How difficult would it be?

[sze5003]

To make a site like grub hub? I'm working on a business idea with a few friends. I did some research and found out that there are scripts for this. Would it be easy to edit them and modify everything after buying them?

If we start from scratch it obviously would be tougher. He is in an area where grubhub doesn't get attention because they charge a lot and we obviously have our own ideas that seem better and throwing something else into the mix. The market in his area is prosperous and he's talked to several restaurants and small food joints who would definitely be interested.

I'm a java developer by trade but I've done simple sites with php, .net, c# before. I've never really thought about a ordering hub. Just trying to get ideas on tech issues we could run into.

 

[Rakehellion]

To make a site like grub hub?

"I want to start a business that will be the next ______.*"

Don't. It's already been done before. You don't have the money nor the infrastructure to make it work, so not only will your site be unoriginal, it will be worse.

"But my business will have ______!"

What's to stop someone from stealing your idea once it's public? With any luck, someone will and everyone will benefit.

If you're serious about competing with a major national corporation, your best bet is to stay local. But if you're strictly looking for technical advice, better to ask the people who created the script you're buying.

(Replace ______ with Facebook, Youtube, Walmart, Starbucks)

 

[Crusty]

"I want to start a business that will be the next ______.*"

Don't. It's already been done before. You don't have the money nor the infrastructure to make it work, so not only will your site be unoriginal, it will be worse.

"But my business will have ______!"

What's to stop someone from stealing your idea once it's public? With any luck, someone will and everyone will benefit.

If you're serious about competing with a major national corporation, your best bet is to stay local. But if you're strictly looking for technical advice, better to ask the people who created the script you're buying.

(Replace ______ with Facebook, Youtube, Walmart, Starbucks)

Said no entrepreneur ever.

 

[sze5003]

Yea it would be local for the most part. Not sure why he thought it's a good idea to do something like that. I guess because in his area its not widely available.

I'm not spending any money. I offered to help and if it goes well for him, he is a good friend and has been for years. I like doing stuff in my free time. I'm not expecting huge money bags either. But I'll be compensated by him via plane tickets to visit on vacation, etc.

 

[Rakehellion]

Said no entrepreneur ever.

Successful entrepreneur? The difference between a good businessman and a bad one is knowing which ideas to throw away.

 

[Rakehellion]

Yea it would be local for the most part. Not sure why he thought it's a good idea to do something like that. I guess because in his area its not widely available.

I'm not spending any money. I offered to help and if it goes well for him, he is a good friend and has been for years. I like doing stuff in my free time. I'm not expecting huge money bags either. But I'll be compensated by him via plane tickets to visit on vacation, etc.

How far along are you?

 

[sze5003]

How far along are you?

Like I said I'm not expecting any compensation. For me this is an extra hobby in my free time. I know the difference between a good vs bad idea. The worst you can ever do is not try. A service like the one he wants isn't available in his area.

 

[Train]

"I want to start a business that will be the next ______.*"

Don't. It's already been done before. You don't have the money nor the infrastructure to make it work, so not only will your site be unoriginal, it will be worse.

"But my business will have ______!"

What's to stop someone from stealing your idea once it's public? With any luck, someone will and everyone will benefit.

If you're serious about competing with a major national corporation, your best bet is to stay local. But if you're strictly looking for technical advice, better to ask the people who created the script you're buying.

(Replace ______ with Facebook, Youtube, Walmart, Starbucks)

You do realize Facebook was the "next MySpace", right?

Google was the next Yahoo. etc. etc. Yahoo and MySpace were both "firsts" ad are essentially on life support now, while Google and Facebook have more money than they know what to do with.

This myth has been beaten to death on the startup blogosphere

 

[Markbnj]

There's no simple formula for a good or bad idea. Whether or not something has been tried before, successfully or unsuccessfully, has almost no bearing on whether another attempt at the same idea will be successful. It can be implementation. It can be timing. It can be subtleties of focus. If you look at successful businesses today and track them back to the origin of their ideas there is no consistent correlation between success and uniqueness, or any other simple measurement or analysis. The most consistent characteristic they all have is they were founded by people with a single-minded determination to pursue an idea, and who ignored all the well-reasoned and well-founded arguments against pursuing the idea in the first place. It's really a mental illness .

