I think there are a few things here that cause this:
a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition that exists a million times over.
b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.
c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.
d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital, it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.
e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80% churn,not retention, fucking churn.
Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c) such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in a very cost efficient and systematic manner.
The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" + "phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing with all those Point Of Sale systems.
IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.
I help run a family restaurant with tight margins to deal with. With really small capital to budget, my father and uncle decided a POS system was not worth the money and commissioned me to build a usable system since I was the "tech guy" of the family.
I hacked something up using kiosk mode browser running off of locally-hosted PHP scripts saving to a MySQL database that backsup online nightly to Google Docs. It's an old computer and hacky system, but it works because of the ability to review data at night at home in the office via GDocs with pretty stats and keeps the family happy.
I'd devote more time to this and get a better MVP out the door except for extreme time commitments to said restaurant on the floor and in the back, and due to school commitments.
Like Retric said, you could make a killing with a web presence+POS on the floor+cloud saving features if you built a startup that showed how you could save time and money for restaurants and make things easier, while not charging for an arm and a leg. The market is filled with Geocities-era looking sites from spammish vendors all with their unique-as-a-snowflake proprietary file and data formats.
I help run a local dance and have been looking for a simple, small POS setup to help tally people (students, adults, seniors, and association members) through the door. Right now we put tick marks in a log book.
I was thinking about developing a jQuery / PHP / PostgreSQL system with nightly updates to Google Docs. Something that would run on a 5-year old laptop.
So true. The restaurant market is a tough nut to crack but if you manage to do it you will be very glad you stuck it out. I only disagree with e. Our churn (tripleseat.com) is less then 1%. If you provide value and have a good relationship restaurant people are very loyal and will stick with you in good times and bad. If your churn is bad try annual pricing at a discount. Restaurateurs love to negotiate and annual pricing at a discount is a win/win
From experience, this is a very high touch business with intense sales efforts to scale. One company that's in our backyard here in NYC has had success with a sales and channel model is SinglePlatform.
They are a bit under the radar but are solving these problems in realtime within a huge market.
After delivering pizza for a restaurant for two years, I finally convinced the owner that his free, Frontpage-generated site wasn't good enough, and got him to pay me to do a redesign. I learned a few things along the way.
1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.
2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.
3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.
4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.
In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.
Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.
How often do you go to restaurant websites vs. actual restaurants (not including Yelp or Google maps)? Truth is, they just don't matter. The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost. Also, a small business restaurant owner won't know how to operate a CMS. They just figured out email, remember? Worse, is that websites turn from beautiful assets to liabilities.
The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website. The kid builds it for $100, everything is great. Until the business owner needs to change store hours.
"What's that password that kid gave me again? What do I do with that password? He mentioned logging in somewhere... Now that kid has a job at Google or is doing a startup and doesn't have the time to mess with $10/hr type of work anymore. Crap, now all my patrons are expecting me to be closing later and I am turning them down. What a huge pain, I have to go find a new web designer."
The solution needs to be the anti-CMS. Something that's not as simple as email, but as FAMILIAR ... Email is simple, but it was a huge learning curve for that small business owner. And learning something else just as simple will be a huge pain.
"The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost."
The question I guess is why restaurant owners spend money having flash monstrosities built when most users -- especially those on mobile devices, which is a big use-case for restaurant websites -- would rather see plain-jane HTML with an address, phone number, and menu.
"The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website."
I suspect this is closer to the truth. The restaurant owner demographic probably runs in the same circles as the dilettante designer demographic, so the site is built by a wait(er|ress) with a copy of Flash CS.
So true. I designed a site for a restaurant while working there as a delivery driver. The site, sucks, and I'm aware of that, but for the hassle of physically meeting with the owner to get the specific on an update about a Christmas party update or the unwillingness to pay something worth 10 hours of work per month I'm not really going to try to improve it.
I have a job at a web agency now and doing anything better than what's there simply wouldn't make since.
Totally. Earlier in my web development career I re-sold hosting to a friend who, as a waitress, did the website for the place she worked. It was pretty terrible, stale, hard to update, and had (I think) BMP format scanned menus. Eventually she was fired and I was dragged into a horrible mess over who actually owned the site, when my friend asked me to take it down (she was the only one I ever dealt with).
> Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.
That seems a bit condescending to restaurant owners? Rather, perhaps, they are so much in the real world, dealing with suppliers, cooks, kitchen equipment, waiters, decor, etc., that navigating the virtual (websites) is antithetical?
