Background

Questions

1. It’s been a challenging couple of years for restaurants—lockdowns, reopenings at 20% capacity, demand shifting from in-person dining to delivery. Across 3rd-party delivery platforms the take rate has been around 30%. Could you give us your own history on what your customer has been going through over the last few years? What are their biggest challenges today and how are restaurant owners thinking about the next 5-10 years?
2. What does the typical tech stack look like both for a more tech-forward restaurant as well as a traditional restaurant? What might they use for website building, for a mobile app, POS, delivery, and logistics?
3. Do you see restaurants using tools like Wix or Squarespace to build websites?
4. What does this unbundling of the stack look like from a unit economics perspective for restaurants? Is it roughly the difference between 30% of each order going to DoorDash vs. 15-20% of it going to ChowNow/et al? Is there an advantage to paying for SaaS as opposed to paying per order as with DoorDash et al?
5. DoorDash is a marketplace building its own vertical SaaS—launching a financing arm, advertising features, healthcare offerings, education benefits, and access to staffing services over the last year. What do you make of this kind of trend? Do restaurateurs think they’re aligned with marketplaces and want to move their stack over, or do they feel adverse towards them because of their high take rates?
6. Marketplaces like Uber Eats and DoorDash are unbundling their delivery functions and offering it as a utility to vertical SaaS players. Can you talk a bit about this trend? How do the economics work out such that it’s profitable for restaurants to use this but not rely on the marketplaces for the full stack of services? Who do you think is winning in the logistics space and why?
7. We’ve noticed a larger trend around vertical SaaS companies of combining software subscriptions with monetizing transactions and also having a marketplace. Can you help us understand how you see your strategy around executing vertical SaaS for restaurants? How is it different from the approaches of Toast or DoorDash?
8. One thing that we observed is restaurants are often these mom-and-pop affairs, people who are good at hospitality, passionate about food, and famously less business savvy. So it seems like ChowNow, this third model relies on folks leveling up a little bit on the business acumen side. Is that something you're seeing and is that something Covid has accelerated?
9. What do you think happened w/r/t all the ideas for ways for restaurants to create more predictable/recurring/higher-margin cash flow that emerged during the pandemic—subscriptions, all-day cafes, gift cards, events. Do you see restaurants caring about these or no?
10. Do you think about cloud kitchens—which can produce diverse restaurant concepts designed for delivery at scale—as potential customers or competitors (if they vertically integrate around delivery) of ChowNow?