Well, my fellow Jews, I’m making this year super special for you all! I’ve hacked together a fun mashup of the APIs from four of my favorite startups: Foursquare, GroupMe, Venmo and Twilio. For short let’s just call it FourGroupTwilVen – or something like that…

Here’s how to participate:

If you’re one of my lucky Foursquare friends, simply visit a Chinese restaurant on Christmas and your check-in will unlock a bit of magic!

I don’t want to give away too much but let’s just say that it will involve a small monetary gift, the company of other awesome Jews, and Mariah Carey. It’s gonna make you smile and cheer up your Christmas.

Let the fun begin!

.

P.S. My friends who do celebrate Christmas are of course invited to participate too And you don’t have to be in NYC — this will work anywhere.

P.P.S.  Make sure your Foursquare account has your phone number entered (most do!) — you can check under ‘Account Settings’ on http://foursquare.com/settings

P.P.P.S. If we’re not Foursquare friends, feel free to add me.  Be aware I’m pretty selective about who I share my location with so you might want to follow up with an email of why you’re worthy :-p

P.P.P.P.S.  I’ll write a post soon about what’s going on behind-the-scenes.

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In June, the MTA hired a bunch of interns (grad students) to explore cheap ways to bring cellphone service in the subway system. The entire project only cost $30,000.  This shift is part of Jay Walder’s new mindset that “The best is the enemy of the good.”  Similarly, the MTA had discussions with OpenPlans about a cheap method for providing real-time bus location data to riders. The MTA is turning scrappy!

But the holy grail is real time subway times and this one hasn’t gotten the refresh it needs — the MTA is spending $384 million to implement countdown clocks in each station which tell riders when the next train arrives. The work is already underway, but won’t be complete until 2016.

This seems crazy.

I haven’t seen any impressive scrappy third party solutions yet other than Roadify which focuses on crowdsourcing.  But it’s hard to imagine this getting the mainstream usage it needs. Furthermore, a crowdsourced system would break when you need it most: late at night when trains are infrequent.

Here are a few solutions I’ve come up with (All of these assume that the MTA hasn’t given you permission to install any equipment on their property.)

1) Consider that trains are actually visible at times: they cross over the bridges as they leave and enter Manhattan.  Why not install a detection device focused on these bridges?  Find a DUMBO startup with a nice view of the Manhattan Bridge and mount a camera or sensor in their window to detect when trains cross.  Then broadcast that information to the world.

2) Similarly, the ground shakes when a subway goes by.  So identify a bunch of different buildings that rumble when trains goes under them.  Leave an iPod Touch (connected to wifi) in the basement of these buildings. The device’s accelerometer could detect the rumble of each passing trains (which I’m betting would be a slightly different signal depending on the direction of the train). With a few of these detection points around the city sending back information to a central database, you could infer train locations for the entire system.  And this system would require a minimal capital investment:  buy fifty used ipod touches for $100 –even ones with broken screens are fine.  With only $5k equipment costs you’ve got yourself an 80% solution.

3) There are other ideas too that might work but don’t seem as elegant: find apartments near the subway exits and install a motion sensor/camera above the subway staircases — when floods of people come out, you know the train just came.  But this really works only at crowded times like rush hour when train schedules don’t matter much.

4) Use directional microphones pointed at subway grates to hear when trains go by.

Have other ideas on how to do real-time train tracking on the cheap?  I’d love to hear ‘em in the comments!

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New Work City (NWC) is one of the most important hubs of the NYC technology scene.

Why?  New Work City houses ~50 amazing tech freelancers and entrepreneurs running a dozen or so fledgling startups such as Perpetually, Loosecubes, Urban Pregame, Homingcloud and TouchGraph.  Creating a home for independent workers and early stage entrepreneurs creates the fertile soil needed to seed innovation and birth new companies. NWC is that home. In short, New Work City is a home for the homeless and a desk for the deskless, individuals otherwise relegated to working from coffee shops or trapped in the depressing isolation of their own apartments.

