11 ms·

Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants

166 points by stevenwei 16y ago

protomyth 16y ago
It might be nice to allow the customers to mark the foods that interest them so they can remember what they want to order when they get to the restaurant.
aresant 16y ago
Solid idea, great implemntation, beautiful landing page. 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!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Excellent feedback, and great ideas. Thanks!
- cmeranda 16y ago
  These are fantastic ideas, thanks!
stevenwei 16y ago
http://www.chompstack.com http://www.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.
- jroes 16y ago
  Instead of charging a flat setup or monthly fee, have you thought about pivoting your business model so that customers can order through your app, and you charge a percentage fee to the restaurant owner? 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.
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    We have been contemplating adding ordering for a while now. To do it well, it's a non trivial problem with a lot of different challenges. 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.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      > ...first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs. 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.
      - 16y ago
jeffepp 16y ago
Steven, 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!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Thanks! I'm not sure about the pricing, but we're definitely open to adjusting it based on feedback.
deleted 16y ago
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jroes 16y ago
Great idea. A friend and I were talking about the need for this kind of product a few days ago. Your implementation looks very nice.
- paulgb 16y ago
  I also was discussing this with a friend the other day. I actually feel a bit relieved to know that someone is doing it better than I could have.
davidedicillo 16y ago
Very clever idea and very nice execution.
pedalpete 16y ago
Very nice implementation, and clear market. 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Great observation. That is definitely on our roadmap. 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.
wanderboy 16y ago
This is well-done. 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Interesting observation. Do you have any examples of this? 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. :)
- tnorthcutt 16y ago
  I know what you're talking about, but do you think mobile sites could possibly get away with not displaying that 'extra' information? Especially considering screen real estate on mobile devices is fairly limited. 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.
  - wanderboy 16y ago
    http://www.itservices.ws/websites/portales/menu2.htm http://www.itservices.ws/websites/portales/menu2.htm 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.
tansey 16y ago
I like it, but I hate your logo. Who takes a bite out of just the bun? Also, by showing a hamburger, you made me think of fast food and I could see conventional restaurants balking at that.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  I created that logo and I hate it too. Any other ideas? I'm a horrendous graphic designer but I'm down to try again, and I agree with your points entirely. We were sort of pushing to get it done at the time. We could consider 99designs.com at this point I suppose.
  - tortilla 16y ago
    Replace the burger with a menu (keep the bite).
    - cmeranda 16y ago
      Tough to figure out a menu icon: how can you immediately know what a menu looks like, maybe a rectangle with some fake lines of "text" and a wine glass pic? I've seen that somewhere...personally I think maybe the bite was my mistake (despite our chosen name) because it doesn't scale down well.
      - jokull 16y ago
        Some lines for text but "Menu" at the top in some cursive font
  - vibhavs 16y ago
    Why not remove the icon and leave the text logo as is? FWIW, I think just the text looks good.
    - cmeranda 16y ago
      That was my original plan but I needed something for Twitter, etc. Maybe I could do what HN does (along with many others) and just use the first letter in a box when I need a smaller graphic. Thanks for the suggestion!
brosephius 16y ago
if this means the end of restaurant web sites that are built entirely in flash or have PDF-only menus, I'm all for it.
deleted 16y ago
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josefresco 16y ago
Bummer, your demo requires Flash which means I can't view it on my iPad. Shouldn't your site be mobile friendly?
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Touché. :) We'll put up a HTML5 video version too.
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    Ok, the demo now loads HTML5 video for you iPad folks. The styling is a bit weird and the video doesn't autoplay, but whatever.
  - Raphael 16y ago
    Or a demo site...
durbin 16y ago
I love this idea
kaiserama 16y ago
Looks really well executed. I would definitely do some legwork on the operator front. I tackled this same problem about 2 years ago and found that operators simply aren't able to understand the need for this type of service (maybe it was the timing). Keep in mind that many don't have a website and some don't even use email, so explaining why they need a "mobile" website makes for a potentially hard sale. 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!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. 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.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  Great points, and we agree wholeheartedly. Most of our cold calls to restaurants have terminated in "We're just not interested" or "We have a website." Wish there was a way to take all of this feedback and channel it directly to them (or perhaps we need to work on our sales pitches? :) ) Like the Chinese restaurant idea. Wonder how receptive they'd be to changing their phone order system.
natep 16y ago
I really like this idea! I don't have a smartphone, but I would like to support you if I could. Do you have a page listing all of your customers, so I could go to them and tell them it was because of your site? 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.
- josefresco 16y ago
