There’s a nice article in Sunday’s edition of the Boston Herald about entrepreneurship.
GoodEatsFor.Me and I both get a nice shout out at the tail end of the article. Full text of the article is below (original link.) Thanks Jennifer!
Typically, it’s the entrepreneurs and the small- business owners who pull an economy out of a recession. But this one has been different.
Housing values dropped. Bank loans to small companies declined. Markets around the world that might have picked up the slack stumbled. Many would-be entrepreneurs were either too scared to get started or they couldn’t find the funds.
That appears to be changing, according to a report released last week. The number of people launching or running young companies worldwide grew about 60 percent last year to nearly 400 million, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report.
Rather than being an indication of how good things are now, however, it’s a sign of how bad they’ve been. The number of new entrepreneurs in the United States hasn’t been this high since 2005, well before the economic plunge.
“It could be that people delayed starting businesses,” said Donna Kelley, a co-author of the report and Babson College professor, explaining the jump. “It could be that people don’t see their jobs coming back.”
In the United States, more people saw opportunities and planned to start businesses, even while the fear of failure climbed to 31.2 percent from 26.7 percent in the previous year.
“People may see more risk in starting a business, and this may be linked to the recession,” Kelley said.
New business owners agreed that there’s risk, but said they couldn’t wait.
Matt Chatham had been working on his plans for a SkyCrepers, a crepe franchise, for more than five years when he finally launched the company in 2010. During that time, he was going to school and developing the concept.
“I would be hesitant if I were coming to the market with something that already existed,” said Chatham, a former Patriots [team stats] linebacker. “I felt more comfortable because we’re unique and we’re filling a void.”
Michael Norwood, who has launched two companies in recent months, said he’d rather face the unpredictability of launching a business than that of the job market.
“I figured if I can succeed in an uncertain economic environment than I can survive in good times,” he said.
Norwood is building Type-U, a social movement for families of people with diabetes, and runs a mobile flip-flop store called Woodywear Mobile Merchandise.
Some have hesitated to start because they didn’t think they could raise enough money, but attitudes have changed, said James Hilton, co-founder of Jacox-Hilton Producer Consulting, which provides analysis tools for life insurance advisers.
“Folks are starting to get used to the idea that they will have to bootstrap,” he said.
GoodEatsFor.Me founder Ajit Verghese said entrepreneurs have had to get creative about financing.
“The realities of launching a startup is that regardless of how lean you can make your operations, you still require capital,” he said. “So to fund myself and the business, I became entrepreneurial, went back to my digital roots and started consulting with big and small brands.”
Verghese’s venture, which helps hospitality companies track their social media, started work on the company in 2009 and went live with the beta site in 2010.
“I’ve spent the past 32 months working, traveling and speaking with many established and budding entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and large brands,” he said. “I’m seeing a lot of innovation, new ideas launched and more risks taken from entrepreneurs in and outside the U.S.”
2011 in review: we accomplished a lot and have so much more to do in 2012!
It is customary to spend the tail end of every year reflecting on what has transpired over the past 12 months. Goal setting ensues once the 1st day of the new year arrives, with a focus on self improvement, elimination of vices and lofty milestones.
I’ve been terrible in consistently documenting efforts to grow our company. I hope to do a better job in the coming months, in addition to growing our business, increasing the traction we currently have and raising some capital. We’ll write more in the coming weeks about some new developments and directions, but for now, here’s an analysis of what has taken place over the last 12 months.
2011 was a year full of success and failure and galvanizing experiences that helped us grow GoodEatsFor.Me and better understand our business, our customers, ourselves and the challenges of startup life.
In January of 2011 we applied to TechStars Boston for the second time. Unlike the previous year, we had a product and some customer feedback and as such were selected to attend TechStars For A Day (#TS4AD) in Boston to meet the team and discuss our candidacy. Unfortunately, i was traveling outside of the US when we found out that we were asked to attend TS4AD. Lucky for me i have an awesome cofounder in Mike who got on the Acela from NYC, came down to Boston and represented us well (despite contracting a horrible case of food poisoning the night before - a story of epic proportions ). While we thought we made a compelling case for Techstars Boston in 2011, alas it was not to be.
We had applied to the New York University Stern School of Business New Venture competition (Mike’s alma mater) at the end of 2010 and were in the throes of competition around the same time we received our TechStars Boston rejection. Mike and I had applied to the competition in 2008 with our failed startup CoachAlly and progressed to the quarterfinals. Over the course of the next several months up through April 2011, Mike and I updated the competition committee on our progress and perfected our pitch deck. We steadily advanced throughout the competition to the semifinals, but after 9 months of competition, we didn’t make the finals and had to be content with being one of 30 semifinalists in competition from an original set of 230 teams.
