How do restaurants work as a team?

Do you think this is going to work for my startup? Finding city partners in different cities globally, represent us and sign the local restaurants to our online service, while my team in another city to handle the system building and other tech problems. We share the profit 50-50.

• Firstly, we have already made this APP and all the complicated backend services and pushed into the market with proven contracts in my city for months. So its not just an idea. Secondly, I know this is not conventional expansion, but if the experiment works, that will be so cool (and profitable). Say my team made an APP providing long-term discounts for upscale restaurants (a bit similar to Groupon Reserve, but totally different in design and revenue). Besides development team, we have only 2 BD people but signed 2 cities with more than 100 upscale restaurants including 5-star hotels like Hyatt. We made an mobile tool to make everything offline simple. We saw Airbnb is trying local guide P2P thing, then we were inspired if we can find part-time city partner, s/he could help us with recruit merchants, then we can expand to different market much faster, and more importantly in a local way. The city partner, is rather a title than actual partner, as s/he is not required to work full time with us. Actually we can have multiple partners in one city. If one partner help us signed one restaurants, then we can share to profit generated from this venue. We would like to try this out by building some mobile solutions, but before that, we'd like to hear some wise voices before rush in developing.

• Answer:

  If you are able to find and convince new partners then it might work, but you have to understand that launching a new product or service is not easy and you have to have a trackreckord before you can get new partners. Your potential partners won't engage unless they are sure or really believe in your business idea. Many of your potential partners might want to work on a fixed monthly fee to be financially secured.