First Day as Yelp on Steroids

After pivoting into a feedback system for restaurants and other service based industries, our goal was simple: Increase the number of people giving feedback.

Currently a restaurant that is getting 4000 customers a month only has 139 reviews on google. Even though this restaurant has tried getting customer feedback through QR codes on the bill or even handing a feedback form at the end of each meal, their feedback rate was less than 5%.

We believe this is because of 2 reasons

1. With no incentive, it’s a relatively difficult process. With the QR method customers need to take our their phone, scan the QR, answer 3–7 questions, and then submit. The barrier to entry starts when scanning the QR itself. Without any incentive to vote, taking out a phone and scanning the QR seems like too much work.
2. Too many questions. Even with the physical feedback system, customers often leave it unanswered or fill it out randomly because there are so many questions on the sheet/tablet. There is no need for a restaurant to get all its feedback from one customer. The restaurant is not going to change day by day. A more efficient way is to get feedback on one aspect of the restaurant from a single day’s worth of customers and change the “aspect” for feedback every day. (Ex: Monday ask about ambiance, Tuesday ask about food, Wednesday ask about service, and repeat).

With this in mind, we designed a booth to collect ratings and a website to view the ratings in realtime.

By asking about only Ambiance, Food, and Service in a repeating cycle, we make it simpler for customers to share their opinion, give structure to how each restaurant is rated, and give owners realtime data on how customers are feeling about the core aspects of the restaurant.

Once we shifted our focus to being a customer feedback platform, there was quite a bit of work needed to make our MVP.

• update the booth design to be a rating system (out of 5 stars)
• connect the wifi enabled ESP32 microcontroller to our buttons and led’s to write each review directly to our database
• develop a website so each store owner can track the reviews in realtime and see the average reviews in each category

The booth design and website were pretty easy to make as our team has experience with both jobs. However when working with the ESP32, we had to learn to use Arduino code and soldering. We ended up short circuiting an ESP32 module in the process 😂. That’s why it took a good 5 days to build the first MVP.

The web app and our first booth set up at at Creamery Cafe. (Since there is no power outlet available in Creamery, we setup a power-bank inside the booth to power the ESP32)

When we took this booth to Creamery Cafe (our first supporter), they loved the idea of getting feedback from their customer in a subtle way and being able to see this feedback in realtime. They pushed their customers to share their review on the way out. When giving our customer real value, they became advocates of our product and try motivating their restaurant’s customers to use our booth.

After the initial interest from Creamery, we talked to 3 more restaurants in the area. SMS, Burmy Foods, and English Food Bar.

SMS was interested in our product and was willing to buy us a Jio Dongle and power outlet to keep our booth online all the time. However since SMS and Creamery were our initial adopters during the public polling phase, we offered to setup completely for free while only accepting the power outlet.

With adopters for our free model, I wanted to see if any restaurant would be willing to pay for our booth. Thats when we went to Burmy Foods; they were interested in the booth, were willing to pay Rs 1000 to set it up, but they were very cautious about any monthly fee’s. Once we assured there were no monthly fee’s they accepted to setup our booth in their restaurant.

We’re still waiting on word back from English Food Bar.

Overall, we learned the restaurants owners want our product to get reviews from ALL their customers. But we still don’t know how the customers are going to vote and what issue’s we’ll face in with these 3 restaurants. Until then we won’t expand to more locations. The first milestone is to get consistent ratings from customers of restaurants and do it without any major bugs.

I’ll see you in the next update 👨🏽‍🦰