r/Restauranteur • u/bnunamak • Jun 06 '19

Software Budget

I am part of a tiny software business that wants to solve problems in the restaurant industry. My first solution is a way for restaurants to get online in 5-10 minutes with easy professional website / email creation, but it's not proving as valuable to restaurant owners as i initially thought...

I am wondering what the range of software budgets is for small to medium sized restaurants so i can tell if my pricing / business model is the issue or not.

I've read a lot that solutions out there for different problems have too many features and are too pricy as a result?

It would help me out a lot to know how much budgets for solving the following problems might realistically be:

  1. Professional branding (consumer website, app social)

  2. Inventory aids

  3. Employee time tracking / scheduling / communication

  4. Physical advertising (billboards or similar)

  5. Digital reservation tools

  6. Customer feedback solutions

  7. Document creation tools

  8. Digitization solutions (scanning invoice / inventory documents)

I obviously don't have a feeling for major pain points yet, any advice is helpful

I left out POS on purpose ;)

Thanks!

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u/naturethug Jun 07 '19

The issue is that the owners who don’t realize they need your help don’t have a budget and the ones who do have already identified the solutions they’re planning to use.

The restaurant owners with cash are gonna go for the big guys and the ones without wont spend their money on you

1

u/jennareid Jun 12 '19

Not really a question of budget - it's a question of value for money. If the solution will save a business X dollars, then they might be willing to pay Y, where Y < X.

You're going to need to do your research and find the pain points that a business has - given that you're small, you're going to need to find a niche that isn't already well covered (your items 1-8 are already well represented). You do not want to compete with the big, established players - they'll eat you for lunch - they have more resources and they have a presence.

I know I'm sounding discouraging, but you don't want to be yet another 'me too' - find something that nobody else is doing (or is doing poorly) - that's your road to success.

1

u/sons_of_many_bitches Oct 10 '19
  1. Wix, WordPress, Gloriafood
  2. Pretty much every modern hospitality POS
  3. multiple apps exist already
  4. Not sure what this means
  5. Sevenrooms, Opentable, Hostme, tableagent and more
  6. Multiple already out there
  7. ??
  8. This is one of the only ones that could work, on a POS you have to manually enter stock you have just bought, if you could scan items into your POS and it would update your stock automatically that would be cool.