Name: The Wait List App "Fast Casual Dining"
Market: My audience is geared towards community dining customers as well as large and small dining establishments scaling from corporate owned restaurants to mom and pop eateries. Specifically: Franchisers, Restaurants, Service Staff and Community Consumers.
Service: The link between wait times at sit down dining establishments providing the ultimate concierge service and dining experience for business meetings, lunch breaks, dinner with family, special occasions or just that valuable meal time in general.
Why: The idea is one that will help restaurants identify foot traffic to increase potential sales with capabilities that will target participating dining establishments, help customers locate time efficient restaurant options and place reservations.This process will deliver increased results and improve bottom lines.
Opportunity:
Venture Concept No 1:
My concept offers a time and money solution for the busy customers looking for quick and easy dining without the hassle of waiting and eliminates stress that takes away from the experience. This is a service concept for customers and restaurants but could also be considered a productivity product in respect to technology. The Wait List App is a cost effective application is built on a preference based interface and demographic data to book restaurant reservations while increasing restaurant sales. On average parties wait up to 23 minutes before being seated at a restaurant. Doesn’t seem like much, but when calculating that number against a sale, were talking 6.6 hours a week on average. That’s 6.6 hours of potential sales.
Not only will the Wait List App help people save time, find food and offer convenience. Partnering restaurants will retain per subscriber data while paying a $2.00 referral fee to the Wait List App at the point of sale from a (lead) reservation.
The Wait List app offers a profile for users to best categorizes their wants and pairing with the need. Through this technology service, The Wait List App is the Ultimate Solution for Fast Casual Dining. Features will include the type of dining to locate in a timely manner, with reservation capabilities that include real time text response for:
- Business casual dining
- Family dining
- Budget friendly dining
- Carry out ordering
- Special occasions
The Wait List App is a cost effective solution to the restaurant industry designed to increase sales and improve the fast casual dining experience. This opportunity is one that could continue to expand through innovative avenues reaching a wide span of markets. The major kickstart expenses would be hiring a programer to build the landscape functionalities. To start the app campaign the employee ratio could be relatively low and facilitated at a satellite office or a small incubator hub. I project the costs to arrive at $75,000.00 for the first year with a return of $200,000.00 in revenues for a market like Gainesville, Fl. These are conservative projections as this is a testing phase of my concept.
Natali,
ReplyDeleteI like that your app helps not only customers that do not want to wait, but it helps the restaurants, as well. I never really thought about how calling ahead and reservations help restaurants serve customers more efficiently. I guess I've only seen it from a customer point of view until now. Your idea is great and something that I would definitely use. With two young children, I don't like waiting for a table at restaurants. I think the most difficult concept of your idea would be getting a majority of businesses on board with the app and the communication factor between business to customer. Great idea!
Brandi Gibbs
I would use your product. I wonder how restaurants will react to using them. I know I’ve tried to do “call ahead seating” for establishments that may not take reservations, but many restaurants have declined that convenience and require all members of a party be present before adding to list (not only just for seating). How do you think you’ll overcome restaurants who do not currently care to do “call ahead”? Do you think they’d argue that your 6.6 hours of potential sales calculation is because they are a packed house, currently transacting a sale and waiting for the sale to complete prior to seating another? Love the concept – very interested to see how it plays out!
ReplyDeleteYour technology helps restaurants save money, it is also a good idea to start thinking of ways to incentivize restaurants to use your service. Clearly it is better to use it than to not, but some restaurants might feel as if their current way of doing things is fine. That said, customers will certainly see the value in this and so one of the main selling points for your service could become the volume of customers you can attract.
ReplyDeleteHi Natali, very interesting post. This is an app that I could definitely see myself using, because I hate waiting to be seated at restaurants. I think that there is definitely a large market for this app. However, one thing that does concern me is the large startup costs. I would suggest trying to find a way to do bootstrapping in order to save money in the first few years. Once the business begins to bring in more revenue, then it would be a good time to invest in an app.
ReplyDelete