

HN:Help Pivot Our Startup -- Eat.ly - shuleatt
http://www.leveragingideas.com/2010/09/14/pivot-our-startup-eat-ly/

======
hugh3
_The idea was born based on the observation that most people can’t remember
what they had for lunch two days ago. However, stopping to take a photo (and
optionally sharing it publicly) adds both accountability and an element of
fun._

A bunch of my friends will occasionally post pictures of their meals on
facebook -- either because they're eating out somewhere particularly awesome
or because they've cooked something themselves which they want everybody to
see. I can't imagine anyone wanting to photograph _everything_ they eat just
for the sake of keeping track of it, though.

Definitely need an iPhone/Android/whatever app. Email is too much effort.

Also, a facebook app. Once food photos start showing up in my newsfeed with
"Posted from eat.ly" under them, I might start checking it out.

I'd de-emphasise the "health" and "calorie counting" side of things and play
up the "food porn" side of things. I don't want everybody to know about the
boring healthy salad I had for lunch today, but I _do_ for some reason want
everybody to know about the delicious foie gras risotto I had at l'Atelier de
Joel Robuchon the other night (as proven by the fact that I just found a way
to brag about it in this very comment. nom nom nom)

Maybe provide a way to rate things by delicious-looking-ness? (You might want
to think of a better word than delicious-looking-ness.) People could compete
to have the most delicious-looking food on the entire site (like hotornot but
without _quite_ as much potential for ego shattering).

~~~
shuleatt
Agree with the iPhone app. We do have a basic Facebook integration that allows
users to post to their feed. Also agree with deemphasizing the calorie/health
aspects, though overtime, I still believe the stronger value prop for an app
like this is to become the mint.com of eating rather than another food porn
site. But, yes, in the near term more emphasis on social, food porn, etc is
prob the way to go

~~~
hugh3
There's already a _lot_ of calorie-counting apps out there if that's what
somebody is interested in. dailyburn.com, for instance, is pretty good. It's
also a _lot_ of work to replicate one of these since you'll need to enter a
huge database of possible foods.

The problem with them is that counting calories is too damn much work, so
adding an _extra_ step, where you take a photo of your food and _then_ count
the calories in it, doesn't seem like a huge gain. On the other hand, I
suppose if you had photos of everything you'd eaten you could more easily
count the calories only once every couple of days.

Still, I think you'll need to decide between "food porn" and "healthy eating"
rather than try both, since they're pretty much opposed.

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prometheus2002
First off, have you measured the time it takes to load your site? It seems
awfully slow to me (maybe it's the HN posting that's slowing it down) and
could be a reason people are not spending more time on the site.

Before you change your vision, have you considered reducing the friction to
use the site? Having to email photos and put in the name of the restaurant is
cumbersome compared to opening a phone app and taking a picture that
automatically gets posted to the site with your location from the phone's gps.

What sets this site apart from the other food photo based sites?

~~~
shuleatt
We're definitely aware that site is uuuber slow. Because we're 100%
bootstrapped (and not generating revenue) we recently scaled down from Engine
Yard to a small instance on Slicehost. We figured we'd cut our costs while
deciding what to do. EY was about $240/mth but 10x faster

------
hkuo
Allow me to offer you an idea:

When I go to Yelp to search for a restaurant, the filters I have available are
type of restaurant, proximity, rating and price. My next step is to either
sort by those filters, or individually click a restaurant. Looking at an
individual restaurant, my options for consideration are photos of the
restaurant, consisting of either interior/exterior or images of the food, and
user reviews. The user reviews consist of reviews about the service,
atmosphere and food, but I have to chug through each review to get this type
of specific information. And with a task of choosing a restaurant and having
to repeat these sets of actions is immensely tedious.

What's missing?

A way to discover restaurants near me that I can discover by their actual
dishes. The user flow would be this -> I'm in the mood for a burger. Show me
restaurants that serve burgers. I get a range of places from diners to more
high-end to delis and more, but instead if getting a list of joints, I get a
sortable grid of user's burger photos from places near me. Then, all I need to
do is say, that burger is the one I want and, barring other misc info such as
price or needing reservations and what not, I will go there and get the burger
that I saw with my own eyes.

The advantage you will have over Yelp is that While Yelp provides a way to
discover restaurants by very general filters, you will provide a way to
directly discover restaurants by the actual individual dishes.

As a side note, think about when you go to a restaurant and get a menu that
has pictures. It gives so much more reference to choosing a dish, because the
mystery is taken out of the equation. Your service would do exactly this.
Remove the mystery of what you're going to a restaurant for.

Also, while you can see some food items on Yelp in the individual restaurant
pages, #1 they come with no context and #2 I can only access these photos on
these individual pages which is tedious.

There you have it.

