Writing about billion-dollar valuations and companies flush with cash is certainly fun, entertaining, and hopefully enlightening, but it’s always fun to come across a teeny-tiny startup solving a small, but real problem for a clientele you know almost nothing about.
No better example than PerfectMenu.com and its dead-simple solution that helps eateries get their menus online and easily maintain them.
Aviv Hadar, an Israeli based in Bend, Oregon, came up with the concept for PerfectMenu a few months ago when he noticed that owners of restaurants, cafes, food-carts, etc., all share a similar pain: None have an easy way to manage their online menus.
He found that what most end up doing is posting their menus in PDF form on their sites. Being hard to read (especially on mobile devices), not only is this a terrible user experience for potential customers, maintaining menus this way is also extremely clunky considering new PDF menus need to be created and sometimes uploaded every single day.
Rather than going down a long development route, Hadar took the idea to a Startup Weekend event in Bend and hacked the product together in under three days. They had paying customers the next day.
The product itself is very lean on features and simple enough for any eatery owner or employee to use.
It takes minutes to set menus up, and updating them is even easier. The menus themselves can be color-customized and can feature the eatery’s logo, links to Facebook and Twitter, as well as a map and the establishment’s telephone number — simple, no frills. QR codes linking to the menus are auto-generated (these can be printed as stickers or in ads). The menus also support multiple locations.
The result is a clean, professional-looking menu that looks — that’s right — perfect on both web and mobile devices. Once the menu is posted online, it can either be linked to from the eatery’s official site, or embedded in it. This does require a bit of tech know-how to get going, but maintaining the menus after that is a breeze.
So next time you’re at your favorite eatery, go ahead and mention PerfectMenu… At $5 per month, per location, with a 14-day free trial, it’s the perfect no-brainer.
