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HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

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Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#21
post #6

The idea was born based on the observation that most people can’t remember what they had for lunch two days ago. However, stopping to take a photo (and optionally sharing it publicly) adds both accountability and an element of fun. A bunch of my friends will occasionally post pictures of their meals on facebook -- either because they're eating out somewhere particularly awesome or because they've cooked something the…

>Maybe provide a way to rate things by delicious-looking-ness? (You might want to think of a better word than delicious-looking-ness.) People could compete to have the most delicious-looking food on the entire site (like hotornot but without quite as much potential for ego shattering).

The app wasn't entirely appealing to me until I saw this. If you did this, I'd use it. (not sure if there are other players in this space)

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#22
post #6

The idea was born based on the observation that most people can’t remember what they had for lunch two days ago. However, stopping to take a photo (and optionally sharing it publicly) adds both accountability and an element of fun. A bunch of my friends will occasionally post pictures of their meals on facebook -- either because they're eating out somewhere particularly awesome or because they've cooked something the…

Agree with the iPhone app. We do have a basic Facebook integration that allows users to post to their feed. Also agree with deemphasizing the calorie/health aspects, though overtime, I still believe the stronger value prop for an app like this is to become the mint.com of eating rather than another food porn site. But, yes, in the near term more emphasis on social, food porn, etc is prob the way to go

There's already a lot of calorie-counting apps out there if that's what somebody is interested in. dailyburn.com, for instance, is pretty good. It's also a lot of work to replicate one of these since you'll need to enter a huge database of possible foods.

The problem with them is that counting calories is too damn much work, so adding an extra step, where you take a photo of your food and then count the calories in it, doesn't seem like a huge gain. On the other hand, I suppose if you had photos of everything you'd eaten you could more easily count the calories only once every couple of days.

Still, I think you'll need to decide between "food porn" and "healthy eating" rather than try both, since they're pretty much opposed.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#23
post #5

What is the objective of the pivot? Cash? Users? Pictures? Something else?

Sounds to me like they're startup enthusiasts, and want eat.ly to get bigger and better without sacrificing the stability they have right now, with their full-time jobs. In other comments, people are saying the iPhone app is important. I think they already know this, and what would be more interesting to them is any shortcuts they could take to build their iPhone app. I think they ought to find an iPhone developer wh…

As far as shortcuts I'd recommend doing the "app" as a jqtouch view of their rails? app. That should work for the vast majority of users and avoid the whole outlay for the app store. They could also look at phonegap. It's far better to figure out down the line that you need a full blown app than to figure out that your app could have been done in HTML. iPhone is a pretty big learning curve.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#24
What about a leaderboard or rankings for popular dishes. Users "vote" by taking pics of delicious food. Restaurants would be more likely to promote the site - "Eat.ly votes our cheesesteak best on the East Coast".

You could also run contests for users - each week a different dish. Submit the most beautiful salad, win a prize.

Finally, promoting the site through restaurant weeks might work out well. There are 120+ restaurants participating in Philly's restaurant week right now. Best photo wins another meal.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#25

Man, I saw you guys present at the Quantified Self Meetup in NY (either late last year or early this year) and I thought, man these guys have a great idea, and are waaaay ahead of my "track your daily activities" project. Sorry it didn't take off!

Awesome! That was great fun night. We've tried to hold true to our roots with quantified self/personal tracking. However, most feedback (here and from friends) suggests we pivot away from this

There's something really strange about personal tracking - it seems like such a good idea, full of great potential for people, and yet the same problem happens over and over again - people start using it, fall off and never pick up.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#26
post #19

With regards to encouraging users to contribute photos: Have you thought about creating a few short blog posts about good ways to photograph food? Things like lighting, angles, how to try to take a decent picture using a smartphone, etc? Food is pretty hard to photograph well, we tend to have overly high standards for what a good food photo looks like because of all the food porn around these days. Just like regular…

Well version 1 was really not meant to be about the quality of photos (i.e. food porn), but if we do move in this direction it's a great suggestion

Ah, my point was just that if the users don't like the photos they take, they're not going to upload them.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#27
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well version 1 was really not meant to be about the quality of photos (i.e. food porn), but if we do move in this direction it's a great suggestion

Ah, my point was just that if the users don't like the photos they take, they're not going to upload them.