 

[smackababy]

Difficult to make a website with the basic "search area, order, pay and send courier"? Not very hard. Even making it look "good" is pretty easy. The difficulty of the idea lies more in the implementation of how the couriers are handled, the start up cost, and having the capitol to keep the business afloat.

Assuming you use your own payment transaction, you have to charge more than the cost of the food at the place, and the upkeep costs (plus, extra to make profit). There shouldn't be many tech issues, but the logistics is what is going to be the problem.

 

[sze5003]

Right but there has to be a connection technique or database of all the restaurants, someone or something to manage the orders. Many people mention orders get lost because no one is watching the computer.

Storing each restaurant's menu and specials, it can get hairy. I've never done something like that for multiple places so I suggested a script for him. I'll probably have a lot easier time reading the code and modifying it how I want than starting from scratch.

 

[Crusty]

Right but there has to be a connection technique or database of all the restaurants, someone or something to manage the orders. Many people mention orders get lost because no one is watching the computer.

Storing each restaurant's menu and specials, it can get hairy. I've never done something like that for multiple places so I suggested a script for him. I'll probably have a lot easier time reading the code and modifying it how I want than starting from scratch.

The problem with lots of the businesses like this one is that it requires the small business owner to be involved in the process of maintaining menus and the order queue. Small business owners(older generations) are the last businesses to adopt and learn new technologies so you end up spending a significant amount of time and effort just dealing with them instead of focusing on your service offering.

 

[Rakehellion]

You do realize Facebook was the "next MySpace", right?

When Facebook first came out, they catered to university students only. They weren't even competing with Myspace. I'm not saying you should never start a business, just don't piggyback on someone else's idea and expect miracles.

 

[sze5003]

When Facebook first came out, they catered to university students only. They weren't even competing with Myspace. I'm not saying you should never start a business, just don't piggyback on someone else's idea and expect miracles.

Yea I've told him this. It's his money and decisions. I'm not expecting anything but I will always help a friend out who I consider family since we've been good friends for a long time. For his sake, he's keeping it local, I'm sure he knows competing nationally with other companies is out of the question right now.

I'm not putting up any of my money, not like I have any to put in anyway. If I can make a couple hundred bucks even if it's for one time that I do something I don't mind.

 

[Train]

When Facebook first came out, they catered to university students only. They weren't even competing with Myspace. I'm not saying you should never start a business, just don't piggyback on someone else's idea and expect miracles.

They took a different path, but they sure as hell were competing with myspace.

 

[disappoint]

When Facebook first came out, they catered to university students only. They weren't even competing with Myspace. I'm not saying you should never start a business, just don't piggyback on someone else's idea and expect miracles.

Seriously? Who was Myspace catering to? Catering companies? Cue Xhibit: We heard you like catering companies so we created a blogosphere catering to catering companies that like to cater and be catered to through a series of serious tubes on the internet of a series of serial tubes. That's serious business. Seriously.

 

[sze5003]

Facebook started off as more mature than MySpace. Cleaner, sleek, only for college students, etc. Now, it's just as crappy if you ask me.

 

[beginner99]

I'm a java developer by trade but I've done simple sites with php, .net, c# before. I've never really thought about a ordering hub. Just trying to get ideas on tech issues we could run into.

Most of the web is powered by Java Application servers so that would be a good choice. The question is were it will be hosted? The advanatge of PHP is that hosting is way, way cheaper and readily available.

Difficult to make a website with the basic "search area, order, pay and send courier"? Not very hard. Even making it look "good" is pretty easy. The difficulty of the idea lies more in the implementation of how the couriers are handled, the start up cost, and having the capitol to keep the business afloat.