If you’re thinking “desks for rent” you’re missing the bigger picture.  It’s all about the people. NWC is people getting together because working in a stimulating environment surrounded by friendly passionate people who love what they do is f***ing awesome. It’s productive, it’s fun, and it’s deeply satisfying.

On September 1, a mere ten days from today, NWC opens its new home:  a brand new 5,000sq space at Canal St and Broadway. The NEW New Work City will support a larger community and will be amazing. As an independent space, New Work City is self-sustained by paying members of the community — people like me. There’s no sugardaddy bankrolling it and no VC firm backing the space.  It’s run as a break-even business and it’s entirely volunteer run — truly a space for us and by us.

In ten days, the dream for NYC to have a dedicated coworking space will be realized. It’s a dream that initially took shape back in the summer of 2007 as part of an East Village coffee shop (CafeBricolage).  Many of the same people are still at the helms.

Having an awesome home to independent workers and entrepreneurs is crucial to New York City’s goal to become a major technology hub.  However, NWC needs your financial support to make this happen. We need about $100,000 total for the new space, and are attempting to raise $15,000 through Kickstarter.  Please donate to our KickStarter fund and be generous (let’s smash through this goal!)

Also, please seriously consider whether your company or organization could benefit from a partnership/sponsorship opportunity with NWC.  If so, please get in touch with me and I’ll happily put you in touch with “mayor” Tony.

By supporting NWC, you’re supporting NYC as a healthy place for startups.  On behalf of me and all New Work City members, thank you for your support,
Jonathan Wegener

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• Young Entrepreneurs and B2B Startups: Doomed to Fail?

When a VC friend asked which young NYC startups I find exciting, I sent him a list of pre-funded companies that I’ve been watching. Afterwards I started writing them into a blog post. Well, I should have pressed publish sooner because as the post sat unfinished for the last week, several have since been funded! I’m including them anyway. Good times!

Here’s my short list of NYC startups I’m keeping my eye on:

JumpPost

Apartment hunting is broken.  JumpPost could be the fix.

JumpPost gives apartment hunters ‘first dibs’ on the best apartments. How do they get the best apartments?  JumpPost pays apartment dwellers $500 to add a listing to the site several months ahead of their actual move out date.  Sometimes it pays to plan ahead.

Jordan and his team is onto something big and they’ve already generated some good press (getting paid $500 for doing nothing is especially buzzable!).  I imagine they’ll need some product pivots before JumpPost truly takes off, but this one’s got potential. Personally I would add a social layer to the product and emulate AirBnB which has made finding places to stay fun, easy, and safe.  JumpPost can potentially bring that same user experience to apartment hunting.

SinglePlatform

SinglePlatform gives bars and restaurants a centralized tool to easily update multiple social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Citysearch, Myspace, and their own website. It’s the same core concept as Postling, except SinglePlatform seems to be executing better.  The founder, Wiley Cerilli, spent the last 10 years running sales at SeamlessWeb so the company clearly understands the market they’re serving — a point that becomes immediately clear browsing their site: “One of the most frequent phone calls to establishments is regarding what games they are playing. SinglePlatform allows you to select which TV packages and team affiliations you have and then posts those games automatically.”

SinglePlatform also seem to be quite good at selling their product at a comfortable price: $450 for a year.  That upfront payment (versus a monthly fee) should help the young company with cash flow issues and also make paying commissioned sales staff easier.  This six month old company seems to be quietly staffing up - LinkedIn already shows 11 employees.  Their aggressive sales force is hitting the pavement hard and closing deals left and right and the product is already being embraced by their customers.  And to top it off, the company is profitable.  This ones gonna be big…

ChallengePost

ChallengePost is a self-described “marketplace for challenges.”  Essentially, ChallengePost is home to dozens of competitions such as NYC’s BigApps which gave $20,000 to developers who built the best mobile apps using NYC datasets. Creative challenges help organizations harness the creativity of the masses to solve tough problems and generate ideas.  It’s a powerful concept that will increasingly become the norm among large organizations struggling to be innovative (also check out Hypios).  Recently, ChallengePost was named the official challenge platform of the US Government.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed Danny Moon points out that in June 2009, ChallengePost raised an angel round of $500,000.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians etc. Essentially, it helps people raise funding to accomplish cool things.  Kickstarter handles the headache of accepting donations and also drives eyeballs to your project.  It also imposes some business logic to the process:  like a Groupon deal, buyers (donors) are only charged if the project raises the target amount of money. And fundraisers can associate rewards for different donation tiers (ie T-shirt if you donate $50)

