Show HN: Simple analytics for restaurants. Feedback on launch page?

First, you just launched, so congrats!

Second, I do have some feedback:

-You don't state the problem you're fixing. You have to make the prospect aware of a problem they're having before you show them the light. And even if a prospect visits your site knowing they have the problem you're trying to solve, reiterating it in very clear terms will only make them more encouraged to buy your service.

-You need visuals, like images of restaurants, dishes, happy customers, happy owners, etc, stuff that'll elicit an emotional response.

-Given the nature of the product, I would include a very simple graph to visually convey the concept of increasing revenues.

-You need testimonials or case studies. As a restaurant owner with a lot on my plate already, I need to know your product actually works and is worth implementing. A case study about how X restaurant discovered some hidden trends in their customer behaviors and tripled revenue in a year will make me more likely to pull the trigger.

-Your hook needs work. "The best way to forecast for your restaurant" doesn't present a problem or a solution. Something like "Easy sales forecasting that'll keep your customers full, and your wallet fat" might be a little better. (That could be a lot better, but I'd need a few hours).

Hope that helps!

First, some (unsolicited) feedback on the product: Itemizing & inputting your sales per item is a pretty hefty thing to ask if the restaurant isn't already doing it. If they are, what makes this solution better than Excel or Google Docs? Integration with a POS or other system that automatically tracks sales might be necessary to make this feasible from a "how much extra work does this force me to do" perspective.

As for the site... 1) "Try now" doesn't let me try it now... not a good start. 2) The site as a whole is pretty dry and unappealing, and gives me no idea what the product would be like to use. Typical best practice for something like this tends to be human imagery + shots of the interface in action. See: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes... 3) If you're going to promise plans and pricing, give us plans and pricing. If not, "learn more" or "hear about us when we're ready" is more honest.

Congrats on getting something out there!

One thing I'm always most cautious about this is what do we really know? I can give you some advice about what I think you could do better, but I don't run a restaurant, and those are the conversations that really count. Maybe they'd prefer this page be brown with a yellow comic-sans font. So take this with an enormous grain of salt.

1) The lede concerns me. Is that how restaurant owners talk? They want to forecast better? If so, great. I have a feeling though that there is a different language they use. I don't know what it is though. If you do, than great keep going. If you don't you need to figure out what this language is. Find a restaurant owner and figure out what he has typed into google. Is it "how to increase restaurant sales" might be a more common question on their mind that you could fit into.

2) You need to show some social proof. Some testimonials. Someone somewhere has said something nice about you and/or this project. If not, that is step 1. Get whatever this is in front of someone that will say, "this is great".

3) I'm nervous self-service SaaS for restaurants might not be the right business model. I've talked with some restaurant owners. Many seem like their top of mind problems are keeping their employees from stealing or their glassware from chipping or their produce getting delivered on time. They don't seem like they have a ton of time figuring out a software system to help them. (I believe Opentable started by basically holding these restaurants hands and giving them the computers systems and everything they needed)

I have a feeling you'd have more luck getting a quick meeting in a booth at the back of the restaurant between lunch and dinner than getting owners to this landing page.

4) There's a great program in Chicago, called Inspiration Kitchen, a non-profit to help homeless people with things like training to work a kitchen to help them get jobs. There's other programs like this in other cities where non-profits are running kitchens and restaurants. If there's something like that in your area, and you volunteered with them for 2 hours a week, I bet you'd get some really nice connections and insight on how you could help them with software like this.

Hey! Cool concept.

My overall comment would be really drive home the problem(s) that you're trying to solve, whatever they might be. I would lead with those. i.e.

- Fed up of wasting perfectly good ingredients? - Want to make smarter purchasing decisions? - Take the guesswork out of your next specials - etc etc

What you have at the moment is mostly the solution, I'd pitch up the problem like I mentioned above, then a few points on your products magic.

It shouldn't be too tough because even from just seeing your current page I "get it".

Just my 2 penneth :)

Looks like an interesting concept for a product. I don't have much experience selling to restaurants in particular so I can't comment on the business model, but I can offer a couple pieces of advice regarding how to sell software to small businesses:

1) Good job emphasizing "increase revenue". Software is an incredibly tough sell to SMBs if you aren't helping them decrease costs or increase revenue, so the more you emphasize the practical implications of your software the better.

2) The homepage is a little sparse on details. If I owned a restaurant, I'd want to see at least a bunch of screenshots, if not an interactive demo. Telling me that the product gives me happier customers is fine, but I really need to see what I'm going to be working on.

3) On the pricing page, a general tactic is to put real prices and see who clicks on which tiers. That way, you can see how many people would actually be willing to pay for your product and how many are just mildly interested.

4) When you get the emails, make sure you talk to them within a day. I've found that most potentially leads go down the toilet if you wait much longer, so you're going to want to engage them while they're interested.

Shoot me an email at the email on my profile if you want to talk more!