To reinforce this point, we did not have core competency to build an iPhone app and wanted to keep the project bootstrapped. Given the feedback here it seems an app would in fact make a big difference.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#28
post #24

What about a leaderboard or rankings for popular dishes. Users "vote" by taking pics of delicious food. Restaurants would be more likely to promote the site - "Eat.ly votes our cheesesteak best on the East Coast". You could also run contests for users - each week a different dish. Submit the most beautiful salad, win a prize. Finally, promoting the site through restaurant weeks might work out well. There are 120+ res…

This is a great idea. The problem with leaderboards and points is a network effect that is not currently there yet. Its a chicken or the egg problem that exists, and we tried to get something out that didn't require mass participation but rather had a strong single player game model. Now that we have some scale (tiny!) this may be a good thing to try

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#29
Allow me to offer you an idea:

When I go to Yelp to search for a restaurant, the filters I have available are type of restaurant, proximity, rating and price. My next step is to either sort by those filters, or individually click a restaurant. Looking at an individual restaurant, my options for consideration are photos of the restaurant, consisting of either interior/exterior or images of the food, and user reviews. The user reviews consist of reviews about the service, atmosphere and food, but I have to chug through each review to get this type of specific information. And with a task of choosing a restaurant and having to repeat these sets of actions is immensely tedious.

What's missing?

A way to discover restaurants near me that I can discover by their actual dishes. The user flow would be this -> I'm in the mood for a burger. Show me restaurants that serve burgers. I get a range of places from diners to more high-end to delis and more, but instead if getting a list of joints, I get a sortable grid of user's burger photos from places near me. Then, all I need to do is say, that burger is the one I want and, barring other misc info such as price or needing reservations and what not, I will go there and get the burger that I saw with my own eyes.

The advantage you will have over Yelp is that While Yelp provides a way to discover restaurants by very general filters, you will provide a way to directly discover restaurants by the actual individual dishes.

As a side note, think about when you go to a restaurant and get a menu that has pictures. It gives so much more reference to choosing a dish, because the mystery is taken out of the equation. Your service would do exactly this. Remove the mystery of what you're going to a restaurant for.

Also, while you can see some food items on Yelp in the individual restaurant pages, #1 they come with no context and #2 I can only access these photos on these individual pages which is tedious.

There you have it.

Re: HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly

#30
Emailed Eric something akin to the "Hunch for food" idea a while back.

How I roughly imagined it:

Scrap the calorie count. Unless you're at a fast food restaurant where it's posted on the menu, people really are bad at guestimating these things.

Change the health ranking to a taste ranking, and have it be for specific dishes at specific restaurants. While Foodspotting is sort of playing in that space, they are just asking people to submit pics of stuff they like, sans rating. While it's great to know what people like, I also want to know what to avoid. And it's much harder to sort through comments than it is to glance at numerical ratings.

Use case: I go to Corner Bistro for the first time. I do a search for Corner Bistro on Eatly. I see that Eric has had the cheeseburger and that Mike has had the chili and fries. With ratings added, I see Eric gave the burger a 9, but Mike gave the chili a 5, so I'm going with the burger.

In the same vein, using tags and descriptions, aggregate photos and average scores for menu items at restaurants. So I look up Corner Bistro, and I'm presented with a photo (the top ranked photo?) and average taste rank for each item on the menu. It's the Waffle House of Menupages [and I just created a new vertical].

And, yes, eventually it could suggest restaurants and dishes based on my activity and that of friends.

Obviously need to make the entry process as frictionless as possible. Few different thoughts there:

1) Expand current email capabilities, a la Posterous. Use special characters to note the restaurant name, add tags, rate the item, etc. 2) Automate and outsource: map EXIF data to restaurants (imagine you guys could find a database like that somewhere...), superusers for aggregating and tagging, etc. 3) And has been mentioned, iPhone app that makes it all pretty and easy

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