ORDR

6 months after having taken the plunge, with our bank account balances decreasing at dangerous speeds, we finally have enough customers to pay for our London rents and more.

All the stress, anxiety, fear that was almost preventing us from delivering quality work, is now gone.

2 years after git commit -m "Initial commit", we have enough code, enough customers and enough faith in our product to cut the cord from our common employer.

It's a massive risk, but we made sure to save as much as possible in the last year to take this step.

This is when things are supposed to get interesting.

Following on from our previous announcement about support from deliveries, we're going all the way in to help our customers.

For the duration of the lockdown ORDR is completely free.

We are still salaried by our main jobs and the AWS/Twilio bills are negligible.

We're sure this will be remembered.

The UK entered full lockdown and restaurants are only surviving thanks to takeout orders.

This surfaced a huge problem with the current state of affairs for F&B businesses.

The same platforms that help restaurants gain extra visibility and manage their delivery orders also extort a massive 20-30% fee on their orders.

We find this outrageous: hitting businesses hard with a 1/3 of revenue loss at a time where deliveries are the only revenue stream?

We spent the last two weeks (this time it was more accurate) adapting our table-ordering software for deliveries and released it to all of our customers.

Sure, they'll have to manage marketing and deliveries themselves, but we're quite sure that the math will work out for them in the end.

We distributed a few packs of "Next time place your order using this QR code" cards for free. Restaurants will place the card in their Deliveroo/UberEats boxes. Win-win!

Things aren't looking good for restaurants, or for anyone really.

Lockdowns have started in China and Italy, and there's rumor that they will spread to the rest of Europe soon.

Can we transform this challenge into an opportunity? We're the first QR-code self-ordering system released to the general public, after all...

It took an unbelievably long time to get to this point, but we now have some sort of validation of our idea.

Working ~10 hours/week on this project, we had some trouble trying to split tech/sales work.

Every. Single. One. of our new customers has given us a long list of feature requests.

Restaurants simply do not want to run multiple systems. We have been completely oblivious to this problem for many months.

At the beginning we envisioned ORDR as a simple "order-building" application for customers. The Staff would then "copy" the order into their old, traditional POS and send it to the kitchen.

This does not work, at all. The small MVP we designed over a year ago has slowly, painfully grown to some sort of cloud-based POS system. It's not beautiful, but it is actually competing with some 20 years old industry dinosaur, and managers prefer us.

The struggle is real, but we make a rule to always end every single meeting with a positive remark.

We have some sort of product, time to get it out there!

We are developers, we don't like to talk to people, at all. But someone will have to get out of the comfort zone.

A few days later we onboard our first customer, a lovely family run restaurant not far from where we lived.

The setup is... interesting and challenging. We find out that filling up a menu online is really not fun. Actually having to stick QR codes onto tables, neither.

We work very closely with our first customers start actually learning how restaurants are run.

We enjoy a few meals there, and even a dim sum making lesson!

Almost 3 years later, they remain our only churned customer. Unfortunately they didn't make it through the pandemic.

It took only 12x the original estimate!

Being still working long hours at our main job, we only had about 3 hours per day to work on ORDR, and not in our best shape. We ordered way too many Deliveroos in those months, which made us aware of another huge problem restaurants are facing right now... more on this later.

In a world before the COVID pandemic, we had seen some restaurants in Asia use QR codes for self-ordering.

We had seen similar apps in large chains in the UK, but they all required to "Download an app", "Signup", "Accept this, and confirm that".

We set ourselves on a mission to build an affordable solution for locations of any size, with the minimum possible friction for the user.

Tap your phone on an NFC card. See the menu. Pick the items. Eat. Pay.

I start working on the Menu interface, allowing people to browse, order and pay. Carlos designs very simple and elegant "waiting list" landing page, and starts building the interface for the restaurant staff.

"This is only going to take two weeks" is the biggest lie we told ourselves to this point.

At some point we start sharing plans about the future, potential ideas that we would like to further develop.

Two very senior developers, avid restaurant goers, frustrated by the 9-to-6 schedule, looking for "financial freedom".

It was just a matter of time until we found a common interest around Restaurant Software.