

Show HN: Simple analytics for restaurants. Feedback on launch page? - fananta
http://flourcast.com

======
kyro
First, you just launched, so congrats!

Second, I do have some feedback:

-You don't state the problem you're fixing. You have to make the prospect aware of a problem they're having before you show them the light. And even if a prospect visits your site knowing they have the problem you're trying to solve, reiterating it in very clear terms will only make them more encouraged to buy your service.

-You need visuals, like images of restaurants, dishes, happy customers, happy owners, etc, stuff that'll elicit an emotional response.

-Given the nature of the product, I would include a very simple graph to visually convey the concept of increasing revenues.

-You need testimonials or case studies. As a restaurant owner with a lot on my plate already, I need to know your product actually works and is worth implementing. A case study about how X restaurant discovered some hidden trends in their customer behaviors and tripled revenue in a year will make me more likely to pull the trigger.

-Your hook needs work. "The best way to forecast for your restaurant" doesn't present a problem or a solution. Something like "Easy sales forecasting that'll keep your customers full, and your wallet fat" might be a little better. (That could be _a lot_ better, but I'd need a few hours).

Hope that helps!

~~~
readme
>First, you just launched, so congrats!

There is no site behind this that is publically available. It looks like a
glorified contact form to me.

~~~
kyro
I was making a funny about them launching unintentionally by making this
submission.

~~~
bennyg
Which is unfortunate, cause a site demo would be great to see when everyone
has their interest piqued. Hopefully we'll see another Show HN when they
actually launch.

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didgeoridoo
First, some (unsolicited) feedback on the product: Itemizing & inputting your
sales per item is a pretty hefty thing to ask if the restaurant isn't already
doing it. If they are, what makes this solution better than Excel or Google
Docs? Integration with a POS or other system that automatically tracks sales
might be necessary to make this feasible from a "how much extra work does this
force me to do" perspective.

As for the site... 1) "Try now" doesn't let me try it now... not a good start.
2) The site as a whole is pretty dry and unappealing, and gives me no idea
what the product would be like to use. Typical best practice for something
like this tends to be human imagery + shots of the interface in action. See:
[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-
tes...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-
part-3-final) 3) If you're going to promise plans and pricing, give us plans
and pricing. If not, "learn more" or "hear about us when we're ready" is more
honest.

~~~
hanley
Your first paragraph makes an excellent point. No one is going to type all
that in each day. And more importantly - you'd have to type in every
ingredient and the quantity for each menu item in order to get the 'better
inventory control' that the website suggests.

~~~
fananta
We're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy. It
will only require to enter the quantity of sales for menu items. Most POS
systems will produce an overall daily count but won't be able to provide
smarter analytics.

~~~
tnorthcutt
_We 're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy._

[http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

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nate
Congrats on getting something out there!

One thing I'm always most cautious about this is what do we really know? I can
give you some advice about what I think you could do better, but I don't run a
restaurant, and those are the conversations that really count. Maybe they'd
prefer this page be brown with a yellow comic-sans font. So take this with an
enormous grain of salt.

1) The lede concerns me. Is that how restaurant owners talk? They want to
forecast better? If so, great. I have a feeling though that there is a
different language they use. I don't know what it is though. If you do, than
great keep going. If you don't you need to figure out what this language is.
Find a restaurant owner and figure out what he has typed into google. Is it
"how to increase restaurant sales" might be a more common question on their
mind that you could fit into.

2) You need to show some social proof. Some testimonials. Someone somewhere
has said something nice about you and/or this project. If not, that is step 1.
Get whatever this is in front of someone that will say, "this is great".

3) I'm nervous self-service SaaS for restaurants might not be the right
business model. I've talked with some restaurant owners. Many seem like their
top of mind problems are keeping their employees from stealing or their
glassware from chipping or their produce getting delivered on time. They don't
seem like they have a ton of time figuring out a software system to help them.
(I believe Opentable started by basically holding these restaurants hands and
giving them the computers systems and everything they needed)

I have a feeling you'd have more luck getting a quick meeting in a booth at
the back of the restaurant between lunch and dinner than getting owners to
this landing page.

4) There's a great program in Chicago, called Inspiration Kitchen, a non-
profit to help homeless people with things like training to work a kitchen to
help them get jobs. There's other programs like this in other cities where
non-profits are running kitchens and restaurants. If there's something like
that in your area, and you volunteered with them for 2 hours a week, I bet
you'd get some really nice connections and insight on how you could help them
with software like this.