OK, point taken! I like what you say about an anti-CMS. I feel like the old Google Pages (and maybe new Google Sites?) were aimed this way, along with the what other posters mention (Let's Eat, Squarespace). The step of getting one's own domain name is a whole other thing, of course.
But I do really love the idea that there's a dialectic between the virtual world of websites/internet and restaurant work -- which is so deeply grounded in the physical. And that there's some meaning here, that these things do not reconcile well, and the lameness of the web presence of restaurants is a living manifestation of this disjunction.
Something like about.me for businesses would be great. Maybe a second editable page with REALLY easy to lists. That way businesses can easily list services or menu items.
Interestingly, here in Israel, there's a standard layout for restaurant websites that is almost always used, and it's pretty good.
I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restaurant websites I visit are Rest-operated sites, with a very decent standard layout, including quick-info for getting their number, quick info on average prices of meals, maps, and detailed menus.
More and more restaurants are creating "unique" websites nowadays, but I think because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it. Pretty funny considering for other things in Israel, there is much less web-awareness than in the States.
If you want examples (sorry, they're in Hebrew, but you can see they look the same). Bottom-left is the quick-info, including information on accessibility for people with disabilities, whether the food is Kosher, hours that they're open, etc.:
That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!), hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.
"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it"
Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely good basic approach.
Oh my god, dentist's websites. I've one full year of dental school left, and as I'm looking around for a job, I sometimes wonder if I should just be a dental website designer instead of a dentist.
So ... why NOT be a dentist website designer, at least part-time? You know the business needs, you know the lingo of both (you're here, anyway) ... It sounds like a job that fills a needed niche! Better sites == more hits due to easier searching; there's a business case.
It is a tough market to operate on since a lot of dentists are busy people and usually their practice is managed by marketing consultants that do their local marketing/business promotion for them. It's not a straight forward "Let's meet and I build you a kick ass website" business.
We have been trying to crack in to this niche for almost two years with our http://patientboost.com/default.html service but it is a damn challenging market.
And while you're at, write some better X-ray and tooth-photo database UI for them. I cringe at the program my dentist plods through every time she takes pictures or X-rays of my teeth.
Its been at the top of my list of software I have basically no interest in working on yet feel like I could do a hell of a lot better at anyway. Of course, I haven't researched what's out there, there may already be much better options available.
Besides being ugly, my main beef is that I have watched her drag photos, one at a time, into their proper slots in my "file" from the incoming area, even though they were already clearly labelled as to what tooth they were pictures of. It's maddening. It's only a minute or two, and she doesn't take pictures every visit, but it's the kind of thing that just screams shoddy workmanship... and opportunity.
I have watched her drag photos, one at a time, into their proper slots in my "file" from the incoming area, even though they were already clearly labelled as to what tooth they were pictures of.
Are you certain that is a software problem? It could well be a user education problem, or a trust issue between dentist and program.
Maybe she's just using an old version. I've seen quite a bit of medical equipment the last couple of months (pregnant wife), in a well-funded academic hospital, and most of that is top notch. The solo practitioners don't have money to upgrade every couple of years.
How does having a better website presence bring the dentist more money? I'm having a hard time answering that in a way a halfway decent VC wouldn't laugh at, and that includes your putative answer, because you don't need a glorious site to be found via search, just a site.
When I needed to get my wisdom teeth removed I googled local dentists and found one that had a decent website with an online contact form. I made my reservation through email. The only reason it isn't more common to do this yet is precisely because most websites are complete garbage. (Flash-only with no contact info is particularly common.)
Having a good website will get you a competitive advantage in the market segment I'm a part of. (And my segment, people who don't want to deal with automated call systems or dead trees of phone numbers is growing every day.)
It really depends on what kind of dentist's ones are. If you are just a run off the mill dentist that takes care of mouth hygiene, then there is little incentive to make better website since you can probably better off doing local neighborhood direct marketing.
However if you are offering Cosmetic Dentistry, each new client can worth thousands of dollars and people will travel from their immediate surrounding to go reach your dentist practice.
No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the restaurant to try to create a good experience online.
I was going to write pretty much the same comment on the tazo tea landing page discussion, but online sales aren't the end-all-be-all justification for having a good, easy to use web site. Very often, if I'm considering going to a restaurant or coffeeshop that I've never been to, I'll look for a website to figure out the hours, location and menu & perhaps to find out more about the place. A website that is difficult to navigate or looks ugly won't hurt them, exactly, as I wasn't a customer, but a good site might compel me to visit or to try their product next time I have a chance. I've also chosen not to try out places and products before, just because I couldn't figure out an easy way of knowing whether they were open or because I couldn't figure out more info about the product.
