The "Lets talk about Etsy" post seemed to get some really good insight and feedback, so I thought I would do another about Opentable.com.<p>I will throw out some questions to get things going:<p>1) How did opentable overcome the Chicken and the egg problem? Did they build up a roster of restaurants before they even opened the consumer side of things?<p>2) Did OT start with just San Francisco? How fast did they expand into other cities? Or did they go from SF to nation wide in two steps?<p>3) How hard was it for Opentable to change the way people made reservations? Was the market ready for it or did it take a long time to get people to make reservations this way?
From my understanding OT was a POS software provider first and only launched their reservation system after they had achieved a certain level of market penetration. As a result they didn't have to try and convince POS providers to integrate with them (the hard part) because they were already running their own platform.
OpenTable was founded in 1998 and ~$5mm a year on its 5-6 year journey to profitability. (Luckily, they were smart with cash during the boom, and had a $48mm pool of dotcom-era VC money.)<p>This TechCrunch article is great for financial details:<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-and-reveals-its-finances/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-and...</a>