My startup, MarksMenus.com, has been growing a product in beta for about a year now. It started as a side project, but I've devoted myself to it full-time for the past 5 months.<p>I submitted a "Rate my startup" entry yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693274) and got some good feedback, but very little criticism.<p>This is pretty typical of the feedback I've received all along (i.e., "nice. great idea!") but despite this I feel like our product has been very slow to get traction. I'm looking for critical feedback on why.<p>Possible reasons, in my mind:<p>1) It just takes a lot of time. We're on the right track and simply need to patiently move forward.<p>2) Poor execution (please point out specific deficiencies).<p>3) Memphis (our location and current target market) is too small.<p>4) Missing market (we're simply wrong in thinking there's a need for this).<p>Other ideas?<p>http://marksmenus.com
After glancing at the site:<p>1. It doesn't look particularly good, visually.<p>2. It's not immediately clear what it does. I just saw a list of recipes, so I assume it's yet another recipe site (there are 1000s).<p>3. After making the effort to dive in further, the "restaurants tab" seems to give me a random map with some random restaurants. I don't get it: what does the site do for me?<p>4. This is a startup about local restaurants, right? Local is very, very hard. And restaurant reviews just aren't very compelling, particularly because the few reviews I looked at where pretty meh, not really worth reading, quite honestly. "Seven dollar lunches -- including soda and tax -- served in about seven minutes have made Celtic Crossing an incredibly popular Memphis lunch stop." -> booooring, and not different from restaurant reviews I can read in 100 other places. I think you're on the wrong track. Sorry to be harsh.
This reminds me of menupages.com. Looks wise, your site is better, but menupages has lot more data (which is understandable, as they are serving much bigger cities). According to compete, they had half a million visitors last month. I think that is proof enough, the concept works.<p>Some things that you could try:<p>1. Add more data (restaurant phone numbers, email, do they have take aways, do they have a delivery service, do they have kid friendly menus etc)<p>2. Why not categorize the restaurants by the food type? (Italian, Indian, Chinese etc)<p>3. More photographs - why not contact the restaurant owners and get photos of their restaurants, foods etc?<p>4. Promotions - Sign up with restaurants and promote one restaurant (or even one dish from a particular restaurant) a day. A coupon that gives big discount (50% +). You get more visitors to your site and the restaurant gets more biz<p>Good luck.
I don't see a benefit to using this site over Google. So, there are a lot of restaurant review sites. But if I am actually looking for a specific restaurant on a specific site, it might have nothing. So it makes more sense for me to search in Google and let it pull up the site with the most or most relevant reviews. Sometimes it pulls up citysearch, sometimes yelp, sometimes b4-u-eat, etc.<p>For me to ever actually come to this site specifically (and risk missing out on good info from another site), I would need a strong reason to do so. An example would be, a blog where you guys go "undercover" and review restaurants. Or where you have a funny twist of some sort, or maybe take a strong POV.<p>Or maybe something like: I'm a vegetarian, so maybe every reviewer enters their dietary constraints or preferences, so I can search for people "like me" and see where they are eating and what they like.<p>Lastly, until I read the reviews her, I wasn't even clear that this was providing searchable menus, it looks like another review site. The primary point to use Google still applies. If the restaurant has a main website, I'd rather go there. If they host their menu with you, Google should fine it.
Where is your traffic coming from?<p>Have you figured out yet why menupages.com and allmenus.com have a lot of traffic, but your website don't.<p>Their websites rock on search engines, but your website is nowhere to be found.<p>I search for restaurants a lot and I never saw your website before this thread. Mostly, I go to Google and search for "$cityName restaurants" or "$restaurantName menu". This is where you want your website to rank, and this is what is going to bring you tons of free traffic.<p>I went through your website, and figured that search engines can not crawl 99% of your website's content.<p>Your website has a nice idea, product and content; but inefficient design in terms of SEO. I see that with a lot of startups. SEO is not something that you can just get it done from a consultant at a later stage. It has to be built right in to the product, your product/website should have a Search Engine friendly structure and design.<p>I have years of experience building SEO friendly websites and web applications. We leverage search engines to get traction and tons of free traffic. I can help you with SEO. Contact me at ravish at realgeek.com
It does take time. You say you have spent the last 5 months full time. How much of that has been in development vs marketing? How are you reaching out to restaurants to populate the site? You have the chicken and egg problem, people don't use it because there is not enough content, there is not enough content because people don't use it.<p>I'd focus on a few major markets and work hard to get as many menus up as possible. People are always looking for free advertisements and having their menu online is one form. I'd push that as much as possible. Since this is your full time effort, you may need to spend money on marketing to get the ball rolling. Perhaps enter the menu's yourself (or hire a VA to do it) and then drop the restaurant a note saying that their menu is now online and they can make changes at this website for free.<p>Other ideas, perhaps white label it to newspapers and/or city websites? In San Diego, there is a dining guide section at signonsandiego.com and this would fit into what they are doing. They also have someone who is doing reviews weekly, which could now include populating the full menu.
What pain point does your app address, exactly?<p>There is a difference between providing something that seems interesting and cool and actually making a point of frustration go away.<p>In my opinion, it's highly likely that your app doesn't solve any real problem that people have right now. It's executed well, it's clear at what it provides, but it is unclear as to why this is a benefit to me as a user.
Have your restaurant members allow you to install a cam at a strategic location and stream that video on your site. Apart from menus, the user can get a look and feel of the place before heading for it. Even if I have been going to it often, I'd check if I will get place. At times, you can do some webinars where the chef maybe showing off his best creations....<p>To make your site create a pull, you could have users register and identify themselves at the restaurant for a free give-away or a discount. Then the restaurant could upload the details of what you had and paid, to a password protected area. It will be a history of my personal spending, what I liked and where. Reward the heavy users etc etc.<p>Build a social network of foodies, would be foodies and the folks who feed these foodies.
>What is my company doing wrong?<p>I think this is the wrong question. The right question is 'what can my company do better?'. In your case, there is not much value-add over a google search. Tell me where I can get 2 for 1 pizza right now, who makes the best lasagne, give me coupons, loyalty schemes, 'say marksmenus.com sent you' calls to action, 'do you like ramen? try these 3 local joints' features. Bury yourself deeper into both the restaurants and users. Your app is good....it could be better.
My personal opinion is that there isn't a need for this, but others have pointed out menupages.com, which I guess is really big. I've never cared to search for restaurant menus online myself. Even if you covered the city I live in, I wouldn't use it. Sorry. That's my critical feedback. It sounds like others do see a use for it though, so I could easily be wrong. I don't consider myself a "foodie" so maybe I'm just not your target audience. Do a lot of people call themselves "foodies"?
To answer the question of why is the service slow to gain traction: While it is a useful service, and I have this pain point, it doesn't come very often. Perhaps this is because I don't eat out much, but I would say I only could use a service like this maybe once per month. It's not quite like email or messaging, that people need to access several times per day.
When i go to the first page it recommends a restaurant in san francisco... i am in alabama. there is some way to guess where people are geographically by their ip address.