Furthermore, there are places that I go to regularly whose easy access to info regarding hours and menu causes me to go there more often. Here is one from a place I like: http://eathomegrown.com/ Could be better (uses flash), but the info I want is there. And they have a blog and social media presence. All this has resulted in more than a few conversions into sandwich purchases from me, personally.
Oh, it will easily lose them business. Generally when I eat out, I'll have a few restaurants in mind and will browse their menus before making a decision. Even if I've been there many times, I'll compare menus so I can decide what I'm in the mood for. If it takes too long to figure out the menu (some places have an absolutely maddening UI) I just won't bother with that restaurant and move on to the next one.
You can't make money if you can't even get customers in the door!
One reason for menus in PDF is because the menus may change frequently, and a PDF is easy to create from their actual print menus. It doesn't seem like a big deal to update both an InDesign layout and a website, but if different people do those two things, then it's quite likely a mistake will be made, so it's smart just to use the already proofed version.
I would be happy if most of the restaurant sites I visit used PDF for menus. They either have nothing, or a badly formatted Word doc that needs custom fonts (no, my install of OSX 10.6 does not have Papyrus, let's keep it that way).
I also deal with this while keeping my resume updated and tweaked. I have an HTML, PDF, and MS Word format. I use a print CSS sytle sheet on my homepage (http://ronnie.me) so that I can print it to PDF for the PDF version and manually create the Word version. Very tedious.
It's as simple as creating a style sheet, targeting items you don't want to print, or create a class such as .noprint, and hide the items with { display: none; }
You'd want to put that CSS in a separate file and include it like this:
I do something similar for my resume (http://antrix.net/resume/). Started with a template by timbray [1] which I 'imported' into Google Docs by directly editing the document CSS & HTML. Finally, export from Google Docs as doc, pdf, etc.
The HTML version on my site has additional print specific CSS to switch fonts, background colour, etc. making the print output more pleasing.
LaTeX isn't the only way you can "write once"; while there are LaTeX exporters for the formats mentioned, you can do the same with LibreOffice, which exports to Word, PDF, and HTML much easier than LaTeX docs do (LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools, it's a simple Save As... or Export in LibreOffice).
> LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools
That's what shell scripts are for. It is trivial to write a script that will accept a LaTeX filename and run the necessary commands on it. It is only a little bit more work to add in hooks (e.g., to your IDE) such that the script is run automatically upon saving the file.
Moreover, with .tex files being plain-text, you could even write simple scripts to assist with updating the documents themselves. Something like "add-new-reference" or "update-hobbies" could accept input from the user and add it to the .tex file quite trivially.
This is in contrast to a GUI program, where you are basically forced to fire up a heavyweight editor, perform the changes by hand, and then perform each export one-by-one, also by hand. I know you could script old versions of OpenOffice using Java or Python, but that ends up being way more convoluted than doing the equivalent with a .tex file.
We've been quite successful at cracking the UK market and we run the sites for a few of the UK's biggest chains down to some smaller brasserie style companies.
I'd like to present some work which I think is good for a change (there are a lot of bad examples on here)
Also we've recently launched a product that allows anyone with a website the ability to have a content managed mobile site set up and working in no time.
At the gourmet high end, my favourite is http://www.squarerestaurant.com/ -- I love the big, big pictures of food, and of course all the other information being available. They use the same format at Pied a Terre.
The annoying ones are e.g. http://www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk/ -- useless use of Flash, this could be done in pure HTML and not force me to scroll a tiny frame with a menu. It could be much worse though, el bulli's website has a "virtual city" you have to wander through in order to select a wine from their menu -- "easy and fun" they say: http://vins.elbulli.com/elbullivi.php?lang=en
Well, I think we're all thinking it- how'd you go about acquiring your customers (as that's a notoriously hard market to crack)?
Also, your pricing for "Chain" @PocketDiner seems wayyy too low. Even £49/mo for "Multi" is probably priced too low. The overhead per store per hour is probably more than that.
Having worked with restaurants before (and having a dad who owns a restaurant), I have come to the conclusion that it's just because most restaurant owners a) just want something that works and is cheap, and b) do not fully understand how web design can help or hurt their businesses.
Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners) because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.
Perhaps there is no business case for having a good, CSS/HTML based website when your business is turning over tables?