Assuming you use your own payment transaction, you have to charge more than the cost of the food at the place, and the upkeep costs (plus, extra to make profit). There shouldn't be many tech issues, but the logistics is what is going to be the problem.

I agree. While it's not trivial to create a functional web site, the other stuff mentioned can be a real issue. Also the design of the site can be hard so that it actually looks good and modern.

 

[Leros]

The advanatge of PHP is that hosting is way, way cheaper and readily available.

Not sure it's too much of a disadvantage. Simple hosting companies with PHP don't really scale once you start to see real traffic.

At some point, you're going to need your own servers, multiple servers. It's not too hard to get a $5-20 VPS and set it up with something like Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL. When you need to begin to scale, you can just get another VPS and maybe a load balancer.

I think the main disadvantage of Java is that an idle prototype/experiment takes up memory. If you want to have 20 experiments sitting idle on the web, you need a non-trivial server just for the memory requirements.

 

[sze5003]

Most of the web is powered by Java Application servers so that would be a good choice. The question is were it will be hosted? The advanatge of PHP is that hosting is way, way cheaper and readily available.



I agree. While it's not trivial to create a functional web site, the other stuff mentioned can be a real issue. Also the design of the site can be hard so that it actually looks good and modern.

Yea java is a memory hog. Our application at work is constantly taking a toll on the cheap virtual servers they use.

If we were to buy one of those scripts, they run on php and sql, which is a lot easier to set up and use going forward.

What you mention is the design, which will be tough. I suck at designing and making anything look awesome. We were going over wire frames last night. My two friends have no idea of the implications of what they want the site to look like and how it should function. All these popping in and out views, layers, fancy functionality, will require a lot of design work. Not only that but also a lot of data to be pulled in and stored. While they are arguing about how it should look I'm sitting there thinking how all it will work in the backend.

I suggest start off simple and clean at first even if it doesn't have all the functionality of the rest of those sites.

 

[Leros]

Yea java is a memory hog. Our application at work is constantly taking a toll on the cheap virtual servers they use.

If we were to buy one of those scripts, they run on php and sql, which is a lot easier to set up and use going forward.

What you mention is the design, which will be tough. I suck at designing and making anything look awesome. We were going over wire frames last night. My two friends have no idea of the implications of what they want the site to look like and how it should function. All these popping in and out views, layers, fancy functionality, will require a lot of design work. Not only that but also a lot of data to be pulled in and stored. While they are arguing about how it should look I'm sitting there thinking how all it will work in the backend.

I suggest start off simple and clean at first even if it doesn't have all the functionality of the rest of those sites.

I suggest you build a minimal viable product and iterate from there once you have some data about how the site being used. There is no point in designing a fancy UI for a feature you don't know will be used.

I'd recommend reading The Lean Startup if you don't know about things like minimal viable product and rapid data driven iteration. It's a good introduction to the methodology. http://theleanstartup.com

 

[Train]

I suggest you build a minimal viable product and iterate from there once you have some data about how the site being used. There is no point in designing a fancy UI for a feature you don't know will be used.

I'd recommend reading The Lean Startup if you don't know about things like minimal viable product and rapid data driven iteration. It's a good introduction to the methodology. http://theleanstartup.com

this. Was just gonna post MVP/Lean Startup

 

[sze5003]

I suggest you build a minimal viable product and iterate from there once you have some data about how the site being used. There is no point in designing a fancy UI for a feature you don't know will be used.

I'd recommend reading The Lean Startup if you don't know about things like minimal viable product and rapid data driven iteration. It's a good introduction to the methodology. http://theleanstartup.com

Yup that's what I would do if this was my project. Essentially if I'll be helping to code it for them, starting simple and lean is the best to do. We have nightly Skype meetings so I'll get them to read up on that link.

Just listening to what they were talking about gave me a feeling of well you guys want to do this but it's exactly the same functionality as the other two sites why not just start simple and make modifications based on that. No need to have all this stuff done at once.

 

[smackababy]

You need to get them to lay out clear requirements before doing anything. And lock them into them.