Pretend Product: Tysther
Pretend Product is a series of musings on a product that should exist in the world or improvements I’d offer to an already existing product
Every good product starts with a user problem to solve
User problem: I want to know how food tastes before I take the risk of buying a meal that I won’t enjoy.
Current solution to the user problem: ask around from friends who’ve had it before or look at photos and ingredients to reverse engineer what it might taste like.
Proposed Solution
Tysther (pronounced “tester”, named after two former classmates of mine) is a site of reviews of a meal that go beyond ‘tastes good’ or ‘filling’ to details like spiciness, texture, sweetness, saltiness, softness, crunchiness, temperature, aftertaste, etc. to give you a better understanding of a meal before you try it.
For calibration, the rating scale wouldn’t be numbers. So for example, it would not have you rate the spiciness of a meal from 1–5 but from avocado to jalapenos so that you can decide for yourself if something would be spicy to you based on your own experiences with jalapenos.
Tradeoffs: Although this ideally keeps you from relying on a restaurant’s rating of its own spiciness, ratings are still subjective. I think of this like buying clothes online where people comment on whether an item runs small or has coarse fabric but you think it’s soft and the perfect size. Tysther wouldn’t eliminate risk entirely which no software can do given that a meal can be prepped differently every time and your palette can adjust over time. Instead, Tysther provides more granularity of how a meal is experienced to help you with your choice to eat somewhere.
The beauty of Tysther is that as compared to leaving a review of entire restaurants where the cocktails are great but the steak was overcooked but also somehow served cold, people can make more informed decisions on where to go for the specific thing they are in the mood for while avoiding ordering what a dining establishment isn’t strong in despite their 5-star reviews all over the internet. You can already see people attempt to try to solve this problem in the way they break down what parts of the meal were and weren’t good in their current reviews on other sites.
Rollout: I think that launching this in a single market then expanding in different cities makes the most sense. It adds some level of desirability due to exclusivity-you can’t just hop on the site from anywhere and start telling us how the meal you just had tasted.
I’m in Houston; a city of many restaurants. We’d have a team go to the most popular and waitlisted restaurants in Houston. By building a database of top restaurants and using inbound marketing to promote Tysther as a resource for tourists and adventurous foodies, we can build a starting market for the product.
Like AirBnB, you cannot request for us to remove a review of a meal if you are a restaurant owner. Since reviewers (let’s call them Tysthers) can edit a review after posting it, replies to reviews-such as with Google reviews-won’t be a feature in order to prevent coercion through the replies and increase the reliability of the feedback you find on our site.
Measuring success: I’d measure success by the number of site visits and as we come to be a reliable source for meal descriptions, return visits from individual users. Monetarily, success is measured in revenue from local ads minus operating costs.
A longer-term direction could be to build partnerships with restaurants to offer coupons to patrons who come from our site to the restaurant and then come back on the site to leave a review of their meal and build knowledge.
Does this matter?
Let us return to the basics.
User problem: I want to know how food tastes before I take the risk of buying a meal that I won’t enjoy.
The hope is that being able to piggyback on the risk active foodies have already taken on a meal will reduce the risk you take when deciding to eat something at a new place or a new thing at a place you frequent. Not only can you see if the meal looks good but also if it sounds good; more importantly, you can decide if it sounds good to you.
Thoughts?
I’d love feedback on the idea either here or on LinkedIn.
