Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Selling local restaurant ads in app - pricing and trust

I have an idea for a local app. It is a guide to a specific (week-long, annual) conference with thousands of attendees. There’s a big need for the app and if I give it away I’m pretty sure it will be heavily used. I’m also sure the attendees will be pretty hungry twice a day (lunch and dinner). So I’d like to put local restaurant recommendations in there, and sell the slots. It seems like a good deal, a restaurant pays a fixed amount and gets a guaranteed full house.

As a complete business beginner, how do I approach the restaurants?

From my side, since I don’t have fixed costs, and this is still a hobby project, this doesn’t easily suggest a certain minimum price.

If I was a big company with good reputation, this point wouldn’t be such a problem.

By the way, I know there is also demand from the restaurant’s side - at previous such events, restaurants printed leaflets and made special offers for the conference guests. So I’m pretty sure the model is viable. It can be a side business but also scale (other events, cities). I’ve looked into the technical and legal aspects (e.g. business registration) and they should be OK. But the business-to-business “hustle” part still gives me trouble. Any advice on how to proceed and make a solid plan out of this?

(By the way, the location is Germany in case this makes a difference.)

Answer 9290

Determine your prices through bidding.

Visit local restaurants close to the event and ask them how much they would like to bid to have their restaurant featured in your app. Take the highest bidders until you fill up all the available slots.

You could offer a redeemable coupon in the ad (for, say, a free dessert, as an example) to prove the efficacy of your ads. Also, online ordering or delivery services are possibilities here too.

Answer 8375

I don’t know about Germany and I never visited there- Part I: You can develop an app for conferences that will be having login/signup with social app, info about conferences (weekly/daily/monthly), past conferences, future conferences, conclusion of each past conference, some information texture/image/video of conferences, like, comment, feedback, share, etc whatever you want to add in this

Benefits - you will have all the information of users and conferences and also you can manage these information for future user suggestions, etc and analyze all the things Concerns - you have to invest on server space, maintenance and management need to be take care.

Part II: in this you need to connect with conference venue’s nearby restaurants, add functionality for restaurants or advertisements (it can be books ads, restaurants ads, any other user’s benefits ads) and for this Step 1: create functionality in to the application that will have ads on landing screen of the app, one separate screen for discounts/offers, one screen for booking. So that after booking the specific advertising owner will be notified either with email or sms. You can also use a coupon system if user will direct contact with restaurant owner then they need to use this coupon number for discounts/offers Also create a screen where user can see history of bookings

Step 2: you need to contact advertisement owners to propose ads. You can do this in different ways a) you can use printouts/templates to send on the restaurants. This will contains the information about your application and its usage and clearly mentions about your thoughts of advertisements. b) send email with same way as mentioned in (a) c) contact one by one to the restaurant owners and convey them about your products and its future benefits and also tell them how restaurant’s will increase sell with this product even with simple advertisements. d) you can hire a 3rd party or person for same above steps (a), (b), (c)

now you can offer restaurant owners about your commission with each booking via user app. Initially you can offer restaurant owners a free advertisement and when your user will increase and your product will be on boom you can ask for paid advertisements as well.


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