A few weeks ago SevenLunches was featured on the This Week in Startups Web Show/Podcast with Jason Calacanis in the Ask Jason segment. Last week Scott Simko, the official blogger for This Week in Startups interviewed me for a follow up blog post which I have posted with permission below and can be found at: http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups-sevenlunches-everyone-eats/

Jeff Lee of SevenLunches was recently on This Week in Startups (#67) asking, “How do we get customers on a limited budget?”.  Since the call he reached out to us to give us an update and let us know what has been working.  In a few short weeks they have over 300 restaurants listed.  They submitted an iPhone app (that should be available any day now).  Have new features in the works and have added another technical founder with an impressive background.  I thought you’d be interested in his story and Jeff was kind enough to share some of his time.

I’m curious how you came up with the idea?

Ryan Maturski is the founder and creator of SevenLunches and a long time colleague and friend of mine. He was in a local sub shop in North Adams, MA last summer and casually told the owner: “Hey you should email all of your customers your daily specials” and then it hit him: “Why not build an automated site that can send a single daily email alert to diners in the area with all of the specials from all nearby restaurants? And also send that E-mail to them right as they are deciding where they are going for lunch.” That was the genesis of SevenLunches.

It’s more the “special of the day”, which can be a deal, or just something the chef is trying out or happens to be in season. Some restaurants don’t want to offer deals or coupons but they do offer a compelling price or cool experimental items. Ultimately, it varies from restaurant to restaurant and they can use it as they see fit.

Yes, restaurants do add dinner specials or specials that run all day. We even have coffee shops that don’t serve full food menus but they do promote things like cupcakes, pastries, or we have ice cream shops, bakeries, bars, etc. Focusing on dinner specifically is in the works, where we will send out a dinner only email or alert.

Some are posting daily, but we give them the ability to load a week or even a month of specials in advance. But many places do it daily for flexibility because they may not decide what the daily special is until that morning. We also send them a reminder E-mail each morning if they don’t already have a special in the system.

We definitely plan to implement some of their ideas.

Now that we have some funding we are going to print out some low buck flyers, cards, stickers, etc and think of creative ways to integrate them in the restaurants marketing. We are even telling restaurants that currently have an email list and asking them to promote us to their lists so we can grow the local E-mail user base with them. We are even considering using things like old school faxes to promote us to local businesses and restaurants by pointing out how ancient and annoying some of these technologies are and that SevenLunches is the future of restaurant marketing.

TableTop Display

Any creative way to get people to refer friends to the service (Jason & Adam suggestion)?

We do have an invite a friend feature on the site, but we are working on a reward program to go along with it. We definitely want to do this. The mechanics are what we need to work out.

We also need to find a way to make the E-mails viral like Jason talked about. I have some ideas I am working on for viral E-mails and maybe videos to include.

For me the genius of this idea was the passive alerts from multiple restaurants you get via a single email or SMS, and the lowest common denominator of those technologies and the devices they are on. My grandma or even my parents will likely never have an iPhone to get our app or be on FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, or maybe not even facebook. But they do get E-mail. Many phones may not have apps, but most have SMS or E-mail and maybe a browser, as do smart phones. An app is not necessary for SevenLunches to work passively. I love Gowalla, Brightkite and Foursquare personally, but there is the general hassle of getting on your phone, finding the place and checking in, and then broadcasting something about it that will go all over twitter and facebook, and you get badges, rewards and stuff which is very cool. But I’m a tech geek. I love all this stuff. I don’t know if the general public does yet. And some people are more private about there whereabouts.

SevenLunches is designed to help people decide where to go to eat because of a special. Not give them a special after they already showed up or because they are the mayor. That is a frequency scheme like those punch cards, or green stamps I remember my mom getting at the grocery store as a kid. What SevenLunches is doing is just a different mindset than location based check-ins. We are also only focused on restaurants at this time. Our service is all about dining. And everybody eats.

ATM we are focusing on the low hanging fruit and what I mean is we are focusing on the restaurants that already have a social media presence, they get the value of social media and digital promotion and can cheer lead for us. We will then focus on the non-technical restaurants and show them why they need to promote digitally. My goal is to have educated representatives or street teams that service a city or region to spread the word and take care of the restaurants.

I did make a screencast video, that I used for our Boston Open Angel Forum application and I plan to adapt that video or make a new dedicated video (with our new features) for sales and educating the restaurants on how to use the site.

Actually, I think it was more for SMS but once we recognized the Twitter tie-in Ryan was able to quickly integrate auto-posting of specials to the restaurant’s twitter accounts via the Twitter API.

Primarily we are going to focus on Boston to start, but it’s going well, and is a very soft sell. When we approach restaurants they love the idea instantly but always ask me “What’s the catch?” Or: if it’s free for them to use, what’s in it for SevenLunches?. So many are waiting for me to say “it costs you $X a month” at which point they are used to saying “No, it’s not in my budget.” From there I generally have to explain the freemium model, meaning that it is free but we may eventually charge for certain account upgrades and features in the future.

