I'm building a new mini startup this week after finding an idea road tripping in Portugal

✨ I'm building a new mini startup this week

I found a new idea while 🛣 road tripping in 🇵🇹 Portugal

A thread 👇

At lots of restaurants/cafes/bars here in Portugal (and in other places in US/EU) you now need to scan a QR code that's on the table to see the menu

This is to avoid 🦠 Corona sticking to the menu and infecting you or the staff

For example at this hipster place in Sagres

I'd think there'd be some service doing this but most of the menus I've scanned are a self-hosted page on the restaurant's site

Many suck, are slow to load, slow to scroll on mobile etc.

Then I thought:

• many venues don't even have sites to host menus on
• managers/owners are usually not very tech
• there's over 1M+ restaurants/cafes/bars in the world
• after Corona these QR menus will probably stay because there's benefits to it like dynamically changing menu

So I started looking if it already existed, it did but:

• the majority are just random QR code creators, not much dedicated to restaurant/cafe menus
• most of the menu builders that do exist are really complicated, convoluted or too technical

That there's competition means the market is validated, and that the competition isn't that great means I can make something better and more simple, so a few days ago I started coding:

On the left I made a markdown editor and on the right a preview how it looks, iterated a lot but it still kinda looked super ugly

So I took the remoteok.io/hire-remotely page because I know it actually sells

Then I wanted to add the QR code for the actual menu so people could immediately scan it while working on their menu and it'd live preview

Super easy with: davidshimjs.github.io/qrcodejs/

And I learnt you can just put a giant image in a QR code and it'll still work, so I put resto logo

Then I added the view menu page which customers will see (all in one index.php of course 😅)

And a print QR codes page so restaurants can print them out as stickers and put them on tables qrmenucreator.com/?action=print_qr_codes&menu_id=bv9jCXYnXsmUjRGA&menu_hash=6e79d24ad7970061759a44c8cb8506a5

And I made the editor live update the menu preview

Then @AndreyAzimov said I should add some Google Fonts to customize it

The funnest part to build is live preview, you can edit while watching the menu on your phone. While typing on the menu it'll change on your phone.

I think useful for non-techy restaurant owners who wanna see it live immediately

Also fun, restaurants can use their own logos in the QR code

And now 🤳 QR Menu Creator is live on @ProductHunt at www.producthunt.com/posts/qr-menu-creator

The biggest challenge here will be to reach restaurant/bar/cafe owners to actually use it, it's not my audience so I'd love your tips/help/feedback 💖

Originally posted on X