and having their menu online is one form. I'd push that as much as possible. Since this is your full time effort, you may need to spend money on marketing to get the ball rolling. Perhaps enter the menu's yourself (or hire a VA to do it) and then drop the restaurant a note saying that their menu is now online and they can make changes at this website for free.

Other ideas, perhaps white label it to newspapers and/or city websites? In San Diego, there is a dining guide section at signonsandiego.com and this would fit into what they are doing. They also have someone who is doing reviews weekly, which could now include populating the full menu.

We're actually about to finalize a deal with the local paper to white label our content. Thanks for the tip about signonsandiego.com; maybe channel publishing will be our niche.

What pain point does your app address, exactly?

There is a difference between providing something that seems interesting and cool and actually making a point of frustration go away.

In my opinion, it's highly likely that your app doesn't solve any real problem that people have right now. It's executed well, it's clear at what it provides, but it is unclear as to why this is a benefit to me as a user.

We're trying to address two pain points:

1) For consumers outside of NY and SF (which seem to be covered by menupages.com), there is no searchable menu database. Since their acquisition by NY Magazine, menupages appears to have little/no growth plans.

2) For restaurateurs, we aim to solve the difficulty of getting menu content online in a conventional way by providing simple, free menu content management.

Point number 1 can be difficult to see for folks outside of the top few major metro areas, but there is honestly no other solution currently in place if you want to search for "salmon in downtown Denver".

Did you have a look at http://www.just-eat.co.uk/ ? It provides a slightly similar service for the UK, although it's focussed on takeaway.

1) Searchable menu database. You're trying but no succeeding in solving that problem. Check this search: http://marksmenus.com/search?page=1&query=pizza&loca...

2) How many restaurateurs are active users?

Yeah, this is a symptom of the chicken and egg problem. We've seeded our DB with menus outside of our local market (Memphis) but the data is sparse right now.

Restaurateur response in Memphis has been okay: 5 paying customers at $30/month and 10-15 that are non-paying but have entered their own menus and participate in discussions.

Most of the activity and content submissions have been from diners/foodies.

That's promising :)

Salmon in downtown Denver? http://marksmenus.com/search?page=1&query=salmon&loc... This result set/results page is just not compelling at all, sorry. You need to work on making this search return something useful.

Did you see the "dishes" tab? Getting the UI right on that search page has been a struggle for us. We return both "restaurants" and "dishes", but the results are split across two tabs.

just a tweak, but maybe weight titles more ... salmon dishes didn't appear until far down the list.

Splitting results over 2 tabs is not a good idea. You're hiding half of your results behind something that most people won't even notice.

A pain point is not "We do x for y like z does for a" (especially when z is showing no growth).

A pain point is the identification of the problem a specific customer has to which you can apply a solution that removes this problem.

In identifying the pain point, you need to validate the entire scope from the user's perspective - their entire perspective.

What I'm trying to say is that you need to be very, very clear on what benefit you are bringing to the user, what other options they have, and most importantly whether or not the "pain point" is worth their investment in finding a solution.

I say the last point because I fear it may be directly applicable to you and your situation, and you even provide the evidence to support this in your comment.

Ask yourself this question: Why doesn't menupages.com appear to be seizing the growth opportunity?

I don't have the answer for that question, but in order to be successful, you need to confirm that the answer is not - in any way - related to the market, or lack of one.

It is highly possible that getting menu content online is just not enough of a problem for enough people to be worth investing in the solution you have developed. I know I eat out a great deal, yet see no use for this particular function beyond casual knowledge. (i.e. if I couldn't find a menu, I'd probably just go to the restaurant anyway).

I think, honestly, you should backtrack to the start point here and go through the process of nailing the customer identification process. It's very possible that my hunch is incorrect, but you need to find out - exactly - how if you are to be successful here.

Good Luck.

run4, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. I read your reply to my partner and it has already catalyzed a vibrant discussion on this end.

I still believe we're onto something, but you strike right at the heart of what we need to do to make sure. Thanks.

np... I wish you guys the very best of success!

Have your restaurant members allow you to install a cam at a strategic location and stream that video on your site. Apart from menus, the user can get a look and feel of the place before heading for it. Even if I have been going to it often, I'd check if I will get place. At times, you can do some webinars where the chef maybe showing off his best creations....

To make your site create a pull, you could have users register and identify themselves at the restaurant for a free give-away or a discount. Then the restaurant could upload the details of what you had and paid, to a password protected area. It will be a history of my personal spending, what I liked and where. Reward the heavy users etc etc.

Build a social network of foodies, would be foodies and the folks who feed these foodies.

>What is my company doing wrong?

I think this is the wrong question. The right question is 'what can my company do better?'. In your case, there is not much value-add over a google search. Tell me where I can get 2 for 1 pizza right now, who makes the best lasagne, give me coupons, loyalty schemes, 'say marksmenus.com sent you' calls to action, 'do you like ramen? try these 3 local joints' features. Bury yourself deeper into both the restaurants and users. Your app is good....it could be better.

Excellent suggestions. Many thanks.

My personal opinion is that there isn't a need for this, but others have pointed out menupages.com, which I guess is really big. I've never cared to search for restaurant menus online myself. Even if you covered the city I live in, I wouldn't use it. Sorry. That's my critical feedback. It sounds like others do see a use for it though, so I could easily be wrong. I don't consider myself a "foodie" so maybe I'm just not your target audience. Do a lot of people call themselves "foodies"?

Change your page tittle. Memphis Restaurant Menus - MarksMenus.

Why stay only at Memphis? Why not the wikipedia of restaurants menus?

Cheers

To answer the question of why is the service slow to gain traction: While it is a useful service, and I have this pain point, it doesn't come very often. Perhaps this is because I don't eat out much, but I would say I only could use a service like this maybe once per month. It's not quite like email or messaging, that people need to access several times per day.

I hear you. Even when I do want to go out and eat, I find that it's much more likely that I am wondering "where should I go?" rather than "what's on xyz's menu?"

Because of this, we recently added a new feature where "foodies" can recommend restaurants and dishes to make it much more effective to browse area restaurants.

Would a feature like this make you any more likely to use the service?

You know, I don't think it would (perhaps, but tough to say). You're right with the "where should I go?" question, which comes down to the "what do I want to eat?" question. Actually, looking at the site again, I can see you're addressing this with suggestions from the local area.

I agree that I wouldn't normally use this site on a daily basis, because once I have found the best "burger" or "lentil soup" in my area, I tend to go there instead of repeating the search each time. That said, with my pregnant wife, we are constantly trying to find where we can satisfy her new cravings, and a searchable menu service would really help us. Tip One: market the searchable menu service much more! It is not clear in the URL name or on the main page that it is an option/strength. Tip Two: Allow reviews and/or ratings not just at the restaurant level, but at the Meal level. That way if I want to find the best (user reviewed) meatloaf in memphis, your site is where I would start.

When i go to the first page it recommends a restaurant in san francisco... i am in alabama. there is some way to guess where people are geographically by their ip address.

When i do add my location birmingham, al...... the 2nd restaurant is Krystals (a crappy fast food place). When I call google voice and ask for restaurants in birmingham, the first one is bottega, one of the best restaurants in town...

Is there anything else you can sell to restaurants (i.e., capitalize on your existing contacts)?

clickable link http://marksmenus.com

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