HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by hkuo » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 3:20 PM UTC

hkuo wrote: post #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.…

Just want to add that of course, you'd be able to integrate food ratings, friending, favoriting, etc etc etc all that standard social stuff, but IMO, in order for this to be successful, you should consider boiling it down to the absolute simplest of functions and tasks to minimize user friction.

So with the above idea, I would recommend the user need only simply 3 things: 1) photo 2) restaurant 3) whether they liked it or not and an optional 4) description.

If it's an iPhone app then you automatically pull geolocation, but if it's through email, I'm not sure how this would be done and you'd have to explore what you can do.

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

#32

Post by evbart » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 9:50 PM UTC

TamDenholm wrote: post #9

As many others have said, iPhone app definitely. This will make the site more casual. For the "pivot" i'd perhaps suggest trying to get people to document recipes with multiple pictures, this lets you target the more hard core user. Theres an excellent blog that i love reading that gives a good example of what im describing: http://smittenkitchen.com/

I like the recipe ideas, there's not a lot of good recipe content out there, and photos are key

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

#33

Post by wesleyverhoeve » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 10:13 PM UTC

Ideas, some already mentioned:

- Android/iPhone app indeed seems like a must, maybe not even so much for ease (tho that would help), but for branding of Eat.ly as a legit product in the consumer's eyes.

- I wouldn't be into the health aspect personally, but I would be into the food porn aspect. It seems too complicated guessing calories etc. BUT maybe you can have two "modes". Turn on "Food Porn" and that is what you get, switch to "Health Porn" and that's what you get. I probably would peek at both.

- This is probably not doable, but if you could integrate menus (like menupages) and calorie counts from restaurants, people could take the picture, pick the food (like on foursquare you pick the venue) and post. Food numbers would come along.

- Single player mode would work better in health mode than food porn mode. You could have numbers to strive for, but then why would you post pictures really? You could just post food.

- Multi player mode could work for sexiest looking food, or for "I'd Eat That!" points. Maybe unlock a badge swarm style.

- Not to mix day job with side project, but it could be pretty sweet to integrate the Eat.ly app (if there will be one) with a "post to foursquare" option so that if you check in your foursquare status can have an eat.ly link to a picture.