Startup by my friend - Share your feedback

[andhracrazystar]

Absoltely. Great insights.. What all you said is correct for most of the chained restaurants and businesses. Our main target  is mid size restaurants who don’t know own infrastructure, technology and cannot invest on marketing.

[JambuLingam]

16 minutes ago, andhracrazystar said:

Absoltely. Great insights.. What all you said is correct for most of the chained restaurants and businesses. Our main target  is mid size restaurants who don’t know own infrastructure, technology and cannot invest on marketing.

Sounds good idea,  all the best bro. 

[usetime63]

good idea, I like it bro

[mentalgang]

Try to put some limitations on offerings. If same restaurant offers coupons every day, it will end up being a scheduled coupon. 

You shouldp keep it interesting for customers with the randomness of offers, sort of making them to check App each day. Look at Peach App for some ideas.

Can add some more thoughts if interested, let me know

[cosmopolitan]

Nice idea 💡 

[MobileMusic]

Indian restaurants don’t cook fresh food everyday except a very few who are large with lots of customers. For this reason, using this service would end up eating food that is not fresh or almost bad. Maybe it would work with small/mid-size non-Indian restaurants..

As for grocery stores, they donate food and produce going bad to local charities.

There are already invested businesses who went on Shark Tank - they buy vegetables in bulk that are not “perfectly” shaped and sell them boxed/bagged at a huge discount.

[andhracrazystar]

Thanks everyone. Appreciate all your responses. 

@mentalgang

Please add more thoughts. Every input is valuable, especially we are focusing more now in go to market and on boarding restaurants. With regards to customer engagements, they receive real time push notifications on the app when ever any restaurant publishes a coupon.

You can refer to app screenshots on both sides on our website 

[MobileMusic]

https://www.hungryharvest.net/

https://www.earnthenecklace.com/hungry-harvest-shark-tank/

[acuman]

On 4/27/2019 at 10:48 AM, andhracrazystar said:

Bayyas,

Check this below, a startup by my friend which will help restaurants to publish last minute discounts and deals during their low demand hours. It helps to cut food waste by selling food for less than wasting it or trashing it out.  Please review website and share your thoughts. 

www.grabqpons.com

Really appreciate your feedback and potential ways to market it aggressively.

very good idea. keep it up. 

1) First select limited cities ONLY and do aggressive advertisement to get restaurant owners and app users.

2) concentrate on restaurants around universities to make  college students use your app then it gets easy popularity.

3) build your app to attract customers who do not cook at home.

4) make local restaurants to publish deals.  

5) talk with chipotle. If you get 50% discount coupon from chipotle its a huge success.

 

 

[acuman]

talk with investors in food industry or food show judges . They do invest money at the beginning. 

[andhracrazystar]

Sure. We want to at least on board 25 to 30 restaurants first before reaching out to investors. Yes we are focusing only in Houston, Charlotte and Boston cities 

[MobileMusic]

You need PR - badly. Take it on Shark Tank. Shark Tank is not easy as the competition is high but if you have a compelling and captivating pitch, it should be cake. Appearance of Shark Tank is worth millions of dollars of advertisement as the show gets syndicated across other channels and re-aired over years - spiking traffic each time it gets re-run.

You will be a WINNER if your show gets aired - even if you do not get an investment in Shark Tank (or even if the deal fails post-SharkTank during due-diligence, etc)!

[andhracrazystar]

You are right.

Appreciate if anyone can share different marketing strategies with less cost. We are exploring and Google and Facebook Ad campaigns. But we wanted to see if there are other ways to spend less and gain more momentum 

[ekunadam_enkanna]

Quote

skmurphy on hackernews wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19764912

There are several good lessons learned presented that are generally applicable:

"We should have spent more time figuring out what the problems were with existing solutions and who specifically had those problems."

"The customers we targeted needed to be willing to pay for our solution."

"We hadn’t been committed to learning as much as possible about the market and the customer. We were making educated guesses instead of coming to well researched conclusions. This led us down the wrong path twice."

In his fourth point he correctly decides to benchmark against the status quo but does not talk to people who are paying for an analytics solution but are using Google Analytics, which was free at the time they were conducting interviews.

"We needed to stop building what we thought the market wanted and get back to basics. Instead of writing code, we went out and talked to customers. We spoke with people who used our largest competitor, Google Analytics. We asked them questions to better understand their needs and the current problems they were having with analytics software. They had a lot to say, so we listened."

But they do find a pain point people are willing to pay to solve: funnel design and management. So far so good.

But the next mistake is instead of focusing team execution purely on requests from customers and prospects who match their target, Hiten Shah tries to move faster by coming up with a stream of ideas (called "Hiten bombs" in the text). He was slow to switch focus from exploration / discovery to execution / delivery. Which is understandable because it was exploration that uncovered the "billion dollar opportunity."

His summary is good and also points out a painful reality about "product-market fit." It's not a one time winner take all event. Your early traction invites competition that copies your success, building on it to raise the bar against you.

"You can’t just capture the market once and expect to keep it. You have to do it over and over again and faster than everyone else if you want to keep distance from competitors coming up behind you and disrupting you. That’s how you get ahead of the market.

We forgot the process that helped us deliver that initial amazing product [listening to prospects and customers]."

 

[MobileMusic]

8 hours ago, andhracrazystar said:

You are right.

Appreciate if anyone can share different marketing strategies with less cost. We are exploring and Google and Facebook Ad campaigns. But we wanted to see if there are other ways to spend less and gain more momentum 

How are customers going to find you? A pizza shop has local foot traffic, Yellow Pages, Google Search/Maps, word-of-mouth, etc.  but you are in the cloud and no one knows about you. We did not know about your site until you posted about it today. Google doesn't bring you traffic unless you pay them. Many people think just building a website brings traffic automatically but it doesn't work like that. Most websites have single-digit or double-digit page views per day even after years because search engines don't bring free traffic unless it is a content site like a blog or forum! The challenge is even bigger when you have 2 types of users with a chick-n-egg situation - you don't have restaurants if you don't have users and you don't have users if you don't have restaurants.

Customer-Acquisition is a huge challenge and the costs are much higher for online services. SEM and social-media marketing sounds like pennies or a few dollars for a "click" but the expense quickly soaks into huge bills even to cover a small demography/geography. Marketing on these platforms is a bidding process and competitors are willing to pay several dollars (some even over $100) per click and to be on the top of the first page of search results. How deep are your pockets? SEO is not cheap either and takes time to build up and it is an on-going process. How much time do you have?

You need to bring awareness and make some PR happen through content marketing, news channels, press releases... Post on Quora, food forums, cooking blogs, launch a YouTube channel and post regular videos, etc. Targeted YouTube advertising is cheaper and effective, too.

A website with no traffic or revenue is doomed.