Comment by paddoq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paddoq | Hacker News Reader

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1. Yes we intend to offer intermediate levels of service, eventually moving all the way down to a self serve option for a single restaurant.

2. We are still working on pricing for the smaller participants. The offering will likely be slightly different, but this scales very well, so we still think they can get access to quite a few of the features, just needs to be low /zero touch on our end, and the pricing needs to be right for them to ge involved.

3. We have geo-fenced notifications for users, we eventually will allow users to set a custom radius, and frequency and sensitivity, all pretty easy stuff to do, just need to get to it.

4. We are open to partnerships and have been approached about this. Yelp's business model is somewhat predicated upon 'Eating out is great' so hosting disparaging information may be less interesting to them. I think as our service continues to become more normalized and understood and expected, there will be a lot more great opportunities for partnerships

5. While I am sitting in this seat, we will not allow companies to buy away reports. Trust is everything, and I think consumers can figure this out really fast, and once you lose trust, you don't have much, especially with what we are doing, there is much more at stake than a normal review site. I thnk the companies don't want this either. As what we are doing continues to become more normalized, if our service started to become corrupted, then consumers lose trust, and another medium will pop up, and it may be a more adversarial organization. So in the end I think the large brands understand that, and should want us to continue to be the leading platform in this space.

TBC

6. We roll data off our site after 30 days, to combat harming restaurants where the circumstances may have changed. We think this is one reason restaurants should actually prefer people report on our site vs twitter, or yelp, or facebook. Our site is not intended as a permanent public record.

7. Yes we have had interest from theme parks, music festivals, caterers, airlines, gas stations, big retail that also sells food. We would go all the way down to food trucks, we get data for all of these, and welcome everyone taking advantage of it.

8. What big data analytics did your model use to "predict" chipotle's outbreak? The relative volume of data we received from Chipotle consumers was staggering - and this was prior to their first outbreak when they were still considered 'high quality' we did not need quants or data scientists for this one.

7. I speak at a bunch of events, but not yet at the National Restaurant Association, they are still fighting transparency on restaurant ratings! It will take them a second to warm up to us. We have started and had some great conversations with them, but it may take a little longer for them to get involved. When I have spoken at restaruant associations or other more broad events (like the Food Safety Summit, or International Association for Food Protection, which has a lot of industry participants) there are two camps. The tech forward companies who embrace data, even where it's imperfect, and are really interested. The remainder is a mixture, when I hear from the critics among these I typically point out 1) people are already reporting on social media 2) What I'm doing was bound to happen 3) Given how responsibly we are running this service, they ought to be glad it is me who is running it. They usually get these points.

didn't expect you to answer all my questions but I would feel more confident using your product now. Personally I don't eat at sketchy joints anyhow, I'm a picky eater myself although I tend to eat anything in front of me

7. I have not been to the food safety summit or internatiionalist association of food protection, but those are tailored more towards corporate clientelle anyhow. The NRA show is just a slog of everything so you would have a response more skewed towards the smaller but larger number of potential clients I mentioned. You are correct in that the adoption process would be much more difficult on this level, but it is also a better way to get your name known just in general among the growing franchisee/franchisor community.

On another note, its important to think of restaurants not as venues of just places where they serve food. Really these big chain stores are in reality real estate companies putting investments into their properties. Wawa and McDonalds are both great examples. Smaller companies generally do not have this mindset so bear that in mind.

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question - whats your plan for marketing to end user?

For larger marketing efforts towards the general public, what is your plan here anyhow? The success of any software largely depends on its users sending in reports (e.g. people eating). Are these people going to find your site purely based on google searches?

For instance, if I imagined myself in the shoes of people reporting. If I got sick from a restaurant, I would potentially as well go on a ranting spree and google things like "how to report restaurant for ecoli/sick/__insert term__/etc". And find your site

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question - How do you plan on using social media instagram / twitter / facebook / email / etc to end user?

I'm curious how this will work. For instance, there's the end users social media(s). The restaurant businesses social media(s) and regional socia media(s). Your company's social media and possibly regional levels of it too.

You said you will be using SMS to alert end user, but have you tailored a strategy laying out all edge case scenarios?