Kickstarter benefitted from the PR buzz stirred up by Diaspora, an attempt by four NYU students to build a private decentralized Facebook.  In Diaspora’s efforts to raise $10,000 on the Kickstarter site, they unintentionally found themselves with $200,000 of donations - effectively an angel round of financing.

Yipit

Yipit makes it easy to find the best deals in your city.  Local daily deals sites like Groupon are hot right now.  But there are literally hundreds of them. Who wants to subscribe to a hundred email newsletters?! Yipit sits above them all, aggregating the fragmented marketplace into a single customized daily deal newsletter with the categories the user wishes to receive.  This puts Yipit in a position to charge a referral/lead-gen fee for each sale it drives to the deal sites. Brilliant.

UPDATE: On June 30, Yipit raised $1.3M.

Other honorable mentions:

-Shoutworthy: A social recommendation system built on Facebook. Think Linkedin’s recommendation tool.  Now imagine a much better version!

-TopGuest: A loyalty reward system built on top of foursquare/gowalla etc.  Formerly known as UDorse.

-Endor.se: A way to find talented freelancers, gauge availability, and built a portfolio of people whose work you endorse.

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…staring at my iPhone, the city right outside the window suddenly had voice, personality, opinion. Notes started pouring in, bite-size songs of praise about people and places…”

Minh Uong/The New York Times

I love it! What a perfect description of that magical moment many of us have experienced — when you suddenly ‘get’ hyperlocal and realize that these nerdy webpages and mobile apps can literally change the way you interact with your own neighborhood, transforming the cement jungle into a friendly playground ripe for exploration.  The author elaborates on the feeling:

“…crack doors open that might otherwise be passed by, giving personality and accessibility to the surrounding blocks. To walk through the city eyeing your Foursquare tips is to realize just how little of it you ordinarily see.”

My moment of awe came during a visit to San Francisco in 2007. With my WAP enabled phone in hand, I walked down the street googling the names of every restaurant I passed — my obsessive-compulsive way of picking a good one.  A website called Yelp.com consistently popped up at the top of the google searches, and although I had never heard of it, I found their information and reviews extremely valuable.  I suddenly realized the power of this technology: I could get more insight about a restaurant by Googling it than stepping foot inside.

Back in New York, I graduated college and waved goodbye to Morningside Heights and moved into to a completely new neighborhood:  Hells Kitchen.  Again, I suddenly I found myself overwhelmed with choice!  I distinctly remember running cost-calculations in my head: “How much it would cost to try out every single restaurant on 9th Avenue?”  The answer?  Too much.

And here’s where Yelp really shined.  Yelp was my insider guide for my new neighborhood.   I could literally zoom into a city-block and see every single business on the block listed — alongside details, reviews, and tips.  Suddenly I had a way to learn about those ‘off the beaten track’ spots. Empire Tea and Coffee?  If it weren’t for Yelp, I’d have overlooked one of the best coffee places in the city.

Why are hyperlocal services so powerful?  Because there’s a high personal relevancy to the information they offer.   Steven Berlin Johnson (author and co-founder of outside.in) sums it up well:

Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world.

It’s news in your world and only your world!  By the way, If you’re not already getting a daily everyblock.com newsletter, you should sign up.  The information you’ll learn is incredible.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that existing news sites and reviews guides are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with hyperlocal information.  Friend-finders like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt are finally starting to take off. But cool startups are working on defining whole new hyperlocal categories too: Deals, Nightlife, and even Casual Encounters!

In the deals category for example, Spotter by Yipit uses the foursquare API to find deals at the places you visit!  The result is an incredible daily deal newsletter that’s custom-tailored to where you live, work, and hang out. In a different category, Buzzd and Citysense are trying to track nightlife activity and tell you what’s ‘hot’ around you.  And let’s not forget Grindr, an iPhone app which facilitate sexual encounters between gay men.  The service has over 500,000 users and on a given day 30% log on.  Incredible traction.

