SmartMenuThe restaurant menu that knows you

JitenChhabra

Beth Mynatt

Paul Freet

Georgia Tech

Business Model Canvas – Week 1

Business Model Canvas – Week 2

Deliverables for Week 2

Get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers face-to-face

Spoke to 10 customers (Umma Sushi, Tin Drum, F2O, Tilted Kilt, Zapata, Atlanta Bread Co, Great Harvest Bread, Chuck’s Deli, Ingredient, Downtown Lodge) and 12 users

What were your hypotheses about who your users and customers were? Did you learn anything different?

Initial hypothesis was that customers are all QSR’s and Table Service and now it is QSR chains and non-high-touch restaurants

Did anything change about Value Proposition? For customers: discoveredadditional value props of reducing cashier-related training costs and CRMFor users:suggestions would be a nice-to-have where as ability to customize a meal, not have to wait and have time to decide what to order would be problem solvers

What do customers say their problems are? How do they solve this problem(s) today?

Training new staff to use the POS ($1000 per new employee)Training new staff to answer questions from patrons< 2% of the orders received by cashiers have errors-senior staff trains the new staff -POS training videos are sometimes available

Does your value proposition solve it? How? Yes, self-service ordering interfaces (kiosk, web, mobile) reduce the burden of training staff to use POS

What was it about your product that made customers interested? Excited?

Future of restaurant ordering - single, automated solution for receiving orders, managing deals, loyalty and CRM

Who is the decision maker, how large is their budget, what are they spending it on today, and how are they individually evaluated within that organization, and how will this buying decision be made

Depends on independents vs. chains or corporate vs. franchisee Decision maker is COO or CEO. Ordering solution budget is 5k to 20k per store. Currently spent on POS and online ordering. POS systems are evaluated on feature set and reliability. SmartMenu $$ can come from the POS budget, HR if it is self-service or Marketing if it has deals and loyalty.

Here’s What we Thought

• All restaurants are potential customers

• The problem we will be solving is lack of personalized up-sell suggestions

• Our main value proposition will be increased average check

• Budget for SmartMenu will be same as POS

So Here’s What we Did

• Spoke with 10 restaurant operators

• Interviewed 12 potential users

Here’s What we Found

• QSR Chains and non-high-touch restaurants are customers

• The problem we will be solving is that it is difficult to customize an order

• Our additional value proposition will be reduced staff training

• Budget for SmartMenu can be POS, Marketing and HR