Hey ed, you briefly mentioned your foray into restaurant tools. I'm interested in this area - can you elaborate a bit more on what restaurant tools are lacking in your opinion, or in general, what problems restaurants are facing?
It's been tough, so far. All I can tell you is that (a) restaurant owners have ZERO time to learn or use new tools and (b) they just want to get more people in the door.
What blew me away was hearing that restaurants in my town are getting hit with 2 to 5 people per day trying to sell them on some coupon or daily deal gig. And I don't even live in a big city!
I've gotten decent traction on the website front so far (cilantrosites.com) but I've also run into some language barrier issues (a lot of ethnic restaurants with ESL owners). I've tried coupon subscriptions (think BirchBox meets Groupon) but none of them wanted to give up 2-for-1 coupons. Next I'm trying some Facebook page tools ... seems promising so far (we've got 2 customers at $99/mo and several leads this week).
At it's simplest, it's just a waiting list for restaurant patrons. But it eliminates the need for pagers, which saves the restaurant money. It alerts people by SMS, which means people don't have to be onsite, they could be next door shopping while they wait. It's also tracking all sorts of metrics that you previously didn't have access to.
The best part to me, is that a lot of the restaurants using it have also tied this data into their websites. So I can hop on, say http://www.burgatorybar.com/ , and see what the current wait time is.
