manifest23
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
We've (https://myaccio.com/) been running as a premium delivery service in Victoria, BC for a few years. Instead of taking a 25-30% discount from restaurants we were marking items up by 20%. We deliver mostly from the "good" restaurants who can't afford to take a 25-30% hit just to provide delivery. While this was turning into a good lifestyle business, delivering food when you don't control all the variables is extremely hard (and not exactly profitable at a small scale).
What we ended up making was "The Kitchen by Accio". It's high end delivery food made by extremely talented chefs. There are four concepts to choose from each with its own head chef. We launched just over 3 weeks ago and things are going pretty well so far. We still deliver from other restaurants but we've noticed that a growing population of our "regulars" are starting to just order from The Kitchen.
The premise behind our site is to help people find the best food in their city, not just the best restaurants. We know there have been different variations of this already, but we are making it more comprehensive. Every item on every menu is searchable. You can find exactly what you are craving and then take a look at photos, ratings and comments. From there you can go and check out what else the restaurant that serves that dish has to offer.
Our first revenue stream is “Time Sensitive Deals”. We are aiming to help restaurants fill their empty seats during off-peak hours (for example, 2-4PM on a Tuesday). Verified restaurant accounts can post a deal instantly to our site and mobile apps. They can set the times it’s valid between, their discount and any rules they might have (not valid on alcohol, 1 per table, etc). This is completely free for them. We make our money by charging our users to buy this deal. For example, a $5 savings would cost our user $0.99. A $10 savings would cost our user $1.99.
We developed ForkJoy in node.js with mongoDB. For search, we use elasticsearch. We will be launching in San Francisco in April with Portland and Seattle following soon after. We also hope to have our Android app in the marketplace close to our SF launch.
We would love to hear your comments, complaints and criticisms.
> No. They're welcome to have them back anytime they want. They could probably do it pretty forcibly if I refused to budge too (see Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft).