Damn, Startup’s are Hard
Alright it’s been 11 days since my last update. It’s been mixed with some frustration, a bit of happiness, and chaos.
The Frustration
With out 5-Star rating system, we kept getting lots of spam ratings. Customer’s would press every possible star in each interaction. Within a 4 second interval, we’d get data like 1 star, 1 star, 2 star, 5 star, 3 star, and 4 star. The restaurant owner’s told us most customers are standing at the booth and pressing all the buttons. After further observation, we realized there are 2 problems.
- The customer’s don’t know which side is 5 star and which side is 1 star. They are playing around with the buttons trying to figure that out.
- There is no connection between the number of stars and the experience they had at the restaurant.
To fix this, we removed the star rating system and redesigned the booth with options that connected our voter with their experience.
Once we made the switch to the new system, we saw in both of our locations that we were able to reduce spam by approximately 70%. People are able to connect the text with their experience, so they are being more honest and less abusive of the booths.
The Bit Happiness
We pitched to around 15 more restaurants and 3 of them agreed to set our feedback platform at their location. We were able to set up at 2 locations (English Food Bar and The Malabar) without any issues and saw the same level of spam control.
However the 3rd location(Momolicious) got skeptical once they saw the feedback platform and wanted something more descriptive. With this feedback, we went back to ask all our clients and the people who rejected us. They felt the same way. So we got to designing a way to keep the feedback system very easy to use while promoting customers to share more detailed opinions.
After some rounds of design, the simplest way was voice. We’d keep a microphone on the side of the booth where a customer can pick it up to speak their feedback. The recording would start when the mic was picked up and stop when it’s back in the holder.
Offering this type of detailed feedback would also make the restaurant owners more interested in looking through each day’s feedback. Unfortunately, testing the MVP for this has been delayed due to local supply issues for the mic module needed to build this.
The Chaos
I had to leave Coimbatore for my sister’s marriage. This was the first time I ran the operation remotely. After being the only person handling the ground work, it was hard to trust somebody else to run the operation.
I realized managing people is way harder than doing everything myself.
On the first day (when we tried setting up at Momolicious) I went into a micromanagement frenzy. I would call Jagad (our guy on the ground) every 20–30 minutes asking for updates and making sure he had everything ready to build, test, and setup. I ended up getting angry, and frustrated both at myself and Jagad.
Then once he got used to the flow, I was able to let go of the micromanagement and give the day-to-day to Jagad while maintaining conversations with the restaurants to find issues and plan the company’s next moves.
Our Next Move
Along with the voice feedback to get more descriptive opinions from our customers, we are going to make the question an LED display so the restaurants can control what they are getting feedback on. In place of “Ambience” or “Food” in the picture’s above will be the LED display.
By making the Voice Feedback and LED Question Display, we are trying to make the restaurants use our platform more actively. After-all, they are the one’s pushing our platform to their customers.
Once we get their full participation, we can figure out a way to structure this data and make it useful for the public.
