

Show HN: Online Reputation Management for Restaurants - zachflower
http://bistro.is

======
joshribakoff
Wow, those colourful tiles are overpowering. Lost my focus immediately. You
should consider simplifying them, focus on key features and not too wacky of
colors, and more whitespace.

~~~
nairteashop
Seconded on the tiles. Maybe flip the current scheme? i.e. go white/light gray
on the tile backgrounds, and use color on the icons themselves?

Looks good otherwise, and seems like a really useful service.

------
Sujan
Not good:

> Unable to connect to MongoDB: connecting to
> mongodb://web:###plaintextpassword###@dawson.mongohq.com:10036/bistro_production
> failed: Operation now in progress

Hmm, as the site is down I don't even know how to contact them. Hope they'll
see it here very fast.

~~~
zachflower
Thanks for the notice, Sujan. I didn't realize the MongoDB library we are
using wasn't suppressing those types of errors out in production. Fortunately,
all the data stored there is just crawl data, as we are careful to silo
sensitive data.

------
rschmitty
Not a restaurateur, but I'd imagine they would be most interested in how you
handle negative reviews. Couldn't find info on how you guys handle that.

Is this more of an alert system on reviews being placed?

~~~
andystone
Right now, we notify the restaurant owner that a negative review has come in
and we encourage the owners to respond to any negative reviews (in a friendly
manner).

Having a family in the restaurant industry, I can say that most negative
reviews and rants can be diffused with a little discussion and an offer to
make it right. With Bistro, we just want to find every mention (from review
sites or even personal blogs) and just start that conversation.

------
peteretep
[http://bistro.is/img/bistro-review.jpg](http://bistro.is/img/bistro-
review.jpg) <\-- "this is a pretty good of your restaurant"

~~~
zachflower
Great catch! We fixed that early on in the live reviews, but clearly didn't
update the screenshot.

Thanks!

------
chrisbridgett
Out of interest, how easy would it be for you to adapt the system to manage
the reputation for hotels, for example?

Doesn't sound like too much work given that you've said the system works on
either web scraping or with API's of other review sites? Obviously you
wouldn't want to jeopardize Bistro in it's current format through generalizing
the platform for other "industries", but if done right, looks like a good
opportunity to me!

~~~
zachflower
It is surprisingly easy for us to rebrand into different industries. We did a
test with the golf course industry a little while ago and it only took a few
hours to go from idea to working product.

------
itsybitsycoder
In the top area, under "Location" I just see a comma. Also in the placeholder
("i.e., Monk's Cafe"), "i.e." should be "e.g."

~~~
zachflower
What is happening there is that we were able to get some geolocation data back
from your IP, but a standard "City, State" format isn't available (for
whatever reason).

That being said, you are absolutely right. It is very confusing. In the event
that happens in the future, we will leave that field blank so users (such as
yourself) can manually enter a location.

As for the "i.e." versus "e.g.," I was honestly not aware of the difference.
You've prompted me to Google it, and the results are super interesting! Thanks
for pointing it out! I'll make sure to get that updated.

------
nakovet
It detected correctly that I was in Toronto and then the search for
restaurants names would all return homonyms all across the world. =(

~~~
zachflower
We recently opted to open up the restaurant searching outside of the target
area to ensure we found the restaurant we were looking for (Google wasn't
always returning accurate matches within the city selected), however it sounds
like it is providing a confusing user experience.

Removing the city selection is something we've talked about, since it is less
necessary, but it sounds like something we should move forward with.

------
kahfei
Like the design :-) Not sure if other seeing this, but there is a tiny comma
near the closed button, screenshot here
[http://www.tiikoni.com/tis/view/?id=3590fd8](http://www.tiikoni.com/tis/view/?id=3590fd8)

~~~
zachflower
I think what is happening there is that we were able to get some geolocation
data back from your IP, but a standard City, State format isn't available (for
whatever reason).

You are right, though, that is very confusing. In the event that happens in
the future, we will need to leave that field blank so users (such as yourself)
can manually enter a location.

------
catilac
Really great idea. Attacking any segment of brick&mortar businesses with this
kind of product is a big opportunity.

I tried doing this before with SquidCube but it was a bit too broad, and
lacked the required focus to be compelling.

~~~
andystone
The focus was one of the main things we found to be a differentiator in this
business model. Down the road, we'd love to look in to a variety of customers,
but we know for a fact that restaurant owners alone could use this. Thanks for
the comments.

------
byoung2
_You can share positive reviews, favorite the best ones or even reply to
reviews on the original source._

For the reply, do you just link to the original site? Or do you let users
reply through your interface?

~~~
zachflower
For the current version, we link directly to the review on the original site,
however we are currently working on integrations with all of our review sites
to allow our users to reply directly through our interface.

------
fam
"Bistro was designed with Proxima Nova, Adelle & Coquette typefaces and
developed using Sublime Text 2 on a Mac."

What's the benefit of telling people that it's built with ST2?

~~~
andystone
I've always been a big fan of colophons in books and on websites—basically
telling people how the thing that you're looking at was created.

It isn't necessary to the end user, but it is fun to show to designers and
developers that we might want to work with.

~~~
markdown
If it isn't necessary for the end user, it shouldn't be on the site.

Put it in [http://humanstxt.org/](http://humanstxt.org/)

2c

------
vikp
I like the idea. The fact that your Twitter account has a ton of fake
followers is a bit shady, though.

------
lamby
Very nice. Do you have a background in restaurants or did you identify the
market?

~~~
zachflower
My co-founder's parents own a restaurant. Being the technical person of the
family, he has always been responsible for managing the restaurant's online
presence.

Checking and updating the large list of review sites and social networks took
more time than he had, so Bistro was originally created as a way for him to
keep a pulse on his family's restaurant's online reputation.

~~~
mjffjm
were you able to get any other early market or customer validation beyond your
co-founder's personal problem? Awesome concept!

~~~
andystone
I'm the co-founder with the family restaurant…

We showed it off to a number of marketing managers of local restaurants in
Boulder, CO and have since sold subscriptions to a number of restaurants in
the area. Since the launch, we've gone through a number of tweaks and actually
end up removing "features" fairly often. We know that restaurant owners are
busy, but we continue to understand what they care about and what information
we should drop to make their days easier.

------
Zakuzaa
How are you collecting the reviews? Web scraping?

~~~
zachflower
We aggregate all of our reviews and mentions through a combination of web
scraping, API integrations, and manual scraping.

~~~
Zakuzaa
Thanks for the response.

What was the thinking behind current pricing structure? I think they are
underpriced, but then again I know nothing about restaurant industry.

[Edit] Are you also doing sentimental analysis of mentions and reviews?

~~~
zachflower
Our pricing structure is the biggest point of debate among us, however we are
testing different models across a few different marketing platforms and will
stick with what performs the best in the long run.

As for sentiment analysis, we were performing a rudimentary analysis on all
non-rated mentions (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), however the algorithm we were
using was providing too many wrong sentiments, so we removed it for the time
being. We are currently evaluating new algorithms and APIs, and may bring it
back in if we can find one that can comfortably handle sarcasm (a favorite of
the review sites) and mentions with no sentiment attached to it (the phrase "I
am eating at <restaurant name>" is neither positive, nor negative).

------
Samuel_Michon
“© 2012.”

?

~~~
zachflower
Nice catch. Definitely a typo, we're only a few months old, but I'll have that
set dynamically from now on.