Hyperlocal has finally come of age.  And seeing it go mainstream is going to be really fun.

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Embrace Google Maps/Transit

Google transit gives point-to-point directions using public transportation for over 400 cities.  The service especially shines on a mobile device.  Google maps on my iPhone was an indispensable part of navigating the city, helping me figure out exactly where and when to catch the buses.  I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t know their iPhone (and Android and some Blackberry phones) can do point-to-point train/subway/bus directions while incorporating the schedules too!

Get a Bike

Public transportation is great, but renting/borrowing a bike is a must.  Yes, it takes cajones to hop on and conquer the streets of a foreign city, but biking is without a doubt the best way to learn a new city.  You’ll cover much more ground than walking and avoid the headache of parking a car or waiting for public transportation.  Basically, you’ll get more done with your limited time.  And since bikes have zero variable cost, they strongly encourage exploration.  So go get lost on a bike! (but bring along your phone with Google Maps of course)

Connect with the Local Community

A few days before embarking, I asked the Austin Yelp community for suggestions of places to see and things to do.  “NYC Eliter Comin’ to Austin” garnered over 70 super helpful tips like: “6:30pm tuesday is the start of hippy hour at the continental club with the lovely miss toni price.”  Several of Austin’s fantastic Yelp members even sent me personal notes welcoming to the city.  If you weren’t already aware, I’m a big fan of Yelp and find it far and away the best source of hyperlocal information.

See the Heart of a Neighborhood

So you’ve picked a neighborhood to explore.  Great, but where exactly should you start?  Use Yelp to figure out the main commercial streets in a neighborhood!  From the homepage just click ‘search’ (leave the search box blank).  Then filter the list by “Most Reviewed” and maneuver the interactive map around your destination neighborhood.  Red pins will help call out the main streets!  Around the UT Austin campus, Guadalupe Street stood out as the clear winner (see picture on left).  This feature also works really well from Yelp’s fantastic iPhone app.

Find Must-See Popular Hotspots

Again, click ‘search’ on Yelp.com and leave the search box blank.  Setup the filters to sort by “Most Reviewed.”  This will show all Yelp listings in that city ranked by popularity.  For Austin, that includes Home Slice, Uchi, Guero’s, Polvo’s, and the flagship Whole Foods Market store.  In NYC, this list features Shake Shack, Magnolia Bakery, Ippudo, Pommes Frites, Katz’s Delicatessen, Grimaldi’s, Lombardi’s, and the Chicken & Rice Halal Cart at 53rd/6th.  You could certainly do worse as a tourist…

Find Weird Local Stuff

Most people know Yelp for its restaurant and bar listings.  But their ‘Local Flavor’ category has some seriously cool stuff.  Austin’s Local Flavor included the Cathedral of Junk, a massive three story structure created from decades of junk.  And my insider knowledge of the Bats Under the Congress Avenue Bridge seriously impressed the locals.  In San Francisco, this category led me to the Clarion Alley Murals and also the Seward Street Slides which turned out to be tremendously fun.

Bookmark Now, Retrieve Later

Bookmark places on Yelp.com that look interesting (you’ll need a yelp.com account to do so).  Then, from the Yelp iPhone App you can view those bookmarks on the go.  Best of all, the app shows your bookmarks ranked by proximity to your current location!  This is phenomenally helpful.

Log your Trip and Get Local Recommendations

I checked in on Foursquare at every place I went, despite having no Austin friends using the service.  Why?  Because afterwards I can view a minute by minute log of my trip on the history section of the Foursquare website! Equally cool, foursquare provided me great local recommendations.  Checking in at a random grocery prompted “Go to Green Mesquite and eat BBQ with friends!”  The tip was left by fellow NYC Foursquare user and friend Lee Semel and Green Mesquite was right down the block.  His trip to Austin occurred eight months prior but the virtual breadcrumbs remained!

