Brio was designed to expedite the worst part of the dining experience.

Everyone’s been there - waiting forever to close out at a bar or restaurant.

Had it been tried before? Yes.

Our twist was the market we addressed - college bars & restaurants. Other solutions went for the largest markets and found problems with market density. We tried to find the half-dozen bars that college kids frequented for multiple years and build momentum via word-of-mouth.

www.paywithbrio.com

Project Overview

 

Technologies

  • Xamarin

  • AWS

  • Stripe

  • Spreedly

  • Omnivore

  • Ionic

Traction

  • POS distribution partners

  • 3 live venues, ~100 on the waitlist

  • ~$5,000 transacted, 500+ items rated

 

Failures

Well, there would be too many to list here. But that’s how you find your way in startups.

Most importantly, our platform relied on API access to POS terminals. We’ve seen businesses work with relationships like this, but that was unfortunately not our reality. Omnivore had a integration to Aloha/NCR which we were told was all we needed…NCR put an indefinite hold on payment integrations while we were in the queue and that broke all of our momentum.

Takeaways

  • Market size is important. Fragmentation might be more important.

  • Fear of payments. Non-tech folks get very reluctant when it comes to payments technology. Irrationally so.

  • Burning problems. Unless someone is extremely motivated to fix the problem (I.e. losing tons of business), they’re unlikely to prioritize your solution.

 
 

Overview Video

Brio was to the point - Venmo for your favorite bars & restaurants. By bringing offline venues online, we could use purchase history to serve targeted ads to the palm of your hand immediately before purchase. Studies showed that 70% of people walked up to a bar without knowing their order and that once they did order, the majority of people reordered the same beverage for the rest of their visit - this served as a large advertising opportunity as well.