My true goal however is to be able to walk into any given restaurant in Boston or any of our target cities a year from now demo the app and show them their competitors down the street using SevenLunches and say: “We can get your special out to 50,000+ people within X miles of you every single day and simplify your social media and digital marketing plan.” Of course they are going to try it. Right now we need to focus on Boston and those key cities get to that user number. Even though we will focus on key cities, everything is local, and SevenLunches can work in any size community anywhere.

It’s no problem at this point. It doesn’t appear that franchisees need to get approval for this type of local promotion. We are also building some cool multi location features that franchisees and franchisors alike will love. At this time we have individual Subway, Quizno’s, Qdoba’s, Applebee’s and other franchisees out there using SevenLunches.

I think they are A/B testing us in a way, by that I mean they only offer some of these specials through our service and they also ask customers where they heard about the special. We also want our users to tell restaurants that they heard about the special through us. We will be working in other ways of tracking things and showing that data to restaurants in the future.

It will be a freemium to paid service but on top of that we will have the ability to place national or regional advertisements into the emails, on the website, and in our apps. Also once we reach critical mass we will have a lot of data that we will be able to use to monetize.

I’m the VP of Sales & Marketing but I also help drive the direction of the site by giving new ideas and listening to what the restaurants and diners using our service want. I am also the first Angel Investor and am a web designer at my day job as the Director of Internet & New Media for the International Hot Rod Association in Norwalk, OH. The IHRA is a drag racing sanctioning body and part of Feld Entertainment (Ringling Bros. Circus, Disney on Ice, Monster Jam, SuperCross). So my day to day is running IHRA’s website and using the web and social media to promote our events and organization. I also sell advertising and sponsorships for our web properties as well.

Ryan Maturski is the founder and creator of SevenLunches. He is an entrepreneur living in North Adams, MA and has been building businesses since 1998. Ryan’s current role is Co-Founder and COO of Raceway Media, which is the parent company of the leading auto racing classifieds service RacingJunk.com which has over 450,000 members, 2.8 million monthly visitors and over 70 million pageviews per month. RacingJunk.com is basically the Craigslist of the racing world and assists all the major teams in NASCAR, NHRA, DIRT right down to the grassroots motorsports teams.

The auto racing industry is how I met Ryan. We have bounced ideas off each other for years. When he came to me with the idea for SevenLunches last summer I just said: “I’m In, let’s do it!”

John Albano recently joined the group. He is an amazing programmer developing the iPhone app, and helping with the website and API. Also very notable is that he was a lead developer for Macromedia and Adobe’s Dreamweaver web design program from 2001-2006. We are very excited and proud to have John aboard and he really fast tracked the iPhone app. Ryan and John have also started a mobile app development company together called FiveIron Software, and SevenLunches will be one of the first apps to come from FiveIron.

The app is very straightforward and works as follows: The phones GPS gets your location and then organizes and displays the restaurant specials in closest proximity to you. It shows you the special, the restaurant’s location and you can call the restaurant by clicking their phone number. You can also get directions to the restaurant from your location and street view of the restaurant using Google maps. If there is not a restaurant near you, you can search by zip code.

We think mobile will be key to our success but we will of course maintain a web presence even though SevenLunches is mainly about the alerts via E-mail/SMS/Social & Mobile. Most people will have a smart phone soon and 200k+ Droid phones are being activated daily so by no means are we overlooking Android. Our developers are iPhone guys so they made the iPhone app first but I’m an Android guy so I definitely want to see SevenLunches on my Droid.

We have many future plans for SevenLunches, but for the immediate future we plan to get this app out there, and focus on promoting and growing in our key cities in the next few months. We’ll continue to add new features to the site, apps, and alerts. Some of that we can’t talk about just yet. We also want to make signup easier, integrate social media sign-ins, make things simpler for and educate restaurants on how to use and promote the service.

We’d love for all of them to sign-up for SevenLunches and help spread the word to friends using the invite a friend form, and also have them ask their favorite restaurants to try us out. If the fans are in the restaurant industry or know anyone who is, please get in touch with me. At this time we are only in the US Zip Code system, but we will work on eventually expanding. And like most startups we are also seeking funding if anyone can help we would love to hear from you.

A couple weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be invited onto Jason Calacanis’ popular This Week in Startups podcast Ask Jason segment after the meetup show the week prior ran long and failed to get Cleveland on. We talked about LeBron James a little bit and I asked about the Chicken or the Egg scenario that many startups face in getting end users and businesses to use your product without spending alot of money in the beginning.  Jason who founded Weblogs Inc. (which started huge blogs like Engadget, TMZ etc. and were later purchased by AOL), Mahalo, and ThisWeekIn, the always insightful Tyler Crowley (Jason’s right hand man), and guest Adam Bernhard of HauteLook offered up some great advice that we will be using as we grow SevenLunches. So I want to thank Jason, and Lon Harris for the opportunity to be on the show, and we will keep building the best promotional service available to restaurants. FYI the Ask Jason segment is in the first 5-10 minutes of the show.