Keep the Community Involved

Each night I updated the Yelp Forum with my accomplishments.  I also laid out my plan for the following day.  This united the Yelp community around my adventures and was really fun.  “You’re doing more things than most Austinites do in a year” wrote one Yelper. Seeing my plans even spurred Riki M., a former Brooklynite herself, to join me at the Cathedral of Junk.  The kindness of a tight-knit online community like Yelp is amazing.  Riki brought with her the Austin essentials: beer and bug spray.  And our mini picnic was fantastic — albeit buggy.

More Tips?

Since my trip, I’ve discovered plancast, which may prove very useful.  Readers: are there other tech tools I should be taking advantage of? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

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Exit Strategy NYC is an iPhone, Blackberry, and Android app that answers the quintessential New Yorker’s question: “Where should I stand on the subway platform?” After months of full-time subway riding, we’ve created detailed diagrams for hundreds of NYC stations, eliminating the guesswork and frustration from subway riding. 

The project launched with an article from the New York Times and quickly got covered by Wired Magazine, NY Post, NY Mag etc (full list of press here).

The locations of the subway exits and transfer points have never before been collected on a large scale in NYC. Similar projects have been done in Toronto and Tokyo. We’re extremely excited to introduce this to New York City.

Soon i’ll be writing more about the thinking behind this app and the experience developing across three different mobile platforms.  But for now, buy it and let us know what you think…we hope you love it!

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First, some background.  I became interested in the mobile coupon business space a few years back when I started thinking about how mobile coupons could effectively be applied to a college campus.  I approached Artia Moghbel, a friend who had started an on-campus discount card (The Pirate Card) and together we wrote up a business plan for Morningside Mobile [PDF] which won second place in Columbia University’s B-plan competition.  Essentially Morningside Mobile (MoSiMob) was Dodgeball crossed with a mobile couponing service and applied to the microcosm of a college campus.

I spent that summer teaching myself the basics of Ruby on Rails and preparing a variant of Morningside Mobile called FreeFoodFone.  But our calculations had relied on using Email <-> SMS gateways to get around high SMS gateway costs.  It turns out this workaround isn’t technically feasible and the service never got off the ground.  Over the next year, I watched Social Monkey, a similar idea to Morningside Mobile (launched by some Tufts University students), which shutdown about a year after launch.

Here’s the big issue:  SMS text messages cost 3 cents to send.  Each. That doesn’t sound like much compared to, say, the 20 cents you would pay the US Postal Service for a direct mail campaign.  But it adds up quickly: sending 1000 text message advertisements costs $30.  Therefore any type of mobile SMS advertising has a cost basis of $30 CPM (truly COST per thousand). If you get a 1% response rate to your mobile advertisement, that works out to a $3 cost of reaching that one responsive customer — and that’s not including the actual cost of the coupon discount.

Now let’s look at some figures provided by Mobile Spinach.  Although they declined to share specific rates, Mobile Spinach says they can routinely get double digit CPMs.  Let’s assume the best case and round it up to a $100 CPM.  Most of the company’s campaigns are between 500 and 1000 text messages.  This means that at best, the average campaign runs between $50 and $100 dollars.  That’s tiny.

What’s the Achilles heel of any hyperlocal business based on advertising?  Small deal sizes and high overhead. The large overhead cost of closing deals makes a local ad business tough to scale effectively.  Let’s look at this on a micro-level by considering the cost of a salary.  Let’s say an entry level salesperson earning $50,000 a year.  They work 50 weeks/year, which means a salary of $1000 a week, $200 a day, or $25 an hour. As shown earlier, Mobile Spinach’s ad campaigns are $100 each on the upper end.  Even if this sales person could close an advertising deal every two hours (a herculean task), the sales people would be burning up half of the company’s incoming revenue.  Add to that the $30 of cost from sending the SMS messages, and there’s not much leftover.  Sure, some of the business is repeat business (there’s longer term value once the relationship is formed) — but it’s still tough to make the numbers work.

