Chewsr 30 day update

Spent this month testing social media as a growth channel. It brought some attention and traffic, but not enough people actually starting sessions once they landed on the site.

Big takeaway is that any friction before starting kills momentum. If someone has to think too much, they bounce.

Also realized the app is way more interesting in dense areas. In rural spots you just end up seeing the same ~30 restaurants and the novelty wears off pretty fast.

After talking with a few entrepreneurial friends and doing some reflection, the direction going forward is:

• Simplify the initial UI so a session starts immediately
• Focus more on young professionals in cities
• Optimize for office lunch decisions and after work plans
• Smaller, walkable radiuses instead of big drive distances

Next month is mostly about tightening activation and leaning into where the app actually shines. Also looking into ingesting food trucks as a vendor option as well.

chewsr december updates

The mvp has been live in a number of English speaking countries, and I’ve had a lot of friends and family testing it out & giving good feedback. On the data side of things I’m using Yelp which isn’t the best internationally, so I’m still exploring other options there like thefork, zomato, justeat, etc. from a business pov I’m still trying to find the right product market fit for the folks using it, I want to make sure it’s something they can come back to and not just use once and never again, to do that, it needs to provide more value.

At the same time, I’ve started working on a few new features, allowing restaurants to claim their restaurant and add in their own menu and photos after they’ve been approved, since I’m running into data scarcity issues I think this is a good middle ground.

I did some beta testing using some canva images as placeholders when restaurants did not have photos, but I think a lot of people find AI generated images off putting when they are looking for food to order, so I’ve reverted that.

As for revenue, I’ve been exploring options especially with affiliate links which are promising, but the US market is actually not great for it, so I’m trying out a billboard approach where restaurants will be able to pay $10 a month to be guaranteed to show up in a swipe session in their region.

Next steps, the focus is going to be working on some social media to showcase how it works, and work a bit on the virality loop with sharing a session.

Chewsr <> https://chewsr.com

why

I decided to take a stab at creating an app that makes the process of picking where to eat as frictionless as possible for groups. One of my personal gripes with the existing things out there was that you needed to sign up for an account, and if you were deciding with other people they would also need an account, so I built it with that in mind.

how

I've iterated a lot on this project already in the past 3-4 weeks, but landed on using Yelp as the data source, due to a mix of it having a good selection of photos readily available in the first API call, and the pricing of it. Compared to others like google places, where the cost would end up being around ~40 cents per session call.

revenue

I'm taking a few different approaches to how I can generate revenue with a free tool like this

• affiliate links on the results page
• analytics on swipe data for certain regions & filters (for restaurants)
• restaurant paid ads in certain regions, guaranteed to show up in the swipe session

tech stack

the app is a rails 8 app, hosted on fly.io, which had it's own technical challenges with integrating certain APIs like Yelp's, I guess a lot of people scrape their data using free hosting so they have blocked a lot of IP ranges from there, so I had to make a reverse proxy where when I make the backend app call to actually get the yelp data, it goes through another server with a dedicated IP they have whitelisted, then it returns all of that back to my server and I can work with it. I'll probably write a more technical write up of how each piece is implemented to not clutter up the intro post.

what to expect in this channel

I'm going to be talking through my process of how I'm building this out, where I encountered challenges, had to pivot, and general lessons learned.