Idea: Local Restaurant Order Placement
Here's something Chip Hayner and I got to discussing over a chance encounter at Drinkhaus today, and something I've been kicking around with various people for some time. Some locally-owned places that are wildly popular, like Baja Burrito and its franchises, Blue Coast Burrito, allow product customization at the counter. But if you've ever noticed, when someone behind the counter is fulfilling a phone-in order, they fly down the line, because they're not having to wait for the customer to make up his or her mind between hot and mild salsa, or whatnot.
If they had an online ordering system - possibly with options to specify what time you'll be there to pick up your lunch, possibly with options to approximate your wait if you got there NOW - they could potentially push an additional X burritos through the store every day. Say X is 100, and say you built the system with a small transaction fee per use - perhaps exposed to the customer so there's no difficulty in getting restaurant owner buy-in - and let's call that transaction fee $1. Now you're talking about an incremental $500 in revenue per day to the restaurant - $15,000 per month to the top line - and $3000 per month in transaction fees for the service.
And customers are probably happier if the system makes their visit more efficient, since going to Baja Burrito means accepting a certain amount of stress dealing with lines and crowds, etc.
And of course this isn't limited to Baja Burrito. It's just a good possible pilot. A biz dev opportunity might be to link in to the whole Nashville Originals network.
Thoughts? :)
If they had an online ordering system - possibly with options to specify what time you'll be there to pick up your lunch, possibly with options to approximate your wait if you got there NOW - they could potentially push an additional X burritos through the store every day. Say X is 100, and say you built the system with a small transaction fee per use - perhaps exposed to the customer so there's no difficulty in getting restaurant owner buy-in - and let's call that transaction fee $1. Now you're talking about an incremental $500 in revenue per day to the restaurant - $15,000 per month to the top line - and $3000 per month in transaction fees for the service.
And customers are probably happier if the system makes their visit more efficient, since going to Baja Burrito means accepting a certain amount of stress dealing with lines and crowds, etc.
And of course this isn't limited to Baja Burrito. It's just a good possible pilot. A biz dev opportunity might be to link in to the whole Nashville Originals network.
Thoughts? :)
Views: 23
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jason Moore on -
I love it, Kate. I have had a few conversations about the Dunkin Donuts' "Dunkin Run" concept and making that a platform that you can add onto a restaurant's site in a similar manner that you are referring to.
The worst part about tell your friends/office-mates about going to a place like Baja Burrito or Subway is when they ask you to pick them something up where the order is complex. Then you have to do the whole money with change thing.
www.dunkinrun.com
This allows you to send out a message to others letting you know you're going there. They can log in, place their order, pay for their order, and when you go to pick up your food, there will be other orders packaged with it. Your transaction doesn't change a bit, and you are now the office hero! :)
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Permalink Reply by Jake Robinson on -
I like the idea... it would be cool if you could order by twitter... especially if you had you 'regular' order saved in a file that you could cut & paste... send it DM and bam! they get notified by SMS
worst case customer could order on the fly (in their car on the way over) and order would be made faster - even if you ordered as you pulled into the parking lot - since you don't have to make up your mind they could 'fly'...
Maybe they could even have a monitor set up close to make line and sound to notify when they receive an order by twitter...
I do like the dunkin donuts idea... i think many restuarants would glom on since they have 'built in' marketing when someone says "I'm going for arby's, McD's, Wendy's, Subway, Burger King - anyone want anything?"
you want to really make money... establish a hub for many restuarants... we set up Visa/MC merchant account and build our profit margin there... set marked up rate to restaurant above or merchant rate... plus flat service fee... get paid twice... i have a relationship with a major merchant provider that could handle the transactions...
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Permalink Reply by Marc A. Krejci on -
Check out http://gomobo.com
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Permalink Reply by Marc A. Krejci on
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Here's a little write up I read about these guys back in '06 http://www.springwise.com/life_hacks/letting_customers_skip_the_lin...
I LOVE the idea of integrating this idea within the Nashville Originals. This other company is obviously not in Nville...
However, would a "me too" app be a good project for a SW? Dunno
Marc A. Krejci said:Check out http://gomobo.com
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Ketsdever on -
Marc A. Krejci said: Gomobo
If folks are still interested in this idea....why doesn't someone take the Pepsi challenge on Gomobo? Order something for lunch and see what the experience is like and what sort of integration it has.
For instance, I know Wells Fargo has an app in beta it lets its customers use that solves payment issues in a group online--but its only available for customers.
[realizing I should read the springwise artilcle]
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Permalink Reply by Kate O' on -
Thanks for pointing out Gomobo, Marc!
I do think this idea is a lot like Gomobo, so yeah, I don't know if having something that we already know has a close relative in another geographic area is a good candidate for a startup. But I do know that by the end of last year's Startup Weekend, pretty much all the groups had found close relatives of their idea, so I'm not sure how different it is to go into the project knowing there's something out there. Especially since it doesn't appear that Gomobo will be broadening past New York any time soon.
They even have a guide to their other competitors:
http://gomobo.com/Restaurants/#tabs-4
but none of them is exactly what we're talking about here.
Anyway, the good news is it's obviously a business model that has already garnered VC support in another market, so it must deserve consideration for Nashville. The bad news is it may just not make a very fitting Startup Weekend project. But I may pitch it Friday night anyway and see how folks feel about it.
- Kate O'
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Permalink Reply by Jake Robinson on
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We can always do like the Japenese - let someone else invent it and we just improve upon it...
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Permalink Reply by Calvin Froedge on -
I worked on MeroSys when I was in High school. This idea has been done over and over and over but the market is so huge that you could keep doing it. You'd never run out of prospects even with 1000s of companies doing this.
Check out OpenTable as well. Antiquated but very popular.
This is something else that at a basic level with a good team could be built really quickly.
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