The village idiot of Las Vegas explains his Chinatown idea to Uncle Ned...

This particular post is for my Uncle Ned; I've been doing my best to explain to him my thoughts on Chinatown and the whole biz I'm proposing, but for some reason or another it won't sink in. Maybe this post will give him a better idea of what I'm thinking. Here's the gist; go into as many restaurants as possible in Chinatown and introduce the idea of online ordering and food delivery. Now, if the Asian proprietor's are interested in the process, we would then sign them up and start selling their food on a website. Whenever product sales on the site, we're entitled to a healthy slice of revenue from the sale. If you want the most successful example of what I'm thinking, look at a site called Grubhub. They had 50 million in sales last year and just received their fifth round of financing (84 million).

Why Chinatown? Why not try an attack on a more traditional route? Both are very good questions; let me start with the first. Chinatown is top heavy with restaurants, and when I say top heavy, I mean it! They're over 100 restaurants on the main drag and not a single one of them has a service like ours. If you go the more traditional route; competition is much thicker. So far we have 10 restaurants signed up for the service and all of them are in close proximity of each other. All signs say that we could sign another ten up in short order. 

Recently, I chatted with a friend of mine in Las Vegas who owns a pizzeria. He has a similar service to the one I'm proposing. He told me that last month they did two thousand in sales at his place. Of that two thousand the site kept 25%. Now take a second and do the math. If this place sliced $500 in one month from a single restaurant, the site I'm referring to has approximately 60-100 restaurants on it at any given time, how much do you think they are netting from all the other places? I'm hesitant to give an exact number because I don't know. Do some guess work on the math; 25-40K a month?

If we follow my direction and utilize the Asian contacts I have; the site I'm proposing could sign 60 restaurants in Chinatown alone. A few more things before I move on to my thought of the day. The restaurants in Chinatown are wide open for a service like this. Competition is non-existent. At this point, I have ten more restaurants signed up in Chinatown then my nearest competitor and I don't even have a site yet.

I like to end all of my post with a thought I'm having...Call it the village idiot thought of the day. "Back when I was in Texas, I met with a potential investor about an idea I was working on at the time. He asked me specifically how I thought I could scale the idea. At the time, I didn't have the slightest idea. That question has haunted me ever since he asked it. With that said, I wish he would ask me that question now: If things are done correctly and the folks in Chinatown get to liking you and the service you're providing them; the chances to scale become exponential."