In February, our application to the Foursquare app gallery was approved and we were included amongst all the other apps that use the Foursquare API. We recieved a lot of signups from our inclusion in the app gallery.
Around the same time we were negotiating our first marketing and distribution partnership with Managed Data Group, a Point-of-sale integrator who helps hospitality establishments normalize the point of sale data across multiple businesses. This partnership provided us with distribution, revenue and good customer feedback about our offering and where we needed to focus our efforts.
As this was the first time Mike and I needed to officially sign something, we needed to incorporate. Through the wonderful introduction of our friend and fellow entrepreneur Russell Wallace (CEO of CivicSponsor) I ended up connecting with Richard Hesp at the law firm Gunderson Dettmer. They got us incorporated, helped us negotiate the contract and supported us through the entrepreneurial process. They’ll be helpful to us and we hope to use their services a lot more over the coming months as we grow the business and raise our first round.
Press opportunities are always good and I was approached by my friend Mike Schneider at the end of March 2011 to talk about a new book he was coauthoring with Aaron Strout - location based marketing for dummies. We ended up submitting a writeup and were included in the book as ‘one of the management tools to use’. The book was published in August of 2011 and you can get your copy on Amazon here.
Mike and his colleague Eric Liest of Allen & Gerritsen were kind enough to interview me on their web show TechInterruption talking about the future of GoodEats and my thoughts on the industry at the end of April 2010.
We are excited about 2012 and are hard at work launching some new things that we hope will help our customers and the industry.
As of January 2012, we have over 100+ beta signups and are working on some big improvements to the site that should help merchants get more value out of GoodEatsFor.Me and help us open up the beta to anyone who wants to sign up to try out our service for free! A bunch of improvements are going to make GoodEatsFor.Me the easiest system to set up and monitor the social activity around your establishment and we are experimenting with a big new idea that should help both our fellow hospitality Startups and the merchants they service. We hope to announce more at the end of the month, so stay tuned and thank you for your support.
Tech on the menu: Bevy of local companies helping to modernize restaurant sector
Kyle Alspach
VC Editor - Boston Business Journal
Traditionally, restaurants have been some of the most Luddite of businesses, says Ajit Verghese, co-founder of GoodEatsFor.Me.
“They just want to do what they do — make food and have awesome drinks. They don’t want to deal with the computer,” said Verghese, whose startup tracks what people are saying about restaurants on social media and helps restaurants to put the information to use.
But unless you’re among the most established of restaurants, ignoring diners’ technology habits isn’t really an option anymore. And a number of Boston area tech startups are helping to connect customers and restaurants, on the web and on mobile devices.
Tasted Menu Inc. of Brookline competes in the dish-recommendation space, and in November launched a website with menus for 1,300 Boston restaurants. The three-person company plans to put out an iPhone app within weeks, said founder Alex Rosenfeld.
Users see a restaurant’s complete menu, and every dish is tagged based on its characteristics — which comes out to 90,000 different dishes in Boston. The company aims to earn revenue by helping restaurants to do targeted promotions to customers, he said.
FoodieBytes LLC, a four-person Burlington startup that launched early this year, has looked to combine individual dish reviews and ratings at restaurants with deals at those restaurants. Founder Ajay Bhandarisays the site has been getting 100,000 unique visitors a month, who have the option of paying a $10 fee to get discounts of up to 40 percent on meals. The site has deals at nearly 1,000 restaurants around the U.S. and has 16 on board in Massachusetts.
Textaurant Corp. of Brookline is working with nearly 30 restaurants — about half in the Northeast — to provide a service that lets customers get notified that their table is ready via text, so they don’t have to hang around the restaurant waiting. Restaurants pay a monthly fee for the service.
The four-person startup plans to broaden the service to allow for reservations by text and to also send customers a post-visit survey on their phones, said Textaurant founder Josh Bob.
Boston’s The Pintley Company LLC’s current offering is a beer recommendation app. FounderTim Noetzel says the plan is to expand into doing recommendations on restaurants and other hang-outs within a month. “We want to shift the application from being the best way to discover beer that you love, to the best way to discover a better night out,” he said.
Customers of GoodEatsFor.Me, also of Boston, get a customized dashboard with a feed of activity concerning their restaurant on Twitter, Facebook and foursquare.
