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I was recently laid off after 18 years, and gave myself 100 days to build soething useful in public. CheapFoodMap is a crowdsourced map of meal under $10, excluding franchises, local good eats only.
It's inspried by 거지맵 (Begger's Map) a Korean crowdsourced map students use to find cheap eats.
Ocverage is heaviest in Texas, since I live in Dallas, but have 1200 meals across 15 US cities. Seed data came from Google Review, 4.2 star or higher with at least 500 reviews, and verified price under $10 per menu item.
Things I would love feedback on : whether the price-freshness model makes sense, and what would make you trust the price on a site like this. How to encourage people to update prices, since inflation is making food price very frequent.
https://cheapfoodmap.com
Any and all suggestion will be super helpful. Thank you!
Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
One of the reasons GasBuddy took off was that it wasn't just based on community reports; there was an incentive for gas stations themselves to accurately report their prices and keep them up to date.
It seems like you're trying to discourage businesses from participating (e.g. by not accepting sponsored placements), and that will have implications for your growth rate. I think you should look for ways to give businesses an active role, without eroding user trust in the recommendations, of course.
Think of the possibilities:
- Business can add coupons to its listing, making cheap food even cheaper
- Business can confirm a reported deal, adding to its credibility
- Business can provide full menu and a link to order takeout
I don't think any of those features would make users feel like the business is "buying" a listing it didn't earn.
That said, kneejerk after using it is: price is a challenging anchor, because food is not uniform. I’d be curious if users are more interested in “under $10, ignoring all else” or “a better deal than comparable” - though, there’s a lot of subjectivity in that.
Gasbuddy works because 1 gallon of gas = 1 gallon of gas, so price is a useful anchor.
$5 for sushi at one place could be a bad deal, while a great deal at another place.
An $8 steak would be cheap. An $8 hot dog would be a ripoff.
I’d be skeptical of restaurants luring people with a single cheap item, or about quality/portion changes.
All this said, Ikea is known for designing furniture _around_ the price their target customer thinks a table should cost. Restaurants are likely (hopefully!) aware of where these price thresholds are for their customers … and your site could be an interesting way of sending them a different type of customer than they’d historically targeted. Or, allow them to refine an offering to maximize profit at the $10 price point.
As others have said, engage restaurants and make them part of the equation. They’re not your adversary.
In short: cool! Do lots of experiments and research!
You know, my dream is to have some kind of movement where people rally to fight inflation and tipflation. Last few years, we seen some crazy food price increases and it seems like its gonna get worse.
If enough people find value in affortable prices, and people go to those restaurants that offer good deals, either as lunch special or weekly promotion, more restaurant will try to offer these kind of deals. Win for customers, win for restuarant.
Might be getting a head of myself there.. but that's the vision. (If you check "About" page, I put another dream which is to make this website turn non-profit later down the road if we make money lol)
Have you thought about either some guidance, or even a filter, for meal size?
I hope this app can help share these hidden gems.
Maybe I should just delete bad data and just put few legit places only?
Basic rules were no franchise, actual meals only. I was filtering manually in DFW area for now, but should actually add more features and guidance in general.
This is actually critical point. Thank you for pointing that out.
But honestly... not fulfilling all the requirement just yet >_<
It would be great to somehow either
- Get to the map from a city list
- refine the city to a neighborhood level
We added tip + tax calculation on the page so you know what you are getting into as well =)
They should add the cost of future open heart surgery to the cheap meal.