------
geoffw8
Hey! Cool concept.

My overall comment would be really drive home the problem(s) that you're
trying to solve, whatever they might be. I would lead with those. i.e.

\- Fed up of wasting perfectly good ingredients? \- Want to make smarter
purchasing decisions? \- Take the guesswork out of your next specials \- etc
etc

What you have at the moment is _mostly_ the solution, I'd pitch up the problem
like I mentioned above, then a few points on your products magic.

It shouldn't be too tough because even from just seeing your current page I
"get it".

Just my 2 penneth :)

~~~
fananta
Thanks. I think we'll add a point to state the current pain point as you said.
Really the goal is to help restaurants better understand their customers'
behaviors and patterns.

~~~
geoffw8
Hey, yeah I totally get it. Just drive home the WHY, WHY do you need to help
them understand their customers' behaviour patterns? What are the benefits?
Honestly I can't say that enough :)

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jgoldsmith
Looks like an interesting concept for a product. I don't have much experience
selling to restaurants in particular so I can't comment on the business model,
but I can offer a couple pieces of advice regarding how to sell software to
small businesses:

1) Good job emphasizing "increase revenue". Software is an _incredibly_ tough
sell to SMBs if you aren't helping them decrease costs or increase revenue, so
the more you emphasize the practical implications of your software the better.

2) The homepage is a little sparse on details. If I owned a restaurant, I'd
want to see at least a bunch of screenshots, if not an interactive demo.
Telling me that the product gives me happier customers is fine, but I really
need to see what I'm going to be working on.

3) On the pricing page, a general tactic is to put real prices and see who
clicks on which tiers. That way, you can see how many people would actually be
willing to pay for your product and how many are just mildly interested.

4) When you get the emails, make sure you talk to them within a day. I've
found that most potentially leads go down the toilet if you wait much longer,
so you're going to want to engage them while they're interested.

Shoot me an email at the email on my profile if you want to talk more!

~~~
fananta
Awesome, will send you a note to chat!

------
joshvm
To the people asking about Excel, the obvious answer is: __most non IT
literate people don 't know how to use it __. My Uncle always asks me to knock
up very basic charts to track how his business is doing because he doesn 't
know how himself.

1) More information - I want to know what kind of statistics you can show me
(ideally in layman's terms), something like a graph. Then some more details on
the technical info - what do you mean by trend? Can you predict sales in the
future?

2) Do you actually have any usage data from a restaurant for this?

3) It would be nice to see your personal background - why did you invent this?
Did you have a problem that needed solving that was hard with conventional
software?

Basically what I'm getting at is I don't really understand what I would get
from your product. I can see a table of things I sold and a rainy icon. Great,
but if I'm a restaurateur presumably my till will dump something like this at
the end of the day?

I get the impression that at the moment you're selling an answer, not the
answer to a posed question. People need to look at your site and immediately
think "Yes, I always wondered about that and I can see it would help!"

------
AznHisoka
Your competitor is Excel. How are you better than it?

~~~
jmathai
I think screenshots would help here.

What do I actually get that I don't get out of the box with Excel? I imagine
the trends and the charts but seeing it visually would go a long way for me to
solidify it in my mind.

------
pud
Tell the audience why they want it. Not what it does.

And be specific. "Make smarter decisions and increase revenue!" does not mean
anything. You could literally say that about anything. What does your product
specifically help them with?

Also, the exclamation mark seems condescending, like it's a service for kids.
But that's just my personal taste.

------
moonie1
I'll be brutally honest for you, since I would want the same: this is crap.
You shouldn't have put this up yet. Here's a list of things wrong, I really
hope you fix them because I like to see people make nice things :)

1\. You're using minimalism as an excuse to not build a landing page. What is
this!??!?!?! I _sort of_ know what it is, but have no idea what the software
looks like (is that a screenshot?)

2\. I hate giving others design directives, but comic sans-ish fonts +
spreadsheets makes very little sense. You can be "cute-sy" on other parts of
the site, but when it comes to numbers you want things to be readable.

3\. please preload any rollover images you have, seeing a button blink when i
hover over it is so 90s.

