

Ask HN: Lets talk about Opentable.com - parkern

The "Lets talk about Etsy" post seemed to get some really good insight and feedback, so I thought I would do another about Opentable.com.<p>I will throw out some questions to get things going:<p>1) How did opentable overcome the Chicken and the egg problem?  Did they build up a roster of restaurants before they even opened the consumer side of things?<p>2) Did OT start with just San Francisco?  How fast did they expand into other cities?  Or did they go from SF to nation wide in two steps?<p>3) How hard was it for Opentable to change the way people made reservations?  Was the market ready for it or did it take a long time to get people to make reservations this way?
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Maascamp
From my understanding OT was a POS software provider first and only launched
their reservation system after they had achieved a certain level of market
penetration. As a result they didn't have to try and convince POS providers to
integrate with them (the hard part) because they were already running their
own platform.

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prosa
OpenTable was founded in 1998 and ~$5mm a year on its 5-6 year journey to
profitability. (Luckily, they were smart with cash during the boom, and had a
$48mm pool of dotcom-era VC money.)

This TechCrunch article is great for financial details:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-
and...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-and-reveals-
its-finances/)

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aaronbrethorst
regarding question 2: [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/08/18/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/08/18/FD97228.DTL&hw=opentable&sn=043&sc=581)

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drivebyacct
They need to redesign their site. I clicked it, thought it was a placeholder
domain/seo page and closed it.

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JimmyL
I'm curious how much their business model is centered around people
organically going to their site and thinking "well, I'd like to go out for
dinner somewhere - let's see where I can get a table" as opposed to arriving
directly on a landing page for the particular restaurant from which they got
the link.

I know if I'm going to go to the kind of place that needs a reservation, I'll
have one in particular I've got in mind, as opposed to thinking that I'm just
interested in going _somewhere_ that needs a reservation.

