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.




Related posts:

  1. IDEA #27 - Lunch/Dinner/Bar Specials - Updated Daily A new site launched called Snag Lunch — quite honestly, I think it’ll be short-lived. This isn’t really done well/automated — but I think the idea has potential. If I were launching something similar, I’d...
  2. IDEA #75 - Where I Hang Out (facebook app) I’m submitting this in the pool of ideas for Startup Weekend NYC this coming weekend. The Idea: Where I Hang Out (fb app) The Concept: Users specify the bars/restaurants/coffee joints that they frequent. Thus I...
  3. IDEA #77 - Social Search Engine (take on Google) Another idea for NYC Startup Weekend this weekend… The Idea: Social Search Engine [take on Google!] (fb app / browser plugin / toolbar) The Concept: Take-on Google with a social search application. Users do a...
  4. IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook) An app where we give people instructions to do things; we give them purpose to live each day. Maybe we change this “task” every 6 hours or something; or maybe it’s more frequently (or maybe...
  5. IDEA #13 - I Got Drunk Last Night This proposed website might be called like ‘DrunkenStories.com’. People would expose what they did the night before and friends could add to the stories. You/they could also submit photos, videos, and voicemails from the night....

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Comments

One Response to “IDEA #76 - The Greatest Menu Meals (fb app initially)”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 jonathan on September 26th, 2007 5:41 pm (perm link)

    so, what are your thoughts on the weekend? when will the app be available?

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