Priyam Saraswat  [00:00:00]:

Making the best quality food. Just focus on just managing their manpower in the best possible way and leave the rest to us. Leave the data analytics, the data crunching, the data, pulling the automation aspect to us. That's what I fundamentally believe, yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:19]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angelus Pesito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking It All. We are here today with Priyam Saraswat, co-founder and CEO of Voosh.ai. Voosh.ai is V-O-O-S-H-A-I. Priyam. Thank you for being here on the show today.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:00:55]:

Thank you so much for inviting me, Angelo. I heard so many good things from a lot of friends in the fraternity, and, you know, this was always, you know, on my hit list to sort of the podcast to go. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me, and I'm really, really excited about the conversation. We're gonna have a lot to learn from you, a lot to share, so I'm sure we both will have a good time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:24]:

Yeah, 100%. I've, you know, just extend the. The compliment. I've also heard really good things about you through some mutual connections and what you're doing. So maybe to just kind of give people a lay the land, tell people, what is Voosh.ai?

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:01:40]:

So, in short, in just one line, it's a platform for food service brands, primarily food service chains, to manage and grow their third party business from a single screen. So what we realized inherently, that post pandemic, a very big share of business has transferred to third parties. And by third parties, I mean the likes of Doordash, Reeds and Grubhub, where you're not doing the distribution or you're not owning the customers yourself. Right? So fair chunk of the business has now transferred to these third parties, but it still remains a big black box. Most of these brands are not running this big chunk of business in a profitable fashion. Or even if they're running it, they're running it highly inefficiently. That's a big gap which we identified in the market, and that's when we started automating a lot of stuff and started bringing in transparency in the way business is done on these platforms. So, in short, we just help them run these third parties in a more efficient and a more profitable fashion.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:52]:

That's awesome.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:02:52]:

Using a lot of cutting edge technology.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:55]:

I love that. I love that. And so what was you know, you spoke to, you know, the problem you're solving, but what, what motivated you or inspired you to, I guess, solve that problem? I'd love to hear about your journey and what led to Voosh.ai in the first place.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:03:09]:

Sure.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:09]:

Sure.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:03:10]:

So let me, let me just start, you know, from, from sort of the background of how this, this idea came into my mind and how we started building upon this. Right. It's a long story and it's a lot of ups and downs involved. So this is, I'll cut it short to the pandemic times. When I was working with a ride share company, I was traveling, I was in southeast Asia, Bangalore, or in China as well. That's a long story. But then, you know, so I was, I was just evaluating the sectors which have been the most impacted sectors due to the COVID pandemic. Right.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:03:48]:

So I was just studying a lot of businesses and I realized that the industry which has taken the biggest hit was the food service industry. Right. The restaurant cloud kitchen industry. And that's when I started talking to a lot of food entrepreneurs and I realized that, you know, post pandemic, the lives of a lot of these, these businesses has changed for bad. And I just wanted to build a product or a solution or a service to cater to these food service entrepreneurs. So the first model with which we started was that how can we give the existing standalone restaurant owners an additional brand from their premise so that they can leverage all the goodness from an existing big brand via utilizing the assets in their store? By assets, I mean the real estate, the kitchen equipment and the stuff. So we realized that a lot of these kitchens, they had all of the real estate, but they were not getting enough volumes to justify that fixed cost. And that's when we tried to build a virtual franchisee out of these existing assets.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:04:57]:

And we scaled it up to around 150 restaurants as well. And we invited some external brands and we curated some brands of our own as well. Sort of like the next bike, previous model, if you all your viewers are aware. So we scaled this model up and fortunately, at that moment, we got into this prestigious Y combinator program as well. For people who don't know about, Y Combinator is the biggest technology investor and accelerator globally. So we got funded by Y Combinator as well. And that's when our journey began. And a lot of Silicon Valley investors also joined in our investment round and we started scaling up the business which I was talking about, and we scaled it up to 150 plus locations.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:44]:

To.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:05:44]:

Realize that it was getting very, very operationally heavy but while we were building this, you know, this. This virtual chain of 150 locations, we realized that doing business on third parties is a complex maze. It's not, it's not easy. There are, I mean, it's literally a black box out there and you need to be. Yeah. And you know, it's. And most of the brands, you know, still are running their business on third parties just for their branding, just for their visibility. And they end up, in many cases, they end up making negative margins on that business.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:06:24]:

Right. Because there's a lot of commission, there's a lot of advertising fee, and then there are errors, disputes, right. So there are lots of avenues where you can lose money and very less avenues to make money. Right. So that's when I realized that. And you need, and, you know, not every brand can afford to have that kind of data science bandwidth, that kind of analytical bandwidth to take decisions to file for those disputes, etcetera, etcetera. So no one has that know how, the capability to sort of nail those platforms. And that's when we realized while running these 150 locations on third parties that this is something which.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:07:04]:

This is a problem every big chain, because small chain with more than ten locations is going through, right? And that's when we started building a product. Like early this year, we started building. We already had built a lot of stuff because we were a venture backed company. We had our technology team, we had a data science team, and we ourselves are tech savvy people. Right. We are not like restoratives from the beginning. Right. We are mostly techies who were trying to solve a problem in the restaurant space, right? That's when we realized that it's a.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:07:38]:

It's a problem which is resonating with every food service entrepreneur globally. And not just the US. We talked to food service entrepreneurs in the Europe, in Southeast Asia, India, of course, and us. Everyone was resonating with this problem statement. And that's when we started productizing the solution which we built for ourselves to manage these 150 locations. And by the first quarter of 2023, we launched the first scrapy version of the product. We tried with a few food brands, started loving it. They gave us feedback and still we are in that feedback loop.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:08:11]:

But now we have 1000 plus locations using our product and it's a big, big pipeline ahead of us. So that's like, in short, the journey as to how we came to this product. I love that we did not start with this particular solution, but during the journey we realized that this is a problem worth solving.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:30]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through that, which is good, which is the idea of, you know, pivoting and listening to, you know, what the market wants and market demand, because, you know, you might start with one idea and you still got to give it credit because that idea led to the next idea or the next iteration of the idea. So sometimes being open is important because I, I see the opposite happen where entrepreneurs maybe are, you know, too stubborn, let's say. And sometimes they're missing an opportunity because they think their idea was right. And it's rare that your first idea is spot on. It's iterations of that idea that eventually becomes the thing that takes off. You know, I want people to almost imagine the customer journey. So maybe let's just walk through the typical journey.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:11]:

I mean, most restaurateurs that use third party know, but what, what does it look like? And then I love to, you know, paint the picture of then they plug in, Voosh.ai and what it looks like after. So to start things off, you got a restaurant, they're a little quiet. They're like, ah, I want to start using third party delivery, whether it's doordash or Grubhub or whatever, but I want to start using these third party. So they sign up. I'm assuming they go online, they connect. Like, what does that process look like? And then what are the typical pain points they hit when then they come see you? Like, at what point are they like, all right, we need Voosh now.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:09:44]:

Yeah, great question. Right? So I think if I'm, if I'm right, you, the first question was that how, if I'm a brand, how do I go online with these third party platforms? Is that the first question?

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:54]:

Yes. Correct.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:09:55]:

I think that's very, very straightforward. They have productized it and it's not even if you just started your restaurant yesterday, I think within two to three days, you can just go live on these platforms. I think that's not a big of a challenge. And most of the brands we work with, they're already running on these third parties for like past 2345 years. It's not like they're not live on DoorDash ugly. They're already live and going live on these channels because they want, they want supply. They would never, unless you are like, grossly non compliant, they would definitely onboard you. That's not an issue.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:29]:

And so when you mentioned black box, like, what part of it would you say is the black box? So they integrate. They've been using it for two, three years, hopefully extra traffic comes in. But like you said, commissions are high and sometimes it's not profitable. But what areas would you say is the black box from the restaurant's point of view?

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:10:47]:

I think everything is a black box. So that will cover it in detail. So I'll tell you, let's talk a little bit meta. So the way these platforms are inherently designed, they're designed thinking from a customer backward way, what do I mean by that? That they've been designed to cater the primary needs of the end user. By end user, I mean customers were ordering food on these platforms, you and me. So they're not being inherently designed from a supplier perspective. Let me give an example. Platforms like Airbnb, they are inherently designed for hosts.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:11:31]:

Their primary product bandwidth and their primary thought process goes into solving the lives of a host more than the end user who is coming on the platform. But on the flip side, with these food delivery platforms or third parties we are talking about, they have been inherently designed to cater the needs of the end user. So that's one primary reason that they have not thought about solving the needs of the restaurant entrepreneurs which are coming on their platform. That's the first reason. Second reason is for a lot of the features which we solve for, it's not in the best interest of these third parties to open up or to be very, very transparent around a lot of these data points, because that's a source of the, of their revenue in many ways. That's the second reason, whether, you know, as to why a lot of these data points remain a black box or it's very, very difficult to solve for the problems on these third parties. Now, Launa, let me start with what are the kind of problems which come on a day to day basis in the lives of a food service entrepreneur or someone who's managing, let's say, 30, 40, 50 locations of a brand, like, like Papa John's or any, any brand with, let's say, more than 3000 locations that say there's a territory manager managing 200 locations of that brand on the third parties. Typically, this comes under the marketing function, which is very, very weird.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:13:02]:

That marketing function still handles the third parties because idly, because it's, it's, it's an ownership of operations, finance.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:11]:

Yes, very operational.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:13:13]:

This vertically comes under the marketing functions a bit. I'll tell you the reason for that as well. The way they used to operate, pre pandemic, the share of business on third parties used to be five, six, 7%. So it was not like a primary area of focus. But now, for a lot of brands, it has gone north of 25% as well. But still, the ways they allocate bandwidth for this critical chunk of business has remained same. And that's why the efficiency or the profitability of this chunk of business is very poor for most of the brands. Now, let me come back to the areas where it's still a black box, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:52]:

Yeah.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:13:52]:

First and foremost, the overall financial visibility of my business. That's a very big black box. It comes in a very, very pathetic weekly excel sheet where, you know, you need to deploy a lot of finance people to just make sense of that data. And still, even the biggest of the biggest brands, they've almost given up on that. That, okay, we can't make sense of this. Let's just live with whatever they're giving us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:20]:

And Priyam just to jump in because I want to make sure I understand. So I'm assuming like at an individual level, they probably have some decent, let's call it reporting. But you're saying, and I just want to make sure I get this right, the minute you're ten plus locations, they don't really have this, call it maybe group or aggregate refined reporting. So you're getting kind of these xls or CSVs from these third parties that you. That are very hard to make sense of unless you got a full time team.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:14:48]:

And even at that, no, even if you have a single location is equally bad. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:52]:

Okay, so even as, okay, wow. I assume a single location would have at least a dashboard single location.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:14:57]:

And there's one entrepreneur running that location. He or she can spend a lot of time to make sense of it. But once you go beyond five locations, it's a mess.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:05]:

Got.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:15:05]:

It's a mess. It's total mess.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:06]:

Okay.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:15:07]:

Yeah. So, yeah, making sense of the financials, right. By financials, I mean overall, where my money is, what's my digital p and L like? Right? Yeah. Let's say I made, I made, let's say $10,000 from my one location from Doordash in one month, where did my money go? And I'm. And out of this 10,000, I'm only receiving, let's say 3800 or 4000, whatever. Some number, right? Where is my rest, 6000 going? How much money am I spending in ads? What was the money which was promised to me, but a customer complained and I never received that money. It's a big chunk of the lost revenue. How much money they spend in ads? If I spend on ads, what was the performance? How can I improve? So the primary incentive for these platforms is to.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:15:54]:

And which is fair. It's part of their business model is to let the restaurant spend money on their promotions, on their rankings, so that they can get more orders. Right. That's their primary business model, that they charge money from the restaurants to, a, get them visibility on their platform, and b, get them a higher ranking by paying some promotion dollars. Right. But the visibility around that is pathetic. That's one area which remains a black box. The second area, which means a very big black box, is that the disputed orders.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:16:25]:

Right. So what are the orders for which I fulfilled, but a customer complained or there was some issue, and I never received the money for that order. That's called a disputed order, which is. Which varies from two to 5% of their total business. Which is huge, right? Yeah. Which is pretty huge. Right. I mean, for a business where the margins are as thin as ten to 15%, and you are saying that 5% of my money is still stuck.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:16:49]:

That's a. That's a big hit, right. For any restaurant brand. And the process to recoup that money, to get that money back from these platforms is very complex. Very complex.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:00]:

And when you say dispute, typical. Just. Just to paint the picture, typical dispute might be like, ah, they missed an item, or I didn't. I ordered this without this sauce. Or just typical things that a customer will complain and they'll want a refund.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:17:13]:

Exactly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:14]:

And then typically, the third party, assuming the person isn't disputing every single week, they'll pretty much 100% give that refund right away.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:17:24]:

That also depends. That's a separate logic.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:26]:

But, okay.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:17:28]:

They would not give the money to the restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:30]:

That's for sure. Okay.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:17:31]:

So that money is gone for you. Yes. You're not getting that money. Yes, but, no, but, but there is a process. Not like they have not made a process to do that, but it's. It's very complex. It's, again, a black box. And especially if you're running locations, it's messy.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:17:44]:

You need a lot of manual bandwidth there. You need to really deploy people. Not just one person, you need to deploy people to this. That's the second problem. Third problem, which is a black box, is on the review site. So when a customer reviews your food on these platforms, the process to reply to those reviews get a clear visibility on those. What are my primary issues? Right. Visibility around that.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:18:11]:

And b, the process to reply the reviews. It's very tedious, especially when you are. If it's one location, then still it's fine if it's multiple locations, it's very tedious. It's not like the best design solution. That's, again, a big problem. And then there are things around advertising. Your performance on marketing, advertising spends, that is, again, another, another black box. And again, to configure the promotions that the process to configure your ads is also very, very tedious.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:18:44]:

It's very messy. Overall, as I said, coming to my first meta point, that these platforms are inherently designed to cater the needs of the end consumer. Being an end user of doordash who reads Grubhub, its platform is pretty easy to use. It clumsy. Right. But it's not the, it's not the best product. Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:06]:

And by the way, the thing, just to paint the even bigger picture that the, all those pain points, I'm already feeling them. And most restaurants and most of our listeners are restaurateurs, so they'll feel the pain, but they deal with three, all three of them. You know, typically they'll have Uber eats and or Nash and Grubhub. So having all three, it just makes it go, you know, exponential.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:19:26]:

