Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses? Hello, We are a chatbot startup, targeting restaurants and other small businesses, brick and mortar that might be affected by covid19. What is the best way to target these businesses, specially that many of them are closing down? We want to help them sell through our delivery system. |
Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute.
Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time.
“When I was ordering food I noticed that I couldn’t prepay online, I almost thought of going somewhere else, how come you don’t have a way to pay before coming in?”
“Don’t know how to do that”
“I built a plugin that takes 5-10 mins to set up and people can pay while they order so I don’t have to come inside, can we do a Skype call when you’re not busy to walk through this?”
Once you’ve gotten a handful of trials like this you can start calling but your options with restaurants(especially mom and pop) are to walk in the door or get to them directly on the phone.
You’re seriously overestimating the layman’s understanding of technology. Chances are they hired a company to do a templated one-and-done website, and you’ll need to give them a reason to not just go back to whoever put the site up in the first place.
P/s: there is another they won’t tell
Showing the prospect how easy it is in some situations against reality is a good way to highlight a real pain point.
Prospects tend to fall into three categories: [1] they'll buy no matter what you do, [2] they won't buy no matter what you do or [3] they'll buy depending on how you sell to them.
Many prospects feel they're in group 2 but if you can outline how your solution solves a problem or provides an opportunity, many of those group 2's will change their tune. The hard part is keeping their attention so you've got to get to value quickly, making it personal is just as important IMO.
Like a lot of the comments here hint at, most of these places do t care at all to be up to trend on the latest plug-in integrated junk.
They could probably use a hand with making their product easier to buy, but the margins are tight and no one wants another Yelp.
Show them how you’re going to help them make more sales, or pay less on fees for the sales they make.
Or just enjoy your sandwich.
Not everyone needs ML/NLP/freespace/Kubernetes/feature flags (Bingo!), but they’d probably benefit from using Stripe
You don't have to type but select from bunch of choices and then the bot automatically does the needful.
Examples
Report an item is missing from the order. The bot pops ups the list - asks the user to select which item is missing - refunds automatically.
for most use cases I would rather have the bot do the work for me than having to talk to a rep.
Everybody wants to sell them something, and they have very, very slim margins. So they ignore most of it. Have a good pitch ready. Don't expect that they have low-level access or even content access to their sites. Prove your value to them For free. Deliver. Upsell to paid.
Source: spent the last 5 years doing SaaS where one of the verticals is restaurants. I'm on the tech/product side, but some of these are things we've looked at for marketing and finding leads.
"Our chatbot will help you find people who want to buy your toilet paper, raw ingredients, and cleaning supplies"
"We will pay you a signing bonus if you commit to doing X, Y, and Z"
Naturally, this is only a speculation, I've never run a brick and mortar chatbot business.
I personally go straight to DoorDash or GrubHub to find my desired restaurant, or something like Yelp or Zomato if need be.
If you're just looking for hours and address you can get that via search (especially on mobile), but a properly-developed website will also provide sub-navigation in Google results for menus, contact info, events, etc.
Menus were also a big part of it. Dropping a PDF (or worse, a JPEG) of a menu onto a website sucks for usability. The sites used responsive design to lay out the menus in a way that was actually readable, and my CMS made it easy for the chef/manager to update on a regular basis. The menu pages were highly popular among first-time site visitors.
For restaurants that host private parties (larger or more complicated than what OpenTable & company will handle), the website was the primary way that people contacted them to start the reservation process. Many more people did that than message on Facebook.
Gift cards around the holiday seasons (mother's/father's day, graduation, December holidays) are also particularly popular.
Of course people go to websites still. I find your question uninformed.
In your case, when people ordering from a different store. Well, it might convince the new restaurant. But old ones will say not in their area, and they’re fine with that.
It’s like chutes and ladders with the wrong answer taking you back to the start of the bot time waste loop.