Restaurant Booking App

[shangbang]

Hi all, first progress post here and very excited to finally be able to contribute to this forum!

I come from a software background in Investment Banking and have never attempted anything like this. I built a messaging app (under review by Apple at the moment) which lets people message me their restaurant booking and I’ll do the leg work to secure them a booking or find alternatives. http://getseated.com.au

I would call this more of an experiment than anything else as I wanted to launch something end to end by myself and learn as much as Apossible. So I’m here to share some lessons for others who are in a similar stage and also would really appreciate any feedback people might have for me.


Lessons

• Don’t rush into building the app. I come from a software background and obviously jumped right into familiar territory first. The app took twice as long as I initially thought.
• I have zero marketing experience and hence left it until the end. This is a mistake. Need to think about marketing channels from day 1, http://startupsheartcustomers.com/ is a great crash course. And also http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/bmc is a great tool get a overview of the idea and to see that product development is just a small slice of the pie.
• This might sound like common sense to most of you here but thinking about marketing from the start will force you to clearly define your customer AND how you are going to reach them.
• As I was submitting the app for review by Apple I had to select which country the app is available in. Now the app is only available in Australia since I live in Melbourne, so I could NOT select the other 154 countries available. This was an absolute gut punch moment. Think bigger.

Feedback

• The app is free to try for 30 days and then $5AUD a month. However I am now leaning towards making it completely free and see what happens. Is this wise?
• Feedback and questions are all super welcomed.

Thanks for looking!

 

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[Winning]

Really cool idea! Kind of like Magic (check out the Magic thread here) but the niche has been narrowed down to restaurant reservations. Could appeal to many business men/women who want to setup lunch with coworkers at different restaurants daily. I also like the look of your site.

I think you did it right by making it free off the get-go. Freemium is the way to go on the App store. $5/mo is a good price after that trial period.

Couple marketing ideas:
-Contact bloggers in the iOS scene
-Set up flyers in business buildings (Have us reserve your lunches at only $5/mo for your headline)

You might be able to spin this and offer this app as a standalone app for restaurants. Whitelabel it and charge the restaurants a monthly fee to offer this convenient service to their customers.

Keep us updated. Look forward to hearing your progress.

 

[shangbang]

Thanks for your reply, your suggestion of handing out flyers is immediately helpful as I'm a little bit stuck on the marketing side.

The whitelabel approach is something I would of never considered myself, very interesting. Definitely something to consider once I have proven this service is of value to users.

Btw the app was just rejected by Apple, I'll try again.

 

[Winning]

@shangbang No problem. And yea, Apple is pretty picky when it comes to anything. I'm sure you'll be able to solve it and submit a new version that will get approved. Keep us updated.

 

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[Sisyphus]

how long did it take for you to build the app in the end? and did you have a team?

 

[johnp]

Interesting app idea. I do stuff in this area but I'm more on the B2B side of things.

When I was in Vegas for the first time with my wife I had no idea where to eat. I felt completely overwhelmed and there were great restaurants everywhere. We used open table to find and book restaurants. Open Table was great, but I felt like something was missing because we couldn't ask open table questions or anything. We spent a lot of time looking at reviews on yelp.

If you need some ideas we can provide suggestions. For example if you want Italian in the city we will provide options until you have a reservation. We are here to help.

I saw this on your website and it got me thinking about how you app could be used as a concierge service for tourists and people at hotels. You could also try to sell apps like this to hotel concierge. If I were you then I would reskin the app and walk into a hotel to try to sell it to their concierge department for thousands and thousands of dollars. Then repeat for every hotel in the city.

 

[tafy]

You could also try to sell apps like this to hotel concierge

Hotels are already striping out the concierge departments as its getting to be an expensive unnecessary expense, people have tripadvisor and online booking now.

Your app sounds like they want to book somewhere, it sends you a msg and then you physically have to make that booking for them?

While your booking the customer into the restaurant on the phone, its a good chance to sell them the admin section for them to get automated booking from their own website and your app.