“It’s all about understanding what people were saying, and ultimately who they were,” Verghese said “So if you were the restaurant you could figure out if you’re doing a good job, bad job, who their loyal patrons are.”
He declined to say exactly how many restaurants are using the beta service, saying only that it’s less than 50. Customers are located in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
In Cambridge, seven-person startup Locu Inc. has developed what its owners say is the easiest platform for updating a restaurant’s menu on its website. The company offers restaurants a widget that automatically updates the menu without having to do any coding, said Locu CEO and co-founder Rene Reinsberg. The product is in private beta and is expected to move into public beta in the first quarter, with commercial launch soon to follow, Reinsberg said.
Exit41 Inc. is older compared to the startups in the sector.
The Andover company was founded in 1999. The company is now on its third life cycle, but this time seems to be finding traction, said CEO Chet Barnard, who joined the company in January.
The 20-person company offers a software platform for online ordering at large chain restaurants, including Bertucci’s (100 restaurants on the East Coast of the U.S.) and Cara (200 Swiss Chalet restaurants in Canada).
Since launching the offering two years ago, Exit41 has grown to serve 40 brands and close to 1,500 restaurants in total, Barnard said. Unlike with services such as GrubHub, Exit41’s platform sits directly on the restaurants’ websites.
The company hopes to enjoy a large helping of new customers in the near future.
“We think this market is still early,” Barnard said. “We believe strongly that in the next 12 to 24 months, this will no longer be an elective for brands.”
And I think we’re missing a much bigger opportunity.
To me, the value that daily deals sites bring to a restaurant is that they are selling restaurants a list of customer leads. The business goal of restaurants are to get as many people in as many seats as possible and deal sites provide a list of people that are willing to put themselves in those seats. Those people are leads and restaurants are paying daily deal sites a pretty for those leads.
The problem with these leads is that they are ‘shitty’ leads. Much like the characters in the movie Glenngary Glenn Ross, merchants feel that they need to use these ‘shitty’ leads in order to get to the good leads - the Glen Ross leads! There are various motivations for running deals across different platforms - but the end goal of restaurants is to fill as many seats as possible on a consistent basis with customers - and the hope is that the customers that come into restaurants based on the deal/promotion will become (repeat) loyal customers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case. You cannot turn a ‘shitty’ lead into a good lead.
But here’s the rub: you don’t need these ‘shitty’ leads - in many cases the great (Glenngarry) leads are out there - volunteered by customers and for the taking.
How so? Well - customers continue to interact with your restaurant across multiple social channels - taking pictures of your food on Foodspotting, checking in and/or leaving tips (and the occasional picture) on Foursquare, talking about your dishes, the quality of your service, recommending food and drink, or times to visit on Twitter and Facebook and a host of other actions across new and upcoming services.
And while these actions that customers are taking are important to the operation of your business - these actions help identify these customers - who are your good leads!
Why are they good leads? Well, for one thing, they know you exist and based on whatever action that they’ve taken they are either existing customers or potential customers. They have come in and engaged with your restaurant. These customers are a targeted, segmented list of individuals that you should market and promote to.
There are lots of actions that consumers can take across multiple services - and keeping track of all those consumers can be hard. That’s where GoodEatsFor.Me comes in - we help you collect this customer activity, understand what these customers say, like and do, and help define this customer base and give you easy ways to market towards them.
It takes time, but will generate results. And without using GoodEatsFor.Me, restaurants can achieve this goal - although GoodEatsFor.Me really does make it easy. ;)
Cultivating leads helps establish better relationships between your business and your customers. Better relationships provide you with an understanding of who your customers are, what they want and most importantly what they are willing to purchase. And this will help you target your efforts and ultimately evolve to a better and more efficient sales process while building up loyalty amongst your customers.
“ Mobile social media boosts Tasti D-lite’s ability to interact with consumers. Those connections are going to lead to conversations. Conversations lead to relationships and relationships lead to transactions. ”
Cambridge-based Locu announced today that it has collected more than $600,000 in funding from angel investors, making it the latest restaurant-related start-up to raise money. Who else in Boston is trying to improve the experience of eating out? Here’s my list…
- TotalTab. View your bill at a bar or restaurant, and pay it using your mobile phone. Self-funded so far. Founder Nick Reuter says the company will look to raise money early next year, when it has a beta version operating in a local restaurant.
