Ask HN: Best Way to Reach Local Business Owners?

I am at the same stage at the same sector, though I am in Brazil. My startup is a loyalty program for bars and restaurantes based on Facebook's checkin.

What I am doing for the last month is a kind of "door-to-door sales". At least my product may benefit if my clients are geographically concentrated. So I selected two neighborhoods with a lot of restaurants, then went door to door asking for the owner just after lunch.

Local biz owners are usually at the business, so it is not hard to be introduced to them by whatever employee you aproach first.

This won't give you scale, but I would strongly recommend you to follow PG's advice: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Doing this not scalable door-to-door aproach you will learn a lot (I did), it is a great form of customer discovery. And if you are able to acquire a few customers on the same neighborhood, quoting the same PG's essay:

"Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs."

I actually could get in my hand a XLS with thousands of restaurant's emails, but decided not to use until I get closer to product/market fit through this door-to-door tactic.

I would start with Yelp and Open Table. There must be conferences that restauranteurs attend. People who either sell food (farmers markets, organic specialty sellers), restaurant supplies, or POS systems would probably appeal to restauranteurs as well so perhaps go talk to them.

You could probably start by just dropping by a number of them during the day when they're not as busy (i.e. after lunch). If they like what you're building I bet they could point you in the right direction towards other restauranteurs.

Good luck!

Even the approach of sending cold emails may not be as effective, since plenty of restaurants still don't leverage basic tools available for communication and connection, including the internet.

As Yiggy said, try sourcing targets from Yelp and Open Table, then proceed to catch someone who is willing to talk during low traffic hours.

Not sure if this strategy is the best, but just something to think about when dealing with people in and around the service industry.

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