Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

jessepollak.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 151 posts

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#141

Post by freshhawk »

paulsutter wrote: post #61
freshhawk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have pointed out some of the other big problems but I disagree that any of them are "the real problem". The biggest problem, as the parent said, is that brick and mortar stores would be actively hostile to this idea.

Not if they specialize in items that are not well suited to mail order. The urban corner grocery doesn't compete on price with the supermarket 10 blocks away. Locality is the foundation of their business. I'm not saying that there are enough categories of items that are not well suited for mail order, and have a high degree of value based locality. But this is the central question for such a product. Retailers whose…

You make a good point, not 100% of the brick and mortar stores would be actively hostile. That wasn't what I meant to imply although perhaps there are more stores, with a high degree of value based locality, than I was originally supposing.

These are also precisely the businesses that currently have the loosest idea of their actual inventory and would incur the most changes to move to the kind of inventory tracking necessary for this to work.

They are also frequently the categories of items that consumers would comparison shop the least. Few people care about going to a few corner groceries to get the right brand of milk. They all carry mostly the same group of products and anything were consumers care about choice (coke/pepsi) they already carry all the options for the same price as everyone else.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#143

Post by elemeno »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #106
elemeno wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there's two things that the restaurants hate - 1) It costs them money which eats into their already thin profit margin. 2) It makes it harder to build a relationship with the customers since the customer has to opt-in to giving their e-mail address to the restaurant which they're less likely to do compared to being asked for an e-mail address if you're making a booking directly with the restaurant. Havin…

I've never seen a restaurant that takes emails, only some retail stores so they can send you low-quality newsletters.

I can only tell you my experiences which might or might not be relevant since restaurant culture in the UK and the US is quite different to begin with.

In the UK there isn't so much the mid range large chain restaurants outside of a couple of chains which largely cater to the office lunch-time crowd (such as Itsu or Nandos type places), the possible exceptions being Pizza Express, Cafe Rouge, Strada and Carluccios which are well positioned in both middle class residential areas and office areas for both the sit-down lunch crowd and the evening casual dinner crowd.

I would say that the mainstay of midrange dinning is almost certainly the upmarket pub or gastropub which are often independent or semi-independently managed (they might be affiliated with a larger brewery chain, but the chain doesn't dictate things like the food they serve), and they're the sort of places which would most like to keep in touch with their customers. The bulk of their customer base is almost certainly pretty local, and has already expressed a willingness to spend money their, and being local they're also easier to entice back in with special offers.

A fairly good example would be my local which was launching a new menu back in November of last year. To trial their menu they sent an offer out on their mailing list offering a free dinner (starter and main, not including drinks) from their new menu to anyone on the list who made a reservation during that week. While it clearly cost a not insignificant amount of money to run a promotion like that (probably equivalent to $50 per head were they charging menu prices) it also gained them practice in preparing their new menu, high quality feedback on the new menu, and a certain degree of loyalty towards the establishment as a whole. The later in particular is no mean feat for the area in which I live which is both affluent and quite foodie.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#145

Post by ricardobeat »

elemeno wrote: post #89
lukeck wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they hate about it? I'm trying to "walk a mile in their shoes" as another poster put it but am coming up blank.

I think that there's two things that the restaurants hate - 1) It costs them money which eats into their already thin profit margin. 2) It makes it harder to build a relationship with the customers since the customer has to opt-in to giving their e-mail address to the restaurant which they're less likely to do compared to being asked for an e-mail address if you're making a booking directly with the restaurant. Havin…

> Having e-mail addresses for customers is clearly valuable for a restaurant for the purposes of marketing and using things like special offers to increase demand during slower periods of the week/month/year etc.

And that's exactly why you have to opt-in. Imagine the size of your inbox (or spam folder) if every restaurant you've ever been to had your e-mail address.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#146

Post by ricardobeat »

citricsquid wrote: post #6

This is a terrible idea[see edit]. What incentive is there for any store to use this system when they're providing their data in a single easy to query location? Brick and mortar stores have custom because of brand loyalty, a large part of brand loyalty is saying "I shopped around twice and both times x was cheaper, I'll assume x is always cheaper and use them". Now imagine if every time a consumer wanted something t…

> Now imagine if every time a consumer wanted something they would just type "product" on their PC and get told "product x is cheapest at: y"

I don't know where you've been living, but this is already here, and that's exactly how I (and millions of others) buy more expensive stuff.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#147

Post by gcmartinelli »

rhizome wrote: post #43
gcmartinelli wrote: post #27

I've had a similar idea, but it involved supermarkets and selling data to governments and companies for economic statistics and makershare data, respectively.

You've just invented the market research industry. Look up Catalina, who has been in this business for ages (as has Nielsen), and is the backend for at least some of the rewards cards in your wallet.

as far as I know, they collect the data manually (people actually go there and ask how much of each product has been sold). but I may be mistaken

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#148

Post by rhizome »

gcmartinelli wrote: post #147
rhizome wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just invented the market research industry. Look up Catalina, who has been in this business for ages (as has Nielsen), and is the backend for at least some of the rewards cards in your wallet.

as far as I know, they collect the data manually (people actually go there and ask how much of each product has been sold). but I may be mistaken

No, they don't. I worked for a company who did this (as well as partnered with both Nielsen and Catalina for customer-level data) and all of our data arrived in text files (CSV, TSV, etc.) exported from their POS systems.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#149

Post by robryan »

aidenn0 wrote: post #140
robryan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if restaurants collect an email for booking, automatically opting them into mailouts is probably on the wrong side of spam laws.

Nope, you have an established business relationship then, so opt-out is okay.

Source? I am not so sure. A quick read seems to define separate rules for commercial and transactional content.

Re: A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

#150

Post by chrisbutlercs »

fizx wrote: post #57
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

This is one of those ideas that you really have to think from both sides. On the consumer side I get this really cool App which I click "I wanna buy a foo" and Blam! every place that both sells and has a foo in stock is right there on the page. Awesomesauce! Ok now look at it from the vendor side. I'm running my store, I need to make $2500 - $25,000 a day to make payroll. I carry a bunch of products, I don't make the…

If you think a little, this is "OpenTable for shopping." Apparently, all the restaurants hate opentable, but they feel compelled to use it, because their competitors do.

I wouldn't say that OpenTable is hated by all restaurants, but there is definitely a spectrum of loving it through hateful ranting...

Generally, I hear a few reasons why restaurants feel they can't leave OpenTable:

Myth #1: they won't be discovered through the web anymore. People actually discover restaurants via word of mouth or local search (Google usually). Great food, SEO, marketing, PR, guest care, etc. matter a lot more than being in one particular portal. See studies about restaurant discovery.

Myth #2: their guest information is locked into OpenTable. It isn't. You can export your guest database with phone numbers (if collected) and email (if they opt-in). While it may sound like they are missing something if they can't export email addresses (unless they opt-in), it isn't. They can't email those guests through OpenTable either.

Myth #3: guests care a lot about points. This is a smaller, sub-population of the restaurant going public. Most people don't care, they just want the ease of booking online when they want, which is generally 2/3rds of the time outside of the restaurant's hours (see poll by OpenTable).

Generally, those people that use points a lot (or discounts) are not great customers either (see any study about Groupon discounting).

Why would you want to give your guest a discount to eat at another restaurant anyways?

Anyways, if you are interested in more restaurant reservation analysis feel free to check out my Quora account:

http://www.quora.com/Chris-Butler-7/answers

Also, check out Complete Seating (http://completeseating.com) an OpenTable alternative I work on!

Post reply on HN