BestInTown

BestInTown Application

Functionality & Features: BestInTown is a application designed to aggregate food reviews from the top restaurant reviews sites such as yelp, Zagat, Urbanspoon, Citysearch etc along with a critiques from the highly trained expert staff at BestInTown to award each specific food item with a true ranking of BestInTown.

It’s often really difficult to find what is truly the best (for example) “pizza” in town. Everyone you may ask will likely say something different, which depending on his or her idea of what good pizza is and it likely will leave you exactly where you started, unsure. Unless you have a desire to go on a pizza-eating binge at every pizza eatery in town, I’ll bet most consumers are looking for a process that is a bit easier and something that will compile research and reviews together for one consensus decision. This is where BestInTown comes in.

Users will be able to search their favorite food items by ingredients and choose through a list of those items to select a dish they desire. For example, a user may enter in chicken, pesto, garlic and the search results will list a number of items such as pesto pasta, pesto chicken sandwich etc. From this point the user can proceed to finding the best dish in town.

If you don’t know what you want, the user can ask the app to “surprise me” and will generate a suggestion based on your previous searches or most searched items in the database.  Additional functionality will include a “BestOfToday” item which will mirror the functionality of groupon; for example users will be notified of the deal to purchase a 25-dollar certificate for 10-dollars at the BestInTown pizza place of SeriousPie.  The daily deal fad is really taking off and is a great way to attract users to the BestInTown platform.

Problem being solved: Each review site will have a different rating which correlates with that reviewer’s opinion and criteria for a good product.  Unless, the consumer has developed trust for one specific review site then it will be difficult to tell which product is truly BestInTown.  Our intention is to combine and process all this data to formulate 1 ranking. In addition if you choose to drill down into the ranking you will be able to see which sites the data was pulled from.

Audience: Our audience is anyone who loves food and eats out frequently. Launching in Seattle market only (initially).

Competing Products: Yelp, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon, Foodie (Chicago market only), Irestaurant.  The primary competitors will be Urban Spoon & CitySearch as they also aggregate data from multiple sources such as blogs, well-known critics reviews, and generate a list of the best restaurants in town. UrbanSpoon has a big name and large user base currently do it will be extremely difficult to overtake the but BestInTown plans to differentiate by not simply suggesting the best restaurant in town but by personalizing it a step further to actually suggest the “best food item in town” based on what your desires are.  In addition, the Groupon like functionality  “BestOfToday” lure new users to try the BestInTown platform.  There shouldn’t be any competition with Groupon  in this space as there’s plenty of room for deals as along as we aren’t promoting the same deal consecutively.

Sponsor: Seattle Chamber of Commerce