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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

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.
    - cmeranda 16y ago
      We'd like to do one in Python/HTML5, open-source, cloud-based server. Not sure about device interaction though, and can you imagine the sales cycle? Yikes. Are people on HN interested in being part of a project like that? We weren't sure (at ChompStack) that we could get enough developer interest, and it's a big project. We've written touchscreen software for restaurants before, for about 5 yrs.
      - thaumaturgy 16y ago
        The sales cycle may not be as bad as you think. The standard model in restaurant (and market) POS systems seems to be a large up-front cost of many thousands of dollars, followed by a yearly "support contract", which entitles the client to a "free" phone call to technical support as necessary. (Without an active "support contract", I've seen some pretty outrageous hourly rates for calls to tech support, and they will resolutely refuse to answer anything unless it's paid for.) On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone. ...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.) With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc. One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell. Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it. But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-) edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
- josefresco 16y ago
  Forget online ordering, just sell lead generation. I could sell your service to my local clients but not easily for 15/month. If you tracked leads you could easily sell your service on commissions alone.
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    Do you mean lead generation to potential restaurants, like an affiliate setup? Or lead generation for restaurant customers?
    - patio11 16y ago
      In this context it almost certainly means "We filled 68 tables for you this month. That has obvious monetary value to you. Pay us and we will continue delighting you."
      - stevenwei 16y ago
        Hmm, I'm not sure how we could directly correlate mobile website hits with actual customer visits. Although being able to record those metrics would be a great selling point. OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    Eh. This is the sort of thing I would (and might) recommend to my restaurant-owning clients free-of-charge, which is why they call me when they have other trouble, and why they recommend me to other people, which is where I make money. That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.
  - jroes 16y ago
    Sounds interesting. Can you give an example of how this might work? It hadn't occurred to me that you could do such a thing without physically exchanging money. Everything I can think of off the top of my head would involve tracking code that presumably the customer wouldn't be able to validate is legitimately tracking leads.
jolan 16y ago
> I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology. I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side. Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue. Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up. > Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.
- URSpider94 16y ago
  +1 for this idea. Maybe you want to consider giving free service to some early adopters in return for the ability to analyze the impact on your business. Ideally, you would spread this out across a few different target demographics, like pizza joints, Chinese/ethnic, late-night, etc., so that your potential customers would identify with the results. Even the most conservative restaurant owner is going to be swayed by a clear financial benefit. Also, convincing potential customers to take the plunge is the kind of task that (good) salespeople excel at.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    That whole vertical idea is brilliant: if we could convince a handful of pizza joints it would give other like restaurants a high level of motivation to join them. What type of restaurants do you think we should target? Who would most benefit from a mobile site?
    - URSpider94 16y ago
      Off the top of my head, I would suggest: -- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand. -- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out. -- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle) A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).
DannoHung 16y ago
I am extremely interested in this, but I wonder why you're doing mobile only? Existing sites are crappy because they don't know any better and doing all the good stuff is HARD. I mean, add in basic mail merge capacities and a place to put a few ambiance ahots of the restaurant and you'd have EVERYTHING my Dad wants me to do with his restaurant's website.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  A restaurant desktop website builder is in our roadmap. The tricky bit is that most restaurants seem to want their own customized look and feel, which is more time consuming to put together. With mobile websites you generally want something that loads quickly, displays all the restaurant information in an easy to access manner, and is somewhat customizable (colors, logo, etc) but doesn't go too far cause then you would lose usability.
spuz 16y ago
I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites. This is the most important piece of information that is missing from your site. As a restraint owner looking at your site I'm thinking "What is this, an app, or a service or what?" and "how will my customers find my restaurant on their phone with this service?". Given that most restaurants that you are targeting are probably not even aware that people might access access the restaurant's site on their phone, you definitely need to answer these questions. (edit: for example, your uWink demo video in the first frame already starts with the app (or site or whatever it is) on the screen. You should demonstrate how a customer would find uWink on their phone in the first place)
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the feedback. It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website? In terms of how customers are going to discover the restaurant, it really depends on the customer. A lot of folks search via the Google Maps app and then click through to the website. I could start the demo video on a Google Maps search and take the user to the restaurant website from there...
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    > It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website? It isn't. The biggest text you have up there is 'Mobile websites for Restaurants'. That might mean you do contract work for restaurants looking to create mobile websites. Which you aren't. May be interpreted both ways - I think your explanation in the post above was clearer.
    - stevenwei 16y ago
      Good point. I'll try to clarify the wording to make it more explicit.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Agree with Spuz - it's hard to recognize the screenshots as a 'website' (as the lines between app and website are a bit blurry on mobile devices). Let's say a restaurant has a normal website, and a potential customers google's them on his phone and browses to the normal website on his phone. How is he going to get on to the mobile version? Should the restaurant set up detection and a redirect?
drusenko 16y ago
Why don't you have a very limited free version that lets them kick the tires without paying you anything? Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)
- stevenwei 16y ago
  We'll definitely consider doing something like that. I'm a bit wary of the freemium model given that we're selling to businesses. I'd hate for folks to sign up for a free account and then forget about the site (usually restaurant owners don't have that much time on their hands to follow through with these things). But offering a way to clearly prove the value of the service before they buy would definitely be useful.
Zak 16y ago
These things are annoying on a PC too. When I go to a restaurant website, I'm looking for some combination of location, hours, menu and specials. Cool visual design is a nice touch, but animations and sounds are just annoying. Suggestion: expand your service to provide good desktop sites in addition to your mobile sites.
- city41 16y ago
  Although I completely agree with you, and I'm sure most HN-type people would. I doubt the restaurant owners would. The idea that a website has to be flashy and fancy is well ingrained by now.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    See I think that statement is a fallacy. Restaurant owners began to believe in the power of websites when other restaurants began having them and HN-type people began using them, and they saw what a great tool the internet is to draw more business and promote themselves. HN-type people (love this hyphen) create the groundswell by which businesses recognize what direction to go in, and restaurant owners are no different, just a little later to the party because they've been cooking the meals.
stevenwei 16y ago
Update: I just want to thank everyone for their feedback. I've read many 'Ask HN: Rate My Startup' posts and knew you guys gave great advice, but I didn't really expect to get this much feedback and encouragement. Thanks a lot guys!

