Backstory: The rapid covid-19 shutdown has made it restaurant owners scramble to stay open in some capacity and letting customers know in clear concise fashion is difficult with details in yelp, google and other platforms. Every restaurant has varied hours and delivery options, it's becoming hard to even keep track of which ones are even still open.

A crowdsourced app, similar to waze for restaurants will help take the guess work out of every nuanced restaurant website and give customers one specific place to find open, local restaurants.

Additionally, yelp continues to drop the ball and many business owners are ready for a new platform. Read more here and here.

The Idea: A crowdsourced restaurant aggregator

Deep Dive: You would build a mobile app that's a mix of yelp and waze. Information about restaurant hours would configurable by business owners but also crowdsourced. Hours, delivery details and special offers are changing daily and are hard to track on individual websites.

You could have expected delivery and pickup times with current, crowdsourced information. Additionally, you could provide crowdsourced details around how to deal with pickups and carryout procedures.

As this gains traction, you could move into the review space, taking over yelp which has become evil in many business owners experiences.

Validation: Waze and wikipedia have proven to be relatively reliable sources in the crowdsourcing space.

Monetization: You would allow restaurants to buy ad space on the platform. Searches are hyperlocal and would be a great place for advertisements for restaurants.

Steps to Launch: Start in one city. You can aggregate a lot of the information yourself. Rather than building out a whole platform, you could add information in a message board platform like discord. Once people start visiting the site and adding information themselves, you can explore building out a custom platform.