  I had a similar question about how the service connects with your site. Does it use a custom DNS record or does this mobile site sit on an island?
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    Right now we're doing a simple redirect to the mobile version if the user browses to the restaurant's normal website.
    - simonw 16y ago
      Do you provide the option to opt-out of the mobile version? I get really, really frustrated by mobile versions that are forced on me with no option to say "no thanks, give me the real thing".
      - stevenwei 16y ago
        We'll definitely add that, thanks!
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Well, the way I find local restaurants (on my iPhone) is: 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.
r00k 16y ago
I love the design of your landing page. In particular, the graphic of the two iPhones on the right side made it _immediately_ and _compellingly_ clear what you're selling. Nice work.
- edash 16y ago
  I agree. I'd remove the drop shadow from the phones, though. It clutters up the design. The simple shadow immediately beneath the phones is plenty.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    Hmmm, good idea, maybe I'll change that.
    - bruceboughton 16y ago
      It'd be neat (if feasible) to have a demo of the mobile site ensconced in an iPhone.
empire29 16y ago
Strangely enough my friend was pitching me on this idea about 6 months ago. It just goes to shows, ideas truly are a commodity, and execution is everything. 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.
jokull 16y ago
All in all - really happy someone is going after this market. Restauranteurs have no idea where to look for a website. They just ask for the coolest possible website without wanting to pay too much so they end up with all the bells and whistles but done really quickly and badly. 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.
akira410 16y ago
I like this idea a lot. In fact, I like the idea so much that I started toying around with a similar idea a few nights ago while contemplating whether or not I had time to go through with the project or not. I decided to hold off a bit as I've got another project I am trying to launch first. Best of luck to you.
redstar504 16y ago
Nice site but it has multiple HTML errors viewable at http://validator.w3.org http://validator.w3.org - especially the blog portion. 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.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  Thanks for the input, I'll validate our blog tonight. We do extensive testing and validation of our mobile sites on many mobile platforms but obviously were sadly neglectful of our Wordpress blog. Doh!
- democracy 16y ago
  huge waste of time, it doesn't have to be 100% valid, it has to work on popular handsets - that's all.
jmillerinc 16y ago
Not very actionable feedback for your product, but I love the name ChompStack. I just want to say it over and over again.
wanderboy 16y ago
A problem with this service's model just occurred to me: The way that you get users onto your "new mobile" version of the restaurant is by re-directing them when they go to the restaurant's home page from a phone browser. 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  I'm not sure if there's any way around that, though. Part of the point of the service is that you don't give up your branding by making customers go through an external site. They go to your site, and if they're on a mobile phone, they get shown a mobile friendly version.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  I think the key word here is "required". Most of the restaurants we've spoken to are averse to the idea of having to promote a new piece of technology because of the time and effort that involves. This gives them the opportunity to make the decision about promoting it--restaurant websites deemed "bad neighborhoods" might choose otherwise :)
doronrotem 16y ago
looks great. both the idea and the UI of the website and what is shown in the the demo. 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?
- cmeranda 16y ago
  We've got a lot of numbers in our minds, that's for sure. We do believe that 1000 clients is a possibility in a landscape of potentially millions worldwide, but a lot of that depends on how much traction we can acquire in the restaurant community.
hotmind 16y ago
Ha. I gotta laugh. I've seen so many websites that look like this, I have a hard time differentiating some of these startups. 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!
- cmeranda 16y ago
  Well I've got to give you credit for saying it to our faces, considering I designed that site. Now on the count of 3, tell me how a software engineer with no design experience can figure out in under a month how to put together a full-featured web application with a frontend, user control panel and admin interface and still worry about the uniqueness of the landing page graphic design? My real concern was that it worked and it communicated our message. Edit: I should mention that I totally agree with your comment. Can't wait to hire a graphic designer :)
  - hotmind 16y ago
    You did a great job in putting together the site. Props to ya.
  - edash 16y ago
    Do you know who cares about "originality" in landing page design? People who design landing pages... 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.
tim_church 16y ago
Great idea. Like everyone else, I am all for better restaurant websites and no more PDF menus. 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.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  We're very interested in expanding the product to include a desktop website version as well for a nominal monthly upgrade. The reason we didn't start out there is because we felt the mobile lure was a little stronger, due to the fact that many restaurants already have websites. Do you think the product would be more compelling if it offered both from the outset?
SriniK 16y ago
Nice idea and design. Liked the website design too - pretty neat. Did you guys use a template for ToS and Privacy. If you have, could you pls share the link? thanks
- cmeranda 16y ago
  I used freeprivacypolicy.com for the PP and ToS from Wordpress, however I modified both of them extensively due to people warning me against the Wordpress ToS being basically like Calvinball. A caveat: freeprivacypolicy.com WILL continue to send you email until time literally ends or our planet is sucked into a black hole.