Let’s look at this from a macro perspective: At full scale, Mobile Spinach envisions 500,000-750,000 users of the service across 30 cities. They also say that at the absolute max, they’ll send 10 messages/month to users — any more, and the service becomes overwhelming and annoying. Let’s assume every ad is sold at a $100 CPM, which works out to 10 cents per text message. 3 cents of that goes to pay for the SMS message, and 2 cents goes to pay a commission for the Tastemaker (20%). That leaves 5 cents per message. They’re sending at maximum 10 messages per month to each user.  Essentially, after we’re accounted for the cost of goods sold, this works out to a per-user income of $0.50 each month or $6 each year.

Assuming a reasonable $8 customer acquisition cost for the company, it will take more than a year of usage to start earning a profit (and even longer if a reasonable churn rate is factored in). If they succeed in their upper goal of getting 750k users on the service, at $6 annual income per customer, the company will have $4.5 million to pay the salaries of all their staff plus overhead costs. Mobile Spinach plans to have 60-70 sales people at full scale.  At a low figure of $50k/year, a sales force of 70 people would cost $3.5 million in salary alone, not to mention benefits, insurance and overhead.  It’s tough to see the numbers working.

In the end, there’s really only two business models based around coupons. You can be in the business of selling coupons to consumers like The Entertainment Guide. Alternatively, you can be in the business of coupon delivery: Newspapers and companies like Valpak (owned by a newspaper company) have done this successfully for years. There are many companies working on the delivery of mobile coupons: Cellfire, 8coupons, CouponAlbum.com, CouponChief.com and CouponMountain.com just to name a few.  But none have taken off.

Why not?  It’s hard to say.  The truth is that SMS messaging has existed for years.  Mobile Spinach could have been built six years ago.  There’s no recent technological change or evolution that opened up the market opportunity  But the company thinks they’ve figured out the issues that have plagued typical SMS coupon services.

Most coupon services are bothersome and overwhelming.  Mobile Spinach tries to solve this problem by offering ‘exclusive’ offers and also by letting users pick exactly the type of deal they’re looking for:  For example,  within the ‘restaurants’ category are the following sub-options:  ‘$$$$’ or ‘$$$’ or ‘$$’ or ‘$’ and fast food, vegan, seafood, grill, deli/bakery, italian, asian, american, organic and health food.  This level of specificity sounds great to the end user, but specificity and exclusivity are the opposites of scalability — and scalability is key to a technology startup. By breaking down their deals into tons of small categories, the company has created a thousand different chicken and egg problems for themselves: creating a critical mass of merchant in each niche AND creating a critical mass of users interested in that niche.  In my humble opinion, the company should sharpen their focus: pick a single niche, dominate it, and then expand horizontally from there.

Additionally, the company is trying to build their user base from scratch.  But companies with large existing mobile user bases would seem to make a perfect fit for Mobile Spinach’s mobile couponing product.  Why not partner with a company like loopt?

Basically, the mobile couponing business is an extremely tough business to scale well.  I like mobile spinach’s gusto and ‘dial-down’ approach, but at the end of the day I’m still vexed by these three issues:

1)  the high cost of sending SMS text messages.
2) the difficulty of convincing consumers to share their mobile phone numbers.
3) the high overhead costs of closing numerous small local deals.

This last issue concerns all types of hyperlocal companies:  Yelp, Outside.in, Patch.com, GoMobo, Grubhub, and Yodle just to name a few.

Local is a tough business.

As usual, readers, I’d love to hear your comments and questions.  So let’s have ‘em!

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(Source: Sahrizvi on Flickr)

In my life, biking serves three purposes:  A form of exercise.  A convenient way to get places.  But most importantly, biking is my preferred means of exploring a city. I cover much more ground on a bike than on foot, which means I’m more likely to stumble on interesting things:  street festivals, outdoor concerts, interesting architecture, quirky stores etc.

Bikes differ from taxis and subways in one very important way: they’re free. Without a usage cost, there is zero risk to exploration and experimentation.  And therein lies the parallel to web development and the open source software revolution.  The internet we know today could not exist without the free web development technologies (apache, php, mysql, etc).  It’s only when failure has no ‘cost’ — that creativity can truly flourish.

Would you ever hire a taxi to drive around in circles until you found something interesting?  Of course not.  But thanks to biking, I’ve witnessed some incredible sights.