The full show and recap notes can be found on thisweekin.com here: http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups-67-with-adam-bernhard/

At the end of May I went to the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago on behalf of SevenLunches. It was an excellent experience and I met alot of people that I had been talking to on twitter and the Internet, and made some new friends that will help SevenLunches grow and that will use us to promote their restaurants. Check out some of the pictures from the show below!

- Jeff Lee

SevenLunches is proud to announce a promotional partnership with restaurant social network tastecasting.com. TasteCasting uses volunteer teams of social media savvy food lovers which restaurants invite to their establishment for promotional tastings to promote their restaurant, a grand opening, new menu items, etc. The TasteCasting teams taste, take photos, videos, and then tweet, blog, vlog, and essentially “tastecast” about their experience using all available social media tools (more details below). Through this partnership, TasteCasters will promote the SevenLunches service to the restaurants they do tastings with, and SevenLunches will promote these TasteCasting social media tastings to the restaurants using SevenLunches, as well as aid in recruiting new TasteCasting team members. At last count TasteCasting has teams  servicing 17 major US cities.

SevenLunches VP of Marketing and Social Media Jeff Lee says: “We love how TasteCasting is using all volunteer teams of social media savvy food lovers to help local restaurants promote themselves in their local communities through any and all social media tools. We feel that what we are doing at  SevenLunches with our E-mail/SMS daily specials service and the social media integration we are building into our system can add value to the restaurants that TasteCasters serve. We in turn want to help grow the TasteCasting network by recruiting new restaurants and TasteCasting team members. It truly is a natural fit for both TasteCasting and SevenLunches. Both myself and TasteCasting founder Dan Harris are very excited about the possibilities of how we can both grow our services.”

What is TasteCasting?

TasteCasting is an all volunteer social network made up of people around the country who enjoy food and helping local and regional food and beverage establishments. An organizer, assembles a team of tasters and contacts establishments with an offer to help. The help is in the form of a blog post on TasteCasting.com, the bloggers own blogs, Yelp reviews, Urbanspoon ratings, tweets, Linkedin profile or Facebook updates.  The establishment can share a new menu item, a new recipe, specials, offers, events with the team and the team will send that message out to their network of followers, fans, friends, and links. This is a promotional effort and not a critical review. The organizer and team of tasters express their own opinion of the establishment, and experience. Establishments can post ads on TasteCasting.com as a way to support our efforts.

What is SevenLunches?

Much like Twitter asks the question: What’s happening? SevenLunches attempts to answer the daily question: What’s for lunch?
SevenLunches.com is a simple service that allows restaurants to post a single twitter like 140 character daily special. We then aggregate and deliver specials based on location via E-mail or SMS to local diners. Below is a brief rundown of how our service works:

How does SevenLunches work for restaurants?

A restaurant manager (or marketing person) creates an account with their E-mail address and enters location and other information about their restaurant to create a profile. The restaurant can then start posting daily 140 character specials right away. The restaurant can login every day to post a single special or post as many specials as they want to in advance. Restaurants can also link their twitter account to SevenLunches so when they post a daily special in our system, it automagically tweets it to their followers as well, making social media marketing a much easier proposition since you can import twitter updates into just about any other social network service.

Restaurants can signup at: http://sevenlunches.com/restaurant/signup

How does SevenLunches work for diners?

A diner signs up for sevenlunches using their E-mail address and zip code. The diner then will automatically receive one daily E-mail at 11:30 AM with all the daily specials from all the restaurants (that use SevenLunches) within the default distance of 5 miles from their home zip code.

Optionally, diners can change the time of day they receive their daily E-mail, and the distance of the restaurants from their home zip code (between 5-50 miles). Diners can also enter their cell phone number and receive specials via SMS text message.

Diners can signup at SevenLunches http://www.sevenlunches.com/signup

Give SevenLunches A Try

We are a beta service and are free for both restaurants and diners to use. Test it out and feel free to send me any E-mails with your thoughts, issues or suggestions about our service. We are continuing to add features to the service as we grow and as we hear about the needs of restaurants and diners in the beta. At this time, we only operate in the United States zip code system and may not currently have restaurants in every zip code.

SevenLunches Contact

Jeff Lee
Partner – VP of Marketing & Social Media
http://www.sevenlunches.com
jeff@sevenlunches.com
twitter: @SevenLunches

Attention all restaurants: Do you use twitter? Do you use SevenLunches? Would you like us to post your daily specials to your twitter account automatically for you? We can do that! All you have to do is go to login to your SevenLunches account and click on “My Page” and you can enter your twitter login and password*. We do the rest for you. See the screenshot below.

Now that you can get your daily specials into twitter, you can also have your special automatically post to your  facebook page using the facebook twitter app, your MySpace page using MySpace Twitter Sync,  and friendfeed as well as having SevenLunches core function of delivering your daily specials to local diner’s E-Mail and SMS inboxes. This social media integration shows that we will continue to find new ways to promote your restaurant as they become available.

*Note we will not share your twitter login info with any third party service. This information will only be used to post your specials to your twitter.