- edash 16y ago
  You're welcome to use my standard privacy policy if you'd like. It's casually written and I think very clear. No need to give credit... http://agentpronto.com/privacy 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.
  - SriniK 16y ago
    thanks a lot.
wallflower 16y ago
Lots of discussion (especially about entrenched players) in this previous News.YC thread "The hell that is a restaurant website" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419
- stevenwei 16y ago
  That thread was very much part of the inspiration for this project! Plus many others around the interwebs.
famfam 16y ago
Kudos for a great idea. I had my head in the menu space several years ago (pre rich-mobile), and I can't believe this idea never occurred to me. Looks to be executed very well. Good luck. "WDITOT?"
rwhitman 16y ago
This is a winner for sure. Everybody's been talking about this lately and I think you won the race in terms of execution. I hope to god most restaurant owners buy into this
sethg 16y ago
You have definitely built something that I would want, if only my favorite restaurants would be willing to sign on. Also, as a Nokia employee, I hope that your pages are compatible with our phones....
- albemuth 16y ago
  Lets hope your phones follow standards ;)
terpua 16y ago
Instead of creating mobile friendly resto sites, why not create a weebly for restaurants, perhaps removing flash as an option making it at least readable on mobile. Perhaps use html5. 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.
cloudkj 16y ago
Looks awesome. A quick glance at the demo showed that the site was hosted on your domain, even though custom domains are offered in all plans. It might work to offer a cheap/free plan that's hosted on your domain, and use that as a loss leader to gain adoption in the early stage.
RyOnLife 16y ago
Interesting idea. I made an attempt to vet a similar idea in the spring of 2009, so maybe my experience can help you out: 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!!
- cmeranda 16y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! This sounds precisely like what we're encountering right now: restaurants are uncertain why people would want to see their site on a phone and how it increases their bottom line. We'd like to educate them and show them that customer discovery = ROI, but we're not sure how to evaluate that in our context. Some people here have suggested success stories, which we think is fantastic.
  - watmough 16y ago
    It should be possible to log when a customer calls through the (app-provided) phone number to the restaurant. 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.
    - cmeranda 16y ago
      Ah that's brilliant! Love it. We could definitely track calls and maybe directions as well.
wanderboy 16y ago
letseat.at - are you worried about this competitor? pretty high-profile company, offering both a desktop and mobile site design for roughly the same monthly price point.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  We're not the first company in this space...there have been quite a few over the years...we're worried about all of them :) 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.
tmitchell 16y ago
Great idea. Execution looks solid, feature set is solid. Now go sell, sell, sell. 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Interesting idea... my initial thought is that restaurants generally like to have nice customized menu designs. But then again, maybe not, maybe they'd rather just be able to input all of their data and get back a simple, usable design without much effort.
martian 16y ago
Imagining myself as a restaurant owner, I'm confused as to how this would integrate with my existing website. Does it replace it? How do people get to the mobile version? 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Yeah, I think we need to make this more clear on our features page. Thanks!
pwpwp 16y ago
Nice idea, execution, and such. Congratulations and good luck! 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.
- freshfey 16y ago
  I second your first point! Something like a fork and a phone would be great as a logo!
freshfey 16y ago
Great site. I think you should limit your first plan a litte more. No custom stuff on the cheapest plan. And maybe a free version with one menu, just to test it out. 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!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  That's a good idea. Certainly showing potential restaurants what their mobile website would look like is a lot more convincing than trying to explain the benefit to them.
kilian 16y ago
This is a very interesting market, and I think your prices could work (restaurants are known to have almost no money) 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Excellent idea, thanks for the tip!
toddsantoro 16y ago
There is a free version called www.MobileHunger.com
- cmeranda 16y ago
  We've been wondering: what's the business model there? How are you dealing with development and hosting costs?
thomasfl 16y ago
You have a lovely site and absolutely great graphic design, but the mobile sites you offers seems to use the dull uiuikit css. You could make the css for phones a bit fresher. Maybe it should look a bit more like your own site?
- cmeranda 16y ago
  We'd like to eventually create a few templates to choose from that have more of our look and feel. Thanks for the advice, glad to know others feel the same way!
DFreed 16y ago
Love the idea. Instead of simply targeting restaurant owners, I would also suggest talking to urbanspoon, yelp and other restaurant aggregators. By offering a simple solution for their now shitty menus, you would bring a lot of value and would enable you to target a much broader market than one restaurant at a time.
barryaustin 16y ago
Strong idea and well executed so far. I know the pain point well. 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!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Our thought with the sidebars was to help educate restaurants about the growth of the mobile internet, and potential problems they might not know about on their own website that might be frustrating their customers. I agree that framing the problem more in terms of 'you're losing customers' could work better.

