The story of haphap.nl

Hey guys (and girls ofcourse),



So.. A few years ago, Maurice and I launched a dutch site where you can order food online. It's called haphap.nl . Now, we were doing some adwords, and we got some orders, but only a few per week. We had this idea about creating not only an order site, but also a whole community to talk about what you ordered, and we thought of a widget (note that this was 2004) for your site where you could post what you ordered last time. We have ratings and everything.



So what happened? We called our ears off, and visited several restaurants, but it was so damn hard to sell a free service! This was something we didn't expect. We had all these great ideas we could do with the site, and cool marketing plans, but we had to make some revenue first. Which never really happened. We felt like Seth Godin, a great markeer. We're both a big fan of Seth, but we make these jokes about how he knows how to do it, but can't really do it himself. ;) Squidoo is doing pretty well lately though.. ok, let's carry on...

Now, a few years later, the site is still online, and we're thinking of doing it again. But this time with a different strategy.

1) Although our site doesn't require an account, we need the postal code to determine where you are. This is a no no for search engines. So we want to create a page with all zipcodes, and make the site more stateless and RESTfull (i.e. /zip/1018/restaurants/chinese)

2) Don't aquire business ourselves. Because we're not that great at selling our business, we're thinking of letter others manage cities. The manager will get a revenue share based on the orders. If they don't perform well enough, we'll find someone else. Let the manager decide on the price (xx per order, or yy% of an order)

3) Ask a monthly fee. I'm not sure if this is something that works, but if it works it'll mean more commitment, and a stable revenue stream.

4) Do the widgets for hyves (our facebook/myspace)

5) Take it international.


So, what do you guys thing of this? Should we do it or not?