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.
  - cmeranda 16y ago
    We'd like to do one in Python/HTML5, open-source, cloud-based server. Not sure about device interaction though, and can you imagine the sales cycle? Yikes. Are people on HN interested in being part of a project like that? We weren't sure (at ChompStack) that we could get enough developer interest, and it's a big project. We've written touchscreen software for restaurants before, for about 5 yrs.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      The sales cycle may not be as bad as you think. The standard model in restaurant (and market) POS systems seems to be a large up-front cost of many thousands of dollars, followed by a yearly "support contract", which entitles the client to a "free" phone call to technical support as necessary. (Without an active "support contract", I've seen some pretty outrageous hourly rates for calls to tech support, and they will resolutely refuse to answer anything unless it's paid for.) On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone. ...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.) With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc. One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell. Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it. But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-) edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
josefresco 16y ago
Forget online ordering, just sell lead generation. I could sell your service to my local clients but not easily for 15/month. If you tracked leads you could easily sell your service on commissions alone.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Do you mean lead generation to potential restaurants, like an affiliate setup? Or lead generation for restaurant customers?
  - patio11 16y ago
    In this context it almost certainly means "We filled 68 tables for you this month. That has obvious monetary value to you. Pay us and we will continue delighting you."
    - stevenwei 16y ago
      Hmm, I'm not sure how we could directly correlate mobile website hits with actual customer visits. Although being able to record those metrics would be a great selling point. OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Eh. This is the sort of thing I would (and might) recommend to my restaurant-owning clients free-of-charge, which is why they call me when they have other trouble, and why they recommend me to other people, which is where I make money. That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.
- jroes 16y ago
  Sounds interesting. Can you give an example of how this might work? It hadn't occurred to me that you could do such a thing without physically exchanging money. Everything I can think of off the top of my head would involve tracking code that presumably the customer wouldn't be able to validate is legitimately tracking leads.

jolan 16y ago

> I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology. I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side. Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue. Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up. > Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.

