In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Brendan Sweeney (@popmenu.com), CEO and Co-Founder of Popmenu, a restaurant technology company. He talks about product market fit by sharing the story of Popmenu and finding success in an obvious place: the online experience of restaurants.

“We started off with delivering to restaurants a dynamic menu that they control... gave consumers all the criteria they want to make their dining decision - photos, reviews, ratings, social validation, interactivity, all of that.”

Brendan details Popmenu’s approach to staying close to the customers, their consumers, and the data. He covers the positive and negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant and hospitality industry and what to expect from Popmenu in the future.

“Delivering that initial product actually opened us up to a whole world of other opportunities for the product. We’re lucky that the beginning of our product market fit journey was something that restaurants responded to, our target market responded to instantly.”

Brendan started Popmenu in December 2015 with several leadership roles under his belt. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Product and Marketing at the SaaS Real Estate Marketing and CRM Platform Commissions Inc. and served as the VP of Product Development at CareerBuilder.

“Now, I understand how you can use SaaS... to help a small local business kind of take some control back from large technically sophisticated third-party platforms, which is clearly the dynamic in the restaurant space just like it was in real estate.”

Brendan has demonstrated success driving product, marketing, and UX innovation scaling high-growth businesses.

Topics covered in this episode:

Why restaurants need a more compelling tool than PDFs to present offerings
The beloved topic of finding product market fit
Brendan's take on how to design features for your customers
The adoption SaaS and the buying habits of buyers in new and different industries
How to help small businesses take back control from big platforms

Links and Resources:

Listen to the episode

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08.14.24 How Should We Live