Blog 4: EZ Eats
For our gate 3 presentation, we presented on our new idea called EZ Eats. We focused on the restaurant problem of decreased customers which was exacerbated by covid. Our customer problem is now difficulty researching restaurant information in your area. Before we focused heavily on being a cheaper alternative, but this was not a great value proposition and differentiator for us. When creating our financials, our previous idea has a much smaller market than our current idea which was also a big factor when deciding to pivot. Our team was very organized when we pivoted and we met multiple times a week to make sure our pivot was reasonable and clear for gate 3.
For our solution, we covered the process for customers using the platform to find promotions near them and purchase them. The feedback we got was that we didn’t detail this as much for the restaurants. We talk about what value is created, but not about the process for restaurants posting their promotions. We need to cover how our platform will be implemented into restaurants and who is going to post to the platform. We agreed with this feedback and are going to implement it. We are thinking managers or informed employees should be in charge of this aspect since they have the more knowledge on pricing of products and what promotions would be the most effective. A cashier would not be ideal for posting the promotions due to their lack of knowledge. We also realized the manager isn’t always working or physically at the restaurant. Because of this we believe having the manager reach out to employees or create a list of promotions to post for the week. This way the manager can still post promotions that are profitable and the employees don’t have to stress over what to post.
For our assumptions we needed to talk more about why restaurants don’t use Groupon. Since we are a two-sided market we need to separate our sales channels for both instead of grouping them. We need to also address how our sales commission is just for restaurants and not for customers. Our sales commission shouldn’t be a percentage of our revenue either, it should be how many restaurants are acquired per salesman. Our AWS is way too high and we agreed we wouldn’t be storing lots of data so that is unnecessary.
For our unit economics we presented some numbers, but talked about different numbers which was confusing. We plan to walk through the calculations and present them in a clearer fashion. This would also explain how we calculated our values since our professors were unclear on some numbers.
Our revenue curve doesn’t say anything about our growth. We need to talk more about our expansion plan and why are revenues are climbing like they are not just show a graph. Also mentioning our ideal restaurant size and the criteria involved is important.
For our expenses we need to extrapolate more about our growth strategy. It was unclear why some numbers were so high and others low for certain years and this has to do with our expansion strategy. Our Y1 G&A is too high, but we disagreed with our S&M being too low since we are the salesmen for year 1. We just need to mention this because we didn’t.
For our funding requirements we need to add working capital as well. Our current total ask is just for break-even. We need enough to support our operations too, so taking this into consideration for when we pitch. We also need to mention how we are issuing convertible notes in exchange.
Our team gets along well, so pivoting was not much of a challenge for us and just required some changes to our previous idea. We have a lot of changes to make before our pitch and we plan to implement all the feedback we received.