That's a serious question. Has anyone here been involved with a restaurant or food-service related start-up that isn't an aggregator or social networking play? Maybe someone can shed some light on the roadblock?
1. Grow their email database and they have contacts they can market to.
2. Engage the customers with the site. Keep them coming back. 2 for 1 vouchers anyone?
3. Provide the basic information like where, when and how much. Make this accessible across devices.
It doesnt matter how good your site is, if your food sucks you loose.
Restaurant owners don't know who to trust, and have no judge of the skill of website builders and/or price. They are often pitched by various company's and the one that eventually gets through will by no means be the best.
Because a lot of web site design services sold to restaurants are sold by hucksters.
p.s.: not all hucksters know that that's what they are. Heck, you or I might be one, without meaning to be so. Of course, plenty enough do mean to be so and do awright for themselves that way.
I think you underestimate the powers that have given rise to the current state of affairs. Ecosystems of sellers usually develop around the characteristics of buyers. Restauranteurs are (as a general rule) terrible buyers and terrible clients.
You might look at a site and think "that'll take x hours to do," but you need to factor in the time that it takes to get the client there. In my experience, that's several times x. Just making the sale could be several times x.
You need to realize you are starting from scratch and that from where you stand, it's hard to know where scratch is. You will need to convince them why flash is bad (even though everyone they ask thinks it looks great). This is just one example. They will not be able to evaluate the site from the perspective of the user, that kind of thinking takes practice.
Then crisis strikes when your offer which includes some little mini-app to do that thing they want with the menus (already done) and a custom design (hired a mid range designer) costs more than the other offer which is largely auto-generated.
The reasons are similar for large companies having bad software, they are bad buyers.
Also, for a restaurant a website is really an extension of their menu/business card.
Frankly, the websites that a lot of restaurants have are perfectly fine. Even the ones made by hucksters. Is the address and phone number clearly marked? A map? Menu? Wine list? If you wanted to get fancy you could update it regularly with events and specials, but that's not really necessary.
I'm working on this site right now, and I understand your concerns because I feel them myself. I'm hoping I can bridge the gap between dining and diner. :)
(Please excuse the design, since I'm the only developer :P)
I'd advise that you nuke the frontpage. Instead, make it location aware and show categories (ex: recommended, asian, mexican, american, italian, greek, other) with five restaurants each.
The individual restaurant pages are very clean and informative compared to what you might see on a restaurant website. The only things missing are restaurant hours and pictures of food items.
I understand exactly what you're talking about and we now have people inputting hours. I'm going to clean up the front page with things that make sense to people, but right now it's under HEAVY development, and I'm the only developer :P
That's really cool, I like where you're going with One Big Menu. When I visit a restaurant, I want to know how good what I'm ordering is--I don't care if the restaurant is 5 stars, if what I ordered is the crappiest thing on the menu.
I know, and I want to provide a good interface for people to find exactly what they want, when they want. :) And the pictures will provide people with a view into what they're ordering. I think this is the major reason people aren't exploring with dining. :)
it's based off of codeigniter, but it's fully OO. are you using some sort of ORM like active record? if you are, you should look at the tables and see how many joins the ORM layer is doing so you know how much work it's going to be to scale.
Hey Justin, thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. I'm not using Active Record currently, but scaling up is something I worry about and just won't understand until I have the problem first hand. Maybe we can chat about this sometime.
I'm working on something at the moment. Just hours + menu + some optional social integration.
Based the research/feedback I've done, decision makers have near-zero time to learn or use a cms (hence why menus are always in PDF) and near-zero budget.
So what I'm going for is a super-simple system much like about.me/flavors.me ... something around $5 to $9/month or possibly even free and use it as a gateway to other services (also working on a diy groupon clone and staff scheduler for restaurants).
See, that's where it gets hard. Menus, and especially prices, change. People get upset if they're charged differently to what they saw on the website, and keeping the two in sync requires a conscious effort on behalf of the restaurant that it's not likely going to receive.
There's two way around this problem (keeping the website up to date) that I can see: integrate with existing POS system (expensive and hard) or offer a service to update the site for them.
There's an idea for someone - buy yourself a fax machine (yes, really), and offer a service whereby clients fax you a copy of their menu when it changes and you update their website.
I once built an online dish ordering website with interface similar to digg and reddit. It showed dishes in your area sorted by the number of times they have been ordered online. I still host a short video demo of the site: http://video.eatlista.pl/ (it's in Polish language, but still, could be inspiring for someone).