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Online restaurant reservations company OpenTable filed for an IPO on Friday, revealing their finances for the world to see.  The SEC filing contains all the financial figures you would expect: revenue, expenses breakdown, details of the public offering, and also operational data. 

Brett Emerson wrote a fantastic blog post a few months ago (Behind the Curtain: Open Table) which gives a thorough evaluation of OpenTable from a restaurateur’s point of view.  Emerson is in the process of opening Contigo, a new restaurant in San Francisco and he lays out the pros and cons of OpenTable and shares his cost and volume expectations from the service.  Viewed from a restaurant’s pespective, the operational data in OpenTable’s finances gives an amazing amount of insight into the OpenTable system, especially when some analysis and number crunching is applied.

OpenTable Web Traffic and User Behavior

OpenTable makes their money from restaurants that pay a one-time installation fee for reservation software/hardware, a monthly subscription fee, and a fee for each restaurant guest seated through the service.

It’s public knowledge that OpenTable charges $0.25/diner booked via the restaurant’s website and $1/diner booked directly through opentable.com (the higher charge reflects opentable.com’s value as a customer referral tool).  The SEC filing tells us that these fees resulted in $17M of reservation revenue from 25M diners.  Pulling out my trusty TI-83 and solving this linear equation  ( 1*a+ .25*b = $17M  and  a + b = 25M diners) leads to the conclusion that 57% of diners book via opentable.com, and the remaining 43% book via the restaurant website. This tells us about the value of OpenTable as a marketing tool: being part of the OpenTable network yields roughly twice as many online reservations as a stand-alone solution.

Per-Restaurant Data

Excluding one-time installation revenues, total North American revenues for the first nine months of ’08 were $37.5M across 8,090 member restaurants, so the average restaurant pays OpenTable $515 each month (N.B. 8,090 restaurants is the midpoint figure across the reporting period: OpenTable began 2008 with 7,391 restaurants and grew to 8,788 restaurants.  I assume linear growth).  Broken down, this $515 consists of $281 in monthly subscriptions charges and $234 in monthly reservation booking fees.

For the reporting period, one-time installation revenues were $1.7M and there were 1,397 new restaurants.  Each new restaurant therefore pays an average of $1,240 in installation fees (this assumes no churn, that all growth is from new customers).

Does OpenTable deliver?

OpenTable seated 25M diners across 8,090 restaurants in the reporting period which means for the average restaurant, OpenTable fills 345 seats monthly or 14 daily (assuming the restaurant is open six days a week).

One of Emerson’s main concerns is the high cost of reservation fees:

Let’s assume most of the other two thirds of the restaurant’s guests book through Open Table. If successful, a 60-seat restaurant like Contigo could easily pay $1,000-1,500 a month to Open Table in cover charges.

Let’s examine this concern in detail.  Contigo has 60 seats.  Assuming tables can be flipped twice, 120 diners can be served each night.  We know OpenTable on average fills 14 seats a day, so OpenTable would be filling about 12% of the restaurant.  Earlier it was calculated that the average restaurant pays $234 in reservation fees.  Emerson’s figures (66% fill rate, $1000+ monthly fee) therefore probably overestimates OpenTable’s ability to fill tables.

International Figures

OpenTable has mainly concentrated their international efforts in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom and so far international business represents a mere 5% of total revenues.  For the reporting period, an average of 696 restaurants were signed up, producing $1.7M in subscription revenue, $282K in reservation revenue, and a mere $76K in installation revenue.

Dividing the installation revenues across the 451 added restaurants shows an average installation fee of $155 which is significantly lower than the $1,240 that domestic restaurants pay.  This likely signifies that OpenTable heavily subsidizes equipment and installation costs in an attempt to gain traction overseas.

The monthly subscription charge that each restaurant pays is comparable ($270 internationally versus $281 domestically), but as you might expect given the early stage of international adoption, monthly reservation charges are significantly lower ($45 versus $234) and fewer diners are seated through the service (60 diners per month versus 345 diners.)

