All proceeds will benefit The Children's Inn at NIH. If you've been to a Spotluck party before, you know there'll be games and prizes as well. If you haven't, Saturday, October 3 is your chance, from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Spotluck to host beer garden at Taste of Bethesda
All proceeds will benefit The Children's Inn at NIH. If you've been to a Spotluck party before, you know there'll be games and prizes as well. If you haven't, Saturday, October 3 is your chance, from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
I'm surprised Spotluck hasn't gone under yet. They've been around for over a year now, and are only in in a handful of neighborhoods in the DC area, and in no other cities. What have they been doing all along?
ReplyDeleteThe way a business like this works is to scale up, and do it quickly -- it's a volume play. They're not doing that.
What do they get, a dollar per use? How many users you think they have? Then when they get a high enough number of users they can sell that data? How many people do they employ? Hope they did the math and the number works out. Best of luck to them, but it's looking rough.
ReplyDeleteThat panel or whatever it is totally makes me think of a beer garden on a nice Saturday afternoon in early fall.
ReplyDeleteHaha yeah not at all.
DeleteHow is this hosting an event if it's for pay? Sponsoring, perhaps? Marketing?
ReplyDelete9:11 is exactly right. Let's say they make $1 per customer referred...they'd need to be doing this hundreds or thousands of times a day to make this a real business.
ReplyDeleteOpenTable, which does online reservations, charges the restaurant $0.25-1.25 depending on if the customer came from the restaurant's website (lower price) or a referral from Opentable (higher price - they generated the lead).
What Spotluck is doing is probably beneficial to restaurant owners. They're giving them a way to fill empty tables during the slow times of day. However, the Spotluck business model itself is basically flawed. To make it work, they need a sales staff to go out and recruit each restaurant, and all that for let's say $50 a month in revenue?
Look at Groupon. They have the same issue in terms of getting sales - they need a sales team to work with the restaurants. The difference is Groupon does much better on each deal. They sell hundreds or thousands of Groupons for the restaurant in a span of a few days, get all the money up front, and take a cut of 25-50% of the deal size. So they can pull in $5k with the same level of effort from their sales team as Spotluck needs to pull in $50.
On top of that, Spotluck already has competitors -- Groupon, Yelp, and LivingSocial all have an "instant deal" function in their apps so you can get special deals for nearby restaurants. Then, those services are much better known than Spotluck.
So time to place our bets. I say they'll be gone in a year. Who else is in?
How's groupon's stock doing nowadays? :)
ReplyDelete@11:07 And that's exactly it. Well-funded Groupon and LivingSocial aren't able to make this work, so who thinks Spotluck will do better, with significantly less funding and expertise?
ReplyDeleteWish them well but it seems the business plan may be a bit short sighted perhaps. I heard it's a local business?
DeleteTASTE OF BETHESDA IS CANCELED - you heard it HERE FIRST!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDyer reports on Taste of Bethesda, and just a few hours later, it gets cancelled.
ReplyDelete12:22: It wasn't canceled when this report was filed.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeletea: I would not take any sort of business advice or news from dyer or think his opinion of a business model vs what the company is actually doing as gospel.
ReplyDeleteb: They are doing very well, none of you are correct in your assumptions about the company or how their business works.
How do you know then? Care to share? Or do we just chalk up your anonymous insight to be the same as our own anonymous conjecture?
Delete3:26: Where in my article did I give any "business advice" or "express my opinion of their business model"?
DeleteI told you they [were] having a beer garden Saturday - nothing more.
Yeah that was weird. Dyer didn't say nothing about business advice.
DeleteStill. Spotluck is... Rather lacking.
Here is a list of who Spotluck is hiring:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.spotluck.com/careers/
1 software developer (good) and 3 interns for various tasks.
Is this the sign of a company that's doing well? Let's say this Spotluck thing is really taking off. They'd be raking in the money, and hiring like crazy. The way you know a company is expanding wildly is if they are hiring full-time across all departments. In Spotluck's case, I'd also expect a lot of positions for "city managers" in each city they are expanding into, to run the team that will hit the street and sign up new restaurant customers.
But no such luck -- they are just hiring a programmer and a few interns.
As for those who questioned my knowledge of this (I'm also 8:23 and 10:34), I am a successful entrepreneur in the tech industry, so I end up evaluating startups on a weekly basis. I can usually spot the winners, and Spotluck isn't one of them. Even if they idea is great (which I don't think it is), they are failing to execute. They need to get big and FAST and they aren't doing it.
Ah interns. Free labor. Taking advantage of young kids. Good for them.
DeleteNot a fan of Spotluck. 10% off isn't worth annoying the restaurant. Especially since Spotluck touts the "local" aspect of it. For a measly 10% discount I would rather support my local mom and pop shop and have them make money and stay in business. And that random higher discount - what kind of person can't decide where they want to go and then goes to a random spot for a small percentage boost. Ha.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone actually use Spotluck?
ReplyDeleteI used it once about 6-8 months ago. Then twice in the last 3 weeks. Looking for a new place to eat, I spun it in Bethesda and got 20% off at Himalayan Heritage. A week later, got 20% off at Batik in Gaithersburg. We enjoyed both places, and plan on returning, with or without a discount. So yeah, I guess it worked out for restaurants and for us.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of their point system. Heck, to be honest, I'm not really paying attention to it.
But it's fun to spin, and if it lands on somewhere interesting, then why not. It's no trouble when asking for the check to simply show the server the screen. That's all you have to do.
This is written almost like a fake review. Look at their so reviews. It's almost comical.
DeleteHaha yeah I saw their iOS reviews and they are all fake. Usernames are Spotluck related oftentimes too. Hahahaha what jackasses.
DeleteWill the cancellation of Taste of Bethesda bring about Spotify's demise?
ReplyDeleteOops, Spotluck, not Spotify.
ReplyDelete