In regards to feedback from users, this is especially true when finding product-market-fit (when an idea actually becomes a business). There’s nothing better than learning what customers who actually use your product want in future releases/improvements. It’s a case of building based off actual demand versus based off a hypothetical in one’s mind (a very common “failing”, i.e. learning experience, for first-time founders). Only when your product grows to the point of attracting potential customers outside your target demographic should you not place tremendous value on every single piece of feedback.
For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped, all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for tables. This is now dead on arrival.
Second perspective as a restauranteur: $219/mo is crazy expensive. I pay $300/mo to Revel and $180/mo to Clover for two different types of businesses.
With the $300/mo to Revel they process thousands a day and I have 24/7 phone support that within 2 min a live human handles my problems.
With the $180/mo to Clover they process hundreds a day and I have an easy to use, to easy to service system that I can hack into and custom build Android apps to do whatever I want.
Your $219/mo don't come close to delivering value like that.
Sorry.
I explain the thoughts behind the price a little in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625906
EDIT:
> From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device needed).
I would like to add that this is the price for two days of rent.
> It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it.
If you're not an existing system, the client interfacing and employee training has to be factored into the costs on both ends. If your demo can't cover the client's needs to a tee, that's either an immediate deal-breaker or you have to build more features just to get considered. Then you have to market your product, do customer service, and do sales.
If you take that all into account, your product is not worth it for you nor the client.
The reason why we use it? We're not in the US - there's not too much room for a commercial $$$/month solution for us at the moment and the switching costs (retraining people, integrating our custom reporting and monitoring) would be way too huge.
I'd definitely consider a different solution if I'd ever start a new restaurant (highly unlikely though - it's hell. Much harder than running a startup of a similar size :)) but I'd much prefer a % revenue-based approach (with an upper cap) than a fixed pricing model.
The problem with being a small shop selling POS products is finding customers at the right time. It is very sales intensive process. You have to reach them at the right time, once a restaurant is invested in a POS, it is almost impossible to convince them to switch. They choose to just live with whatever choice they made and focus on other things that matter. So now, as a developer, you need to give them a good reason to switch.
Money is a good one. So now you are in a price race to the bottom; never a good place to be as a small shop.
Another common ask is integration. They want to try out the product before committing but they can't afford to train folks to use two products at the same time. So now you need to come up with an integration strategy without even having a clear API/structure to work with.
It's a nightmare. Unless you have customers ready to commit which to me seems impossible in the retail business without already knowing people on the inside.
General: As the site came up in German, I assume you at least think of targeting this market was well. Germany made invoice copies for customers mandatory this year, on top of the already somewhat crazy requirements regarding auditability and compliance for POS systems. Quite a barrier for new systems, but from what I heard out of the local start-up scene here, there are not that many certified solutions out there yet.
I would talk to a tax consultant to get an opinion from that angle. And I would aim for official tax certification, that will make life for your customers so much easier and would be a true selling point.
Pricing: Kind of tied into the above, obviously a solution that gets tax authorities of your clients backs has some inherent value to them. For the upper range, 219 USD doesn't sound to abusive, depending on service levels and support. I would just add a couple of tiers between hte free version and the Pro one. And maybe limit functionality for the free version instead of tables, by limiting tables lacals with less than 10 tables will never convert to paying customers. And you are incentivizing toying the set-up to work with 10 "tables", depending on what exactly is a table.
I don't agree that a table based solution is dead on arrival, een if restaurants are forced to close. Sure, a delivery, contactless, solution would be great by now. But things will get to normal one day. And then an affordable, certified POS solution like yours will certainly have value.
Marketing might be an issue, so. But maybe the corony crisis akes care of that when a lot of competitors relying on VC money to get customers, well, leave the market.
1) Print out QR codes for every table
2) Customer scans QR code
3) etc.
(or if that's not how it works, I didn't understand it either!)
Also I've heard that using establishment-provisioned tablets results in greasy screens, this solution alleviates that by using the patrons own devices :)
Part of the university project was to make a quantitative survey, ask the staff of events what they need, ask the customers what they need. Then I built the application and made an event to test it. This enabled me to collect a little feedback.
From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device needed).
Until now only leisure clubs used it for events.
I maybe wrong though.
Editing quantities from cart will also be helpful.
As many other commentators have pointed out, you face an uphill battle. The incumbents have way more features than you do and they handle more use cases out of the box. They also offer support. Still it's important to not compete on price - you need to differentiate your service, find your initial market and aggressively pursue those customers. This is more marketing than anything technical.
Some constructive criticism:
On the demo:
1. It is not clear from the demo itself if the demo is for self ordering or for waitstaff ordering. I would like to know how my waitstaff will manage multiple tables? How do I switch tables?
2. How does my kitchen or food runners mark an order as done? I try to click on the order in the status page and it only opens the accordion.
3. How do I input my menu? What is the admin panel like?
4. If I run out of fries, can I scratch the item from the menu in real time?
5. Feels like managing each location in a different instance will be a pain point for multi-location customers. I would test this assumption with market research. If the market share of multi-location users is small, and multi-location management is painful I would recommend not targeting those customers until you get traction and can afford to fix the problem or handle supporting the customers.
On performance:
My load times for the status page were about 2s - which is still too slow. Given that pupdogg experienced 4s load times, I am guessing that your backend did not handle the HN traffic spike well. Definitely look for ways to speed this up - most of your app's traffic will be concentrated within a few hours.
On pricing:
I agree with the other commentators that the pricing makes no sense.
Right now you have a freemium model, tiered by # of tables. 1. Freemium is great when you can tier by feature offerings or when you can tier by resource allocation. For the former, a SaSS will offer Single Sign On for paying users only. For the latter, the SaSS may give a free tier for personal use, (e.g. a single user account).
2. When we delineate by seats (in your case tables), we are making a bet that as the customer scales up, our product will become essential to our customer working at scale so they see the value in converting to the paid tier. This has an assumption that our customers will scale up.
as fapi1974 pointed out, restaurants don't scale up like this. Their tables are, for the most part, fixed.
Restaurants with more than 10 tables will likely not try the product, and restaurants with less than 10 won't add more than 10.
Instead a free trial makes a lot more sense. Your product is not one-shot, it is recurring. If a customer does the trial and invests the time to input their menu and train their staff then there is a good chance they may convert after the free trial ends. (in fact you can and should track free-trial usage and an leading indicator of whether the customer will convert)
I would also think about unit pricing. $219 for 10 tables is very steep. $219 for 100 tables is a bargain. However, I would guess that the market skews closer to the 10 table capacity.
Final thought. Think about how this helps your customers. Does it save more than $219 a month? Does it increase value for their offerings (probably for event organizers) When you sell to businesses remember they are economic buyers - they need it to make business sense first and foremost.
Best of luck!
Yes, the demo is just the access point for guests, so changing the status on the status page is not possible. It's an information for the guest about there current orders. The interface for waiters is nearly the same, except they can choose the table at the beginning and are able to checkout orders on a table (mark them as paid).
Maybe a video with some examples would be helpful to understand the process.
Currently it is important for me to find real customers so I will definitely work on the pricing model. I also thought about different pricing models (like tauntz mentioned a % revenue-based approach with an upper cap). For starting this MVP it was important to keep it simple so I decied to use a fixed price per month. Maybe I should cut it to find real customers.
