Subscribe
Sign in
Scan For Table — Please scan to be seated, a restaurant wait list SaaS
Don't make your customers huddle at your front desk just to put their name down for a table! Let your customers check in easily by scanning a QR code using their smartphones. Then use our app to TEXT them when their table is ready. Ideal for busy restaurants.
21
Replies
Best
Francoo
Hello there, congrats on launch. Sadly here in Paris, having a queue kinda means "its good enought for people to queue" and that is free marketing for the restaurant.
Report
Share
@francoolaami No worries, there'd still be queue:) Only thing is they don't have to bother the hostess at the door for putting down there name and keep on asking her how many parties are ahead of them :)
Neat concept - I'm curious what your target restaurants look like.
With anything remotely upscale I'd imagine the restaurant would prefer to provide a human check-in experience. What do the restaurants look like that aren't too "nice" but also not order-at-the-counter downscale? Which restaurants are feeling especially burdened by the check-in process?
@nasiscoe French Laundry is out of scope, of course :)
I dine out with my friends on many weekends and in my experience any restaurant that has more than 50-60 seats and uses either a paper and pen on a front-desk where you put your name down or the one that gives you a bulky RF pager that doesn't fit inside your pocket and restricts your movement within 100 meters of restaurant would benefit from this. This could includes many chain restaurants too, places likes CPK, Olive Garden, PF Chang, Chillies etc. Many a times these restaurants are in a mall and have 1+ hour wait time on weekends but I can't leave their waiting area and roam around in a mall freely because their voice announcement or RF paging won't reach me deep inside the mall. You can say I'm scratching my own pet peeve :)
@saroskar This is a nifty idea. I'd love to use it when visiting restaurants. However, if I knew that a popular restaurant used this system, I would cheat by taking a photo of the check-in QR code so that I could check in from home for future visits. That way I could wait around at home until I saw myself rising to the top of the queue.
There are a few ways to stop cheaters like me:
1) Use geolocation to verify that the person checking in is in fact at the restaurant. This feature could be a setting that the restaurant could turn on or off.
2) Ask the restaurant to print out a new QR code every day/week/month. This solution is simple, but knowing restaurants I think they could struggle to remember to do this.
3) Have restaurants display the QR code on a tablet instead of a piece of paper. The digital display would let you update the QR code for the restaurant automatically.
In the end, I suppose it's not the end of the world if people are able to check in from anywhere. Allowing customers to check in when they're not yet at the restaurant does give them lots of convenience. However, I also think it would dramatically increase the number of people who check in but never show up. The problem could be especially bad if a check in QR code got posted to a restaurant's Yelp page or Google listing.
@magnuson Thank you for your kind words! You are right, I plan to fix gaming of the system by checking in from your home by using geo location at the time of the checkin if it becomes a widespread issue. That's why I take the restaurant's street address in the sign up page :)
This looks cool. Would there still be a traditional hostess? My concern is with restaurants that have a high amount of elderly customers.
@effectivenerd Yes! Most customers would self-checkin by scanning the QR code posted at the door but the hostess/restaurant managers get login so they too can add Guests to the waitlist using the app if they need to. Same screen can be used to add over the phone reservations as well - with reservation time in future.
Feel free to create login for yourself and play with the hostess side of the application. You just need an email address - no credit card details are asked anywhere in the signup flow.
Oh, hello there! I think we will be competing for restaurants, you and I! 🍻
@saroskar We're currently building Belhana and we're almost there for our MVP launch. You can tag along here: https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
@musictriage That's on purpose. My product is now ready and I want to sign up few beta customers so that I can see how it fits their needs and processes before I start charging them. So I'm giving it away for free now. It'd cost few tens of dollars per month once it is commercially available.
