Hey HN, we are Shane and Mikey, the co-founders of Boostly (https://boostly.com). Boostly is a text marketing and feedback system for restaurants that works seamlessly with their point of sale, online ordering, and phone systems.

Restaurants live or die based on their ability to keep their customers coming back. However, with the rise of the third party delivery platforms, which charge 20%-35% commission on each transaction, restaurants are afraid that many of their customers will stop ordering directly from the restaurant (even if the restaurant can do their own delivery), and wipe out their small profit margins.

The delivery platforms also maintain ownership of the customer data. They know how valuable this is for marketing, whereas the typical restaurant owner is focused on the food and service, as they should be—and they miss out on being able to communicate directly with their guest as a result. With so many restaurants hanging by a thread these days, it’s more important than ever that they be able to market to their customers themselves, build relationships, and get their customers to order through their most profitable channels.

Customer data is notoriously hard for restaurant owners to access because it is scattered across different systems with various challenges. Even if they access it, they don’t have a way to manage opt-in consent for texting. And of course, most restaurant owners are non-technical and so none of this stuff is easy for them to begin with. We help restaurants access their data, get people opted-in to receive text marketing, and then put it all on autopilot.

All of this started when I (Shane) was running sales for Jolt, a restaurant operations software company, and saw the early stages of online ordering trends. Everyone was focused on the transactions, while customer data was largely getting neglected. Our insight was that this was leaving an incredible amount of opportunity on the table—to turn online ordering into a marketing tool for the restaurant, instead of just being an order taker.

Initially, we founded the company as an online ordering system with a few marketing and feedback tools. We thought that the only way for us to access the customer information would be to own the transaction. We sold that online ordering system to StrideQ, and through that experience we learned how to access customer data from the restaurant's point of sale, online ordering, and other systems. We’ve built Boostly's current tools to put that data to work for the restaurant.

Essentially, we work with the restaurant's point of sale, online ordering, and phone systems to ask for opt-in consent for the customer to receive marketing texts. For example, when ordering online, someone could check a box to opt in to receive marketing texts. Or when someone calls the store, one of the prompts that they can select is to “Press 1 to join our text club and get 10% off today’s order.” Once we have the customer’s permission, we put text marketing on autopilot for the restaurant, so that they can send weekly offers, birthday deals, and other reminders to their opted-in subscribers. We then track the usage so that a restaurant knows exactly how much revenue they drove through their text marketing campaigns.

Additionally, we collect feedback on the customer's experience and give an easy option to leave a review or to give internal feedback to the restaurant that the restaurant can use to resolve issues in real time and get the customer to come back and re-order.

I know some of this might sound a bit spammy, by HN’s demanding standards—one key thing we help the restaurants understand is that it’s in their interest not to over-text their customers. We are scrupulously opt-in, focused on asking politely for permission, and making sure that restaurants set the right expectations for how many texts the customers should expect.

Here’s a quick video that shows a bit about how it works: