QR menu with actual analytics for restaurants
The idea
Covid made QR menus universal, but they’re all dumb PDFs or static pages. Restaurant owners make menu decisions blind — they know what sells (POS data) but not what diners looked at and rejected. A dish with high views and low orders has a pricing or description problem. That gap between attention and orders is data no restaurant currently has.
Who pays
Independent restaurants and small chains. Price at $29–49/month per location. Sell it as “know which dishes to cut” — menu engineering consultants charge thousands for this.
MVP scope
- Menu builder + instant-publish QR pages
- Four event types: open, section view, dish tap, dwell
- One dashboard page with the four core charts
- Skip for v1: ordering, payments, translations, POS integration
Build MenuLens: a QR-code menu platform for restaurants that includes dish-level analytics. Restaurant owner flow: sign up, create a menu (sections and dishes with name, description, price, photo, dietary tags), get a QR code PNG/SVG to print. Menu edits go live instantly — that's the pitch against printed menus. Diner flow: scan QR, get a fast mobile menu page. No app, no login. Track anonymized events: menu opens, section views, dish taps (tap expands a dish's photo and description), and dwell time per dish. No cookies, no personal data — aggregate counters only. Owner dashboard: for a chosen date range show most-viewed dishes, most-expanded dishes, dishes nobody taps (candidates to cut or re-photo), and busiest scan hours. One clear insight-style summary line at the top, e.g. "Your seafood section gets 3x more views after 7pm." Stack: Astro for the public menu pages (they must load instantly on 4G), Supabase for auth/data, a tiny vanilla-JS event beacon, and a simple dashboard with server-rendered charts (use a lightweight chart lib). Multi-tenant from day one: menus live at menulens.app/m/<restaurant-slug>.
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