- Tasted Menu. Founded in 2009 by a recent Harvard Business School grad, the company is still in stealth mode, but seems to want to tap your social network to recommend specific dishes at restaurants. Has raised an unspecified amount of angel funding. Founder Alex Rosenfeld says coyly, “We’re a new entrant in the restaurant social recommendation space. We’ll be complementary to some existing players, competitive with others, but most importantly I think we’re bringing something proprietary, unique, and (most importantly) useful to the table, no pun intended.”
- Locu (formerly Goodplates). When I first wrote about Goodplates back in May, the MIT-spawned start-up was hoping to persuade diners to use their mobile phones to take photos of their food at restaurants, and upload ratings and reviews to a Web site. But as founder Rene Reinsberg began to demo the service publicly, and pitch investors, he started to notice how crowded the resto-tech space was. Over the summer, Goodplates changed its name — the company is now known as Locu (pronounced “low-koo”) — and began focusing on using humans and intelligent software to digitize and categorize information from restaurant menus. They plan to help restaurants share menu information with lots of Web sites and mobile apps that would like to deliver it to their users, and create an API that will give developers access to the info. Pricing isn’t yet set, but they hope to generate revenue from both parties. Raised $600,000 this month from a group of angel investors. (That’s the Locu team pictured at right.)
- Leaf. Cambridge company trying to render extinct that faux-leather bill presenter that’s dropped at your table at the end of the meal. What if instead, your waiter handed you a small tablet computer that allowed you to review what you’d eaten, split the check, figure out the tip, rate each individual dish and beverage, and swipe your credit card to pay?
- AisleBuyer. mDine service, announced last month, will allow you to use your mobile phone to choose what you’d like to eat and pay using your mobile phone. Company hasn’t yet announced any café or restaurant partners. AisleBuyer has raised $11.5 million
- Textaurant. Brookline start-up that enables restaurants to manage their wait-lists with a PC, and buzz diners when they’re ready via their mobile phones (instead of those expensive coaster-shaped pagers.) In use at Fire & Ice in Boston, Finale in Cambridge, and Jerry Remy’s at Fenway (only on game days). Hoping to raise a seed round in the next quarter. (I covered them here last fall.)
- Crave Labs. Helping restaurants expand their customer base using social media and mobile devices.
- GoodEatsFor.Me. Similar to Crave Labs, helping restaurants use social media to see what diners are saying, and distribute special offers.
- Survey on the Spot. Newton company assists restaurants with designing feedback surveys that customers can fill out on smartphones or tablet computers. In use at restaurants like British Beer Company and The Ninety Nine.
(Last year, I wrote about E La Carte, another TableTech company that was born in Boston, but is now based in Palo Alto.)
GoodEatsFor.Me included in Location Based Marketing for Dummies Book!
On September 6, 2011, Mike Schneider and Aaron Strout’s book, Location Based Marketing for Dummies hit online bookstores and news stands. The book helps businesses understand and develop Location Based Marketing programs to promote customer loyalty, drive customer engagement and improve the bottom line.
GoodEatsFor.Me was fortunate enough to be included in the section “Choosing a Third Party Dashboard” - take a look at the screenshot below from the Kindle version:
This book is a great reference book for small businesses and it is tremendously helpful in providing a good way to get started with location based platforms. Go pick up a copy for yourself! Thanks Mike and Aaron for including us!
Where Does Textaurant Fit Into the Future of Restaurant Tech? Founder Josh Bob Speaks
Gregory T. Huang
7/21/11
Maybe it’s because I’m hungry, but I’ve been thinking about the future of restaurants lately. Like a lot of people, I eat out far too often, and I have strong feelings about the way the experience should go—the food, the service, the ambience, and so on.
So does Josh Bob. OK, it’s his job (though maybe he’s hungry too). Bob is the founder and CEO of Boston-based Textaurant, a startup that runs a mobile service aimed at taking the hassle out of waiting for a table, and boosting customer loyalty through deals and offers. Using the service, restaurants can send text alerts to customers’ mobile phones telling them their table is almost ready. So Textaurant does away with buzzers and pagers and tries to reduce the workload on the host, while helping the restaurant win over customers who would otherwise leave and not come back.
In case you’re wondering if this causes restaurants to lose out on business from people waiting at the bar, Bob says surveys show more than 40 percent of people will leave (and not even consider going to the bar) if told there is a long wait. That’s the lost business Textaurant is trying to save—and not just by texting them, but also by opening up a channel whereby restaurants can offer special deals and rewards.