URSpider94 16y ago
+1 for this idea. Maybe you want to consider giving free service to some early adopters in return for the ability to analyze the impact on your business. Ideally, you would spread this out across a few different target demographics, like pizza joints, Chinese/ethnic, late-night, etc., so that your potential customers would identify with the results. Even the most conservative restaurant owner is going to be swayed by a clear financial benefit. Also, convincing potential customers to take the plunge is the kind of task that (good) salespeople excel at.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  That whole vertical idea is brilliant: if we could convince a handful of pizza joints it would give other like restaurants a high level of motivation to join them. What type of restaurants do you think we should target? Who would most benefit from a mobile site?
  - URSpider94 16y ago
    Off the top of my head, I would suggest: -- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand. -- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out. -- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle) A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).

DannoHung 16y ago

I am extremely interested in this, but I wonder why you're doing mobile only? Existing sites are crappy because they don't know any better and doing all the good stuff is HARD. I mean, add in basic mail merge capacities and a place to put a few ambiance ahots of the restaurant and you'd have EVERYTHING my Dad wants me to do with his restaurant's website.

stevenwei 16y ago
A restaurant desktop website builder is in our roadmap. The tricky bit is that most restaurants seem to want their own customized look and feel, which is more time consuming to put together. With mobile websites you generally want something that loads quickly, displays all the restaurant information in an easy to access manner, and is somewhat customizable (colors, logo, etc) but doesn't go too far cause then you would lose usability.

spuz 16y ago

I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites. This is the most important piece of information that is missing from your site. As a restraint owner looking at your site I'm thinking "What is this, an app, or a service or what?" and "how will my customers find my restaurant on their phone with this service?". Given that most restaurants that you are targeting are probably not even aware that people might access access the restaurant's site on their phone, you definitely need to answer these questions. (edit: for example, your uWink demo video in the first frame already starts with the app (or site or whatever it is) on the screen. You should demonstrate how a customer would find uWink on their phone in the first place)

stevenwei 16y ago
Interesting, thanks for the feedback. It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website? In terms of how customers are going to discover the restaurant, it really depends on the customer. A lot of folks search via the Google Maps app and then click through to the website. I could start the demo video on a Google Maps search and take the user to the restaurant website from there...
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  > It is not clear that we're allowing restaurants to create a mobile version of their website? It isn't. The biggest text you have up there is 'Mobile websites for Restaurants'. That might mean you do contract work for restaurants looking to create mobile websites. Which you aren't. May be interpreted both ways - I think your explanation in the post above was clearer.
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    Good point. I'll try to clarify the wording to make it more explicit.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Agree with Spuz - it's hard to recognize the screenshots as a 'website' (as the lines between app and website are a bit blurry on mobile devices). Let's say a restaurant has a normal website, and a potential customers google's them on his phone and browses to the normal website on his phone. How is he going to get on to the mobile version? Should the restaurant set up detection and a redirect?

drusenko 16y ago

Why don't you have a very limited free version that lets them kick the tires without paying you anything? Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)

stevenwei 16y ago
We'll definitely consider doing something like that. I'm a bit wary of the freemium model given that we're selling to businesses. I'd hate for folks to sign up for a free account and then forget about the site (usually restaurant owners don't have that much time on their hands to follow through with these things). But offering a way to clearly prove the value of the service before they buy would definitely be useful.

Zak 16y ago

These things are annoying on a PC too. When I go to a restaurant website, I'm looking for some combination of location, hours, menu and specials. Cool visual design is a nice touch, but animations and sounds are just annoying. Suggestion: expand your service to provide good desktop sites in addition to your mobile sites.

city41 16y ago
Although I completely agree with you, and I'm sure most HN-type people would. I doubt the restaurant owners would. The idea that a website has to be flashy and fancy is well ingrained by now.
- cmeranda 16y ago
  See I think that statement is a fallacy. Restaurant owners began to believe in the power of websites when other restaurants began having them and HN-type people began using them, and they saw what a great tool the internet is to draw more business and promote themselves. HN-type people (love this hyphen) create the groundswell by which businesses recognize what direction to go in, and restaurant owners are no different, just a little later to the party because they've been cooking the meals.

stevenwei 16y ago

Update: I just want to thank everyone for their feedback. I've read many 'Ask HN: Rate My Startup' posts and knew you guys gave great advice, but I didn't really expect to get this much feedback and encouragement. Thanks a lot guys!