166 points by stevenwei 16y ago

It might be nice to allow the customers to mark the foods that interest them so they can remember what they want to order when they get to the restaurant.

aresant 16y ago

Solid idea, great implemntation, beautiful landing page. 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!

stevenwei 16y ago
Excellent feedback, and great ideas. Thanks!
cmeranda 16y ago
These are fantastic ideas, thanks!

stevenwei 16y ago

http://www.chompstack.com http://www.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.

jroes 16y ago
Instead of charging a flat setup or monthly fee, have you thought about pivoting your business model so that customers can order through your app, and you charge a percentage fee to the restaurant owner? 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.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  We have been contemplating adding ordering for a while now. To do it well, it's a non trivial problem with a lot of different challenges. 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.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    > ...first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs. 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.
    - 16y ago

jeffepp 16y ago

Steven, 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!

stevenwei 16y ago
Thanks! I'm not sure about the pricing, but we're definitely open to adjusting it based on feedback.

deleted 16y ago

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jroes 16y ago

Great idea. A friend and I were talking about the need for this kind of product a few days ago. Your implementation looks very nice.

paulgb 16y ago
I also was discussing this with a friend the other day. I actually feel a bit relieved to know that someone is doing it better than I could have.

davidedicillo 16y ago

Very clever idea and very nice execution.

pedalpete 16y ago

Very nice implementation, and clear market. 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
Great observation. That is definitely on our roadmap. 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.

wanderboy 16y ago

This is well-done. 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
Interesting observation. Do you have any examples of this? 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. :)
tnorthcutt 16y ago
I know what you're talking about, but do you think mobile sites could possibly get away with not displaying that 'extra' information? Especially considering screen real estate on mobile devices is fairly limited. 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.
- wanderboy 16y ago
  http://www.itservices.ws/websites/portales/menu2.htm http://www.itservices.ws/websites/portales/menu2.htm 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.

tansey 16y ago

I like it, but I hate your logo. Who takes a bite out of just the bun? Also, by showing a hamburger, you made me think of fast food and I could see conventional restaurants balking at that.

