You will get some valuable experience and learn a lot about the process of going to market and about yourself personally too.

Go on the journey, or in your case finish the journey. The next time you get a good idea, it will no longer be your first time and you will have lessons from the is experience to draw from. You will make mistakes and by the end of this you will look back and know what you would and wouldn't do again. If you derive no other value, that by itself is a worthy prize.

Go get your hands dirty and get your first time behind you I say. Nobody builds Facebook on their First Rodeo and you won't either. Consider it an exercise to prepare you for the future.

In terms of embarrassment, there's no inherent shame in creating something that fails. Most ideas don't work out, that's fine, it's what you learn and what you push forward that matters.

That's okay, build it anyway.

Put your ego down and finish it. Set goals about completion of the project, not receiving accolades and making sweet user acquisition graphs.

Ship it.

With that in mind, what do you have to lose or feel embarrassed about? You'll most likely fail either way, but you will never know unless you try. By shipping, you'll have accomplished more than 95% of the developers out there.

Welcome to entrepreneurship!

Doing something hard knowing very well that it's most likely is going to be a waste of time is just part of the game.

Every once in a while, you may strike gold and make it big. But a lot of the times, you strike silver and it's just promising enough to keep you going.

Striking silver is the exact "waste of time" failure mode you want to avoid. I speak from experience when I say that I blew ~3 years of my career chasing after a product idea that hovered just at breakeven. In hindsight, I should have given up in the first 3 months and moved on to something else.

But you won't know until you release something to users. Don't give up before you start, obviously.

My sense is users want this, but no one will pay for it. Yelp does this already. Grab doesn't, but if we did, we'd do it in house and not pay a 3rd party. The human capital within these companies would be excited and capable to build such a project internally, so this would be challenging to sell b2b to review marketplaces.

Maybe, there is use for e-commerce websites that don't have an army of engineers that can diy?

I also wouldn’t view it as wasting time. I’m sure you’re still going to learn a lot in the process. To “waste” as little time as possible, I’d boil the app down to the core, what makes it different, and distill that down and release it. All the other features around that which the other guys already have, can come later to round it out if it takes off.

Back in 2011 there was an app called Oink [0] that was kind of like Yelp, but for individual items. It looks like it shutdown 4 month later [1]. A lot has changed in the last decade, but I also like your idea (if I’m understanding it right), a bit better. If you’re surfacing existing reviews based on the dish, I think that gives you the ability to have actual content on day 1. Having to wait for enough new reviews on a per dish basis, like Oink was doing, would take a while and I think it would be hard to hit critical mass, so having that seed data from other sources sounds great.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/kevin-rose-oink-app-store/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-shuts-dow...

Will it remain a thorn in your side, like that idea that actually could have worked, and that you'll finish it later? or will you just be able to move on without second thoughts?

If the former, then ship it now, it'll fail, and you'll get experience in understanding how hard it actually is to reach people.

If the latter, drop it now and move on.

Honestly, no one is going to use this.

- you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu and think "ah I wonder what the internet is thinking about the ragout", I don't buy it for a second, but let's imagine it happens

- then you take your phone out

- then you authenticate

- then you look for that app that you barely use, what's the name again?

- then the app locates the restaurant through GPS, nice.

- then you need a way to tell your phone which dish you're looking at, will you type it? too long. Will you dictate it? in a restaurant? Will you shoot it with your camera, in a dim-light environment?

- then the app connects to other services to compile reviews, this is slow af.

- then you see an ad, cause monetization

- then 80% of the time, the app responds that no review talks about the dish you're looking at.

- and by the time you're there your date is gone. A shame, cause that ragout was pretty good.

> Honestly, no one is going to use this. - you're in a restaurant, you look at the menu…

IMHO, you’re making a lot of assumptions, the primary being that it’ll be used while in the restaurant. Why not at home, whether you’re planning to go to a restaurant and trying to decide if it’s worth or just ordering a take out. How about planning a party? And so on.

There are several definite use cases, of course that doesn’t mean it’ll be successful, it’s just that it’s not clear but that no one will use it. Only post launch data will tell you.

For example, I went to a brunch place recently to meet some friends, and I was skeptical it'd be any good for some reason, maybe I just feel like brunch is a scam for people who don't care. I looked at the reviews, and pretty much confirmed my suspicion based less on the specifics of any particular item, but on the way food was generally presented and priced. So I went anyway and paid too much for not that much mediocre food, and tempered my expectations accordingly. Any comments on the food could have just been "my food was ___", it wouldn't have mattered what I got, it was all arbitrary food meant to capitalize on location and people drinking (what do the photos show me? Is all food paired with a drink? Maybe people aren't there for the food).