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question - if I search "X restaurant name" would I see a domain name link to dinesafe.com/restaurant_name?

I have a question regarding this. Obviously corporations are going to have a big social media presence, but smaller restaurants (should you most likely be targeting this avenue) have a weaker social media / google presence.

I can see if your service were to really take off, it might inadventely affect businesses negatively. For instance I might search "XYZ restaurant name" and out comes a list on the 7th or 10th listing about a food safety illness report on google.

I know you mentioned earlier you have no intention for businesses to tamper with data entered from their clients. But, what about giving them a 2nd chance? Unlisting the report directly on google, but leaving the report intact on the site. Have you considered recourse on this angle as well?

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question - mobile users - webapp or native iOS / android app?

Reporting seems to be a one off thing I can't imagine someone frequently reporting items. Do you, or do you not intend to make a native app? Possibly for searching through reported areas, etc

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question - how do you gauge how much a corporate client will pay for your software?

I'm just curious how this works. You don't need to answer this or be very specific I am not entirely familiar on how marketing analysis is done to give an accurate quotation estimate for how you quantity the "risk" they avert and therefore potential revenue savings.

From a salespoint, it sounds interesting and sometimes hard to convey. Its like selling just general IT services - some people will question a year down the road "why do we need IT if they sit around doing nothing and not make us money" mentality. Either through a change of leadership down the road nearing the start of the next fiscal year, etc.

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I probably don't have any more questions just curious if you had thought of the above cases

Good! glad to hear it :)

Thanks for the tip re the real esate perspective, I had not thought of it that way. The publicly listed companies definitely have a larger group of participants who care about the outcomes, in their investors. -----------------------------------------------------------------

question - whats your plan for marketing to end user?

Earned media has been helpful to us here, search, and social media have also been helpful. Google search "food poisoning kfc" (or any brand) and you can see we do reasonably well at that. With more resources we can do a lot better at all of these, and there is a virtuous cycle for us of identifying more outbreaks = more press = more awareness = more reports = identifying more outbreaks.

We are also pretty close to roll out languages - we have active users and reports in most countries, and public health as well, but improving languages will help that.

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question - How do you plan on using social media instagram / twitter / facebook / email / etc to end user?

There is a ton of work to do here, and a lot of upside for us when we get to it. In terms of the best strategy - this is a work in progress, and as we pull more brainpower in to help us with that we have a high degree of confidence we will get it right.

question - You said you will be using SMS to alert end user, but have you tailored a strategy laying out all edge case scenarios?

We have not ironed out all the edge cases as yet. Our email subscription is the most popular, there is demand for our app as well, but that is down the road. There are some interesting opportunities with SMS and messaging, they need more work.

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question - if I search "X restaurant name" would I see a domain name link to dinesafe.com/restaurant_name?

I have a question regarding this. Obviously corporations are going to have a big social media presence, but smaller restaurants (should you most likely be targeting this avenue) have a weaker social media / google presence.

I can see if your service were to really take off, it might inadventely affect businesses negatively. For instance I might search "XYZ restaurant name" and out comes a list on the 7th or 10th listing about a food safety illness report on google.

>> Yes this does happen, there are some cases where we do rank higher than the companies own website. Not our intent, we are thinking through this.

question - I know you mentioned earlier you have no intention for businesses to tamper with data entered from their clients. But, what about giving them a 2nd chance? Unlisting the report directly on google, but leaving the report intact on the site. Have you considered recourse on this angle as well?

>> We offer the restaurant the opportunity to secure message with the complainant (anonymized complainant information). Fast, and positive response to customers can often result in review retractions, and even stronger brand loyalty. If a customer wants to take a review down we do it. We encourage this route. Given we roll data off our site after 30 days we feel like we are doing a lot already, but we are open to refine our solutions on this point.

By the way Patrick if you ever need input or feedback I am very well acquainted with the industry in many different angles. Feel free to reach out to me, I am interested in seeing how your company progresses

I have my contacts on my username

You can always search through posts comments I've made here on hackernews to get an idea of what my background knowledge is in.

Thanks! I will do that. I appreciate it.

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