cmeranda 16y ago
I created that logo and I hate it too. Any other ideas? I'm a horrendous graphic designer but I'm down to try again, and I agree with your points entirely. We were sort of pushing to get it done at the time. We could consider 99designs.com at this point I suppose.
- tortilla 16y ago
  Replace the burger with a menu (keep the bite).
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    Tough to figure out a menu icon: how can you immediately know what a menu looks like, maybe a rectangle with some fake lines of "text" and a wine glass pic? I've seen that somewhere...personally I think maybe the bite was my mistake (despite our chosen name) because it doesn't scale down well.
    - jokull 16y ago
      Some lines for text but "Menu" at the top in some cursive font
- vibhavs 16y ago
  Why not remove the icon and leave the text logo as is? FWIW, I think just the text looks good.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    That was my original plan but I needed something for Twitter, etc. Maybe I could do what HN does (along with many others) and just use the first letter in a box when I need a smaller graphic. Thanks for the suggestion!

brosephius 16y ago

if this means the end of restaurant web sites that are built entirely in flash or have PDF-only menus, I'm all for it.

deleted 16y ago

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josefresco 16y ago

Bummer, your demo requires Flash which means I can't view it on my iPad. Shouldn't your site be mobile friendly?

stevenwei 16y ago
Touché. :) We'll put up a HTML5 video version too.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Ok, the demo now loads HTML5 video for you iPad folks. The styling is a bit weird and the video doesn't autoplay, but whatever.
- Raphael 16y ago
  Or a demo site...

durbin 16y ago

I love this idea

kaiserama 16y ago

Looks really well executed. I would definitely do some legwork on the operator front. I tackled this same problem about 2 years ago and found that operators simply aren't able to understand the need for this type of service (maybe it was the timing). Keep in mind that many don't have a website and some don't even use email, so explaining why they need a "mobile" website makes for a potentially hard sale. 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!

stevenwei 16y ago
Thanks for the feedback. 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.
cmeranda 16y ago
Great points, and we agree wholeheartedly. Most of our cold calls to restaurants have terminated in "We're just not interested" or "We have a website." Wish there was a way to take all of this feedback and channel it directly to them (or perhaps we need to work on our sales pitches? :) ) Like the Chinese restaurant idea. Wonder how receptive they'd be to changing their phone order system.

natep 16y ago

I really like this idea! I don't have a smartphone, but I would like to support you if I could. Do you have a page listing all of your customers, so I could go to them and tell them it was because of your site? 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.

josefresco 16y ago
I had a similar question about how the service connects with your site. Does it use a custom DNS record or does this mobile site sit on an island?
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Right now we're doing a simple redirect to the mobile version if the user browses to the restaurant's normal website.
  - simonw 16y ago
    Do you provide the option to opt-out of the mobile version? I get really, really frustrated by mobile versions that are forced on me with no option to say "no thanks, give me the real thing".
    - stevenwei 16y ago
      We'll definitely add that, thanks!
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
stevenwei 16y ago
Well, the way I find local restaurants (on my iPhone) is: 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.

r00k 16y ago

I love the design of your landing page. In particular, the graphic of the two iPhones on the right side made it _immediately_ and _compellingly_ clear what you're selling. Nice work.

edash 16y ago
I agree. I'd remove the drop shadow from the phones, though. It clutters up the design. The simple shadow immediately beneath the phones is plenty.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  Hmmm, good idea, maybe I'll change that.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    It'd be neat (if feasible) to have a demo of the mobile site ensconced in an iPhone.

empire29 16y ago

Strangely enough my friend was pitching me on this idea about 6 months ago. It just goes to shows, ideas truly are a commodity, and execution is everything. 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.

jokull 16y ago

All in all - really happy someone is going after this market. Restauranteurs have no idea where to look for a website. They just ask for the coolest possible website without wanting to pay too much so they end up with all the bells and whistles but done really quickly and badly. 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.

akira410 16y ago

I like this idea a lot. In fact, I like the idea so much that I started toying around with a similar idea a few nights ago while contemplating whether or not I had time to go through with the project or not. I decided to hold off a bit as I've got another project I am trying to launch first. Best of luck to you.

