After the interviews came scoping. The hardest decision for a new product is not what it is going to do; it is what it is not going to do. We wrote it on a sheet with three columns: "yes", "not yet", and "never".
The "never" column drove the most arguments. But it saved us months.
Before coding anything, we set ourselves a limit: 30 interviews with restaurant owners before opening the editor. Taverns, grills, cafés, a couple of fine-dining kitchens, a three-location franchise. No rigid questionnaire; coffee, a notebook, and two opening questions: "What tool do you use today?" and "What drives you up the wall every week?".
We thought we would walk away with a long, scattered list. We walked away with three sentences that repeated almost word for word.
In mid-2025 we sat down with an uncomfortable question: do we really need another tool for restaurants? The market looks saturated. There are reservation systems, POS terminals, loyalty programs. And yet, every time we walked into a kitchen or stepped behind a bar, the same thing happened: the screen the manager was using looked like it was built in 2010.
We have spent eight years building SaaS for other industries. The founder's partner runs a restaurant in the city center, so the testing ground was already in place. After many late dinners spent talking it over, the conclusion was that it was worth a shot.