At first glance, the title seems ironic, since we are a startup, and most of our customers are restaurants. But read on, and you'll find we're talking more about bad startup marketing - marketing strategies that make life harder for restaurant owners.
You may have seen our recent post "Dear Google, Please Leave Restaurant Search Results Alone", where we derided our beloved Google for messing around with search results in a way that takes traffic from local businesses, and makes it harder to get accurate information from them.
Well, I have another target today. Startups.
I know startups. I've seen a few, actually I've been in many. Running one right now.
Startups try all sorts of wild ideas to get growth, attention, and press. They have to do it to survive and thrive. But come on, when you're messing with local business search results, stealing traffic from the local businesses you're trying to serve, or making business owners work harder without your permission, you've gone too far.
The main culprits are delivery services, menu services, review sites, and feedback services.
Look, restaurant owners get pitched all the time. They are extremely busy people and their attention is stretched as thin as New York pizza dough. They've gotten burned on so many startups already, especially in the last 5 years: Groupon, loyalty programs, apps, the next hot POS, the new hot software, and review sites, namely Yelp. The margins in the restaurant industry are thin, and your service has to have a great ROI to make it worth the effort and expense.
Note: There are many ways to reach business owners that avoid these growth practices. Try getting into partnerships with businesses that already sell to these businesses, or try SEO, or PPC, content marketing, or all of them. But stay away from the following growth ideas.
Rule 1: Never make more work for business owners without their permission.
There are a number of menu services that are causing headaches for business owners. If you Google "Pat's BBQ menu", Google now breaks out menu items in the results. That would seem great, but the prices are incorrect. Where does Google get these? There are now 4 different sites we've discovered: Locu (owned by GoDaddy), AllMenus, MenuPages, and SinglePlatform.
Why doesn't Google just make the Pat's BBQ menu page from its website the 1st result instead? Well thanks, startups. Now Pat's BBQ has to track down where these are coming from, get signed up, pay a fee, edit the listings, or convince Google to remove it completely. Where do you think the prices are accurate? On a 3rd-party service, or Pat's website itself?
Rule 2: Never steal web traffic from business owners.
Back in May, some growth hacker at OrderAhead, a food delivery startup, came up with the awful idea that they would register domains similar to the domains for existing restaurants and set up web sites to fool consumers into thinking they were on the restaurant's website. Even Google was fooled, and sites were even verified to be the official site on Google local. Due to SEO tactics, the imposter sites even outranked the actual restaurant's Google result, and the original restaurant ownership had no idea this was happening. Graduating from Y Combinator and getting $10.5 million in funding doesn't necessarily mean you have been vetted for your ethics.
If you are one of a large number of review sites, your result can sometimes take the place of a business' own website. That just doesn't seem right. The only time a Google result for a business name should show up instead of the business itself is when that business has no website at all.
Does it seem fair that when a consumer Googles a business that the first result is Yelp, with stars highlighted? Some of this is Google's fault, but it's also Yelp's. They have such high PageRank that small businesses just can't compete. Business owners should not have to be SEO experts or hire a firm just to be on the top of Google for their own name.
It's hard enough for business owners to stay on top of local search results. Don't make it harder for them by clogging up search results with your website and pushing theirs lower, to page 2 or page 3. The more startups that do this, the worse it gets.
Disclaimer: We were guilty of potentially stealing traffic with our reviews site that highlighted only positive reviews. It wasn't meant to rank higher than the business itself, but we could see how it might have moved a given business down in ranking for a search term, so we shut it down. It just wasn't the right thing to do.
Rule 3: Don't stand between a business and its customers.
"Hello Business Owner, congratulations, we have feedback for you from a customer! Create an account at badStartupIdea.com to read it and respond. Aren't we awesome?"
Can you imagine a dozen of these type services? That would mean the business owner has to maintain 12 different accounts to keep in touch with customers. It's not fair. I won't name some of the startups that do this, even though many are our competitors.
From a competitor's FAQ:
If there is no owner registered, the [redacted] staff immediately gets on the case and works to locate the owner. Among other things, we call the business, we email them, we tweet them and find them on Facebook. We even resort to snail mail if we have to.
Imagine 12 businesses doing this. What a hassle for owners.
At TalkToTheManager.com, we start with the business owner, not the consumer, and let the business owner decide whether they want to receive feedback or not. Otherwise, you're just making more work for a business owner.
Yelp is also a culprit in this. They accept reviews from the consumer, but if the owner wants to respond, they must claim their account and use Yelp to respond. Imagine another 4 or 5 services that did the same thing (oh that's right, there are). That's a lot to manage. Business owners are already busy enough.
Please Consider
When considering a new startup or growth idea, please consider this rule of thumb:
Rule of thumb: If you had 10 competitors or businesses doing the same thing as you, using your same growth idea, what would happen to the search landscape? How difficult would life become for a local business owner? Is it right? Is it fair?
Growth of your business at any cost, eh? Is that how you want to build your business?