redstar504 16y ago

Nice site but it has multiple HTML errors viewable at http://validator.w3.org http://validator.w3.org - especially the blog portion. 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.

cmeranda 16y ago
Thanks for the input, I'll validate our blog tonight. We do extensive testing and validation of our mobile sites on many mobile platforms but obviously were sadly neglectful of our Wordpress blog. Doh!
democracy 16y ago
huge waste of time, it doesn't have to be 100% valid, it has to work on popular handsets - that's all.

jmillerinc 16y ago

Not very actionable feedback for your product, but I love the name ChompStack. I just want to say it over and over again.

wanderboy 16y ago

A problem with this service's model just occurred to me: The way that you get users onto your "new mobile" version of the restaurant is by re-directing them when they go to the restaurant's home page from a phone browser. 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
I'm not sure if there's any way around that, though. Part of the point of the service is that you don't give up your branding by making customers go through an external site. They go to your site, and if they're on a mobile phone, they get shown a mobile friendly version.
cmeranda 16y ago
I think the key word here is "required". Most of the restaurants we've spoken to are averse to the idea of having to promote a new piece of technology because of the time and effort that involves. This gives them the opportunity to make the decision about promoting it--restaurant websites deemed "bad neighborhoods" might choose otherwise :)

doronrotem 16y ago

looks great. both the idea and the UI of the website and what is shown in the the demo. 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?

cmeranda 16y ago
We've got a lot of numbers in our minds, that's for sure. We do believe that 1000 clients is a possibility in a landscape of potentially millions worldwide, but a lot of that depends on how much traction we can acquire in the restaurant community.

hotmind 16y ago

Ha. I gotta laugh. I've seen so many websites that look like this, I have a hard time differentiating some of these startups. 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!

cmeranda 16y ago
Well I've got to give you credit for saying it to our faces, considering I designed that site. Now on the count of 3, tell me how a software engineer with no design experience can figure out in under a month how to put together a full-featured web application with a frontend, user control panel and admin interface and still worry about the uniqueness of the landing page graphic design? My real concern was that it worked and it communicated our message. Edit: I should mention that I totally agree with your comment. Can't wait to hire a graphic designer :)
- hotmind 16y ago
  You did a great job in putting together the site. Props to ya.
- edash 16y ago
  Do you know who cares about "originality" in landing page design? People who design landing pages... 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.

tim_church 16y ago

Great idea. Like everyone else, I am all for better restaurant websites and no more PDF menus. 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.

cmeranda 16y ago
We're very interested in expanding the product to include a desktop website version as well for a nominal monthly upgrade. The reason we didn't start out there is because we felt the mobile lure was a little stronger, due to the fact that many restaurants already have websites. Do you think the product would be more compelling if it offered both from the outset?

SriniK 16y ago

Nice idea and design. Liked the website design too - pretty neat. Did you guys use a template for ToS and Privacy. If you have, could you pls share the link? thanks

cmeranda 16y ago
I used freeprivacypolicy.com for the PP and ToS from Wordpress, however I modified both of them extensively due to people warning me against the Wordpress ToS being basically like Calvinball. A caveat: freeprivacypolicy.com WILL continue to send you email until time literally ends or our planet is sucked into a black hole.
edash 16y ago
You're welcome to use my standard privacy policy if you'd like. It's casually written and I think very clear. No need to give credit... http://agentpronto.com/privacy 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.
- SriniK 16y ago
  thanks a lot.

wallflower 16y ago

Lots of discussion (especially about entrenched players) in this previous News.YC thread "The hell that is a restaurant website" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419

stevenwei 16y ago
That thread was very much part of the inspiration for this project! Plus many others around the interwebs.

famfam 16y ago

Kudos for a great idea. I had my head in the menu space several years ago (pre rich-mobile), and I can't believe this idea never occurred to me. Looks to be executed very well. Good luck. "WDITOT?"