All that said, everyone's a bit different, I'd maybe poll people on Reddit, it's uniquely positioned for people to comment on specific subject matter that's important to them. See what the vibe is.

If the wind is out of your sails, and you've learned the "interesting" parts of the problem, then you may choose to move on to the next problem with "interesting" parts.

However, the other side of the coin is that you don't know what it takes to ship something until you ship it. And there's just a ton of detail that happens when shipping. It's one thing to build a table, it's another to level it, sand it, finish it, and wax it.

As they say 90% of the time of a project is developing it, the other 90% is getting it ready for production.

That final part is an important feather to have in your cap.

That doesn't mean this is the project for it, it could be another project. But just know that there's a gap between being "done", and "shipping".

Even if you publish the best and most useful app in the universe, if nobody knows it exists then does it really exist?

Not trying to discourage you, but you should know what you're getting into.

If you don't finish it, nobody will use it. If you do finish it and nobody does, so what?

building it out would require spending some money and a significant chunk of my time

Working is the hard part of working on ideas.

I really don’t want to build something no one wants

Wanting to build something is the reason to build things.

I’d die of embarrassment

No you won't.

I’d just be sad about wasting my time

Inefficiency is the luxurious reward of creative work. Good luck.

The seems like an interesting concept at least. I think you probably need a better name and some idea how to market it. I think you should use the same data so instead of 'what are people saying about x item at y store' or be more like 'which store has the highest rated y', same concept but easier to market.

If you're super worried about "maybe nobody will use this thing" then that's great - next time start with validating that people DO want a thing and that you know how to reach them.

If you are building, spending and expecting anyone to automatically use it I would stop. Your product is only one part of a successful release the other part is figuring out how to get people to use your software. Many of us don't care and publish for the joy of releasing. Changing your mindset would make any project you release successful.

Bad reasons to work on a personal project – You expect it will get tons of users and gain broad adoption, and will consider it embarrassing and a waste of time if it doesn't.

I’d go for it. You are better off embarrassed and learning than safe and stagnating.

The more fundamental problem with reviews is:

A) People have shit taste in food (grandpa who can't taste salt anymore and the family in BFE where every Sunday dinner is at IHop shouldn't be reviewing food)

B) Food is inconsistent

Health Department reviews of restaurants however, is a great indicator of quality and care.

I assume you believe you have good taste in food and I very well might find what you think is good to be terrible. It is not impossible the majority finds what you think is good to be terrible too.

My experience is that the only way to know if I like a dish is to eat it and reviews are completely useless.

But your attitude and personal outcome from this.

You can be equally happy or miserable, learn valuable lessons or feel time wasted in either case.

And i bet it depends on whether your decision ultimately reflects your real motivation of starting it.

Think about it.

Whether you stop now, or complete and "ship" the project, what will you have learned? That's probably the most important question.

Focus on what makes your app different, cut out the rest and launch.

Take the risk!

Actually, seriously, how did you come up with the idea, and did you test it with anyone?

Build and use stuff for fun. No room for ego with software hobbying. I use Foursquare/Swarm and now none of my friends do but I have a blast with it.

Post your Github repo to get feedback!

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-shuts-dow...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-rose-joins-google-2012...

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170609232551/https://www.winen...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/wine-n-dine-is-a-meal-revi...

[2] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html#:~:text=For%20examp...

It's a nice idea, simple to execute an MVP on tech side - but you need a truckload of money to reach customers and sell it.

Unless you get significant adoption you are unlikely to be profitable.

Do you like marketing and sales? Are you good at it? This will be the bulk of the work that makes or break the product.

If you are not ready to do that, you need to decide if you want to build it for the pleasure of building or for getting into the rhythm of shipping - both are valuable goals.

TL;DR: you won't make money with this.

Some reasons I could be wrong: if you're actually excited about it, but the potential embarrassment is clouding your judgment. Honestly, nobody cares if you have a failed project. Or even a failed startup. I've watched people blow seed rounds on things they were passionate about but couldn't get traction with, and they don't have any regrets. And more importantly — nobody else really cares. Try to think about why you started building it in the first place. Do you still care about the problem you're solving?

One more thing — I've been pitched this same idea multiple times over the past 10 years (some seed-funded, some bootstrapped). Not saying that it's a bad idea, but it's not clear what's unique about your iteration that would give it better odds of success than previous attempts. In my opinion, it suffers from the "not 10x better" problem. If I want an awesome burrito, it's not that hard to find an awesome burrito place without going through item-level reviews. And if I want the best item on a menu, I can usually ask the waiter or go through some of the reviews (Google sometimes highlights certain menu items).