Serving Success One Meal At A Time

Welcome to another episode of the SaaScast, the show that flips the traditional podcast format on its head. Here we have a simple rule one question, one answer from some of the biggest names in the SaaS world. Today we're thrilled to have the founder of Dine, a SaaS restaurant marketing automation platform, helping over 800 restaurants boost their revenue by 55%. So I'm curious, very, very curious, to say at least, arnav, it's an honor to have you with us. Can you please share a little bit about yourself and your company, just to kick things off, and then we'll dive into the one question.

Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much, jason. It's a pleasure to be here as well. So Dine is a machine learning company in the restaurant space. We provide marketing automations. There are new forecasting, pricing analysis and a bunch of other features to help restaurants grow their margins with revenue, as well as scale operations using the data analytics and insights. We process about a billion data points every month to empower these restaurants to make some impact-free decisions that can help them actually understand the core of the business. And, of course, being a foodie, while we are doing so, we also connect a lot of fellow foodies around the network to explore the hidden gems, the true beauties of the restaurants, and to explore different cuisines, culture and, of course, the people who run these restaurants throughout the journey.

That's amazing, and, speaking of the people that are running these restaurants, I mean, they've gone through some of the most challenging times that any business could be thrown in front of, and so obviously I'm talking about COVID and it seems like a distant afterthought at this point, but there's no discounting how much struggle the restaurant industry was faced with during this time, and so I guess it's a two-pronged question connected together. One, how did you convince restaurant owners during this time, who were already dealing with such a big, profound change to their business their revenue was being hit to take another chance on another platform, and why I say another platform is restaurants. There's lots of different software out there to help them manage, grow and drive their business. I guess what made you stand out from the rest and what was your secret sauce?

Absolutely Great question. Essentially, you're right. Dine started during the pandemic because we saw the restaurant industry was heavily hit. There was over $500 million lost in the industry in terms of revenue and a lot of jobs were lost. Restaurants went towards bankruptcy.

It was just a difficult time and we saw that the entire industry in the restaurant sector focused on two main things. There were players who focused on the delivery that's all the old worry eats, the door dashes of the world. Or the players who focused on reservations and payment gateways this is all the fancy iPads, you see, let's say Touch Me, stroll, clover, lightspeed, pos and they focused on helping restaurants pay and get customers. But nobody actually looked into the middle section on how the restaurant operates and how do they actually make sure that this can be digitally transformed. And if this was an IT company, buzzwords like digital transformation, automation, machine learning, data analytics would be in play about a decade ago. But the restaurant industry is one of the oldest industries in our planet. Like since Roman civilization, across all the countries, across all the ethnicities, the culture of having a restaurant and the skeleton of how a restaurant operates in terms of serving food has not changed much. We have added some fancy things like robots, but there's still the concept of serving food, and having a price to pay is very simple, and that's where Dine came in.

We wanted to make things much more simpler for restaurant owners to focus on what they care the most. That was to serve their hospitable experience to their customers, and this is where we started creating experiences within the restaurants, from the point a customer walked into the doors, from the pricing strategies, the menus, the branding of the restaurant and also understanding what type of communities around that restaurant. Is it a fast serve coffee shop or is it a Michelin star diner? Is it a university pub? Creating these experiences and making sure that you can target your right target demographic was a key part of it.

So what made Dine separate or different was that, rather than competing in the restaurant industry for the piece of the pie in the delivery of the POS segment, we actually started complementing these services. We have integrations with over 75 other restaurant tech companies, including, let's say, uber, eats, clover, lightspeed, pos, restaurant 365, allowing us to pool in the datasets, combining it on our own with our proprietary dataset and processing all of this through machine learning algorithms, telling restaurants some key data points that matter to them on understanding how the pricing strategy should be, understanding the customer demographic and planning the marketing campaigns using Generative AI. A restaurant typically spends $500 on marketing every month. We do it for just $20 a month, in 15 seconds, where Generative AI can create the campaigns for them, can put it into text formats, can publish it in different platforms. And this was not a reality, maybe a year ago, but thanks to chat, gpt and us adapting into AI and machine learning.

It has become a reality where restaurants can actually benefit from this and that's how we started building the relations and the trust in the community and through referrals, through incentive programs with enterprises, sales, go-sell with Microsoft, oracle and a couple of big players, we were able to scale our marketing and our branding and our reach and we were able to help the restaurant industry grow one step at a time or one meal at a time.

That's amazing. I love how you bring it back to you, something as simple as one meal at a time, and really that's what it's about You're there to help these amazing restaurants build back their businesses, which is going to take them time, and you mentioned some very, very cool use cases.

So thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for helping us understand the platform differentiation you have and how you're able to crack in during your really challenging time for these restaurants and help them. Hope you have a great day ahead and we'll be rooting you on and cheering from the sidelines.

Absolutely Pleasure dining with you, thank you.