looking for feedback for an app idea

[holleroutsg]

thinking of building an app.. i posted on the edmw forum then i found this section clearly a noob

anyway the idea is to encourage customers to make recommendations to by paying them. consider the following scenario:

you eat at a restaurant and you like it enough to gladly recommend it to anyone. would you be more likely (put in more effort etc) to make the recommendation if now the restaurant says they will pay you $5 for every new customer you bring in?

would appreciate any feedback!

actually i made a survey too : surveymonkey.com/s/DKX2Q96
if you are free and want to read more of how i envision it to work haha

 

[davidktw]

thinking of building an app.. i posted on the edmw forum then i found this section clearly a noob

anyway the idea is to encourage customers to make recommendations to by paying them. consider the following scenario:

you eat at a restaurant and you like it enough to gladly recommend it to anyone. would you be more likely (put in more effort etc) to make the recommendation if now the restaurant says they will pay you $5 for every new customer you bring in?

would appreciate any feedback!

actually i made a survey too : surveymonkey.com/s/DKX2Q96
if you are free and want to read more of how i envision it to work haha

Your point (5) could be an issue for some people depends on how well they know the friend who recommend the restaurant to them, whether it's for the sake of freebies or they trust the friend's judgement.

I don't know about how "greedy" people can be over cheapskate tokens like these, they never worked on me in vouchers or coupons or what. If it is good and I trust it is good, I take a stab at it even without the freebies to benefit others or myself.

For me, I don't bother if i'm paid at all to recommend a place of good delicacies. It's just for the benefit of the person I share with, not because I want to earn something from it. No doubt it will have some marketing effect, but I feel it does not have sufficient velocity and impact to sustain. If the food sucks or doesn't meet the customers' expectations, I highly doubt giving them money will get sufficient attractions to buy more people in. On the other hand, the side effect is the restaurant may in the process suffer from bad publicities where people think customers' are bribed to market for the restaurants. Once you get a few cases of these negative impacts and the lousy restaurants(definitely exists) pull away, even the good restaurants will not want such software since it can potentially turn onto them. You see food nice or not is subjective, and some food are just novelties.

I don't see how the business model may work well. This model has been rather common among ecommerce online shops, and I don't think it works well for something of the food nature since in comparison, the recommendation for online biz works not because the product is good, but rather for the reduction of the product price.

 

[natnai]

thinking of building an app.. i posted on the edmw forum then i found this section clearly a noob

anyway the idea is to encourage customers to make recommendations to by paying them. consider the following scenario:

you eat at a restaurant and you like it enough to gladly recommend it to anyone. would you be more likely (put in more effort etc) to make the recommendation if now the restaurant says they will pay you $5 for every new customer you bring in?

would appreciate any feedback!

actually i made a survey too : surveymonkey.com/s/DKX2Q96
if you are free and want to read more of how i envision it to work haha

Seems like this would be more appropriately posted elsewhere. Anyway I think you should consider scalability. Restaurants already operate on notoriously thin margins. They're squeezed now by other companies like Groupon, FoodPanda etc. So I would suggest doing some projections - 3 and 5 year.

 

[KnightNiwrem]

Unless you are asking for help to make the software, itself, I doubt the thread is really relevant here.

That aside, I agree with david. This is a perversion of the recommendations model. Good food will naturally receive recommendations. Recommendation apps simply facilitate this to a wider audience - that is the value added to the community.

Throwing money without much forethought simply decreases the credibility of the recommendations, itself. You cannot just throw money at an issue and hope it goes away.

I would recommend you to put more thought into defining the exact problem you are trying to solve, and how your approach can solve such a problem in a sustainable and scalable manner.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[holleroutsg]

ahhh ok thanks for the feedback! no la i already have someone building it for me, it should be rolled out in June. just looking for feedback here really.

anyway yes i agree with david on coupons/discount, i don't use them myself too. it's the reason why i think this concept will work actually. for me personally almost all merchants (not just restaurant) i try is based on recommendation from friends, so i reckon if people are rewarded a token sum like $3 or $5 as a form of appreciation from the merchant, its customers will put in more effort, or simply remember to spread the word to his friends.

i imagine the discount is also nominal, maybe like 10% off above a certain spending? again, its meant for the merchant to thank the new customer for his first time patronage, as opposed to attracting the customer with the aggressively low prices (which has never really worked for me, and i imagine same for david)

anyhows, thanks for the input! i will make some tweaks to my offering and market positioning!

 

[KnightNiwrem]

ahhh ok thanks for the feedback! no la i already have someone building it for me, it should be rolled out in June. just looking for feedback here really.

In that case, you are not wrong to put the thread in EDMW...

anyway yes i agree with david on coupons/discount, i don't use them myself too. it's the reason why i think this concept will work actually.

Ok...

for me personally almost all merchants (not just restaurant) i try is based on recommendation from friends, so i reckon if people are rewarded a token sum like $3 or $5 as a form of appreciation from the merchant, its customers will put in more effort, or simply remember to spread the word to his friends.

i imagine the discount is also nominal, maybe like 10% off above a certain spending? again, its meant for the merchant to thank the new customer for his first time patronage, as opposed to attracting the customer with the aggressively low prices (which has never really worked for me, and i imagine same for david)

anyhows, thanks for the input! i will make some tweaks to my offering and market positioning!

You could try - definitely. Ultimately, there is no telling what will succeed and what will fail.