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

chompstack.com

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

#101

Post by watmough »

cmeranda wrote: post #96
RyOnLife wrote: post #94

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 handfu…

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by democracy »

redstar504 wrote: post #57

Nice site but it has multiple HTML errors viewable at 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.

huge waste of time, it doesn't have to be 100% valid, it has to work on popular handsets - that's all.

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

#103

Post by stevenwei »

wanderboy wrote: post #100

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.

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.

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

#104

Post by drusenko »

stevenwei wrote: post #2

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 interesti…

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 :)

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

#105

Post by SriniK »

edash wrote: post #91
SriniK wrote: post #73

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

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 It's not vetted by a lawyer, but as far as I know privacy policies are for visitors and not for the courts.

thanks a lot.

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

#106

Post by tmitchell »

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.

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

#107

Post by albemuth »

sethg wrote: post #83

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....

Lets hope your phones follow standards ;)

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

#108

Post by martian »

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.

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

#109

Post by stevenwei »

martian wrote: post #108

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 accessib…

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

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

#110

Post by stevenwei »

tmitchell wrote: post #106

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 t…

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.
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