
Ask HN: Best Way to Reach Local Business Owners? - jbarrec
Good morning HN,<p>I am in the early stages of researching a potential start up concept for local restaurant owners. What do you think is the best &#x2F; most efficient way of going about this? Ideally I would like to obtain email addresses and reach out so I can scale quicker than cold calling for example.<p>Any insight would be much appreciated!
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soneca
I am at the same stage at the same sector, though I am in Brazil. My startup
is a loyalty program for bars and restaurantes based on Facebook's checkin.

What I am doing for the last month is a kind of "door-to-door sales". At least
my product may benefit if my clients are geographically concentrated. So I
selected two neighborhoods with a lot of restaurants, then went door to door
asking for the owner just after lunch.

Local biz owners are usually at the business, so it is not hard to be
introduced to them by whatever employee you aproach first.

This won't give you scale, but I would strongly recommend you to follow PG's
advice: [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

Doing this not scalable door-to-door aproach you will learn a lot (I did), it
is a great form of customer discovery. And if you are able to acquire a few
customers on the same neighborhood, quoting the same PG's essay:

 _" Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow
market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot
before adding more logs."_

I actually could get in my hand a XLS with thousands of restaurant's emails,
but decided not to use until I get closer to product/market fit through this
door-to-door tactic.

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jbarrec
Thanks for the reply and link soneca. I will check it out right now! Is there
a rule of thumb regarding how many questions to stick to once you have the
local business owners attention? Do they tend to get annoyed after asking so
many questions?

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soneca
I came to them after I have the idea of the product. They will only pay
attention to you if you are offering something of value to them. Doesn't work
here the aproach "let's take a coffee and chat about your problems".

You don't have to have anything built, but you will pitch as your product is
functional and tested. So they will answer questions regarding your concrete
product, not an abstract idea.

If someone decide to buy, then you build what you promised. If not, you try to
learn why.

Do you mind if I asked what is your idea?

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yiggydyang
I would start with Yelp and Open Table. There must be conferences that
restauranteurs attend. People who either sell food (farmers markets, organic
specialty sellers), restaurant supplies, or POS systems would probably appeal
to restauranteurs as well so perhaps go talk to them.

You could probably start by just dropping by a number of them during the day
when they're not as busy (i.e. after lunch). If they like what you're building
I bet they could point you in the right direction towards other
restauranteurs.

Good luck!

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xgarland
Even the approach of sending cold emails may not be as effective, since plenty
of restaurants still don't leverage basic tools available for communication
and connection, including the internet.

As Yiggy said, try sourcing targets from Yelp and Open Table, then proceed to
catch someone who is willing to talk during low traffic hours.

Not sure if this strategy is the best, but just something to think about when
dealing with people in and around the service industry.

------
davj
Check out Radius.com

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soboleiv
Radius.com seems to be all about lead generation?

Plus they're kind of interviewing potential customers - I was rejected to get
access because I worked for not their target segment at a time.

