
Ask HN: How should we go about marketing our app? - ShinyCyril
So I&#x27;m not looking to be spoon-fed an entire marketing strategy - we are doing lots of reading on the topic at the moment. Rather, after having worked on the app so long we&#x27;ve lost a certain sense of clarity, and would appreciate some fresh eyes and outside opinions.<p>The app itself (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getchowderapp.com) is a collaborative restaurant finder, and came about after many frustrating incidents trying to decide where to eat with my girlfriend (usually something along the lines of &quot;What do you want to eat?&quot; – I don&#x27;t mind – &quot;Do you want pizza?&quot; – No – &quot;How about seafood?&quot; – No – &quot;Then pick somewhere!!&quot;). A friend and I had some fun developing an app to try and ease the friction of making food decisions when out in a group. It&#x27;s a little like Tinder for food, only you&#x27;re matching restaurants, not people, with your friends.<p>When we initially did our market research, we were aiming solely at indecisive couples who had troubles picking places to eat because they were overwhelmed with options, but later realised that there was a much wider audience and shifted our focus to groups of friends. However, while we&#x27;ve had plenty of people respond with &quot;Huh, neat idea&quot; when we pitched it as an app for groups, I feel like it resonates much more strongly with people when pitched as an app to &#x27;help couples decide where to eat&#x27;. When pitched as the latter, we got responses where people explicitly mentioned having this problem with their SOs, as opposed to the former where it was maybe more like &#x27;Cool idea, I could see people using this&#x27;.<p>Given our incredibly limited budget and lack of funding, I&#x27;m beginning to think it might make more sense to focus on couples first and expand from there. I&#x27;d be very interested in hearing other people&#x27;s thoughts!<p>Ultimately we&#x27;re both just looking forward to the opportunity to launch something in the first place - the experience gained thus far has been very beneficial, and we&#x27;ve had a blast developing it.<p>Many thanks in advance.
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alain94040
I have been watching the app/food space for many years. The idea you describe
has been tried many times over.

It's one of those problems that everyone faces one evening, but the hassle of
using an app is usually higher than actually having a 2-minute conversation
about where to go.

That being said, you never know what will work, so don't give up just because
of random Internet advice.

It looks like your app doesn't need to have network effects to be useful.
That's a good thing. So you'd be fine with even 10 people using this every
week. That would be a sign that your app is useful. Once you reach that stage,
you can focus on scaling. But just even getting 10 couples to use this weekly
is a tough challenge. Do you use it? Does any of your friends actually use it?

Looking at your website, if you are disappointed by the conversion rate,
target a smaller niche first and see if the conversions increase. Right now it
sounds like a generic "restaurant recommendation". The couples angle is not
there. You go with more punchy headlines: "no more arguing Friday night about
where to take your SO".

Bottom line: go from 0 to 10 users by sheer force of persuasion. Then come
back here and we can chat some more :-)

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Ryel
I don't think the Tinder model and/or Tinder UI is a good fit for your case.

I'm hesitant to "like" a restaurant suggestion because if I was to match, then
I'm stuck going to that restaurant for dinner when there is possibly a better
match that just had yet to be suggested to me. The original Tinder model works
because there is no risk of being locked-in (lol).

That being said, I think this is a great idea and IMO your initial use-case
and test users should be startups trying to decide what to order the team on
Seamless. Print out some flyers that say "Team can't decide what to order for
lunch?" and post them around co-working spaces.

If I was building this app my first iteration would have been to show the
users a list of the top 10 nearby restaurants weighted by stars on yelp and
filtered by price/distance. Let them give a 1-5 thumbs-up rating of as many
restaurants on that list as they want and total up the number of upvotes for
each option.

Goodluck!

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brudgers
Is anyone using it right now?

If so, what are their pain points and how are they being addressed?

If not, then getting one user is more important than a marketing strategy, and
harder. People using the app validates the beliefs:

    
    
      1. the app solves an actual problem
    
      2. there might be a profitable product
    

Most importantly, it provides feedback to iterate upon and word of mouth
advertising.

Good luck.

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ShinyCyril
Thanks for your feedback. Both myself and my girlfriend, and my business
partner and his girlfriend use the app regularly. Occasionally we use it with
family too. We launched a beta recently and got some users, but didn't get
much engagement - I think partially because we pitched it for groups of
friends.

