Ask HN: Best Way to Reach Local Business Owners?

4 points by jbarrec 12 years ago | 7 comments

Good morning HN,

I am in the early stages of researching a potential start up concept for local restaurant owners. What do you think is the best / most efficient way of going about this? Ideally I would like to obtain email addresses and reach out so I can scale quicker than cold calling for example.

Any insight would be much appreciated!

soneca 12 years ago |

I am at the same stage at the same sector, though I am in Brazil. My startup is a loyalty program for bars and restaurantes based on Facebook's checkin.

What I am doing for the last month is a kind of "door-to-door sales". At least my product may benefit if my clients are geographically concentrated. So I selected two neighborhoods with a lot of restaurants, then went door to door asking for the owner just after lunch.

Local biz owners are usually at the business, so it is not hard to be introduced to them by whatever employee you aproach first.

This won't give you scale, but I would strongly recommend you to follow PG's advice: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Doing this not scalable door-to-door aproach you will learn a lot (I did), it is a great form of customer discovery. And if you are able to acquire a few customers on the same neighborhood, quoting the same PG's essay:

"Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs."

I actually could get in my hand a XLS with thousands of restaurant's emails, but decided not to use until I get closer to product/market fit through this door-to-door tactic.

jbarrec 12 years ago | |

Thanks for the reply and link soneca. I will check it out right now! Is there a rule of thumb regarding how many questions to stick to once you have the local business owners attention? Do they tend to get annoyed after asking so many questions?

soneca 12 years ago | | |

I came to them after I have the idea of the product. They will only pay attention to you if you are offering something of value to them. Doesn't work here the aproach "let's take a coffee and chat about your problems".

You don't have to have anything built, but you will pitch as your product is functional and tested. So they will answer questions regarding your concrete product, not an abstract idea.

If someone decide to buy, then you build what you promised. If not, you try to learn why.

Do you mind if I asked what is your idea?

yiggydyang 12 years ago |

I would start with Yelp and Open Table. There must be conferences that restauranteurs attend. People who either sell food (farmers markets, organic specialty sellers), restaurant supplies, or POS systems would probably appeal to restauranteurs as well so perhaps go talk to them.

You could probably start by just dropping by a number of them during the day when they're not as busy (i.e. after lunch). If they like what you're building I bet they could point you in the right direction towards other restauranteurs.

Good luck!

xgarland 12 years ago |

Even the approach of sending cold emails may not be as effective, since plenty of restaurants still don't leverage basic tools available for communication and connection, including the internet.

As Yiggy said, try sourcing targets from Yelp and Open Table, then proceed to catch someone who is willing to talk during low traffic hours.

Not sure if this strategy is the best, but just something to think about when dealing with people in and around the service industry.

davj 12 years ago |

Check out Radius.com

soboleiv 12 years ago | |

Radius.com seems to be all about lead generation?

Plus they're kind of interviewing potential customers - I was rejected to get access because I worked for not their target segment at a time.