Aroma Insights

Our vision for Aroma was to have a free to use search engine that had a zero entry barrier for restaurants. This ensured we could build the catalog of places on the app without having to sell every single restaurant on the idea.

Aroma Insights (AI) was the monetization strategy we created to allow for the above to be possible. AI's vision was to be a data hub for restaurant owners to understand how they performed on our application. They would have tools to promote their business likes coupon targeting and much more. Restaurants could also update any of their information and even received small SEO bumps for keeping this updated each week.

Along with the creation of a dashboard we wanted to go even further with how data could be used. So we created the "Transparent Data" section. It was a simple way to search for your competition and see everything that they were doing. Other then revenue every bit of data you could see on your dashboard you could view for your competitor. It's a wild idea that we believe could be invaluable to a restaurant and hopefully bread a "one-up" mentality. Restaurants fighting to be the best only results in better experiences for the users and that is what we're all about!

*My Thoughts*
This idea only dawned on me when we interviewed restaurant owners and I heard the dozens of stories on their cheeky ways of finding competitor information. "I used to drive over on Friday nights and count how many cars were in the parking lot to understand how good they were doing," said one owner. First time I heard this I thought it was just this dude being super creative. I was wrong, everyone did something crazy like this and sometimes daily. So I thought, why not embrace the antics! Of the restaurant owners we spoke to they all fell head over heels in love with the idea. One saying, "You'll save me a lot of time and give me real numbers, can I cut you a check now?"