Learning what works and what doesn’t
--
Launch, test, see, learn, adapt.
This is Part 5 of 6. You can pick up the story at the beginning here.
Now that we have 50 of the 100 cities open and over 1,000 restaurants showcased on the site, we started to have a real, living experiment in place where instead of guessing what we think might work, we could actually now see and know what worked — and what doesn’t.
There were three crucial lessons we learned by doing.
Let me go back a step.
When we designed the city page for onehundredtables.com the idea was to visually present the restaurants in the city in a way that the user could immediately see them all in one shot (as opposed to forcing the user as on some other sites to look at 4,352 restaurants in some city across 400 pages — of which they’ll never get to.
Our vision was, and is, one city, one page, see it all easily.
Also, on the city page of a matrix of 10 squares across by 10 squares down each square is sold on a first come, first choice basis. So if you’re the first restaurant in the city you have the first pick on any of the 100 squares on the city page.
Our thinking was that in the early stages of filling a city customers would select the first square first, then perhaps the second square on the top row, then perhaps the top row would fill out, then the four corners and so on until the whole city page is completed with restaurants.
Then as each city would fill up and say there’d be 95 sold spots with 5 left, then you’re into a situation of “do I do it or not?” — well of course you do it because if it was a no-brainer before, at this stage it’s really a no-brainer now to not be excluded from the collection of great places to eat in your city.
But even there what we learned is that at this stage some restaurants might think that they’re too late and “missed” the best spots as it were. While that’s not accurate, if that’s the perception then you gotta deal with that somehow.
Lesson No. 1:
What we found was that the first part of our thinking was correct, but we learned that when a city is say 30% full, it looked 70% empty and really the only way to get to the end of the city was to absolutely get the city to at least 90% full and the final 10% would take care of itself.
The second thing we learned had to do with Facebook and how we use Facebook to validate whether or not a restaurant would be accepted onto the platform.
If a restaurant has 250 Likes then the platform allows the restaurant to proceed, if not then the site will not allow the restaurant join.
During the application process, One Hundred Tables goes out to automatically do a check on the number of “Likes” the applying restaurant has. This takes about 1 second.
The idea here was to find a way to automate the process of admitting only good restaurants to the site. It worked (and works) great.
The thinking goes like this: if a restaurant has at least 250 people that are willing to say they like the restaurant, they must be doing something right. And the reality is most of the restaurants have far more than 250 Likes and usually well into the thousands, such as Canoe in Atlanta.
Lesson No. 2:
Technically Facebook used for this purpose works great but the one criticism that we consistently received was only really around this point — that 250 Likes simply wasn’t either enough or wasn’t really so hard to hit and didn’t necessarily mean the restaurant was “worthy”.
Fair enough. While the process works great, we realized that this was really the only thing about the whole site/platform that we were having to regularly “defend”.
We decided we would have to figure out a different way to handle this automated onboarding of great restaurants that wanted to have a profile on One Hundred Tables.
We’ll tell you what we did coming up.
What’s a URL worth?
When I originally registered the URL onehundredtables.com I also had the chance to registered 100Tables.com but I decided not to because I really preferred to go with the spelled out version of the name.
When we created the App “One Hundred Tables” was a bit too long so we went with 100Tables, which in the world of App actually is a great concise and to the point name.
So we decided we should probably go back and registered 100Tables.com but we discovered is was already taken in the meantime by someone else.
WTF?!@#
100Tables.com
Some guy had snagged that URL and sat on it. For a year!
He did nothing with it, but the problem was we didn’t have it.
As a sort of insurance on our end (or to at least beef things up), we went out and registered every other possible use of “100Tables” we thought useful.
After about a year we noticed that 100Tables.com was up for auction.
The day of the auction we were there ready to purchase it and we succeeded.
Lesson 3:
In retrospect I was stupid for not having originally registered that URL when I had the chance.
So kiddies, when you’re setting up your online business, make sure you register all the the URL’s you think you might need.
We dodged a bullet here because an online business called “One Hundred Tables” of course should also have the domain “100Tables” as that is exactly what rolls off your tongue when you say it. And also because certainly there would be a lot of first time users who would hear “100 Tables dot com” and perhaps naturally go to a place called 100Tables.com
Now that we had also that domain, we had a choice to make. Do we make it simply point to onehundredtables.com or do we do something more interesting with it?
We decided to make use of all of the new and good looking App city images and create a giant single page website that should somebody happen to go to 100Tables.com it would show them something nice and get them to the right place.
This is what we designed with a lazy load (go there if your curious).
And of course when you’re building a start up the adventures never end so wouldn’t you know it but OpenTable decided to run a nationwide restaurant showcase promotion called… ready?…. 100 Open Tables.
100OpenTables.com
When we first saw this we thought hmmm, either this is a giant coincidence or the folks and OpenTable might be looking for a way to move us down in online search.
What to do….?
We decided to play along, have some fun, and go with the David and Goliath playbook.
We got in the game on Twitter and we looked at this as an opportunity.
This went on for most of the OpenTable campaign and we learned a few great ways to run a national promotion and well as were introduced to some amazing restaurants.
Life in the startup lane.
Up next, Part 6 of 6 —” How to Up-Design your Website”.
