

Show HN: Cibarsi.com - Create a website for your restaurant - sktrdie
http://www.cibarsi.com/

======
itsprofitbaron
I like the idea of a website builder for restaurants because the majority of
their websites suck - they're either flash OR they want you to download a PDF.
However, there are a lot of competitors in this space such as:

<http://www.happytables.com/> \- who are using a Wordpress Backend which I'm
pointing out because

<http://en.wordpress.com/restaurants/> \- Wordpress are offering designs for
Restaurants as well

<http://www.letseat.at/>

<http://www.bistrosquare.com/>

<http://www.restaurantors.com/>

However, I noticed that you actually launched on HN, 192 days ago -
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483473> \- which I'm assuming didn't
give you a massive uptick in the signups that you wanted which is why I have a
few suggestions:

First of all your website is a little bare, I would add more content etc onto
the site, with additional pages etc. Likewise, I'd also make it clearer that
you can click on the tablet etc to view the demo restaurant websites as well.

Have a look at your rivals (some of who I mentioned above) and you can see
that they all have a considerable amount of content on their websites which
encourage non-technical users (the ones with 100 toolbars on their browsers)
to trust them more than you.

Likewise, you don't really have what I call an “Effective SEO” plan in place
so you should start to get this going as quickly as possible - some of your
rivals have been covered by high authority websites as well meaning, you need
to get this started ASAP.

The “Effective SEO” plan goes back to the earlier point about lack of content
on your website as well, which is something you definitely need to add. Once
you have done that you need to focus on the following:

\- Advertising & Partnerships With Sites In Your Niche

\- Off-line Marketing (inc. word of mouth & traditional ads)

\- Bloggers & Other Webmasters Within AND Outside Your Niche

\- Online Communities e.g. Relevant Forums etc

\- Social Media Channels - Twitter, YouTube etc

\- Capture Future Leads (Newsletter Subscribers etc)

\- Effective Site Branding

~~~
pfui
Would you happen to know any such sites for NGOs?

~~~
itsprofitbaron
It depends on the niche as NGO's still provides a large scope.

For instance if your NGO's is a non-profit I would immediately go to:
<http://www.google.com/grants/> and apply for the $10,000 per month Adwords
Grant.

After that I would start by reaching out to sites listed in:
<http://nonprofit.alltop.com/> and
[http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/05/08/the-worlds-best-
non...](http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/05/08/the-worlds-best-non-profit-
blogs/) I would reach out to them with the intention of getting a post written
about the non-profit in them and/or offer them a guest post to post on their
websites.

------
kmfrk
This is great. I was in Paris a short while ago, and it was impossible to find
anything on the restaurants online. I assume things like location and contact
info will show up in Google results as well?

If I could make a suggestion, a checkbox for "vegetarian food" or "vegan food"
upon creation would be great, so I'll know right out of the gate whether I'll
be able to dine there.

~~~
mlent
Second this. Or allowing owners to denote certain menu items as
vegan/vegetarian/gluten-free, etc. So people with dietary restrictions can
quickly scan the menu. Looks great though!

------
sktrdie
Essentially it’s a site that allows small restaurant owners to build their own
site, without any technical skills. Think of it as about.me for restaurants.
The issue is that if you own a restaurant and you want to communicate and
interact with your online users, you need a website.

But the whole “building a website” scenario sucks. You’re stuck with having to
contact professionals to build it, and you end up spending thousands of euros
in the process. You end up with something that you basically have no control
of, and every time you want to make specific changes to your menu or anything
else, you have to waste time and energy to contact your “webmaster”.

Cibarsi gets rid of all this extra boilerplate and puts you in charge of
everything. With a very basic interface you can edit your menu, change the
color schema, add new images, etc. And in the end you get this very basic
webpage where you can show off your restaurant and make it visible to your
online clients.

~~~
labpdx
Any examples of what the sites could/would look like, without signing up?

~~~
rooshdi
Click on the phone and tablet image on the homepage to transfer to one of the
example sites.

