Ask HN: Lets talk about Opentable.com

[parkern]

The "Lets talk about Etsy" post seemed to get some really good insight and feedback, so I thought I would do another about Opentable.com.

I will throw out some questions to get things going:

1) How did opentable overcome the Chicken and the egg problem? Did they build up a roster of restaurants before they even opened the consumer side of things?

2) Did OT start with just San Francisco? How fast did they expand into other cities? Or did they go from SF to nation wide in two steps?

3) How hard was it for Opentable to change the way people made reservations? Was the market ready for it or did it take a long time to get people to make reservations this way?

[Maascamp]

From my understanding OT was a POS software provider first and only launched their reservation system after they had achieved a certain level of market penetration. As a result they didn't have to try and convince POS providers to integrate with them (the hard part) because they were already running their own platform.

[tessro]

OpenTable was founded in 1998 and ~$5mm a year on its 5-6 year journey to profitability. (Luckily, they were smart with cash during the boom, and had a $48mm pool of dotcom-era VC money.)

This TechCrunch article is great for financial details:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-and...

[aaronbrethorst]

regarding question 2: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/08/18/...

[drivebyacct]

They need to redesign their site. I clicked it, thought it was a placeholder domain/seo page and closed it.

[JimmyL]

I'm curious how much their business model is centered around people organically going to their site and thinking "well, I'd like to go out for dinner somewhere - let's see where I can get a table" as opposed to arriving directly on a landing page for the particular restaurant from which they got the link.

I know if I'm going to go to the kind of place that needs a reservation, I'll have one in particular I've got in mind, as opposed to thinking that I'm just interested in going somewhere that needs a reservation.

[bdickason]

Yes, I went to their site as well and was surprised that it looked like it was from 5+ years ago. Their software is quite ugly as well :(

However, all of the servers/waiters that I know that work with it tend to sing its praises.

[dshah]

I believe a lot of their transaction volume is now coming via the iPhone app (which is not too bad)