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brudgers
Why don't groups of friends have a high level of engagement?

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ShinyCyril
The app requires each person of the group to have the app. Like messaging
apps, no-one will use it unless all of their friends use it too. We're
currently implementing a 'hot-seat' feature to mitigate this and make it even
easier for couples to use.

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montbonnot
If I were you I'd switch the main focus. I use iMessage to chat about where to
eat. If we're in a place we don't really know then yelp is my to-go app. It
has more info that I need and it works well. In zero case I'd need to download
another app just to show me pictures of food or names of restaurants nearby.
Do you get that one? So since you already have everything, your app is out,
coded, showcase-able, etc. "All" you need to do is to tweak the use case a
little bit in order to make it essential for someone who's looking for a place
to eat. Bring value on top of what's out there. That's why an app with coupons
would go viral before a scheduling app for example. Make it a game where the
app picks everything for you based on people's tastes and in only one click
you can book a spot and pre-order a meal. All you have to do is to get to that
place and that's it. The app would be a personal assistant with an actual
first name and it would be smart enough to do all the research for you in
order to present a meal you and your girlfriend would like, different from
what you guys had previously. It would give you price details, what people
think about that meal and place, etc. Again, based on some settings/profile
you would have to setup at the beginning in the app. It would also learn about
where you went, liked and disliked and re-ajust the future choices. So your
new use case would be something like: "Hey Siri-for-restaurant, what should we
have today? I'm with Kate". "Hey Bob, how are you today? You guys should try
that pineapple fried rice chicken at the new place called the Hipster Asian-
fusion-Mexican Temple located on market and washington st. It would cost you
guys $40 with desert and a beer. Do you want me to book it for 2 at 1pm
today?". YES/NO. Done.

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joeld42
Facebook ads targeting mobile users sounds like the best place to start. Try a
bunch of mobile ad networks and see which work the best. 15-second video ads
tend to be a good way to drive installs on mobile.

Also try pitching food blogs and technology/lifestyle blogs to review. Write
up some stories like "My wife and I kept ordering gross pizza because we
couldn't decide where to eat -- here's how we saved our relationship!" Make
them entertaining and relatable, and offer them as content for food and
restaurant blogs. Find some quality food blogs or youtube foodies, offer to
pay for their dinner if they will use your app to decide where to go.

Find larger food/restaurant apps and sites, ideally ones that complement and
not compete with your concept, and look for ways to cross-promote. e.g. they
make a post or ad or something to drive users to your app, and in return you
put a prominent button on in your app for six months that says "View this in
BigFoodApp" and opens their product.

I like the approach suggested by the book "Traction", which boils down to try
a bunch of things a little bit to see which one works, then focus on the
channel that gets you the most return.

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jordansmith
FB/IG video ads have been doing very well for apps. You can target people in
relationships.

I would try a basic video that just is informative showing off your app.

I would also see If you could get a short video made that is somewhat humorous
involving a couple arguing over dinner and then using your app, it could have
potential.

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Eridrus
I'd love to have something that does a good job of recommending restaurants,
but this seems like a thin wrapper around yelp... which is what I already use
to solve this problem.

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HeyLaughingBoy
How do you plan to make money from it?

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ShinyCyril
Currently it costs us practically nothing to run, so we're just focused on
getting users.

Monetisation will come primarily from providing analytics to restaurants.
Because of the way the app works, we can go to a restaurant and give them info
like "x number of people were interested in going to your restaurant, but they
went across the road to your competitor instead". In addition to analytics, we
planned to do the usual promoted results and coupons etc.

~~~
AznHisoka
Think about the sheer number of users you'd need to have to make this useful
to a random restaurant in a random city (or even a popular one).

Now think about Foursquare and how even they have not been successful in
offering something similar to local companies.

I'd quit before I'd waste any time on this venture.

Unless you view this as a learning experience or side project.

~~~
ShinyCyril
You make a good point. I hadn't heard about Foursquare in a very long time, so
I had no idea that they were trying to do something similar to monetise it.

Like I said though, it costs us practically nothing to run and it's been a
great learning experience so far - I don't see any reason to give up just yet.

