IDEA #76 - The Greatest Menu Meals (fb app initially)
By Steve Poland • September 18, 2007
Submitting this to Startup Weekend NYC this weekend.
The Idea: The Greatest Menu Meals (fb app initially)
The Concept: Users rate specific meals on the menu of restaurants. We’d have menu’s for restaurants and users could specify what they thought of various meals — it would also be a reminder to them (personally) to know in the future what they’ve had and like.
I always find myself at a restaurant asking someone I’m with what they’re getting or recommend; or what the waitress recommends. This would be a way for us to all know what our friends recommend and the public at large. Imagine holding a menu at a restaurant that had Amazon-style user ratings of all the meals, how cool would that be?!
The Money: Ads on the pages — future would be very targeted ads by restaurants and other local advertisers. If someone is just looking for a good mexican restaurant in San Fran, we could show them a list of the top-rated ones by their friends and everyone, with some sponsored ads at the top of particular restaurants.
The Marketing: Viral via Facebook newsfeeds and such.
Questions: How do we initially populate restaurants across the USA? And then specific meals on their menu’s? Maybe initially people can specify menu items themselves — “Burger” — “the burger is amazing at Founding Father’s; you’ll never have a better one! Get it done medium!”. We could start out with generic food items and the user could specify a genre of the restaurant, thus if they said it was Mexican, we’d populate with generic Mexican dishes that the user could add/subtract from (bean burrito, chicken fajitas, beef fajitas, etc).
Future: Full menu integration for restaurants. Ability for restaurants to manage their menu, daily hours, and daily specials. Daily specials might be updated by voice (a VXML app that dials-out to the restaurant every morning; pincode protected to ensure the owner/manager can only update the daily specials).
A ‘dating’ function that allows you to browse photos of other users that go to the bars/restaurants you go to regularly. Suggested other restaurants/meals that you may like based on people that recommend similar restaurants/meals as you have. SMS to retrieve recommendations from a restaurant or recommended restaurants based on your location.
Competition: There’s restaurant listing competitors like Yelp, but is anyone focused on specific meal ratings by users?
Why It Would Work: In the user’s profile page, the profile box for this app will show recent meals the user has rated. People eat 3 meals a day — I think a ton of people eat 2 meals out per day.
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so, what are your thoughts on the weekend? when will the app be available?