rwhitman 16y ago

This is a winner for sure. Everybody's been talking about this lately and I think you won the race in terms of execution. I hope to god most restaurant owners buy into this

sethg 16y ago

You have definitely built something that I would want, if only my favorite restaurants would be willing to sign on. Also, as a Nokia employee, I hope that your pages are compatible with our phones....

albemuth 16y ago
Lets hope your phones follow standards ;)

terpua 16y ago

Instead of creating mobile friendly resto sites, why not create a weebly for restaurants, perhaps removing flash as an option making it at least readable on mobile. Perhaps use html5. 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.

cloudkj 16y ago

Looks awesome. A quick glance at the demo showed that the site was hosted on your domain, even though custom domains are offered in all plans. It might work to offer a cheap/free plan that's hosted on your domain, and use that as a loss leader to gain adoption in the early stage.

RyOnLife 16y ago

Interesting idea. I made an attempt to vet a similar idea in the spring of 2009, so maybe my experience can help you out: 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!!

cmeranda 16y ago
Thanks for your feedback! This sounds precisely like what we're encountering right now: restaurants are uncertain why people would want to see their site on a phone and how it increases their bottom line. We'd like to educate them and show them that customer discovery = ROI, but we're not sure how to evaluate that in our context. Some people here have suggested success stories, which we think is fantastic.
- watmough 16y ago
  It should be possible to log when a customer calls through the (app-provided) phone number to the restaurant. 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.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    Ah that's brilliant! Love it. We could definitely track calls and maybe directions as well.

wanderboy 16y ago

letseat.at - are you worried about this competitor? pretty high-profile company, offering both a desktop and mobile site design for roughly the same monthly price point.

stevenwei 16y ago
We're not the first company in this space...there have been quite a few over the years...we're worried about all of them :) 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.

tmitchell 16y ago

Great idea. Execution looks solid, feature set is solid. Now go sell, sell, sell. 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
Interesting idea... my initial thought is that restaurants generally like to have nice customized menu designs. But then again, maybe not, maybe they'd rather just be able to input all of their data and get back a simple, usable design without much effort.

martian 16y ago

Imagining myself as a restaurant owner, I'm confused as to how this would integrate with my existing website. Does it replace it? How do people get to the mobile version? 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
Yeah, I think we need to make this more clear on our features page. Thanks!

pwpwp 16y ago

Nice idea, execution, and such. Congratulations and good luck! 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.

freshfey 16y ago
I second your first point! Something like a fork and a phone would be great as a logo!

freshfey 16y ago

Great site. I think you should limit your first plan a litte more. No custom stuff on the cheapest plan. And maybe a free version with one menu, just to test it out. 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!

stevenwei 16y ago
That's a good idea. Certainly showing potential restaurants what their mobile website would look like is a lot more convincing than trying to explain the benefit to them.

kilian 16y ago

This is a very interesting market, and I think your prices could work (restaurants are known to have almost no money) 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.

stevenwei 16y ago
Excellent idea, thanks for the tip!

toddsantoro 16y ago

There is a free version called www.MobileHunger.com

cmeranda 16y ago
We've been wondering: what's the business model there? How are you dealing with development and hosting costs?

thomasfl 16y ago

You have a lovely site and absolutely great graphic design, but the mobile sites you offers seems to use the dull uiuikit css. You could make the css for phones a bit fresher. Maybe it should look a bit more like your own site?

cmeranda 16y ago
We'd like to eventually create a few templates to choose from that have more of our look and feel. Thanks for the advice, glad to know others feel the same way!

DFreed 16y ago

Love the idea. Instead of simply targeting restaurant owners, I would also suggest talking to urbanspoon, yelp and other restaurant aggregators. By offering a simple solution for their now shitty menus, you would bring a lot of value and would enable you to target a much broader market than one restaurant at a time.

barryaustin 16y ago

Strong idea and well executed so far. I know the pain point well. 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!

stevenwei 16y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Our thought with the sidebars was to help educate restaurants about the growth of the mobile internet, and potential problems they might not know about on their own website that might be frustrating their customers. I agree that framing the problem more in terms of 'you're losing customers' could work better.