~~~
armenarmen
might be good if you made that more clear on the site

------
sktrdie
Guys in your activation email replace 'attiva' with 'activate' in the url.
Sorry am away from computer and can't push code changes right now. Yuk has to
happen

------
epa

        "Error
        Over Quota
        This application is temporarily over its serving quota.   Please try again later. "
    

Well then.

~~~
sktrdie
My quota is finally reset. Sorry about that! Didn't expect to get HNed :-)

------
charlieirish
Looks great for restaurant owners who need a quick site. Well done for
launching.

One of your competitors will be <http://www.happytables.com/> who are doing an
amazing job with a Wordpress backend.

~~~
noeltock
Thanks for the mention Charlie, we've just done a huge iteration so we're
really excited to release the final bits there. Cheers!

------
orangethirty
My research shows that businesses, such as restaurants, are mostly focusing on
social networks for their online presence. Reasons are obvious: direct
interaction with regional client base, targeted advertising, free business
page _with_ photo gallery, and comments/likes, and other minor stuff. I do t
see how services like these can compete with that. Due to how they always end
up having social widgets integrated into it. For $10 a month (which is
$120/year), the owner can simply buy targeted advertising and get real
tangible results.

~~~
arbuge
I think restaurants would be ok with just $10/mo for a website. Most
restaurant owners aren't too web savvy but I doubt they have a social-media-
only policy when it comes to web presence. How you reach restaurant owners at
scale is the hard part of this business. Same for any idea targeting local
businesses.

~~~
orangethirty
Reaching SMB owners at scale is not reay an issue. Has never been. Problem is
most startups only care about online marketing. Which in this case, is not the
right choice. Offline is the magic bullet here.

Plus $10 may not seem a lot, but a Facebook page is $0. It also allows them to
directly market to their niche. Try and achieve that with a stand alone
website.

And next to the HN crowd rest. owners might not seem tech savy. But they can
sure see the value in marketing where their customers spend about an hour of
their lives every day. They will never get that kind of attention on a stand
alone website. Plus you would be surprised how knowledgeable people in the
restaurant business are when it comes to tech. I just had someone not long ago
ask me for a POS system _with_ Facebook integration.

------
dougk16
Great idea. The website is a little bare, so I don't have a great feel for
_how_ you're solving the problem, but it's a problem that definitely needs
solving, so at the least you've got step 1 down. :)

One minor pain point for me with many restaurant websites (maybe you're
addressing this already), is I look at the menu, decide what I want, and then
I have to hunt down the telephone number. I guess it's never a deal breaker
for me, but it's annoying. The telephone number should somehow be within clear
reach at all times.

------
thom
This is a great idea, and I hadn't heard of any of the competitors others have
pointed out (including UK-built happytables). It seems like penetration of
these services isn't great yet, because I rarely come across a restaurant
website that isn't terrible - PDF menus, contact details and little else.
Hopefully that's a sign that this is a huge untapped market, and not that
websites don't make much difference to restaurants' livelihoods.

~~~
orangethirty
It's not an untapped market. Facebook owns it.

------
jelder
Though I want to like the idea (restaurant websites are incredibly broken as a
species), your onboarding flow is really messed up. The confirmation email was
in italian, though everything else up to that point had been english. The
confirmation link (<http://www.cibarsi.com/attiva?token=gVngeWcA>) results in
an error page.

~~~
wallzz
got an error page too , my confirmatin link is
<http://www.cibarsi.com/attiva?token=s1d4dkZy>

~~~
sktrdie
Yeah sorry about that. You can just login with your credentials, I disabled
confirmation for now. I was getting HNed I guess.

------
arbuge
How do you plan to get the word out to restaurant owners? Businesses targeting
local scare me - they seem hard to scale... You need to find 1,000 local
business customers to get a steady income of $10k/mo. Somewhat daunting.

------
davidgolub1
There's also appetas.com

