As some of you may remember, I am heavily involved in an on campus organization called the Collegiate Entrepreneurs which is focused on helping students get real world business start-up experience while being a college student.
For the past couple months, we as an organization, have been working on developing a new online menu hosting website called Radmenus (http://www.radmenus.com). The idea of an online menu hosting website is not revolutionary, other sites such as Campus Food have been around for a few years. However, we feel the moves that we are going to be making in the next few months will really set Radmenus.com apart from the other competitors.
Right now, in our area of Southwest Virginia, there is one other similar website to ours. It’s focus though is on just providing a restaurant listing: all the restaurants in the different towns categorized by the type of food they serve and only provides their address, operation hours, and a phone number. Radmenus differs from this approach by actually hosting the restaurants menu on our website – all restaurants, all menus, one website. Radmenus.com eliminates the needs to visit many different restaurant websites to search for menus and also you no longer need to have paper menus laying around your apartment or house.
So, the initial phase of the business has launched – the website. We currently have 40 restaurant menus online and are adding more each day from 3 different cities. You are probably thinking “if this is a business, how are they making money?” Well, how is any other online business making money – through advertising. After a certain amount of time, restaurants will have to start paying to have their menu hosted on our website, this would basically be compared to paying to be listed within a phone book, however, the website is able to offer so much more information to the visitors. On top of restaurants paying to have their menu listed, they will also have the opportunity to purchase premium advertising on the website, comparable to advertising in the school newspaper or other publication.
So, now you know about the idea and the business a little, what do you think? We have received some initial press from the University as well as The Roanoke Times (the larger newspaper in the area).
Feel free to ask any questions you may have an I will attempt to respond with the best answer possible. I look forward to getting some feedback!
Radmenus certainly seems to have outgrown Campus Food though I have to say that I like the layout of the latter better. Still, it’s about the service and not anything else, right? It just goes to show that an old dog can be taught new and more profitable tricks!
Jay – I have to say I agree with you about the layout and design for the site. WE were in a sort of hurry to get something up there and did not have a lot of development time for the front end. The table formatted layout fits our needs for now, but it is definitely something we are going to be reworking when we return to school in mid January. Thanks for your comment!
Radmenus is now College Town Menus (CTM). We have a much better layout than before, more features, and will be continuously adding more capabilities, restaurants, and schools in the near future. Stay tuned!
Thank you very much for the ind words Jay.