As a product company, RedTLV addresses innovation in places that aren't necessarily expected and addresses challenges that might not be popular or attractive from a business perspective.
One of the first products we've built allowed restaurants to gain a VIP personalized experience in restaurants worldwide within their first visit.
How did it all start?
I've always dreamt of owning my own restaurant. It started with the thoughts of being able to make people happy and providing them with an experience to remember. When coming out of the army, and taking my first steps as an adult, I was told of the risks of opening a restaurant and immediately started taking on different positions to get my own perspective of the challenges that restaurants are facing, from being a waiter to a cook in the kitchen to becoming shift manager and being able to manage everything going on in the kitchen.
Realizing the risks, being unable to forecast traffic, assure customer satisfaction and a service that would meet customer expectations and needs. I've decided to give it some thought and figure out another way of making people happy while looking at the restaurant industry from a different perspective.
MultiDine was Born
The Understanding of an enormous gap between our online identity and the information available offline inspired a vision where any customer could visit any restaurant in the world and would be treated as a VIP customer although he's there for the first time.
It was clear to me that I was able to have a greater impact on people's happiness and satisfaction if I were to pursue this vision than having my own restaurant.
It was 2008, Facebook was founded just 3 years earlier, the iPhone was introduced in 2007, The concept of a user profile and the technology behind being able to identify customers digitally in a physical location was completely innovative at the time.
How are we to be able to provide a personal phigital (Phisical-Digital) experience when the term was not even invented? :)
I knew I couldn't do it alone, and that's when my first marriage started. I met my co-founder Ehud Ben-Kimon during my BS.C in Information systems engineering. As we were walking back home from showcasing our projects i proposed and he immediately said YES!
Why Tabletop Surfaces?
Despite the rising fears of user-privacy, we knew our first milestone to make our vision a reality was being able to gather user data. That means bringing in technology to one of the world's lowest tech-adopting industries.
One of the principles that we agreed upon early on was that we would use technology for the purpose of enhancing the dining experience, as opposed to having it distract and create a sense of isolation.
The only way we saw that possible was if we were able to have everyone interact on the same device.
Inspired by Microsoft's multitouch coffee table, we went to the drawing board and though of a way to utilize it in a restaurant environment.
Given the hight price point of the hardware, we understood that for this business to be viable we would have to innovate not only with hardware but with the business model.
Bootstrapping this in a student apartment, and with a surprise donation of $2K from my parents, Ehud and I were able to build our first 4-seater multi-touch table product and place it at a working restaurant for our POC!
Our First Customer
Zygota, our first customer, was co-owned by Avi Zaguri, someone i've worked with in one of the kitchens, loved the concept and was willing to help us learn while operating our products in his restaurant.
3 Months in, we started seeing that users were not only hooked by the experience, they were spending more! The visual images prior to ordering it and the possibility of self-ordering without the need of a waiter increased the average customer spend by 17%.
Ehud was Coding in the kitchen, I was gathering feedback from customers by spying on what people were tapping on the table and speaking with customers as I was sitting at the bar.
We finished school, Ehud was married and lived 100 km away, and we needed to find a way to make this work.
Sharing a bed from Sunday to Thursday, we were able to build hardware, a waiter interface, a chef interface, and a POS that was able to link a customer with his Facebook profile and share information like birthday and friend-dish recommendations.
At that point, we understood we needed help to be able to move faster. We didn't have money and I was working nights to make a basic living and working on the start-up during the day so we had to be creative and I had an idea: The Engineering departments in the university need projects and i need a team, what if we was able to break down Multidine into several projects and have students consider them as their final project for the university while we still own the IP?
That way we could get free help and probably expertise in building recommendation engines from university professors.
Well, this didn't only work, it actually turned out to be a great way to filter great talent and hire them directly out of school.
Our first $$$
Appreciating our traction and accomplishments, I received a PM on angellist.com, a product-investor marketplace, from an Australian investor mentioning he'd love to join us on our journey.
Andrey Shirben, one of the first people who believed in us, jumped on a Skype call with me, and after only a couple of minutes and without any contract, immediately wired us $25K to help us get going.
He later became a great friend and invested twice more in the company.
Growth
To ensure we move fast, we've decided to set a goal - Launch on the Tech-crunch Disrupt 2013!
