Local Dine: What Deal Can You Offer Me Tonight?

Would you choose a nearby restaurant if it offered you a free appetizer or a 10 or 15 percent discount, depending on the hour and the number people in your party? Would you invite more friends if you could get a bigger discount?

Kyle Chronis thinks you might. And—of course—he has an app for that.

Enter Local Dine, for those times you can be persuaded to choose one Los Altos or Mountain View restaurant over another.

He and former Pinewood School classmate Clay Wayman teamed up to give it a try in their hometown. He had direct experience as a customer when he was at WIMM Labs on San Antonio Road and set out to lunch with his colleagues, often with no particular restaurant in mind.

“We would literally walk aimlessly until we decided where to go in,” Chronis said. “I thought, we should have some incentive.”

The concept is simple enough. As a user, you open up the app on your mobile device and the GPS locator sees where you are.  It asks how many people are in your party. Then you can hit the button “View Deals.”

Up come a list of the several restaurants that Local Dine has in its beta version, such as Maltby’s, First and Main Lounge, and Opa!  Are you in Mountain View? Restaurants such as Scott’s Seafood, Morocco’s and La Bamba come up, with discounts such as 15 percent off of the bill or a free calamari offer for that meal.

It tells you how many of these deals are left. When you click on a restaurant, it shos you the details, such as “Each diner must order an entrée,” (i.e. no ordering one dish and everyone sharing). It also gives you a chance to move up to a bigger deal if you have more people in your party.

Click on “Hold,” and go to the restaurant. Show your hold on the deal to the server, and they will use the four-digit validation code. The deal will expire at the end of the meal, and it will say “Complete.”

No money is paid, except to the restaurant for the meal.

“If you don't use it, you don't use it,” Chronis said. They designed it this way to address the user frustration with other deal sites when the coupons they bought expired before they found time to use them.

It’s simple for the user. Where the action happens is on the restaurant side. Most of the app is really restaurant-centric, Chronis said.

When he sat down with about 15 different restaurant owners or managers, he learned how difficult it was to make group discount sites like Groupon or Living Social work. He discovered a new perspective --“the horror stories of doing deals.”

“Restaurants, in particular, can't handle that business model,” Chronis said. “They’re getting 25 cents on the dollar, and praying people end up letting them expire." 

They might get 800 people buying the deal and get obligated to it for six months, Chronis said he learned. And restaurateurs have no idea how many people might redeem those coupons on a given day.

Chronis, who was new to the restaurant business, said his eyes were opened. “I started to feel bad when I ordered water,” at restaurants because they often make up their thin margins on drinks. “Maybe I'll switch to bottled water.”

Local Dine’s response: Give more control to the restaurateur.  They are free to lower or increase the deal not on hold. They can increase the number of people required for a deal. They can experiment for an hour or so. Restaurant owners’ eyes started to light up with the prospect of that control.

The app also provides data points to the restaurateur. How many people responded to that deal? On which day? And what time? How many? Did anyone add people to their party to take advantage of a bigger deal? For that, they pay a small subscription fee.

“People glorify start-ups and taking chances, but starting and maintaining a restaurant is just as difficult,” Chronis said.