When both subscription and reservation charges are factored in, it’s revealed that although the average international restaurant spends less with OpenTable per month ($315 versus $515), they pay substantially more for each customer ($5.29 versus $1.49).

OpenTable has emerged as the leader in the US market, surviving the first dot-com bubble, gaining traction with restaurants, and beating out the competition (DinnerBroker.com, Foodline.com, Ireserve.com, iSeatz.com, and RestaurantRow.com and others).  It should be noted that OpenTable operates very profitably within the US — $6.7M profit on $39M revenue, a 17% margin.

Is another victory in the cards?  It’s certainly going to be a tough fight.  OpenTable lacks the first-mover advantage and faces intense competition.  There’s also a strong network effect working against them.  Already OpenTable has conceded Spain and France, closing their offices which had only recently opened in 2007.  OpenTable appears to be pouring every dollar they can into their international expansion and heavily subsidizing equipment costs which is the reason why the company as a whole appears to be unprofitable (and I suspect is the reason for filing for an IPO — to raise more money for their international push).  Looking at their international business, OpenTable posted losses of $6.5M on $2M revenue in the first nine months of 2008.  OpenTable, I wish you luck!

Market Sizing and Market Saturation

OpenTable includes some interesting estimates about the size of their market:

We believe based on our internal estimates that there are approximately 30,000 reservation-taking restaurants in North America that seat approximately 600 million diners through reservations annually.

Considering that OpenTable has signed up close to 10,000 restaurants, they have captured roughly 1/3 of the possible restaurant market — pretty impressive!

Extrapolating through the end of 2008, OpenTable seated 33.5M diners which means that 6% of all restaurant reservations are made through OpenTable — also really impressive!

Quantifying OpenTable’s Marketing Power

Advertising a restaurant in an effective manner is a difficult task.  Press, buzz, and word of mouth recommendations are great, but these aren’t something a restaurant can control.  Besides buying ads on Citysearch or Yelp, there’s not much to be done online (although Russ & Daughters did recently join Twitter!).  Unfortunately launching a search marketing campaign around the keyword “restaurant” doesn’t work too well.  OpenTable clearly realizes the tough position that restaurants are in:

Cost-effective marketing opportunities are limited. Typically, restaurants promote themselves through magazines and newspapers as well as online dining guides and directories. However, restaurants generally do not have the ability to track the number of people who ultimately dine in response to their advertisements, nor are the costs of these advertisements tied to the number of diners they attract. Therefore, restaurants usually are unable to measure or compare the effectiveness of these marketing channels.

Is OpenTable’s $1/diner fee fair?  Emerson suggests that it’s too high:

When a diner pays $40 to eat at Contigo, that dollar [fee per diner] equals about 2.5% of the cost of the meal. That’s significant in an industry where the average profit margin is less than 5%.

Interesting point.  But if you bought a $300 newspaper advertisement which caused 300 new customers to walk into your restaurant, wouldn’t you consider that a phenomenal return on your advertising spend?

The average restaurant spends $515 with OpenTable and gets 345 diners each month, so when all is said and done the true cost of the service is closer to $1.50/diner.  But keep in mind that 43% of the OpenTable bookings come through the website of the restaurant — these 148 diners have already decided to eat at the restaurant!  These customers exist regardless of whether the restaurant is subscribed to OpenTable.  The real value that OpenTable delivers, therefore, is the 197 NEW customers generated due to the marketing exposure on opentable.com.  Restaurants are really paying $515 to gain 197 new customers, which comes to $2.61 per customer.

Concluding his blog post, Emerson writes:

In my mind, the question of whether or not to sign up for Open Table boils down to whether or not I feel Contigo needs to take advantage of Open Table’s substantial marketing power.

The question restaurant owners should therefore ask themselves is this: Is acquiring customers at $2.61 per head a worthwhile investment?  And is there another method that can acquire customers for less?

Well there you have it!  A fascinating look at the business of online restaurant referrals and the insights derived from very basic operational data.

I’ll leave you now with this amusing quote from the SEC Filing about OpenTable’s competition: “Currently, our primary competitors in North America are the pen-and-paper reservation book used by most restaurants and the phone used by diners.”

As always, readers, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts!

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