We had only 96 days to go, and we needed laser focus to make it happen. This also meant that we needed to drop purchase orders to align with our go-to-market strategy, NYC first, Israel later.
With the seed money, we were able to provide our employees with partial salaries and get them onboarded full-time, I've turned my wine bar into a huge desk, my living room into a gym and we started to grind!
Ehud led the developers, I managed the product, design, marketing, business, and everything else.
It was truly an amazing time, everyone was in perfect sync and we arrived at the date as ready as we could.
We've killed it! everyone loved what we were doing, We were featured on the home page of Forbes.com, were selected top 50 start-ups at the web-summit, and top 50 start-ups at the pioneer's challenge and we were on fire!
Even Micros, the POS giant that I was trying to get a meeting with for months reached out and asked that we meet with them.
A month later, given the traction we've seen, we made a bold decision that we would direct all our focus and resources to launch a POC in NYC and seek round A funding.
Within days, i had to leave my apartment, leaving everything i've had there, including my night job and use up all my savings for a NYC relocation.
New York, concrete jungles where dreams are made of
At least that's what was playing in the cab that took me from the airport to where i've stayed (Empire state of mind, by JayZ and Alicia Keys)
I moved to Queens, carrying 4 table-top surfaces, weighing 50 Kilos's each. I had to move so quickly that they were actually partially ready, luckily I was able to rent storage space and turn it into my new office.
Each day, I'd take them out of the box, take them apart, buy parts from the hardware store, and work on them. Weeks later, the hardware was ready, the software was running and they were ready for delivery.
This is the part where i run around in the big city with a big and heavy box trying to sell a "Monitor".
If this scene doesn't look familiar, you probably haven't seen "The Pursuit of happyness" (Yes, with a "Y" and you definitely should see the movie).
From one VC to another, i was turned down, one "No" after the other with claims that we were too early to market, that the hardware complicated the deal, and that we were too late for a seed round and too early for a round A.
They were all right, we needed to simplify things.
We never intended to be a hardware and software company, our business model was focused on Data and services, and we just had to get to that point and prove it.
A Moment of Happyness
After months of business development and trying to raise capital, i flew to LA for a super important meeting with Micros.
If I was able to close them and be able to integrate our product with theirs it would provide us access to 60% of restaurant POS's worldwide - This meant that all the data related to customer orders would be accessible to us - A significant milestone to make our vision a reality!
Walking into their office, the contact person who set the meeting guided me to a place where I could set up the table surface.
Tens of people gathered around, and I started to sweat, nothing seemed to work.
These guys were so understanding and supportive that one of them printed out a meme on how live demos never work smoothly.
Eventually, with Ehud's support from Israel, we were able to get it to work. They were so impressed that I actually received CVs to my email asking if we might be hiring :)
Later that day and after a 7-hour drive, I arrived in San Francisco for a VC meeting, just to realize that there was a mixup and the partner that was supposed to meet with me was out.
Exhausted, i turned back around for another 6 hour drive just in time to Santa Monica for a LAVA (Los Angeles Venture Association) event, which i've heard of from one of the Couchsurfing hosts i've stayed with, for a round table meetup between investors and entrepreneurs.
After meeting with so many investors and pitching your product hundreds of times, you develop these great skills and intuition to be able to stand in the corner and read a room full of people and spot those who might be most likely to connect with you and truly be interested in what you have to say.
It was midnight, and i was still waiting for this one guy to free up from entrepreneurs pitching him their business. The opportunity finally arrived, he was walking to his car, and i had maybe 30 seconds to get a meeting. And what was even more challenging was that in 24 hours, i had to be on my flight back and stop at UPS to get the Product shipped back to NYC.
Anyway... I introduced myself following with my best elevator pitch, and 12 hours later - I was at his office to show him MultiDine!
He was a partner at a private equity fund, one that was able to sell Skype to Microsoft (Twice), i arrived at his door carrying a huge box, he was overwhelmed but gave me some time to set it up.
What started as a demo ended up being a 4 hour meeting, where he showed interest in proceeding and discussing terms with his partners. He then outlined what he felt his partners would raise as weaknesses and suggested how we could arrive prepared for the meeting.
We both agreed, our next milestone was to be running Multidine at a local restaurant.
To be Continued...