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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.