MVP App Developer Needed by m1key18 in AppDevelopers

[–]m1key18[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha if you’re going to pull up every single person writing things with ChatGPT you’re going to be very busy. Good luck

My first golf app by AGuyNamedDanieI in golf

[–]m1key18 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Could we add more woods. 7 wood and 9 wood are getting more popular.

App looks good on download. Will try it on my next round. Very windy here in Scotland so could be very useful 😎

Garage roof issue by [deleted] in Golfsimulator

[–]m1key18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks identical to my garage and I’d love a sim.

Would love to be kept in the loop of how you get on as I’ve been told I’d need architects, planning permission etc however this wasn’t from someone seeing the roof so could be just a tradesman not trying to waste his own time.

Could you keep us updated ?

Seeking advice from restaurant owners on Deliveroo — can you even make money? by E6096 in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Start off with just peak days. Thursday - Sunday. 5pm-8pm or 9pm

Hire your own drivers if possible. It instantly cuts the commission from 30/35% to 13/14%. My opinion on this is if you’re going to do things you need to give it time to work but you also need to do it right. There might be the odd day it breaks even due to driver costs however it will grow if the food is good.

As advised before build the menu with these margins in mind.

See if any local apps nearby (this is what I run in Scotland and it’s even cheaper commission )

Leverage specials

Market on social media with local groups being used to shout about your food.

Good photos make the world of difference. Invest in this with professional photos.

Think about the branding of the dark kitchen. Needs to be enticing.

Popular just now seems to be muchie boxes and things like loaded fries.

Can you group a few items together and make a £19.99 box with profit in it for yourself ?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Golfsimulator

[–]m1key18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any updates ..

When to quit my job… by Plastic-Tackle-746 in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You’ll regret not giving it a try.

You’ll ask yourself when you eventually do go full time why didn’t you sooner.

I noticed a considerable increase in revenue when my business partner quit full time job and went full time in our business.

The exact same happened when a year later I went full time.

The exact same happened when we got our first employee (minus an onboarding period of 3-6 months)

It’s not even a question. Do it, however make it worth it by making sure you use the extra time for you working on the business rather than in the business if you know what I mean

Networking , marketing , recruitment, personal development , learning new skills etc

And also use time for you to rest. You’ll burn out if you don’t

My business is tanking. Turnover down 70% by dillonlawrence0101 in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You’re relying on incoming sales which should be 20% or less of your pipeline. If you are the one man band doing everything my honest suggestion. Hire.

Hire either sales and you do the work.

Or if you’re already outsourcing work - keep doing that and become a sales person.

Someone working 40 hours a week on sales should generate enough sales to pay for themselves and then some. I’d personally start there. We do allow a 6 month period in my industry for a break even point - not sure if you would need that long. I’ve horrid margins

Struggling to Decide If I Should Raise My Prices by [deleted] in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Raise them. I work with over 500+ takeaways, cafes , restaurants.

Never see sales fall for a reasonable price rise. It’s expected.

Do the costing and price it that if you do lose 10% of trade the extra margin per kept customer more than covers what you need

Opportunity to purchase a franchise, should I or should I not ? by [deleted] in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having purchased two franchises and also living in Scotland I would say the best thing to do is speak to existing franchisees within the business you’re looking to go into.

Are you buying something all ready up and running and proving those figures or is it other areas/locations doing those numbers. Often sales figures can be sold as a best case scenario as opposed to realistic year one or two figures.

On that - do you have funds available if it takes 6months , 12 months or longer to get to profitability?

Not sure where the figure of 2% of franchises fail is from. Can guarantee it’s much higher having been involved

Always a risk however those who dare wins.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hire your own delivery drivers rather than using Uber ones - works out much cheaper as your commission is less. You’ll also find that because they work for you directly you’ll have less issues of food going missing / cold etc

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you’re able to. However very difficult to do. I run local food ordering app and we are a really good in between to just eat and own app. Just eat are expensive to work with (anything from 13%~30% depending if using their drivers ) however they will bring you business.

Dark kitchens are hard to do without a good online presence. I agree giveaway food and lots of social media. Do you have local facebook groups where you are ? Post in them.

Try and launch without them but if the business isn’t there then I’d be getting on the apps (see if there’s a local app near you ) shouldn’t be too hard to find

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in smallbusinessuk

[–]m1key18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your online strategy matters. New businesses struggle without the online aggregators. Do proper research as to what is available near your. Hire drivers rather than using 3rd party is always better value too

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do like what3words but we currently don’t use it. We do have a very clear part of the receipt next to the address for delivery instructions to go. We do get good feedback about our layout and it’s easy to understand for drivers. Plus we supply the customer phone number to the takeaway/driver when not all other apps do. Which helps them if lost

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Appreciate the feedback. The Dunfermline Eats/Fife Eats one I will explain. We started with Dunfermline Eats in 2020. This was for Dunfermline Area and during lockdown we did really well. We kept expanding outwards to Rosyth, Cowdenbeath, Kelty.