Yeah. Yeah. So these three independently are pain points. And imagine combining all of these three with 100 locations. So it's hundred into three. So it's 300 pain points on a daily basis. Right. It becomes, it becomes a nightmare.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:19:41]:

And without technology, you just can't scale your business. And mind you, and I feel, I strongly believe that the next sort of wave of innovation, the next wave of sort of overall growth in the food service industry will be, if not completely led, but technology will play a major chunk in that. The brands which are going to emerge, the next wave of brands, and I'm already seeing with a few brands we started to work with, because they embrace technology. They know that they are restoratives at heart, but they know that they will have to embrace technology and they'll have to ride the wave of technology to grow. If you just want to be at 510 locations, it's fine. But if you're going to want to scale to 5000 locations someday, it's impossible without automating a lot of stuff, which I talked about. Right, right. That's where we come into the picture.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:20:31]:

That's how. So that's where we come to. We try to solve each and every problem, which we talked about using a lot of AI, using a lot of automation, using a lot of algorithms in our back end for brands to recoup most of this money to get a lot of, to get an amazing performance on their ads, which they are running to automate their ratings and reviews automate a lot of manual tasks because, you know, having a person or two, it's just, I mean, the margins are so thin, you just can't afford to have multiple people for each of the problems which I talked about. Right. Just into all of your thin margins that you're having. Right. That's where we come to the picture and that's the problem which we are solving.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:12]:

I love that. I love that. And so, you know, let's say, let's say there, I like that example you gave, you know, territory manager of, you know, 100 or 200 pizza locations. So you go in, who you talking to? Because, you know, my mind directly goes operations. But now, as you kind of alluded to, it's kind of like under the marketing role. So what does that look like? Who do you go in and like, how fast do they connect with, with your pain? And what is that? I mean, let's start there. So, so who do you connect with? And like, you know, what typical conversation look like.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:21:42]:

Great question. So mostly, as I said, it's either either the marketing function which leads the entire third party business, or in some cases it's the COO as well. Under rules governance, the entire third party is also coming in. So we usually start with these, or of course founders in our network who are running businesses which are having a decent share on third party. So that's where we begin our conversations. The biggest, I mean, I feel the problem which connects with them, which resonates with them the most, is around the disputes, because that's where they feel this three to 5% of their money being blocked and the process to recoup that money is very tedious. So what we have done is we have built an AI which represents you, is on these platforms and gets your money back. So we built our logics, we built our fair, fair logics.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:22:42]:

Wherever you deserve your money back, we're just getting you your money back. That's it, nothing else. So we represent you on these platforms and we try tend to remove any form of a manual intervention and we do a job which is, I mean, which no human could have done, especially at that scale. So we just tend to replace that manual bandwidth and we've automated the entire flow to get that money back. And we have seen a success of more than 80%. So let's say your $10,000 was stuck. We typically get your $8,000 back.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:17]:

I was just going to ask how much you recapture. 80%.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:23:19]:

Yeah. So our success rate, we have machine learning, we have built in a machine learning algorithm viewers understand machine learning is consider like when a child is born, a child learns like a new thing every day. And, you know, when he or she turns 30, 35, he or she becomes a mature individual. Right. So our algorithms also tend to learn because every brand is different, every order is different, we learn each day, and we tend to better our algorithm. And at a steady state, let's say two months down the line, the success rate, some over somewhere north of 80%. So if you are, of course, depends, brand to brand, depends on the practices which they deploy. And I'll cover that.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:24:01]:

How we overall make the restaurants operate in a better way using our product, I'll come to that. But this is the primary product which resonates with most of the brands. The disputes manager, in which we automate the entire dispute management module. You just need to click one thing, set auto dispute on and done.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:21]:

Wow.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:24:21]:

Every single order which is disputed is taken care by us. Absolutely. That's the module which is resonating the most with our user.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:29]:

That's really cool. And for people listening, it sounds like, obviously this is a no brainer for the large, larger groups because it's the problem compounds. But for single location venues, can they benefit? Can they use Voosh.ai as well? Turn on the dispute. Is it. I'd love to know. For those people, is it still pretty affordable, given I don't even know what the cost is? Maybe you can just chat about that. The ROI on a single location.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:24:52]:

Yeah, yeah. So, so, see, pricing, of course, varies. If we work with a five, with a 300 location brand, the pricing is, of course, discounted. If you are a ten location brand, the pricing is pretty much standard. So we have multiple tires and. Yeah, talking about a dispute manager, it's a dollar 75 per location per month, which tends to give, like, just the dispute manager club with a few more services, gives you a four to five X ROI on the spend, which you are doing. So if you are. If you are typically.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:25:24]:

If your 400, $500 are stuck, we tend to give you back around $350 to $450 per location per month back with a spend of $75. So, yeah, so that's. That's the standard operating model with which we have. Of course, we work with multiple bigger brands and we work with a very customized pricing for them. So that's, that pricing is subject to our, you know, our tier and, you know, our scale with work. So that's something which is not very, very stringent, but, yeah, I mean, and we typically work with chains. As I said, we don't shy away from working with single or two or three locations as well. But our sweet spot is 20 to 30 locations and we work with 100, 5200.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:26:12]:

We are in. In pilots with a very, very big chain. Big chain as well, which is thousand plus locations. We are in pilots with 100 plus, 500 plus locations as well. But that's a sweet spot, which I was talking about like a, like a mid market segment where the complexity of business is higher. That's where we add the most value and we believe that we solve for. It's a. It's a product built to cater to enterprises.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:26:35]:

So we can cater someone with 50,000 locations as well. We built for that scale. We're built in an enterprise way. That's a USP. I would say so, yeah. I mean, that's how typically we operate. That's the feature which resonates with everyone because you can just clearly see it's like a cash cow from day one. Right.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:26:52]:

It's a no brainer, just.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:53]:

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Yeah. It's funny. It's what I was gonna ask you. I was gonna ask you why. Why would someone say no? I mean, based on what I'm hearing, it's kind of just like, try it out if. Plug it in, plug and play. See if you get your disputes back.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:07]:

If so, keep it on and keep paying. If not, you can cancel. It sounds kind of like a no brainer.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:27:13]:

Yeah, I mean, so I think most of the people who talk to us, they say yes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:17]:

That's awesome.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:27:18]:

And a few who don't say yes end up losing a lot of money.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:22]:

That's crazy. And I wonder, and you might know or not know, but like, when you look at, let's say, the big, big chains that typically have their own, you know, internal software, like, I don't know, McDonald's or something just to do. They have, obviously they have a lot of their own proprietary software. Do they have something like this for their operations or is this still kind of new territory? Generally speaking, yes and no.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:27:44]:

So let's say. Let's say we talk about overall financial visibility or overall visibility of the business. What they typically do is they have their own business intelligence tools, but the data which is fed into those tools is still manually sort of sucked from these platforms. So still they're not completely automated, like push. So we have like automated everything end to end. They're still using a lot of manual processes, but they have at least solved for the visibility bit of it. I won't say that they have not solved for the visibility bit of it, they have solved for it. But on the other hand, the kind of problems I'm talking about like the ratings and reviews, the disputes, they still deploy, they still solve it completely manually and they still don't use the best technologies available out there.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:28:33]:

The machine learning and AI, which I was talking about, they're still not using those. But they solve for these problems in a much manual fashion. So I won't say that they haven't solved for this, they have solved for it, but 80% to 90% of the stuff is still done manually.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:48]:

Got it.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:28:48]:

Which is costing them a lot. Yeah. So I'm sure someday we'll get the answers.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:54]:

I love that. I love that. And so, and so you know, just to move on from the dispute side, which is super fascinating, like I feel like we should chat. I'd love to have WISK refer this to people because it seems like a no brainer. So, so we'll definitely chat offline and maybe work out some type of, you know, referral where we can help each other out. But really because not, I mean it sounds like a no brainer. And if we, we can help restaurants, like that's, that's our mission at WISK, we help restaurants with a back house. So inventory ordering, invoicing, all that kind of thing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:21]:

Yeah, you know, cogs type of stuff. But this, this sounds like a no brainer. But going from like let's say the disputes you mentioned, you know, some of the operational efficiencies or you mentioned also like reviews, I'd love to maybe touch a bit. Touch on that a little.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:29:34]:

Correct, correct, correct. So we have. So I'll talk about module, right. So one is the sales module which gives you a very clear visibility of. Not just. So I'll tell you how the restaurants typically operate. Right. And talk.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:47]:

Sure.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:29:47]:

Like some of the big brands as well. Right. So they usually have a PoS system. Right. Pos system integrates with an aggregator and they tend to get the data from these third parties. So the only data point which is exposed via an open API is just the sales data. That's it. So if I'm an operator, I'm looking at a report which is coming from any pos which I've installed, sparked by any aggregator, I'll just get access to my sales data, more or less.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:30:16]:

That's it. So the nitty gritties of each order. The nitty gritty is like what was the rating on this order? Right. What are the financials for my 50 locations? Right. What are the primary reasons for my rating going below four star, right. Or what. Why are the. Why is my overall NP's going down, right.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:30:37]:

So all these factors are hidden and they are hidden inside these dashboards somewhere. Hidden. Right. And no one has actually gotten a bad. These operators are so busy. I'm like completely with them. I. Because I talk to them, I stay in touch.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:30:52]:

I know their pains, and it's not an easy, I mean, business to be in, right. I know. I've been in touch with. I know a lot of my friends and families who are running multiple businesses. And, you know, the highest churn is in this business because it's not easy to run a large scale food service, restaurant kitchen business profitably. I have, like, huge respect for these operators and I know what they go through on a day to day basis. Right. There are thousand things breaking each day.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:31:22]:

There are suppliers there. So many things, man.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:24]:

You know it.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:31:25]:

Right. So, I mean, I know that they don't have time to sort of collate this data on a daily basis and try to make sense of it, right? And the open APIs are only for the sales data, which they get access on a. On the POS reports, right? So all the critical information regarding this third party business related to the customer ratings, the financials get lost because it's just hidden inside those independent dashboards. Let's say you're running 100 locations, 100 into three. You can't be logging into 300 login dashboards and trying to manually download an Excel report and combine those hundred excel reports and try to make sense of that data, right. That which restaurant location is having. What issue? What we have done is we've automated this entire piece and we give them this operations analytics. Right, that, okay, for last one week, this location had this issue.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:32:13]:

These were your top performing locations. What were the top complaints from the user? So we scrape all the reviews coming in and we try to make sense using our AI, that these are the top issues at this location. Overall, this recipe is having issue across all your hundred locations. This recipe is fine, but this, these are the culprit. Five locations where you need to intervene and you need to figure out that what are the key issues. So what we want is, overall, broadly, if we talk about the larger picture, we want these disputes to go down with time, right. Because we're trying to make you more and more operationally efficient as well. That's the kind of operational analysis dashboard I was talking about, which we have given them as a part of the dispute managers complimentary, in which we talk about all of these problems in a much more analytical way and we help them become more and more equipped to run their business and we don't want them to do something which is not their forte.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:33:09]:

We want the operators who just focus on making the best quality food, just focus on just managing their manpower in the best possible way and leave the rest to us. Leave the data analytics, the data crunching, the data, pulling the automation aspect to us, that that's what I fundamentally believe.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:28]:

Yeah, I love that. And it makes it in a sense like the parallel give on the WISK side real quick is it's actually one of our kind of mission statement is like to give restauranteurs or time back to focus on the things they love. And it's very similar to what you're doing. It's like sometimes, or not. So I said, a lot of times restaurateurs open up their restaurant or their bar for their love of hospitality or guest experience or the culinary scene or whatever, all these kind of artistic things and passion things. And then it's like they get stuck, and on our side, that analogue, they get stuck on excel, recipe costing, inventory, all this boring but super important stuff because the margins are so thin. So it's like, it's a double edged short because it's like you need to do it. But now all of a sudden you're like, man, I had this vision of what it was going to be to open a restaurant and now I'm like, on Excel doing this, doing that, to your point, handling disputes or reviews, and it's like, it kind of sucks all the fun energy out of it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:24]:

And so I love what you're doing on the dispute side, on the operational side. I know. And I was checking out your website. I know you guys also mentioned sales and profitability. Something about kind of boosting third party sales. I'd love for you to touch on that. How do you help restaurants when it comes to potentially increasing their sales with these third parties?

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:34:43]:

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, very interesting question. So see, I'll just give you a brief background as to how the overall sales works. As a sales is a function of two kind of customers. Right. One are your new customers and the other are your returning customers, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:59]:

Yeah.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:34:59]:

Overall, as a brand, you would want a maximum, the maximum chunk of your business coming from the returning users. That's what you would always want to optimize for because is a very high cost of acquisition for a new user.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:12]:

Correct.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:35:12]:

But having said that, you would want a new user to come in at some frequency, but you would want that user to retain. Right. If it's a leaky bucket and that's the easiest way to shut down your business, that you're just acquiring users by paying the ads fee and you're. So they don't come back user and that user is not sticking. A, you lost all that advertising money and b, your ranking goes down significantly on these platforms. These platforms will penalize you very, very heavily if the users are not giving you right feed. Like a good review. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:49]:

Yeah.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:35:49]:

And if they're not coming back to your restaurant to order again. Right. So it's a double whammy. Right? So, and on the other hand, if you acquired a user, and for once, let's say for whatever CAC, your. I mean, CAC also, there are literally 100 parameters to define the acquisition cost. But let's say you are in San Francisco and you are selling burgers, there's a certain cact to acquire a new user because there are literally thousands of outlets, Bay Area, San Francisco, combined with selling a burger. So how do you stand out? You pay money to these platforms and you rank yourself up and there's an ad which will pop up and a customer would come and buy from your location. So that's the customer acquisition cost.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:36:29]:

But if your service is really good, if you know that I needed to fix burger at this particular location and you actually fixed it, then the customer would actually retain that customer ordering so that the lifetime value of that customer will go up and your ranking will also go up, the platform will reward you that. Okay, now this customer ordered again and he or she is saying good stuff about it. Let's rank this brand up. When someone search searches for a burger in their location, right? That's one way. So overall, it's completely linked. So one way is how do you optimize for your ads performance? How do you get that cat down? How do you acquire a new user for a lesser money? That's the first way to increase your sales via the new customers. The second way to increase your sales is via a good retention of the new users which came in. So it's a mix of both of these.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:37:20]:

So with our ads and marketing module, we tend to give you a very high ROI on the ad spend which you have done. And secondly, with our operations module, we tend to give you a high retention on the customers which are coming on your platform. And these are two primary ways to overall grow your sales. That's how we tend to holistically help the brands grow their sales using the Bush platform. That's a very very 50,000 view, which I've shown a lot, goes behind the scenes. There are 100 plus parameters which decide for both of these. And a lot of data crunching goes in the background to help these brands, you know, particularly analyze the business.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:04]:

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's good that you're giving that 50,000 foot view because I think this way the restauranters listening can kind of understand high level the main problems it's solving. I think it'll resonate with them and I think it's one of those things. And just to kind of do a quick plug for you guys, like, you know, people might be listening to this. It sounds like a no brainer. What's the best way they can maybe reach out, do a demo or just learn more? Where do you want to point them to?