The three-person startup is backed by Massachusetts angel investors (and 500 Startups’ Twilio micro-fund) and counts among its dozen or so customers Finale Desserterie & Bakery, Fire + Ice, and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers. It is a finalist in the MassChallenge accelerator program. (You can expect a rebranding and name change along with a new website in the next month, Bob says.)
Textaurant is part of a thriving mini-cluster of food- and restaurant-related startups around Boston that also includes Plummelo, I Am Hungry, Text My Food, Good Eats For Me, and Objective Logistics (see profile here). To some extent, the technologies offered by these companies are a subset of the local-marketing, loyalty, and deals systems that have permeated small-business life as of late. But restaurants have their own quirks and challenges. They are not usually the most eager adopters of new technologies, which can be very polarizing among their managers and staff.
“The restaurant industry has to change,” Bob says. “Anyone who doesn’t use technology will get left behind.”
So here’s his vision of what going to a restaurant will be like five years from now. You’ll decide you want to go to a certain type of restaurant (Italian or Chinese, say) or a particular neighborhood, he says. You’ll use your mobile device to look at Textaurant, which will show you that there are five Italian places nearby, say, and what the wait time is at each of them. You’ll check yourself in at one of the restaurants—with or without setting foot in it—and customize how the table alert will come to you (via text, voice, Twitter, or e-mail). You can also pre-order drinks for the table so they’ll be waiting for you when you sit down.
What’s more, your phone will be connected to your bill so you can accrue loyalty points based on purchases and receive special offers (like a free appetizer at the bar), he says. And on your way out, you’ll pay through your Textaurant account or another mobile system connected to your credit card or payment account.
Groupon, by the way, will have morphed into something else that’s probably unrecognizable today, Bob says. (Presumably along with other daily deal sites.) Not that it’s a bad thing, of course.
“There will always be significant value in helping businesses survive,” he says.
Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mike Schneider (@schneidermike) and Eric Leist (@ericleist) from Allen & Gerritsen on their show Tech Interruption (#techi).
It was a great time and I had a chance to talk about GoodEatsFor.Me. Tech Interruption is modeled after ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption. So check out ‘Four Good Minutes’ with myself, SchneiderMike and Eric!
SchneiderMike has a great post up called ‘What is the Hamburger Sushi Problem on Yelp?’. It talks about the problems with getting Yelp reviews that are accurate to a number of people but not necessarily applicable to you for a number of reasons. He refers to it as ‘Hamburger / Sushi problem’ where the reviewer normally eats hamburgers and not sushi - as such the review is outside of the reviewer’s traditional reviews and might not be as reliable as a review from someone that eats lots of sushi.
Great post - check it out. I think that looking at the ‘taste preference’ from Hunch could help solve this. From my comments on SchneiderMike’s post:
I struggle with this all the time when looking at Yelp. I try and triage a few different sources to get an understanding of a restaurant.
I’ll check out the Foursquare tips on a restaurant - I assume them to be more relevant to my demographic given that Foursquare users are closer demographically to me. I sometimes also search Twitter to see if anyone says anything. I will also quickly scan the Yelp reviews, eliminating those that focus on non-food/drink aspects of the restaurant - in my experience unless there is a trend of horrible service mentions, reviews that focus on non-food/drink are usually critics beating a drum for a number of reasons that probably don’t affect me.
What would be extremely useful in addition to the frequency/cuisine segmentations and the influencer model that you mentioned - would also be a ‘taste segment’ understanding how similar the reviewers ‘tastes’ are to my own. Using the Hunch API, Yelp could analyze its user base and then understand their taste preferences. And as such then create personas around some of the wonderful attributes that the taste preferences provide. This segmented user base could help provide you with an understanding of how similar you are to the other reviewer - and as a user you can ascribe your level of trust and relevance to that reviewer and to that review.
A simpler solution using the Hunch API would be to show you a taste relevance score for each reviewer as a percentage of how close they are to you. Close to 100% is a great match, <30% interpret the opposite of what the review states.
Doesn’t totally solve the Hamburger Sushi problem as I have friends with similar tastes in many regards whose recommendations and reviews of food don’t entirely jive with mine, however combining all of these segments provides us with a higher probability that Yelp reviews are going to steer us to the best choice.
We’re looking at how these taste preferneces come into play with GoodEatsFor.Me. I think they are really powerful for consumers AND businesses.
GoodEatsFor.Me gets a nice mention in a roundup article by Boston Globe technology columnist Scott Kirsner on his Innovation Economy blog.
