Restaurant Owners Uncorked

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Chip and the team at Beau Jo's here. 

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Abby, Shawn and the team at Windfall here. 

How do you get the word out to thousands of independent restaurants that you’ve launched your company? At that point, social media wasn’t a thing. We didn’t have money for advertising. We were buying Google AdWords, but not many people were looking for restaurant employee scheduling software back then. So what do you do? One thing we tried was going to each of the ~7000 restaurant profiles on OpenTable and getting the info@ email or whatever email was listed and sending an intro email. Tyler did this, manually. He literally went one by one. The first day had had emailed over half of them over something like an 18-hour period. The next day when he sat down to knock out the rest of them, BellSouth cut off his internet access. He had to call and convince them he wasn’t some mass spammer who’d be sending thousands of emails every day in perpetuity. He just needed to finish this list and they’d never hear from him again.So they cut him back on. And he finished the list. And we got a few dozen customers from the effort. Mission acomplished! P.s. Five years after Tyler did this, Paul Graham from @ycombinator wrote a GREAT piece about building startup companies, “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” It’s here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Brian and the team at Kickfin here. 

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Aaron and the team at Lucy Boone Ice Cream here. 

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Kristen and the team at EatDenver here. 

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Jeff and the team at Romeo's here. 

We're celebrating 16 years of Schedulefly here in 2023. A few notes about our business:BootstrappedWe don't have any sales peopleWe've never spent more than 1% of revenue on marketingWe have five people in our company, the same five we've always hadIn sixteen years, the five of us have only been together in the same place at the same time once, for lunch at Tower 7 Restaurant in Wrightsville Beach, N.C. (I believe that was in 2013)We've never had a company-wide conference callWe've served a total of >17000 restaurants and independent hospitality businesses over the yearsToday we serve ~6000We have ~250,000 end users yet only get ~30-40 support emails per day~800 retaurants have used Schedulefly for 10+ yearsWe relate to the fisherman in the parable of The Fisherman and the MBA (it's worth looking up)We've done >400 episodes of our Restaurant Owners Uncorked podcast, the #6 ranked restaurant podcast in the worldWe've published two Restaurant Owners Uncorked books, selling >20,000 total copiesWe made The Story of Sup Dogs, the most amazing story we've come across in all of these sixteen years of learning our customers' stories

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Ashley and the team at Free Reign Restaurants here. You can find Trent here.

This episode is sponsored by Popmenu. Popmenu specializes in transformative online and on-premise technologies that help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. We currently work with over 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups and are helping them get the most out of their most powerful marketing tool: their menu.Find Peter and his team at T/aco here.