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

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.

True, and you can always change your logo later if you change your mind. Many companies alter their logo down the line, but my first impression of your site was very positive.

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.

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?

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.