~~~
hkuo
Just want to add that of course, you'd be able to integrate food ratings,
friending, favoriting, etc etc etc all that standard social stuff, but IMO, in
order for this to be successful, you should consider boiling it down to the
absolute simplest of functions and tasks to minimize user friction.

So with the above idea, I would recommend the user need only simply 3 things:
1) photo 2) restaurant 3) whether they liked it or not and an optional 4)
description.

If it's an iPhone app then you automatically pull geolocation, but if it's
through email, I'm not sure how this would be done and you'd have to explore
what you can do.

------
shib71
You're focusing too much on what your users aren't doing. Find out what they
are doing and retarget the app based on that.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Precisely. If you could so easily change your users' behavior to suit your
needs you would simply get them to pay you money for sitting at home playing
Halo:Reach. People pay money to companies that either solve their problems or
entertain them.

------
austinbryan
Emailed Eric something akin to the "Hunch for food" idea a while back.

How I roughly imagined it:

Scrap the calorie count. Unless you're at a fast food restaurant where it's
posted on the menu, people really are bad at guestimating these things.

Change the health ranking to a taste ranking, and have it be for specific
dishes at specific restaurants. While Foodspotting is sort of playing in that
space, they are just asking people to submit pics of stuff they like, sans
rating. While it's great to know what people like, I also want to know what to
avoid. And it's much harder to sort through comments than it is to glance at
numerical ratings.

Use case: I go to Corner Bistro for the first time. I do a search for Corner
Bistro on Eatly. I see that Eric has had the cheeseburger and that Mike has
had the chili and fries. With ratings added, I see Eric gave the burger a 9,
but Mike gave the chili a 5, so I'm going with the burger.

In the same vein, using tags and descriptions, aggregate photos and average
scores for menu items at restaurants. So I look up Corner Bistro, and I'm
presented with a photo (the top ranked photo?) and average taste rank for each
item on the menu. It's the Waffle House of Menupages [and I just created a new
vertical].

And, yes, eventually it could suggest restaurants and dishes based on my
activity and that of friends.

Obviously need to make the entry process as frictionless as possible. Few
different thoughts there:

1) Expand current email capabilities, a la Posterous. Use special characters
to note the restaurant name, add tags, rate the item, etc. 2) Automate and
outsource: map EXIF data to restaurants (imagine you guys could find a
database like that somewhere...), superusers for aggregating and tagging, etc.
3) And has been mentioned, iPhone app that makes it all pretty and easy

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icey
With regards to encouraging users to contribute photos: Have you thought about
creating a few short blog posts about good ways to photograph food? Things
like lighting, angles, how to try to take a decent picture using a smartphone,
etc?

Food is pretty hard to photograph well, we tend to have overly high standards
for what a good food photo looks like because of all the food porn around
these days. Just like regular porn, the real thing is going to look a little
different. If your users hate the pictures they're getting when they take
pictures of their food, they're never going to upload them. They'll probably
give up completely after a couple of attempts.

~~~
shuleatt
Well version 1 was really not meant to be about the quality of photos (i.e.
food porn), but if we do move in this direction it's a great suggestion

