Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses?

I personally go straight to DoorDash or GrubHub to find my desired restaurant, or something like Yelp or Zomato if need be.

If you're just looking for hours and address you can get that via search (especially on mobile), but a properly-developed website will also provide sub-navigation in Google results for menus, contact info, events, etc.

Menus were also a big part of it. Dropping a PDF (or worse, a JPEG) of a menu onto a website sucks for usability. The sites used responsive design to lay out the menus in a way that was actually readable, and my CMS made it easy for the chef/manager to update on a regular basis. The menu pages were highly popular among first-time site visitors.

For restaurants that host private parties (larger or more complicated than what OpenTable & company will handle), the website was the primary way that people contacted them to start the reservation process. Many more people did that than message on Facebook.

Gift cards around the holiday seasons (mother's/father's day, graduation, December holidays) are also particularly popular.

Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute.

Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time.

“When I was ordering food I noticed that I couldn’t prepay online, I almost thought of going somewhere else, how come you don’t have a way to pay before coming in?”

“Don’t know how to do that”

“I built a plugin that takes 5-10 mins to set up and people can pay while they order so I don’t have to come inside, can we do a Skype call when you’re not busy to walk through this?”

Once you’ve gotten a handful of trials like this you can start calling but your options with restaurants(especially mom and pop) are to walk in the door or get to them directly on the phone.