Seeking technical founder for Restaurant QR code POS service
Looking to offer a service where we set up QR code point-of-sale systems for restaurants. Charge a one-time set-up fee and a monthly retainer.
How it would work:
- A customer scans a QR code on the table they are seated at.
- Customer enters payment info.
- Customer orders from the menu.
- Kitchen receives the order instantly.
- Food is brought out to the customer.
- Customer is free to order more or leave, and their tab will be closed when they leave.
Benefits:
- Protects against dining and dashing.
- Streamlines customer experience by cutting down the time to receive food.
- Makes it easy to order, so customers are more likely to impulsively order.
- Reduces strain on staff during busy times.
- Allows restaurants to precisely track customer data regarding, what is ordered most and least.
The idea is for this to start as a service to gain revenue and prove product market fit, and then leverage it into a platform for restaurants to be able to set this up themselves.
Shoot me an email: [email protected]
or leave a comment if this is something you'd be interested in.
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This is already done in so many places here in NL doesn't really sound that novel of a concept. The QR code here is most often just a Website URL that attaches a tableID to it. The annoying bit of this whole concept is that t still requires you to carry a smartphone with you and to find and capture that QR code correctly. You might thing that sounds trivial, but for certain age groups that's surprisingly a higher hurdle to pass.
It also depends a lot on the quality of your phone lens and the environmental lighting condition and scrolling through a menu on a small phone display is often actually a mediocre user experience.
That's why many fast food chains use a kiosk POS system instead.
Those are all good considerations so thank you for pointing those out. The idea is to start locally, and around where I live I have only seen it done once. The other consideration is that in a big city like Cleveland the population tends to be younger and I would safely assume all carry new smartphones.
As opposed to the kiosk system, being able to remain at the table and very easily order more drinks reduces friction significantly which will drive up order volume. With the kiosks, to start a new order you have to also reinput your card info all of which is trouble that deters people from doing so.
Your idea is just a variation of already existing and proven tech, there is no need to look for market fit.
I have done similar ordering systems for https://www.davidlloyd.co.uk and https://www.bupa.co.uk only the first step was using your membership card instead of your credit card.
You do not need a product build, you need to find a chain of restaurants that want to use it and can pay for it, small single operation restaurants have no need for it as they don’t have enough volume and membership schemes (regular visitors that will appreciate the convenience), this is your target market only after big volume of customers are educated about the possibility of using it (similar to the delivery apps, no restaurant used them before the big companies made it popular)
It will be very difficult to get traction by getting tis and that restaurant to try using it, not that it is impossible but will take a lot of time and money to do it and it will most likely fail as you need significant numbers to maintain a dev and marketing teams to support it.
Technically speaking you are looking at 3-6 months of developing the App and the Back Office for it and another 2-3 to do an integration with a bank for CC payments and a single POS system, if you want to do your own POS that is at least another 6 months. All of that assuming you have a tech team of at least 3 people and they are good, you are looking at least $100k (good people cost money)
Hey Phillip,
This sounds like a solid concept, especially with restaurants looking to streamline operations and reduce staff strain. Starting as a service to validate demand before scaling into a platform is a smart approach. Have you spoken to restaurant owners to gauge their interest and understand their biggest concerns with QR-based ordering? Could be a great way to refine the offering before building it out.
Best of luck with the search for a technical co-founder!
This is a little different from the stuff normally on IH, but I was inspired by this community to start working on side projects and decided to do a game first. It's a real-time version of chess where you don't take turns and pieces have a move speed and cooldown. I used to play it online back in the early 2000s, but the original site and its successors are no longer running.
I've rarely built a full product from scratch, so I got to flex a lot of muscles, especially on the UI/design side. I'm hosting it on AWS Lightsail, which is cool but pretty limited (I'm a long-time EC2 user). The code is also open-source: check it out here. Let me know what you think!
Hello, I built something similar but focusing on events, however this could also work in restaurants. I just skipped the part were the customer is required to enter payment information. Payment is still part of waiters and for my use case (events) this was not an important factor.
If you want to check it out it's https://www.flexiblepos.com/
At the moment I just have one customer with one to two events per year.
The hard part for me is marketing and sales but I do not invest much time in it. I think this is something were you really need to go and talk to a lot of possible customers, which takes a lot of time and probably very good sales skills because there is always a lot of skepticism and things to explain how this works.
In Austria we have a lot of events from non-profit organizations (like small local sport clubs, volunteer firefighters) and I've found that once it's in use, it's a relief, especially for waiters at events - even without self-ordering by guests.
All the best!
Seems like you've got this well organized, could consider doing something like an affiliate program where you share profits with people who act as salesmen for what you've built. Why don't you give me your email or shoot me a message at mine and we can hop on a quick call?
Great Idea. Thank you.
What's your email? You can also reach my via the contact form on Flexible POS Website at the bottom.
I sent you an email from transmeta01[at]gmail[dotcom]
We built something like that with a friend for his restaurant here in Sweden last year. It is being used by 2 restaurants atm.
It doesn't have the "open-tab" system but works more like for example the Mcdonald's machines.
But we could add that if there would be a customer interested in it.
https://www.slicesize.com/
Let me know if you want to cooperate.
This seems really interesting and would love to hear more, what's your email let's coordinate a call. Would love to help you guys bring this to some places near me.
That sounds very exciting.
Sure, shoot me a msg at [email protected]
What have you already done? Any kind market research? Potential users?
Just began whiteboarding the idea, and formulating the end-to-end experience in figma. My market research consists of a verbal survey with restaurant and club owners in my area(Cleveland) and many expressed interest depending on price and simplicity.
Hello! am currently building my startup in the food tech space in Africa. If you would be interested, I would love to talk to you and collaborate.
What have you done so far? How many customers?
This is a fairly new idea I've been whiteboarding and brainstorming in Figma. I have received verbal interest from restaurant owners in my area(Cleveland) but do not have the technical capability to deliver on my own.
Have you converted any of that verbal interest into deposits, pre-pays, seed funding etc. Verbal interest/commitments are worth $0, so please don't use those as a reason to move forward without some concrete validation.
Also you need to validate it with consumers (as mentioned too - of all age groups). They are "buyers" of this product too who will vote with their feet and wallets. IE if they don't like it they will leave, go to other restaurants etc.
There are valid reasons why a QR system "should" work and "could" be beneficial, but I'm not sure they outweigh the other types of order systems (waiters, kiosks, order stations (McD's) etc.
Why can't you do it? These are everywhere, pretty sure you could find something already built/ready to white label with a 5 minute search.
I agree with @aabreu have a look on codecanyon and search for qr restaurant, you'll find plenty of solutions. I believe the by far toughest task is to convince restaurants at scale. Many small restaurants are soooo low tech.
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I hadn't heard of platerq prior, so thank you for sending that over I'll be sure to take a look. As common as the idea seems, I hardly see it done. I'm playing around with making a mockup using some nocode tools to have ready an end-to-end experience so when a dev is interested, we can build from there. The idea is fairly new, and wanted to just put it out there to see if there was any interest.