4\. The "Try now for free" should be right aligned, forreal.

otoh, the logo looks nice, except you should consider better aliasing on the
font (or a css3 web font!) :)

~~~
shocks
Wow. Way to be a dick.

------
egsec
Past performance is not an indicator of future results. If you want to look at
the future, you need to combine previous results with possible future
scenarios. Is business to a particular restaurant different based on the
season, are there cash flow problems to consider? Regression or historic
modeling is not that great - this includes where it is frequently used such as
network analysis, stocks, etc. However, some of the drill down type things
might be useful to monitoring food cost or helping to do future modeling. It
depends on what features you have when you are near an MVP.

I am also not sure what this dones that a spreadsheet template couldn't do at
this point. For the rainy day scenario, are you asking them to put this in, or
will you take their location with weather data to automate this analysis?

------
mattm
You should probably ask people who manage restaurants rather than people on
HN.

------
mbesto
Some feedback:

\- _sales on rainy days_ -> This is insight, not trends or analytics. (that's
not to say it's less or more important)

\- _Simply record your daily sales in Flourcast._ -> Why is this any easier
than having my cashier put this in an Excel spreadsheet and do a pivot table?

\- _The best way to forecast for your restaurant._ -> As others have pointed
out, this needs some work. Forecast what? Sales? Inventory? What problem are
you solving and why is your product any better than the competition?

------
srgseg
I'd say the real value is in the statement "Make smarter decisions and
increase revenue".

I'd concentrate the focus of the page on walking them through a concrete
example of what insight would lead to what actions which would lead to what
increase in revenue.

If you make a compelling case for that, that'll give them the motivation to
sign up and input the data. Motivation is the single biggest determinant of
conversion.

------
chef
My first impression would be to change the font and preload the hover-image
for "Plans and pricing" (when you hover over it now, it shows the image
loading)

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jmathai
I don't know much about the space but I think the biggest thing you can do is
to both make it easy and convince me that it's easy before I sign up to do the
manual entry of data.

Assuming this is a real problem (I imagine it would be) then I think easing
the data entry will make/break your retention.

~~~
fananta
I agree. Most larger restaurants are sold massive POS systems which aren't
easy to extract data from. We're obviously looking into this too.

------
mark_sz
Looks interesting, but I can't see who is behind this project (no
company/developer info on the page), so I won't share my email address.

Also "Try NOW for free" is misleading, as there's no product behind it yet (so
I can't try it).

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username223
This sounds like a potentially useful thing, but putting up an ugly webpage
with two links to a box asking for someone's email is the opposite of useful.
FWIW, "flourcast.com@mailinator.com" will receive their spam.

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eCa
The two links "Try now for free" and "Plans and pricing" are making promises
about what waits on the other side. You should always keep promises.

I see no reason why "Plans and pricing" is an image.

~~~
fananta
Sorry. This was bad late night judgement on my part. Will change this.

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pbreit
Not gonna lie...it's pretty bad. For starters, the call to action is off the
page on the right. Unforgivable.

Since your design skills are limited, you might need to find someone to do it
or at least look online for some templates.

Here's what you're up against: [http://www.ex-pos.com](http://www.ex-pos.com)
[http://www.averoinc.com](http://www.averoinc.com)
[http://euclidanalytics.com/product/qsr](http://euclidanalytics.com/product/qsr)
[http://restaurantsciences.com/](http://restaurantsciences.com/)

This one might be within the range of your skills:
[http://www.tapastech.com/analytics](http://www.tapastech.com/analytics)

~~~
jejune06
He was probably going off of Joel/Buffer's example landing page:
[http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-
in-7-week...](http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-
how-we-did-it)

~~~
solistice
Swiping stuff you don't understand will land you in a world of pain.

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dsfreed
Rather than having a "sign up" link and a "Plans and Pricing" link, I think it
would be better if you had just 1 page, and had the signup form be the focus
of the site (the call-to-action).

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joshribakoff
Plans & pricing button disappears when I rollover. Moments later it shows back
up. its because you lazy load an image. No need for an image, do it with pure
CSS.

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AndyJ1972
On my iPad in landscape the green button isn't visible without scrolling.

Best wishes with your venture guys.

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jontonsoup
Good work! I think you should checkout how your site looks on mobile and
smaller resolution screen (It breaks).

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xsace
So what are we suppose to evaluate exactly?