To the people asking about Excel, the obvious answer is: most non IT literate people don't know how to use it. My Uncle always asks me to knock up very basic charts to track how his business is doing because he doesn't know how himself.

1) More information - I want to know what kind of statistics you can show me (ideally in layman's terms), something like a graph. Then some more details on the technical info - what do you mean by trend? Can you predict sales in the future?

2) Do you actually have any usage data from a restaurant for this?

3) It would be nice to see your personal background - why did you invent this? Did you have a problem that needed solving that was hard with conventional software?

Basically what I'm getting at is I don't really understand what I would get from your product. I can see a table of things I sold and a rainy icon. Great, but if I'm a restaurateur presumably my till will dump something like this at the end of the day?

I get the impression that at the moment you're selling an answer, not the answer to a posed question. People need to look at your site and immediately think "Yes, I always wondered about that and I can see it would help!"

Your competitor is Excel. How are you better than it?

Tell the audience why they want it. Not what it does.

And be specific. "Make smarter decisions and increase revenue!" does not mean anything. You could literally say that about anything. What does your product specifically help them with?

Also, the exclamation mark seems condescending, like it's a service for kids. But that's just my personal taste.

I'll be brutally honest for you, since I would want the same: this is crap. You shouldn't have put this up yet. Here's a list of things wrong, I really hope you fix them because I like to see people make nice things :)

1. You're using minimalism as an excuse to not build a landing page. What is this!??!?!?! I sort of know what it is, but have no idea what the software looks like (is that a screenshot?)

2. I hate giving others design directives, but comic sans-ish fonts + spreadsheets makes very little sense. You can be "cute-sy" on other parts of the site, but when it comes to numbers you want things to be readable.

3. please preload any rollover images you have, seeing a button blink when i hover over it is so 90s.

4. The "Try now for free" should be right aligned, forreal.

otoh, the logo looks nice, except you should consider better aliasing on the font (or a css3 web font!) :)

Past performance is not an indicator of future results. If you want to look at the future, you need to combine previous results with possible future scenarios. Is business to a particular restaurant different based on the season, are there cash flow problems to consider? Regression or historic modeling is not that great - this includes where it is frequently used such as network analysis, stocks, etc. However, some of the drill down type things might be useful to monitoring food cost or helping to do future modeling. It depends on what features you have when you are near an MVP.

I am also not sure what this dones that a spreadsheet template couldn't do at this point. For the rainy day scenario, are you asking them to put this in, or will you take their location with weather data to automate this analysis?

You should probably ask people who manage restaurants rather than people on HN.

Some feedback:

- sales on rainy days -> This is insight, not trends or analytics. (that's not to say it's less or more important)

- Simply record your daily sales in Flourcast. -> Why is this any easier than having my cashier put this in an Excel spreadsheet and do a pivot table?

- The best way to forecast for your restaurant. -> As others have pointed out, this needs some work. Forecast what? Sales? Inventory? What problem are you solving and why is your product any better than the competition?

I'd say the real value is in the statement "Make smarter decisions and increase revenue".

I'd concentrate the focus of the page on walking them through a concrete example of what insight would lead to what actions which would lead to what increase in revenue.

If you make a compelling case for that, that'll give them the motivation to sign up and input the data. Motivation is the single biggest determinant of conversion.

My first impression would be to change the font and preload the hover-image for "Plans and pricing" (when you hover over it now, it shows the image loading)

I don't know much about the space but I think the biggest thing you can do is to both make it easy and convince me that it's easy before I sign up to do the manual entry of data.

Assuming this is a real problem (I imagine it would be) then I think easing the data entry will make/break your retention.

Looks interesting, but I can't see who is behind this project (no company/developer info on the page), so I won't share my email address.

Also "Try NOW for free" is misleading, as there's no product behind it yet (so I can't try it).

This sounds like a potentially useful thing, but putting up an ugly webpage with two links to a box asking for someone's email is the opposite of useful. FWIW, "flourcast.com@mailinator.com" will receive their spam.

The two links "Try now for free" and "Plans and pricing" are making promises about what waits on the other side. You should always keep promises.

I see no reason why "Plans and pricing" is an image.

Not gonna lie...it's pretty bad. For starters, the call to action is off the page on the right. Unforgivable.

Since your design skills are limited, you might need to find someone to do it or at least look online for some templates.

Here's what you're up against: http://www.ex-pos.com http://www.averoinc.com http://euclidanalytics.com/product/qsr http://restaurantsciences.com/

This one might be within the range of your skills: http://www.tapastech.com/analytics

Rather than having a "sign up" link and a "Plans and Pricing" link, I think it would be better if you had just 1 page, and had the signup form be the focus of the site (the call-to-action).

Plans & pricing button disappears when I rollover. Moments later it shows back up. its because you lazy load an image. No need for an image, do it with pure CSS.

On my iPad in landscape the green button isn't visible without scrolling.

Best wishes with your venture guys.

Good work! I think you should checkout how your site looks on mobile and smaller resolution screen (It breaks).

So what are we suppose to evaluate exactly?