QuickBytes: How Waitrr is making restaurants more efficient

QuickBytes is a Q&A series featuring Asian startups that showcases their innovations and the challenges they face. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Tim Davies, COO, and Tim Wekezer, CEO of Waitrr / Photo credit: Waitrr

What is your company’s elevator pitch?

Waitrr is a Singapore-based mobile ordering platform for the hospitality industry that lets restaurant guests order and pay using their own phones without having to download an app.

How much traction have you gotten?

Photo credit: Waitrr

Waitrr has seen an increase in gross merchandise value after the end of the Circuit Breaker in Singapore. Our services have been in very high demand and seen very high adoption, and we’ve seen more and more restaurants process their dine-in orders through Waitrr.

Who was your first hire and why?

Our first hire was a local named Simon who helped us with business development.

As two foreign founders in Singapore, we faced the industry’s high skepticism toward Waitrr, on top of the already high hesitation around contracting the services of a newly-founded startup. Simon helped us create a bridge between our technology and local restaurant owners.

That initial hesitation turned out to be a great asset after all. It forced us to provide better service and a more powerful technology. Today, nobody cares where we or our team members are from. Waitrr managed to establish itself as a solid company to work with since our humble beginnings in 2015.

What is your biggest challenge?

One of the biggest challenges for an entrepreneur – and for any startup – is that you don’t know what you don’t know. We’re always doing our best to project our future and trying to anticipate or “know” what we don’t know yet. That’s the first and hardest step.

Once we know what we didn’t use to know, we then look for the answers by seeking advice from more advanced, serial entrepreneurs. Our investors are also a great resource – even when they don’t know the answer, they can at least connect us with someone who would.

What do you have planned next?

Since March, the Covid-19 crisis has led to a surge in demand for our services, not only in Singapore but also globally. We started receiving many requests from restaurants in other countries so we launched in new markets, mainly in Europe.

This is also the main goal for the near future: To launch and strengthen our operations in new countries with our current products and services. There are so many growth opportunities, and the current pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology in restaurants by years.

In the more distant future, we envision providing an entire ecosystem for restaurants to manage their operations: Orders placed on Waitrr would automatically update the inventory, reorder ingredients, and schedule staff. Our mission is to help restaurant owners focus on their recipes and concepts instead of tedious admin tasks.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Building a company takes a lot of time. Have patience.

When we started Waitrr, we thought we’d be a unicorn within a year. But in reality, it takes a long time to find the entrepreneurial path. There isn’t a plan. Everything has to be learned from scratch, specific to your own company.

Our breakthrough moment was at the Insead Entrepreneurship Forum where we met many fellow entrepreneurs, many of whom have built multiple companies over the decades. Back then, when we told them that Waitrr was four years old, they told us that it was only the beginning for us, as it takes eight to 10 years to build a big organization, if not more.

That really changed our attitude toward this whole journey and recalibrated us to obsess more about the things that matter, such as product-market-fit and great customer service.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.