 

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[DaRK9]

Hotels are already striping out the concierge departments as its getting to be an expensive unnecessary expense, people have tripadvisor and online booking now.

Your app sounds like they want to book somewhere, it sends you a msg and then you physically have to make that booking for them?

While your booking the customer into the restaurant on the phone, its a good chance to sell them the admin section for them to get automated booking from their own website and your app.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[shangbang]

how long did it take for you to build the app in the end? and did you have a team?

It was just me. It took 2 months including the website. I did spend quite a bit of time doing the design and actually learning graphics tools to create the assets as well.

Let me know if you want to know my development stack.

 

[shangbang]

Interesting app idea. I do stuff in this area but I'm more on the B2B side of things.

When I was in Vegas for the first time with my wife I had no idea where to eat. I felt completely overwhelmed and there were great restaurants everywhere. We used open table to find and book restaurants. Open Table was great, but I felt like something was missing because we couldn't ask open table questions or anything. We spent a lot of time looking at reviews on yelp.



I saw this on your website and it got me thinking about how you app could be used as a concierge service for tourists and people at hotels. You could also try to sell apps like this to hotel concierge. If I were you then I would reskin the app and walk into a hotel to try to sell it to their concierge department for thousands and thousands of dollars. Then repeat for every hotel in the city.

Very interesting idea, this could be expanded to one app which onboards all the various hotel chains and the guests will only need one app to contact
which ever hotel they might be staying at.

Thanks for your input!

 

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[shangbang]

Hotels are already striping out the concierge departments as its getting to be an expensive unnecessary expense, people have tripadvisor and online booking now.

Your app sounds like they want to book somewhere, it sends you a msg and then you physically have to make that booking for them?

While your booking the customer into the restaurant on the phone, its a good chance to sell them the admin section for them to get automated booking from their own website and your app.

Yes I will be physically making the phone calls for the bookings.

There is a service in Australia which does this already however I would estimate only 60% of restaurants have signed up for it. Perhaps its hard to implement or too expensive, this would be an opportunity to get in!

Thank you for the input!

 

[BigBrianC]

Why not make an app with two sides, one each for business/restaurant and consumers. Then bookings go straight to the business to confirm/deny/put wait times. Give consumers option to put in 3 requests at once (only one will be filled, once it has the ticket is reminded. Pay for more requests at one time. ) or for a specific genre and food type. Either way it wont be scalable, imo, as is. Also, there's probably a review site (yelp or something) API or embed so consider that

 

[shangbang]

Thank everyone for the feedback.
I have gone down the route suggested by @tafy and @BigBrianC

This means my customers have changed from diners to the restaurants. Doing a bit more research into this in Australia and there are booking management systems which a lot of restaurant use but they are expensive (charged per booking on top of $25AUD per month for a basic setup).

1. Validate that diners are willing to make reservations by messaging, this is now completely free.
2. If there is traction I'll attempt to sell the admin side of the app to the restaurants for a monthly subscription. The value prop for restaurant will be using the app to build a relationship with their diners kinda like a mini CRM. While also being a simple tool which will save them money (saving money per booking from current online systems).

I've update http://getseated.com.au to reflect this and have submitted the app again to Apple.

 

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[tafy]

I think table booking systems are still a bit old fashioned, you can totally get in on this. Opentable is now owned by booking.com which means they will plan to muscle in on this space soon. But they will just generate bookings and wont do any direct or management stuff.

Personally I would go for a visual management screen where you can see the tables on the screen, you can set out your room space to look like what you have (think Sims) . You can move tables around and add people to the tables.

I would leave it at that, I would not get into the POS side of things.

This would be great to help manage seating, and visually appealing for bookers that want a specific table or something.

Pricing I think you should do by cover charges same as opentable (£1 per seat) and its totally free otherwise, this will make it way easier to sell as bookings online will be rare to begin with for most places.

You can build a massive inventory of restaurants which will be worth a shit tonn more than a few bucks a month.

Good luck, pm me if you need to chat or anything