May 27, 2011 at 14:48Tasty there - eat and evaluate
I want to tell you about a small startup about restaurants. There Tasty - a guide to cafes and restaurants of Volgograd and Volzhsky . (Volzhsky, who does not know, is a satellite city of Volgograd). We ourselves visit restaurants and evaluate them.
The vast majority of restaurant sites (both Volgograd and Moscow) work on two principles:
1. A delicious description of the establishment, attractive photographs - everything is beautiful. The restaurant pays money for this information. You come and in fact everything is not as great as in the picture.
2. Description of the institution (short or detailed) + customer reviews. There are such cheating opinions that you wonder. One writes that he was almost sick after dinner, the other that it was the best restaurant he had ever visited. Self-praise and drain of competitors is booming.
There are also large restaurant portals where a lot of visitors leave opinions and they also form a rating, but they also wind up there. There is a Restaurant Criticism Poster writing a couple of paragraphs after visiting a restaurant. But Afisha does not go to Volgograd institutions, and we don’t have a large restaurant project with a rating.
Therefore our studiodecided to make a small project about the restaurants of Volgograd. The site grew out of notes on my personal blog. The principle of independence was taken as a basis. Reviewers go to a restaurant, eat, watch, evaluate, and write honest, honest feedback. Restaurants do not pay us money for the review. We consciously left web2.0, where opinion is formed by the crowd, towards expert opinion.
Another feature of our reviews is a large number of photos. The interior and all ordered dishes are photographed. The restaurant is evaluated according to 4 parameters:
cuisine (the most important parameter);
service;
interior;
atmosphere.
The site was made quickly - on the fuel framework, the template design.
The texts are not written by journalists, so they are not always smooth. We now have 4 reviewers. The author must understand the food and service, be able to take a picture of acceptable quality and correctly express their thoughts.
Not all establishments are allowed to take pictures. An idiotic, in my opinion, requirement. And the larger (better) the camera, the more noticeable it is. I have to take a picture covertly, sometimes even on the phone.
The influence of the human factor - one waiter serves poorly, the next day another - good. But, I think so: if you have 20 waiters and one of them is bad, then this is still the problem of the institution that they could not educate everyone. And, therefore, it was unlucky that we stumbled on just this and the rating for the service was reduced.
The cost of visiting restaurants. The project is not yet commercial; most of the money we spend is on visiting establishments. With monetization is still foggy. We definitely will not write custom reviews (although we have already suggested). To post banners on tamvkusno.ru restaurants that we scolded will not).
Plans to add the ability to write reviews to visitors. The main ones will still be expert reviews, but visitor reviews will not be redundant.
In the long-term plans to post reviews not only about cafe-restaurants, but also clubs, massage parlors, dance schools, etc.
How do you like the idea of the project? And how do you see its monetization (something more interesting than contextual and banner advertising - this is too obvious a proposal)?
The vast majority of restaurant sites (both Volgograd and Moscow) work on two principles:
1. A delicious description of the establishment, attractive photographs - everything is beautiful. The restaurant pays money for this information. You come and in fact everything is not as great as in the picture.
2. Description of the institution (short or detailed) + customer reviews. There are such cheating opinions that you wonder. One writes that he was almost sick after dinner, the other that it was the best restaurant he had ever visited. Self-praise and drain of competitors is booming.
There are also large restaurant portals where a lot of visitors leave opinions and they also form a rating, but they also wind up there. There is a Restaurant Criticism Poster writing a couple of paragraphs after visiting a restaurant. But Afisha does not go to Volgograd institutions, and we don’t have a large restaurant project with a rating.
Therefore our studiodecided to make a small project about the restaurants of Volgograd. The site grew out of notes on my personal blog. The principle of independence was taken as a basis. Reviewers go to a restaurant, eat, watch, evaluate, and write honest, honest feedback. Restaurants do not pay us money for the review. We consciously left web2.0, where opinion is formed by the crowd, towards expert opinion.
Another feature of our reviews is a large number of photos. The interior and all ordered dishes are photographed. The restaurant is evaluated according to 4 parameters:
cuisine (the most important parameter);
service;
interior;
atmosphere.
The site was made quickly - on the fuel framework, the template design.
Difficulties
The texts are not written by journalists, so they are not always smooth. We now have 4 reviewers. The author must understand the food and service, be able to take a picture of acceptable quality and correctly express their thoughts.
Not all establishments are allowed to take pictures. An idiotic, in my opinion, requirement. And the larger (better) the camera, the more noticeable it is. I have to take a picture covertly, sometimes even on the phone.
The influence of the human factor - one waiter serves poorly, the next day another - good. But, I think so: if you have 20 waiters and one of them is bad, then this is still the problem of the institution that they could not educate everyone. And, therefore, it was unlucky that we stumbled on just this and the rating for the service was reduced.
The cost of visiting restaurants. The project is not yet commercial; most of the money we spend is on visiting establishments. With monetization is still foggy. We definitely will not write custom reviews (although we have already suggested). To post banners on tamvkusno.ru restaurants that we scolded will not).
Plans
Plans to add the ability to write reviews to visitors. The main ones will still be expert reviews, but visitor reviews will not be redundant.
In the long-term plans to post reviews not only about cafe-restaurants, but also clubs, massage parlors, dance schools, etc.
How do you like the idea of the project? And how do you see its monetization (something more interesting than contextual and banner advertising - this is too obvious a proposal)?