Anyway I ditched the idea after talking to restaurant owners, they were mostly older people, having hard time grasping the concept of the site (and even the Internet itself) and I didn't enjoy the idea of educating them.
I've been thinking about developing a custom cms/site builder of sorts, pitch it to one restaurant and make both the customer and owner experience really smooth. On one side, I would have a restaurant directory with all the info, recommendations and what not, but the owner would get a site with no 3rd party branding and their own domain, charge a monthly fee and get free dinners on a bunch of places.
But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so, uhhm, like geocities?"
I did local SEO work for a while - I assure you, assuming small business owners have knowledge of even geocities is greatly overestimating their technical knowledge.
Obviously, because the sites are based on decisions made by one person who is not a web design expert. But that's okay, there are ways around that problem for the restaurant-goer: yelp.com provides a useable interface, socially vetted, and normalized so that places can be compared. I hardly bother with the restaurant's site anymore, they're all on yelp.
With restaurants, its much better to "physically crawl", some of the really good hole-in-the-wall places, I think, would be terrible at self-categorization.
I think its much better for restaurants to list themselves with a service like "yelp" or "open-table" or even the local city paper than to try to make anything more than a bare-bones website.
I don't work for Factual, so I can't speak to that. Does Yellowpages.com have an API to access this data? I've worked with the Yellowbook API in the past, and wasn't that impressed.
I know first-hand what kind of budgets most small/medium-sized restaurants have for websites and online marketing.
Its much better to put resources and money into a profile/photos/menu on a site like http://www.grabmytable.com/ than doing a half-arsed 'proper' website.
Luddite client meets designer who has made their living wowing luddite clients with style over substance.
Also note that movie websites have the same problem. For mostly the same reasons, though the organizations involved and cash transactions are much larger...
Anyone tried offering a deal to a restaurant owner whereby you get a tab (e.g., shout friends a $500 dinner) to build a site and then a lunch/dinner per month in exchange for maintenance of menus, etc?
I just wondered about sending a letter to a swag of restaurants offering it as a service. Say that the first 3-5 to respond can take up the offer but potentially take on more. Quick site build, get interns to do the maintenance, and then eat out at a different restaurant each night of the month. Hmmm.
We've found that the owners and managers who "don't get it" are the ones who think that the web site experience should be the same as the restaurant experience: background music, a menu that looks identical to the physical one, and a picture of every dish.
The ones who do "get it" entrust their web site to designers and usability experts who make it their goal to turn web site visitors into patrons.
Many - because they don't need a better online presence to get more business. Their tables are full - the only way to squeeze more profits is to charge more, possibly changing clientele, or act more efficiently, or both.
A cool website for reservations/tables/photos etc COULD be part of a themed restaurant or restaurant chain to differentiate them in the market... but for the most part, the food speaks for itself.
Huh. I just realized that I have a strange association between restaurants and their websites.
My expectation of quality is inversely correlated to the quality of their website. When I see a restaurant website that is "good", it makes me thing "chain. corporate. bland. boring."
No, and neither do I. One of my favorite chain places that I eat at all the time is Jimmy Johns. They have awesome sandwiches. I always joke with my friends that, if they like subway, they should definitely not go to JJ because they're never going to be able to eat it ever again.
What I was getting at is that a crappy website can sometimes be a good indicator for places like the little deli that I go to sometimes, or my neighborhood bar. If the little deli (called cheese and stuff, for you Phoenicians: http://www.cheesenstuffdeli.com/) had a "good" website, it would seem out of character to me.
No you're not. I enjoy restaurants, regardless of whether they're chain or indie. If it's good it's good, if not, not. Bonus of chains is that if it's good one place, it's probably good in most places.
The reason these websites are bad is because the owners have never heard of conversions, marketing iteration, "the funnel", so what they end up with is a shitty site that they forget about.
Indeed. I went to a fabulous tiny restaurant in philly recently. While chatting with owner, she mentioned that a reservation had just canceled and then proceeded to tweet that there was an open table. Within literally 2 minutes, she filled the reservation.
Who says restaurant owners don't get computers!
The saavy ones know their core competency and don't try to get fancy. The restaurant I mentioned has a super simple website done with inuit sitebuilder. It does the job, but with places like this the most important thing is what others say about the place and the clout the owner cultivates with their customers.
a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition that exists a million times over.
b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.
c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.
d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital, it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.
e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80% churn,not retention, fucking churn.
Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c) such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in a very cost efficient and systematic manner.