Forget food blogging: this startup aims to show that table reservations are the real money-makers

The sight of entire families working in the same industry is nothing new. According to Family Business Review Magazine, family businesses make up roughly 80 precent of all the companies in North America. In the same vein, family businesses have also played a huge role in growing the Asian economy since 2000.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since having family members whose passion and specialization lie in a certain industry would no doubt be a boon to the next generation – assuming they want to take over the mantle, that is. Just ask Benson Chang, CEO and founder of Malaysia-based online restaurant booking site TableApp, who was more than happy to help out around the family restaurant in his younger days.

“I used to help my parents run one of their five restaurants, and so am very much aware of the pain points that come as part and parcel of running a restaurant,” he says. “I performed almost every role there was in the operations side – a waiter, cashier, and even phone picker.”

Through the agonizing moments of running the restaurant, he began thinking of solutions to tackle them head-on. One of the biggest problems he identified was the lack of manpower to take reservations during peak periods. “When the restaurant staff are busy serving customers, and the telephone rings, we simply don’t have time to pick it up,” Chang explains.

When this happens, the restaurant could very well be losing a potential customer. In Chang’s opinion, the best way to remedy this is to reduce telephone bookings, and instead deal with them online. “It is so much more convenient to make a booking online, rather than have to shout over the restaurant noise to communicate with the staff at the other end of the line,” he adds.

From reviews to reservations

TableApp was the product of this train of thought, but it wasn’t his first foray into the world of online F&B. Chang began his journey running a food review website called JoinMe. However, as many food bloggers can attest to, the food review space was far too crowded to take on yet another platform.

“Most restaurants told me, there are plenty of people writing reviews about us already, why should I pay for your service?” he recalls. “All they need to do is offer free food to the many food bloggers out there, and they would write about the restaurant. In fact, bloggers in Malaysia even actively ask restaurants whether they can come in to do reviews.”

A lack of money was another problem as they weren’t able to engage in marketing, unlike larger competitors like OpenRice and HungryGoWhere. He concedes: “As a startup with little capital, we just couldn’t fight with them.”

With this venture behind him, he came across Taiwan-based online restaurant reservation site EZTABLE while studying there. Chang decided to give it a try, and found it to be very useful. “I thought, why not bring it back to Malaysia? Restaurants in Malaysia like to see results – no results, no pay,” he says. “So upon returning here, I decided to build TableApp, and charge restaurants per successful transaction made, as well as a monthly maintenance fee.”

To his surprise, the concept proved to be very popular among the local restaurants in Malaysia:

Partnering with Groupon

Plenty of room for growth