Questions

I'm making a food delivery company that advertises the restaurant's products. This has been done many times over with different companies throughout the years (grubhub, doorstep delivery, eat24, etc.) the majority of them are making million's per year and it seems like it would be a home run. What we've done differently is that we have been able to market the restaurant's with full picture menu's, video and banner ads across our website and various forms of social media. Even though we don't have much traction yet would this be justifiable enough to investors to pitch the idea.

Two key issues in your question:

(1) when you say "majority are making millions" you're not seeing the hundreds of startups that failed in the same space...

(2) if it's such a great idea, you should have traction.

CHALLENGE:

Adding photos to menus is tricky... Good pics are very expensive, and bad pics will detract from a menu's appeal. I could let a restaurant owner fax me a menu and get it online for around $2 using offshore labor for data entry. But a good photo shoot would cost hundreds or more and require local talent everywhere (or place a large and expensive burden on the restaurant owners).

It's also labor-intensive to get thousands of restaurants signed on to something. Are you planning to scrape other sites and spam restaurant owners? Walk door-to-door? Buy a mailing list? If you've been personally soliciting restaurants, that's useful for market research - but obviously can't ever be profitable. You should test a scalable strategy for acquisition. Remember, a menu service that has only 30% (or even 60%) of the restaurants in my neighborhood is pretty much useless. Can you acquire them all, cheaply? Do they even want photos of their food? Only restaurants like McDonald's, Cheesecake Factory, and Chinese take-out do that these days.

To earn investment dollars, you'll need to prove: (a) you can execute this concept at scale, on boarding hundreds of restaurants, (b) restaurant owners are signing up, and (c) you're able to gain sufficient traffic to the site for the business to generate ongoing value.

RECOMMENDATION: prove yourself in one city, and investors may help you to expand to many. But if you want funding to pay for initial marketing / webdev / photography while you "gain traction", then that would be a wasted effort. Investors need to see scalable proof, and since fund-raising is time-consuming, better to invest your own energy in proving the business first.


Answered 9 years ago

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