eclipse31

"likely doesn't benefit anyone other than Google"!!

Hey, thanks for getting back to me and taking a look.

Newtown and Johnny's Diner were just sample names I came up with. If you go to the homepage, you'll see links to area searches and the 3 most recent;y added restaurants. I didn't want to put anything specific, I guess I probably should have!

Thanks alot for this very detailed response. That's interesting about Google's war with aggregators but makes total sense now that you say it.

I do plan on integrating opentable, that'll be the next feature I add, if I stick with it. It's pretty much a labour of love at this stage, HN has convinced me I'm fighting a VERY uphill battle.

Restaurant management, along with freemium services on the site, was where I was hoping to make money eventually. Sadly, as you and others have pointed out, restaurants live on the breadline, so I think I picked a bad market!

In terms of SEO, think I posted the easy wins I did on another comment. "newtown" was just an example of a made up place for illustration purposes in the original post. That's cool that I'm in position 16 for Rathmines, I was down in the 50s last time I checked (Rathmines is a cool area with plenty of restaurants).

Nice suggestion, thanks. Means I could pivot but still using my existing dataset

For something like "newtown restaurants" I hwas hoping the search results page for that would rank, something like menucosm.com /restaurants/newtown-123 . On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.

The reason I said the Johnny's Diner page doesn't show the value is because t;s the area search that's most useful. I have added links to the area search from the Johnny's Diner page, and that might be why I'm slowly seeing this upturn in traffic from 350 to 500 (the dates tie in with when I released the code)

Initially I was targeting users, eyeballs on the site. If I could get a few 1000 a month, my plan then was to approach investors, saying "I've got this many people using the site, this is how I plan to make money". So, I have 0 revenue and only 500 monthly visitors, they're the only figures I have right now!

Thanks :-) I've learned loads developing the site, so it hasn't been a total waste.

Yeah, so freemium services to the restaurants was one of my ideas of making money. However, as you've pointed out, restaurants "just don't like to spend money where it isn't absolutely necessary", which is an interesting and valid point.

Yeah, it was bad restaurant websites, with PDF menus, that inspired me to build the site.

Thanks for this. The main use case is "Hungry people looking for a place to eat" when they know where they want to go, or near their current location if on mobile. I guess the market's too saturated for something so generic now. As you say, I should really "pick a specific problem", specific being the key word.

Thanks again

OMG, this is an amazing idea! Thank you so much. Something like this would get me the inbound links I need. It might involve some sort of a pivot, but definitely worth investigating.

I do have one unique feature in that the reviews are linked to proper professional critic's reviews in the natioanl newspapers, rather than anonymous commenters.

To be fair also, I have put in a signficiant amount of work, adding all that content for 500+ restaurants, their menus, reviews.

I also do have a monetization strategy but was trying to get eyeballs on the site first.

Yeah it was when I noticed that TripAdvisor listings for a given restaurant were featuring higher than the restaurant's ACTUAL webpage, that I thought I might be too late.

However, individual restaurant listings aren't my priority for traffic, it's the area listings. However, I now feel aiming for terms like "blackrock restaurants" was alsways going to be tough, due to it being quite generic

Cool, thanks so much for the encouragement.

In terms of functionality, yes, there's LOTS more I could build for sure, both from the regular user and the restaurant owner sides. I was trying to keep it quite minimal, but now that you point it out, it's obvious the site needs to be more engaging.

TBH, I originally thought SEO would be enough to get some eyeballs, but as you point out, that's totally not the case! I tried contacting a few local food blogs, but none of them ever got back to me. Other than that, I've just told literally everyone I know and tried using Twitter, by tweeting restaurants as I add them, in the hope they would retweet to their followers. I've thought of putting it on Reddit/r/Dublin, as a sponsored ad. I never looked into backlink building, good suggestion. In short though, I guess I do need to try harder :-) Thanks.

I was curious to see if anyone thought the upswing could be promising!

The site's https://www.menucosm.com since you asked!

Ah ok, sorry to hear that. With such a small development team, it sounds like it could be hard to move into management. However, this should also present opportunities: if you see something that needs to be done and no one's dealing with it, do it yourself, accept the responsibility and try and make sure some one notices that you've gone to that effort (or ideally, point out the fact that you're going to do this to whoever you report to).

I'm in a similar position at the moment. Basically what you want to do is ask for more responsibility from your PM, specifically to do work they'd normally do. Over time, that work will become part of your responsibilities. As you gain more confidence from doing those tasks, and as your team begins to recognize you moving away from programming and taking on more leadership, you'll put yourself in a good position to manage a sub-team on a small project. If you can pull that off, you can build on that for a bigger project/promotion to PM/SDM.

For example, we work in an Agile environment, so I've started running some of the 'Agile ceremonies', such as story refinement, estimation etc. From there my plan is to try and fully manage a sub team for a smaller project, as mentioned above. On top of this, I've arranged to go on a Project Management course in a few months. Doing all this should put me in a good position for a PM/SDM role.

Hope this helps and good luck!

When I read the title originally, it reminded me of when Microsoft wanted MSN to replace the Internet, seemed like the exact same scenario.