Have you ever been sitting at home debating whether or not
to go out for a bite to eat but were reluctant to get off your butt because of
the cost? What if you had an app on your mobile device that alerted you to
restaurants in your immediate vicinity that were having very compelling deals
for that night only? Perhaps a pizza joint that normally charges $20 for a pie
for walk in customers is only $10 for just three hours that night. What if
a Chinese restaurant said they would knock off 10% of the bill that night AND
throw in an order of complimentary chow mein?
I believe that offering immediate, compelling and
short-lived deals, will motivate casual, indifferent diners to experience
restaurants in their vicinity.
How it works:
Using Wha-Sup, restaurateurs upload and then push out
special offers to mobile subscribers who have downloaded and installed the
application onto their mobile device. This is an ideal solution for restaurant owners who are having
a particularly slow night or just want to give their place a little marketing
kick in the pants. Unlike other discount/coupon sites or services, such as
Living Social or Restaurant.com that allow potential customers to purchase
discount offers in advance of visiting a restaurant, Wha-Sup deals are more
immediate and time bombed.
For example, on a Wednesday night, if the owner of a pizza
joint feels at 5:00 p.m. that it’s probably going to be a slow night, they
could send out a Wha-Sup special offer to subscribers of the app saying, “Tonight
only from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. all large pizzas are $10 off.” This not only
increases foot traffic to an establishment that would generally be suffering
through a slow night, but more than likely, most of the people coming into the
place will be local to the restaurant (due to the short opportunity window).
Users who install the app on their mobile device will be
able to set their location and distance parameters depending on how far they’re
willing to travel for a deal. Again, because of the short opportunity window
for these deals, the default for most users would probably be set at one mile.
For Wha-Sup to work, it would require a large number of
restaurants to sign up for the service. The service could be free (and the
restaurateur would simply pay a small percentage based on the number of people
who click on a given deal link), or you could charge the restauranteur $5 per year
(depending on the number of Wha-Sup subscribers that are local to the area). As
more subscribers sign up for the service in their radius, the yearly fee may
increase. Users, on the other hand, would be able to download and install the
app for free.
The idea would be to start this service in one city, such as
San Francisco. And, depending on its success, the service could spread to other
cities and countries around the world.
