Hello my name is Tj and I’m the Founder of Snarki, your personal restaurant selector. We provide a mobile app that connects users to local restaurants based on their cuisine choices.
Right now, restaurants are recovering from the pandemic. With a previous sharp decline in foot traffic, roughly 10% of US restaurants closed their doors over the past 2 years. On the other hand, dining out at restaurants has bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. With increasing supply chain prices and inflation, attracting more customers is critical to restaurants' survival. And the best tool on the market, Yelp, is hated by local restaurants.
But having an online presence is critical to restaurants success. More than 170 million people were food service patrons on any given day in the US and 90% of customers check out a restaurant online before dining there. Every restaurant needs representation online to succeed in today’s climate.
Our product provides a better mobile experience to help restaurants attract the exact customers they’re looking for a fraction of the cost. Our goal is to bring in more customers while keeping our platform affordable to the smallest of restaurants.
Users are able to swipe yes and no to cuisines they are in the mood for and are matched with local restaurants. We have the MVP created with our own database of roughly 15,000 restaurants in NYC, Westchester county and Fairfield county. Owning our own database is critical because API fees from Google or Yelp make new entries into the market impossible to afford. And our platform is built on Flutter allowing us to use one code base to write for both iOS and Andriod operating systems.
Our biggest competitors are the status quo. People are using Yelp, Google, Trip Advisor, and Social Media when they want to find new restaurants. The biggest differentiator is no external reviews. Harvard conducted a study and found that 1 extra star on these sites leads to a 5%-9% increase in revenue. This has created a hostile platform with reviews being center stage. By eliminating external reviews, restaurants have more flexibility in their marketing efforts to attract new and existing customers. We provide the restaurant's webpage, Facebook, or Instagram page for the users to view. Small chains dislike the review system and it’s time to break the mold.
Another big difference is our pricing model. We are not a PPC model like the rest of the restaurants, nor do we take 30% from every order like the delivery apps. It’s free for restaurants to make a profile, and those that sign up for premium access will appear in more searches, are able to post discounts/coupons, and have different UI elements allowing them to stand out even more from their peers. All of this with 0 costs to consumers and they love looking at restaurants.
With roughly 700,000 restaurants in the US at our current pricing model, we’re looking at a TAM of 420 million. Our current database has roughly 15,000 restaurants or a SAM of 9 million.
Our 5 year+ plan is to transition from just a marketing platform for restaurants to a big data company. Attracting millions of customers around the world and tracking their restaurant habits: from time spent in restaurants, cuisines by geographical location, frequency of visits, foot traffic by store, heat maps of activity, and more. This information will provide more insights into restaurants than the current review system. Restaurants may have a few hundred reviews if they’re lucky, but they attract more than a few hundred customers a day. Our future analytics plan will allow restaurants to use real data to market to their customers not just the reviews from customers.
We get there by approaching our GTM strategy in 2 folds, the first is our enterprise solution and the second is the consumer. Because restaurants are brick-and-mortar locations, the best way to get in front of them is by actually getting in front of them. Going location to location that has a strong online presence will increase our success to get us off the ground. We plan on doing activities that don’t scale at first to get us in the door, then as we grow add plans that are scalable.
Our Consumer strategy is focusing on SEO/ASO, local media/food blogs, and virality/sharing. Because our database is only in NYC and the surrounding area, we want to target local media with low costs and a strong sense of loyalty to their followers. We are also adding a “share” button for users to share their results with their friends, thus increasing downloads/MAUs.
Our goals include increasing our database to 100,000 restaurants in 7 major cities around the US, having 200 paying restaurants and 5,000 users.
Our team consists of myself, Jean-Carlos Martinez, and Shubham Sapra. Jean and I have spent years working together at Enterprise rent-a-car and set multiple records in sales/operations/marketing within our region. Shubham joins us as our fullstack engineers with experience working in small-scale start-ups and large tech giants like Walmart. Our team has a great sense of business, sales, marketing, operations, and programming knowledge to have us succeed in this space.
We are looking to raise a pre-seed round of $200,000 to have us achieve our milestones and get us to the seed stage round. We plan on using roughly 70k for personnel, 50k for marketing, and 80k for operational expenses/tech improvements. Would this be a company you are interested in investing in?