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:38:29]:

Yeah, just. Just visit and you can just sign up for our demo. We'll typically set you up with a demo within less than one day. This is your visibility, this is your availability, and you can block our time on the calendar, on the website. So that's the best way to reach out to us. Since I'm on your podcast, I'll give my email address as well. P R I Y A M Priyam. At the rate.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:38:58]:

V o s h I n. Any viewer. If you are a restaurant owner, feel free to just shoot me an email and I'll be happy to personally connect you with the right folks and get you on board.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:08]:

That's amazing. That's amazing. And so kind of shifting gears, you know, obviously you mentioned y combinator, you know, prominent, you know, accelerator and venture capital fund. So what would you say is next for Voosh.ai? It sounds like you're doing some cutting edge stuff. You're tackling some pretty big groups, I guess. Where do you envision Voosh.ai going when it comes to growth and expansion in the next? Call it 1218 months.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:39:37]:

Firstly, how we think is that the primary goal for us is just to give the best product and best customer support to all of our existing users and the new users which are coming in. It's a huge. As industry goes to a million locations in the US, almost half of it is coming via the chain setups and half of this. So almost like a $500 billion is coming from the chain setup and $500 billion is coming from a little lesser, the 400 5450. Close to a $900 billion food service industry in the US. Half of it is coming from the chain setups, half of it is coming from the independent setups. So overall, the market is humongous. We would want to focus, although we get a lot of leads from international markets like UK as well, like Southeast Asia as well.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:40:20]:

But we are primarily focusing on the US market, although the product is inherently built to be global from day one. But we are only focusing on the US market from, as of now. So in the next, I would say one year or so, we would be focusing primarily on the upper mid market and a few enterprise customers as well. That's, that's what we are, we are focusing in. As I said, our system is designed to handle even 20,000, 30,000 location brand as well. So that's not an issue for us to onboard. But yeah, so our primary focus will be upper mid market brands in the next, I would say nine to twelve months. Sweet spot would be like 52.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:41:07]:

5300 locations is a typical sweet spot. But we have, as I said, we have brands with three, four, five locations as well and we are, we have just started to work with some thousand plus location brands as well. So it's a, it's a wide range and since we are a piece of technology, we are a piece of code for us. We are very much flexible in the kind of brands we want to onboard. But yeah, in the next twelve months we want to focus on the US market, upper mid market brands and yeah, the more the merrier.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:37]:

That's awesome. And then for you, like, are you able to give our listeners a glimpse into maybe any upcoming features? You know, it sounds like you're doing quite a bit. Is there anything new on the product roadmap that you could share if it's.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:41:49]:

Yeah, yeah, I'm super excited to share. So, so yeah, viewers, we have already launched this week two crazy features which everyone was almost demanding. One is we have integrated easy cater. So now easy cater is also part of our bush offering. So we have integrated your easy, but it's getting very difficult to manage the catering business via a standalone dashboard. So we have integrated all the features of easy cater in the boost dashboard itself. So now you can basically seamlessly manage your entire easy cater business via the push dashboard itself. That's the first thing.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:42:25]:

Secondly, Doordash Drive. So we saw for some of our big brands working with us, DoorDash Drive was a big chunk of their business, which is a self ordering platform powered by DoorDash. So we have integrated the disputes for DoorDash Drive also in our module, so it's completely automated, driven by AI. So Doordash Drive is also now live on the whoosh dashboard. Thirdly and most importantly, the marketing dashboard is also live and we are. So I'll split into two pieces. One part of the marketing dashboard is overall analytics of your advertising spends on these third parties. So we give you a very nice visibility on the performance of your new user acquisitions on these platforms and gives you a very nice visibility on where your money went and what is the overall performance of those ads.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:43:20]:

That's the first part, but the second feature, which was highly requested and, you know, we took some time to build it, which is just gonna go live in next two weeks or so, is the configurations bit on for advertising. As I was saying, that, let's say if you have 100 locations running on three platforms, you have to go through a nightmare of logging into 300 entities and running and configuring your promotions, which is a mess, right? I mean, this is 21st century. Come on. Why would I want to do that? Right? So we have built an automation in which, via the whoosh dashboard, you can configure all your promotions without actually logging into those 300 entities. So we have just made it very, very easy. Within, I would say, 15 minutes, you can configure all your ads via the whoosh dashboard, even if you are running 200 locations. So it just made it that easy. That's.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:44:15]:

That's one feature which I'm personally very, very excited about.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:17]:

Yeah, that, that is exciting.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:44:19]:

Yeah. So these, I guess.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:21]:

Yeah, that's awesome. And I guess just to maybe, you know, wrap things up, I'd love to maybe end off on a note where, you know, any advice for restauranters, or you could even go as general, just entrepreneurs in general. But any advice that maybe, you know, restaurateurs, you're dealing with this space, you're solving a lot of their problems. Like, to them, to the restauranteurs listing, anything you would say, you know, I'm sure you see similar mistakes often made. So really, just to wrap up, any advice that you want to share is more than welcome.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:44:51]:

Yeah, okay. Sure. So since I'm not, as I said that I am not a restorative. So I would not talk about, although I would want to talk about. I would not talk about the core business of, you know, of hospitality or overall food service. I can only talk about implementation of technology. So my piece of advice, which I see, I've seen slight hesitance, right. In a lot of food entrepreneurs because.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:45:14]:

And I completely understand, because they are coming from a pit of. They're coming from the hospitality backgrounds. Right. And they have. They don't have a lot of exposure to technology. And same for me, I don't have a lot of exposure in their industry. So I see a lot of hesitance in implementing a lot of new age technologies, especially AI. They have some concerns.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:45:34]:

So my piece of advice, my humble piece of advice would be that you, that because this is going to be the future, right. We can't deny, I mean, we, we can't live in denial that, that AI is going to be a significant part of our lives and future. I strongly believe so.

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Angelo Esposito [00:45:50]:

Yeah.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:45:51]:

Right. Maybe because I'm spending a lot of time in San Francisco. I don't know. But. But anyway, I'm just saying that, that you should embrace new forms of technology, try to adopt to newest trends in technology, and try to just. Just use them to. Just use them for your. For your business, use them to automate a lot of things, use them to just make sure your profitability goes up with each day.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:46:16]:

But that's the only way to survive. It's a brutal business. It's a brutal, the competition is brutal, and everyone is trying to extract money. So you just have to take care of yourself, take care of your profits. And technology, and especially AI, is, is the primary, primary enabler for that. So please embrace that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:35]:

That's great advice. And, like, just to tack on my two cent there, by the way. Very well said. I often tell people it's don't, don't fear the technology. Look at how it can help you.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:46:46]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:46]:

It's that you don't want to be. That you don't want to be blockbuster.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:46:48]:

Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:49]:

You don't want to be the. You know when Netflix. What? Netflix. It's a blockbuster. You know, that's, that's a classic example. But, you know, there's obviously that on a micro scale as well, that a lot of little things that happen. And what I tell people is. Or the advice sometimes I like to give to restaurateurs to add on to yours is like, think about the main problem you're solving.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:07]:

Because the flip side is sometimes I find that hospitality will get overwhelmed because tech for this and that and third party and loyalty and this and Pos, and they're getting hammered. But sometimes just take a step back and focus on, wait, what problems am I trying to solve in my business? And if they take a step back and, you know, third party is a black box and disputes is a black, like, then it's like, okay, is this solving my problem? Is this a no brainer? Cool. Okay. On our end, it's like, my cogs are out of control, my food cost is up. I have no all right. Does WISK or something like it, it doesn't have to be solve that problem. And I think that's a key point to sometimes think about is really define what's the problem trying to solve and then evaluate the tech and then make a decision. But sometimes I find people get bombarded and they get kind of almost tired from so many different pitches, and then they're missing out.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:54]:

The flip side of that is they're missing out on actual good tech that will help their business because they sat in to ten other demos that didn't really have anything to do with their core problems.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:48:03]:

No, I absolutely second that, Angelo, because there has been, there are, I think I was reading somewhere that there are, I think, some 5000 plus restaurant tech companies which have emerged in past three to five years. Yeah. So I mean, it's a lot of noise out there. I agree. And a lot of these folks are just selling air, selling thin air, which is a bit unfortunate. And that's where a lot of good ones also had to bear the brand. So I completely agree with what you were saying, but yeah, I love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:48:32]:

Well, look, Priyam, it's been amazing having you here once again, co-founder and CEO of Voosh.ai. That's V-O-O-S-H-A-I for restaurant owners listening, it sounds like a no brainer, but check it out for yourself. Do your due diligence, have a demo, and if it makes sense, try it out. So, Priyam, thank you for being here, sharing your knowledge. I appreciate your time and joining us on the Wisking It All podcast.

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Priyam Saraswat  [00:48:57]:

Thank you so much, Angelo, for having me. It was, I had a lovely time. I had a blast. And yeah, I hope you keep doing this great work and I'm super excited for our days ahead.

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Angelo Esposito [00:49:08]:

Amazing. Feel free to check out WISK.ai for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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