~~~
icey
Ah, my point was just that if the users don't like the photos they take,
they're not going to upload them.

~~~
EGF
To reinforce this point, we did not have core competency to build an iPhone
app and wanted to keep the project bootstrapped. Given the feedback here it
seems an app would in fact make a big difference.

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wesleyverhoeve
Ideas, some already mentioned:

\- Android/iPhone app indeed seems like a must, maybe not even so much for
ease (tho that would help), but for branding of Eat.ly as a legit product in
the consumer's eyes.

\- I wouldn't be into the health aspect personally, but I would be into the
food porn aspect. It seems too complicated guessing calories etc. BUT maybe
you can have two "modes". Turn on "Food Porn" and that is what you get, switch
to "Health Porn" and that's what you get. I probably would peek at both.

\- This is probably not doable, but if you could integrate menus (like
menupages) and calorie counts from restaurants, people could take the picture,
pick the food (like on foursquare you pick the venue) and post. Food numbers
would come along.

\- Single player mode would work better in health mode than food porn mode.
You could have numbers to strive for, but then why would you post pictures
really? You could just post food.

\- Multi player mode could work for sexiest looking food, or for "I'd Eat
That!" points. Maybe unlock a badge swarm style.

\- Not to mix day job with side project, but it could be pretty sweet to
integrate the Eat.ly app (if there will be one) with a "post to foursquare"
option so that if you check in your foursquare status can have an eat.ly link
to a picture.

------
TamDenholm
As many others have said, iPhone app definitely. This will make the site more
casual.

For the "pivot" i'd perhaps suggest trying to get people to document recipes
with multiple pictures, this lets you target the more hard core user. Theres
an excellent blog that i love reading that gives a good example of what im
describing: <http://smittenkitchen.com/>

~~~
evbart
I like the recipe ideas, there's not a lot of good recipe content out there,
and photos are key

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YuriNiyazov
Man, I saw you guys present at the Quantified Self Meetup in NY (either late
last year or early this year) and I thought, man these guys have a great idea,
and are waaaay ahead of my "track your daily activities" project. Sorry it
didn't take off!

~~~
shuleatt
Awesome! That was great fun night. We've tried to hold true to our roots with
quantified self/personal tracking. However, most feedback (here and from
friends) suggests we pivot away from this

~~~
YuriNiyazov
There's something really strange about personal tracking - it seems like such
a good idea, full of great potential for people, and yet the same problem
happens over and over again - people start using it, fall off and never pick
up.

------
jasonz
What about a leaderboard or rankings for popular dishes. Users "vote" by
taking pics of delicious food. Restaurants would be more likely to promote the
site - "Eat.ly votes our cheesesteak best on the East Coast".

You could also run contests for users - each week a different dish. Submit the
most beautiful salad, win a prize.

Finally, promoting the site through restaurant weeks might work out well.
There are 120+ restaurants participating in Philly's restaurant week right
now. Best photo wins another meal.

~~~
EGF
This is a great idea. The problem with leaderboards and points is a network
effect that is not currently there yet. Its a chicken or the egg problem that
exists, and we tried to get something out that didn't require mass
participation but rather had a strong single player game model. Now that we
have some scale (tiny!) this may be a good thing to try

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ebiester
Why _wouldn't_ you have an iPhone app? It would make sending the pictures much
easier. It's a small revenue stream, but it is one.

~~~
ebiester
Also, why not pivot into the diet/accountability market? It seems a bit
skeezy, but people might pay for it.

~~~
shuleatt
It's possible. One thing we looked at was working with personal trainers, or
programs like weight watchers. Another variation was to use mechanical turk to
'guesstimate' calorie counts and charge as a premium service

------
fleitz
What is the objective of the pivot? Cash? Users? Pictures? Something else?

~~~
benatkin
Sounds to me like they're startup enthusiasts, and want eat.ly to get bigger
and better without sacrificing the stability they have right now, with their
full-time jobs.

In other comments, people are saying the iPhone app is important. I think they
already know this, and what would be more interesting to them is any shortcuts
they could take to build their iPhone app.

I think they ought to find an iPhone developer who has developed an app
similar to what would be needed for eat.ly, and is in a similar position where
they are enthusiastic about startups but not doing it full-time.

~~~
fleitz
As far as shortcuts I'd recommend doing the "app" as a jqtouch view of their
rails? app. That should work for the vast majority of users and avoid the
whole outlay for the app store. They could also look at phonegap. It's far
better to figure out down the line that you need a full blown app than to
figure out that your app could have been done in HTML. iPhone is a pretty big
learning curve.

