I learned about an Indiegogo fundraising campaign started by David Clements, and I want to share it with you. From the email I received about the campaign, David had this to say:
“I have great news, my new project, an Indiegogo crowdfunder called Restaurant Report just launched a few minutes ago.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been pouring my life into Restaurant Report – the first national app that lets you pick restaurants with good grades on their health inspection before you eat out.
Today, I’m unveiling my crowd funding campaign. Please check it out”
You can read all about David’s project on the Indiegogo campaign website. The goal of the campaign is to raise $20,000, and there are various levels of incentives for people who contribute. For instance, restaurant owners can give $900 and get an enhanced listing on the website for 6 months. For giving $1, people can download the app once it is live. There are other incentives for other levels between $1 – $900.
At the time of this post, the campaign has raised $187, although it just launched today.
David has been in the domain space for quite some time. In January of 2012, David and his partner Harvey Kaplan sold Cheesecake.com for an undisclosed sales price. According to an email I received from David, the website will be operated on RestaurantReport.CO.
For more details about this, check out the Indiegogo campaign.
Sounds like an app I would possibly use if it had a full database of restaurants in my area. I won’t be donating to the fundraising efforts, though, because if I’m helping fund a profit seeking venture, I would like to have the chance of seeing some profits myself, in the event the venture becomes a success.
Anyway, best of luck to them.
P.S. An interesting article about Yelp integrating restaurant grades into their app: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/19/local/la-me-ln-restaurant-grades-yelp-20131219
$20k?? I agree with Josh. I don’t see enough of an incentive for people to donate to something like this. Most food ratings can be found online for free and some counties require all restaurants to post their health inspection rating in the front window.
Restaurants don’t stay in business with serious violations.
Sounds like another useless app – I’ll pass.
Thanks for the coverage, Elliot. There are about 76 million cases of preventable food poisoning in the US, and restaurants cause about half of them. We’re trying to build a national database for restaurant health inspection scores, and we’re starting off small, first only covering Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Washington DC.
Scott, what City or County are you in?
All restaurant rating sites are USELESS. I have my taste and you may like something totally different, so what for one person taste great for another person may taste like s*it
@John
Except that their app isn’t a taste rating app, it’s a health inspection rating app. If a joint gets an F on a health inspection, is that rating useless?
I was working in a few restaurants in my life and if you could see what is really going on behind in the kitchen you wouldn’t want to eat in most of them. Do you expect them to have a health inspector in all of them 24 hrs a day and report it on their site ? Stupid idea
Well, I would think they would use the public health records, no? Like the ones found here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/services/restaurant-inspection.shtml. I agree, having an inspector in all restaurants 24-hrs a day is insanity.
While I don’t think it’s an app idea that warrants an indiegogo campaign (and it looks very doubtful that they will meet their $20k goal), I don’t think it’s a ridiculous idea altogether, if they can figure out a way to keep a full and current database of public health records. And that’s a big if.
Forget donating to this, though. Like I said in my first comment, if I’m helping fund a profit seeking venture, I would like to have the chance of seeing some possible profits myself.