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Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
121–130 of 144 posts
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#122You have a lovely site and absolutely great graphic design, but the mobile sites you offers seems to use the dull uiuikit css. You could make the css for phones a bit fresher. Maybe it should look a bit more like your own site?
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 the…
Great idea, but like others said make it clear, with one sentence, what your service does (think like you're a restaurant owner who vaguely even knows what an iPhone is - just that a lot of your patrons use them in your restaurant).
Also, using the location-network effect you could also help promote their establishments. Build another app that allows you to search and view your client's mobile-friendly sites and open their location in Google Maps
So its like Urbanspoon, except you can actually see what the hell is on the menu. This helps your product sell more because not only are you making it easier for the restaurant to gain visibility through your promotion and marketing through the app (which is what you could technically charge them for - giving away the site for free), but you are also giving them an established mobile presence as well.
One two punch.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#124Love the idea. Instead of simply targeting restaurant owners, I would also suggest talking to urbanspoon, yelp and other restaurant aggregators. By offering a simple solution for their now shitty menus, you would bring a lot of value and would enable you to target a much broader market than one restaurant at a time.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#125http://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…
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.
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.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#126Strong idea and well executed so far. I know the pain point well.
Not so sure you're appealing to the right target market. It's hard to see this within the HN echo chamber but your site still comes across as very techie. It's clear how your service will help people like us, smartphone-wielding techies, but we don't run restaurants.
You should be targeting restaurant owners, executive chefs and general managers. These people are super busy and extremely tech-averse. They will shut off their brains instead of trying to understand anything even slightly technical about phones, Flash, web, etc. So get rid of that stuff. Instead show how they can get more customers by presenting their food and experience to people who are out in their neighborhood and hungry right now. And show how they can do this with near-zero hassle.
Messages like these might work: You're losing customers! X% of people are already out and about when they decide to eat. Y% of restaurant websites are broken on phones (use this instead of "Top 4 problems..."). Fancy phone = the income and connections to be prime customers.
Get rid of everything that doesn't clearly and directly support your main value proposition within the domain of your target market. For example the "Did you know?" section has only one relevant point ("14% of smartphone users look for restaurants...") and it hurts you because the number is small.
Test everything, including our comments. Good luck!
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
I got the message that you were offering to create mobile sites for restaurants, but maybe it's because I'm already used to the idea. I think you may be overestimating how many people have and understand smartphones, though. According to slide 62 of the Morgan Stanley “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” you link on the front page, there's only a 25% percent penetration (est 40% by the end of the year). After a quick s…
> Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner.
This is key. stevenwei, you need to get your butt into some restaurants and test this idea out. I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Spend a day in as many of the restaurants in your area as possible and request a meeting with the owner. Most of the time you'll get turned down, but take what you can get.
Ask them about their current website and if they have any issues. Talk to them about smartphones and try to understand how they perceive their problems. Take lots of notes. Then, use the words the restaurant people did on your site. It may seem unclear to us on HN, but if it speaks to restaurant people that's all that matters.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#128Ha. I gotta laugh. I've seen so many websites that look like this, I have a hard time differentiating some of these startups. I know it's a proven navigational scheme and sound UI that studies show converts at a higher blah blah blah, but when is some one going to do something new with landing pages? Sheesh. Okay, on the count of 3, everyone click the down arrow on my comment!
Well I've got to give you credit for saying it to our faces, considering I designed that site. Now on the count of 3, tell me how a software engineer with no design experience can figure out in under a month how to put together a full-featured web application with a frontend, user control panel and admin interface and still worry about the uniqueness of the landing page graphic design? My real concern was that it wor…
You did a great job in putting together the site. Props to ya.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got the message that you were offering to create mobile sites for restaurants, but maybe it's because I'm already used to the idea. I think you may be overestimating how many people have and understand smartphones, though. According to slide 62 of the Morgan Stanley “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” you link on the front page, there's only a 25% percent penetration (est 40% by the end of the year). After a quick s…
> Disclaimer: I'm not a businessperson or a restaurant owner. This is key. stevenwei, you need to get your butt into some restaurants and test this idea out. I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face. Spend a day in as many of the restaurants in your area as possible and request a meeting w…
> I work with restaurant owners and workers all the time. They're loud, brash, and won't hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of you (and your product) to your face.
Great advice, and that has been our experience as well.
Re: Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
I got the message that you were offering to create mobile sites for restaurants, but maybe it's because I'm already used to the idea. I think you may be overestimating how many people have and understand smartphones, though. According to slide 62 of the Morgan Stanley “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” you link on the front page, there's only a 25% percent penetration (est 40% by the end of the year). After a quick s…
Hmm, I must have gotten my surveys mixed up. The 42% figure comes from here: http://www.changewaveresearch.com/articles/2010/01/smart_pho...
I'll add another citation. Although I would love to find more recent numbers, as I bet the percentage has jumped since then.
Great idea for the before and after videos...although on a Flash site the 'before' video won't be particularly exciting. :)