Quick Pitch: BistroSquare is a website builder specifically for restaurants.
Genius Idea: Making it easy for restaurants to create websites that are as simple or as fully featured as they need them to be.
Richie Ward's family has been in the restaurant business for three generations. Ward prefered to start a tech company, but didn't want to abandon his deep understanding of independent restaurants. So last month, Ward and his co-founder Andrew Kurz launched a website builder targeted specifically at the 311,548 businesses in the United States that fit into that category.
"I'm sure that there are some out there who have a background in web development and just kind of landed in the restaurant industry that could build a website themselves and never need our service," Ward says. "But by and large there seem to be restaurateurs out there who are excellent at running restaurants but don't really know where to start when it comes to building a website. That's who our product is geared toward."
BistroSquare is designed for restaurants and other small food businesses, like bakeries and caterers, and has features that easily create online menus, coupons and reservations. Instead of paying hundreds to thousands of dollars for a functional website, restaurant owners with minimum technology skills create and maintain their own sites.
Other startups like Culini and LetsEat.at are also targeting independent restaurants with web builders that integrate social media and help create a sleek website. Ward says his bootstrapped startup is different in that its web builder goes beyond putting up a "build it and forget it" website.
"We're not really just a web builder," Ward says. "We're kind of the complete package for managing a website."
BistroSquare's site offers the basics, but it also has advanced features like a reservation system, email accounts, multiple user management tools and a shopping cart. LetsEat.at integrates with OpenTable, but doesn't have its own system.
An ad-supported free version of BistroSquare has limited features and doesn't include the $19.99 annual domain name fee. Other plans run from $29.99 to $49.99 per month, which is considerably more expensive than LetsEat.at but on par with Culini, which has more complicated features.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, nikada
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
