Kyle
It all started over 2 years ago in Columbia South Carolina, over a piece of “death by chocolate” cake. It was Chris Hanscom’s birthday and in like most relationships is wife asked him a simple question, “where do you want to eat tonight?”. It was Hansom’s night and he didn’t really care where he ate, but he wanted a piece of death by chocolate cake.
This search, online and through phone calls, almost brought the death of him (or perhaps his smart phone), but Hanscom was determined to find his favorite piece of cake. What he found was a mess of websites for local restaurants. Some had mobile pages, some had scaled down pages, others had flash that he couldn’t get to load, and still others had text that didn’t look right. When he went to the computer, it was much of the same. There was no consistency in the online menu.
With Hanscom’s battle with the chocolate cake, an idea for OpenMenu was born. Now what Hanscom is proposing is a daunting task and he is well aware of that. He’s hoping to make a platform attractive enough that most restaurants will streamline their menus utilizing the OpenMenu platform.
Lets make this abundantly clear though, Hanscom doesn’t have some groovy restaurant app that he wants to sign restaurants up for, he wants them to JUST streamline their menus. The framework around the websites can remain the same, the graphics are all the restaurants, however the menu part, if streamlined and then tied to an API could become a very welcomed thing for restaurant patrons, and a very lucrative startup for Hanscom.
We got a chance to interview this bold entrepreneur. Check out the interview below: