20k visitors in ~24 hours...now what?

Hey Aaron, congrats on your traffic spike/success. First: I think categorizing restaurants by dishes rather than reviews/cuisines/etc. is clever and there is a market for that.

Some random thoughts floating around in my head:

• IMHO you need an app. People look for places to eat on their mobile devices, not on their desktops (or at least not often).
• "Buy me a coffee/Patreon" approaches work only very very rarely. On long or short you won't generate substantial revenue this way. Instead, you should think about different ways monetizing (ads/premium subscription)
• After you've implemented your changes / implemented a monetization model "simply" try to repeat your marketing success by re-launching on different platforms/forums/groups/… with new features (good read I always recommend: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/relaunch-like-a-pro-100-places-to-launch-relaunch-and-list-your-product-7c67875635)

Hope that helps. Good luck on your journey 🤘

Congrats on your users!
I'd do these:

• connect restaurants' names with their websites
• also add links to the point on the map
• create separate pages with the restaurant information (like price level, noisy or not, kids-suitable etc.) - but! this would be placed for the paid restaurant. Say, you could add this information for the first 50 restaurants (to create the visibility of crowds) but then you can ask the restaurant to pay you some monthly fee to be listed.

Do you generate any revenue or email list? traffic is good but it is not something we own add option to get emails and then find what can you sell to your audience

For monetisation;

Perhaps think about how you can get the restaurants to pay for customers, maybe visitors can order through your site, maybe a discount code which gives you some commission, if it's eat in a way of booking a table.

Maybe the first phase is to see if they are on something similar to Uber eats that has an affiliate program, then add a order button.

Hey Aaron,
The idea is great. Just small remark, the webpage is kind of slow. I don't know if it's my browser or whatever the problem is.

An idea could be to add some ads from restaurants:

• Cold approach some restaurants if they want to pay for ads.
  20k users is a huge amount of people

Hey Aaron... first off congratulations... this is the best damn MVP I have ever seen!
I will advice you don't make rookie mistake of adding more features/cost immediately but identify how you can sustain 20k visitors with positive unit economics based on the MVP. Study what worked on subreddit that drove their attention and engagement. Repeat that experiment on other forums. Most important thing for monetization is churn. Will those same 20k users return or were they one time? Before you invest in features assess this first. It will give you more ideas and approaches to take.

Do people use the site because they actually want to try the best dish or because they like to read and debate about food? The organization by dish is really clever and lends itself to engaging people who visit the site for entertainment. Maybe there's a community-building approach you could take (newletters, food tours, etc)?

Someone else mentioned this, too, but monetizing does seem a lot more tractable if you focus on a specific city where you can get to a critical mass of eaters and restaurants.

Nice

Congratulations! subreddit?

Add a feedback widget 😉
https://supa.cx

I would try to onvert them to newsletter subscribers, or build some kind of channel to talk to them afterwards, and start following up with them right after.

Congrats, Aaron! I love the idea of grouping by dish.

Do you collect data on your app's usage? If not / not obsessively, I'd recommend to do so. This creates a map on how to prioritize features or where your gold mine is.

Next are some ideas I had to monetize your traffic:

• Focus on the most voted city, and contact restaurants with the most voted dish and offer premium spots on the page for a fee (like Yelp).
• Partnering with restaurants and issue NFTs (I know, it's the hype).
• Profiling your dishes and users, then sending personalized recommendations based on their tastes (did this with music and offering "seemingly risky" recommendations is very accurate.) This needs analytics skills, but nothing too fancy.
• Use the data from above and sell it to food chains

Let me know if I can help.

Are you doing anything on your site to monetize (I only see the "buy me a coffee button")? You can try adding some monetization and see where that goes.

But have to say for the most part, hard to see how you'd convert this into something where you can charge. Seems like it'd be a ridiculous uphill battle.