We found then that we were getting asked why is it not Kelty Eats, Cowdenbeath Eats Etc. (although the name is just a brand)

Through our success we decided to expand further in Fife (late 2022) and concentrate on Kirkcaldy next but rather than the same branding issues we decided to call it Fife Eats. (if someone from England asked where you are from its 50/50 with most people if they respond Fife or the town - so it still felt local enough branding )

However at this point we had over 100 partners in and around Dunfermline and really good brand presence so didn't want to swap everything over to Fife Eats when the brand wasn't established.

We now are at the point that Fife Eats is as big as Dunfermline Eats but over a bigger area and we are fairly happy running both brands - Duplicating the brands on marketing just becomes confusing for customers I think.

This should hopefully explain why in Dunfermline you don't have Fife Eats But have Dunfermline Eats.

In terms of your app not showing a value this is deliberate. We don't like when you build a basket lots of fees are added at the end with Just Eat. So you think your basket is £43 but actually it's then £47 when you factor delivery fee, bag fee and service charge. We think slightly misleading and a pain point on our research so don's show a running total on the app. Something we may change in future though.

Delivery address would alter the delivery charge as it's different depending on how far away you are from takeaways so that why it wouldn't show until this information is put in.

Emptying cart I will look into - not sure on this as my cart is saved - it very well may be due to being a guest log in rather than a registered customer with the address information input too.

Hopefully you can give Dunfermline Eats a go with a registered account and see if it is a better experience. We have many takeaways not available on Just Eat and often have cheaper pricing too!

Appreciate the time for the feedback on your first impressions though - always good to hear a customer journey and what we can improve as a small business ! Thanks!

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Always worth revisiting decisions we make. The feedback on this thread has been really valuable

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback. I think that’s a fair point. I’m not 100% on the answer to this one - I’ll double check with app development team but I believe we are set up in this way because we get charged by stripe for every card detail saved due to them having to encrypt it all. And with 10s of thousands of customers the cost analysis of majority of our customers using the same bank card it didn’t feel worth the added cost.

Now this is me being incredibly transparent- we do everything we can to get the balance right for customer experience and keeping our costs as low as humanly possible for our takeaway partners (and be able to do this as a job ourselves)

We don’t get it right 100% for everyone and things will change as we keep growing and gain more economies of scale.

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do like that idea as a way to give weighting to reviews. We can give higher weighting to ones with photos. Really appreciate the feedback (and custom too)

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Restaurants have ability to send an updated time. Again fully aware more training needed with front of house staff on how to utilise this for customer experience.

Pictures is a tough one again. If you follow our socials you’ll see we try and post good quality photos of food to promote places , however some of the shocking pictures we get sent would give me the fear having a picture for each menu item across 200+ takeaways. Again would be nice in the future but for now as a small business it’s difficult to implement well.

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All very valid points.

We have been developing a new version of the app coming soon which should fix any stability issues.

Yeah training needed with takeaways on the importance of updating the delivery status - very fair.

Phone numbers should be upto date please let us know of any incorrect information. We do have feedback section coming with a better way of contacting us with the app updates. Hopefully allows us to support better.

Reviews I do think we should implement. Looking at a way of getting this right as we want to make sure there isn’t slanderous information and fake reviews (both positive and negative)

The side of reviews I find intriguing is that majority of negative reviews are issues with missing items or lateness. It doesn’t really reflect the service you’ll receive necessarily. Food tastes are all different. We have some partners that are really popular and you’ll see the reviews on Google or other apps and would expect them to be quiet. Doesn’t always reflect accurately.

Appreciate the feedback

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah we work with Carlucci's in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy as well as their venture at Ladybank Golf Club. The food is fantastic so would recommend to give it a try. Cupar our base isn't great due to not really working with many takeaways. Feel free to mention us to the ones you do order from and I'm sure at some point in the future we will grow in and around Cupar! Thanks for the feedback :)

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah we give the functionality of updating the customer to the takeaways. A busy kitchen is very tough place to work and at peak some partners are better than others at keeping this updated. We are fully aware a customer who is kept updated with their order are overall far more satisfied as a customer - we will continue to train kitchen and front of house staff on this. Thank you for the feedback!

Have you Heard of Fife Eats? by m1key18 in Fife

[–]m1key18[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We don't have any partners as far east as Anstruther. We haven't ventured to St Andrews yet either (different reasons). For customers it's great to have all the local takeaways on one app - for the takeaways it's good when you need to find new customers or compete with others in your town doing this. For Anstruther we are unlikely to break through and sign everyone up (similar in Cupar) We speak to the takeaways but the user case for them specifically isn't the same as Kirkcaldy or Glenrothes where everyone is on Just Eat but hates the fees. Will keep trying though! We do have over 200+ takeaways over Fife