Zach Goldstein [00:00:00]:

They realized they could do something similar to what I just talked about. They invited some of their local VIP's to be the focus group. They didn't pay them. They gave them access and free food. And now they stopped paying the focus group, and they turned vip's into social media influencers who were all previewing the upcoming seasonal menu to their friends. That's what a loyalty program should do.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:26]:

Welcome to WISKing It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, 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're here today with the founder and CEO of Thanx, Zach Goldstein. Zach, Thanx for joining me.

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Zach Goldstein [00:00:54]:

Absolutely. Pleasure to be here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:56]:

I'm excited to talk. I mean, I hear nothing but good things about Thanx and, you know, the loyalty program and it's also CRM. I know there's a lot going on and can't wait for you to share it. I always like to maybe start with a quick one liner of what is Thanx for maybe our listeners who don't know.

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Zach Goldstein [00:01:10]:

Yeah, Thanx is a complete guest engagement platform for restaurants with a goal of driving customer lifetime value.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:17]:

Love it. And one thing that always comes to mind is I love hearing about how people got to where they are today. I find hospitality industry super interesting, and you meet really, really cool people. But I always like to learn what kind of path got you here. So what, what led you to Thanx? Like, what was the pain point or the things you were doing? I mean, I know your history I saw on LinkedIn, but what were you doing that made you want to solve this problem?

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Zach Goldstein [00:01:41]:

Yeah, I'll go way back, actually, because I know you tend to dive into these stories on your podcast.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:48]:

Yes, I love them.

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Zach Goldstein [00:01:49]:

My first job out of college was at Bain and company. I worked in a number of industries for years in semiconductors and advertising, and ultimately I switched from those to working at a restaurant. And there was a restaurant doing a turnaround. They had been bought by a private equity company. They'd been levered up with debt. They'd opened a bunch of locations, and things weren't going well, so they didn't really have the money to pay us. And as a result, we had a small SWAT team, and my boss was mapped to the CEO, and I was mapped to every other executive in the company. And so I really got this understanding of the challenge of day to day operations at a restaurant we were working on changing the menu.

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Zach Goldstein [00:02:39]:

We were working on procurement, we were working on marketing, we were working on in store operations and make times kitchen efficiency. We were trying to do everything to keep this business afloat, and we did. It still exists today and is doing quite well. That was exhilarating for me. It was a really complex business challenge. But one of the things that stood out to me, that stuck with me many years later when I started. Thanx. Was just how little data the business was operating with when it came to customers.

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Zach Goldstein [00:03:10]:

Lots of data on exactly how many cents every item cost in the, in the kitchen. And, and we could come up with an item specific margin and we knew exactly how many ounces needed to go of protein needed to go on this item. And we were deeply lacking in data about understanding. Okay. But of the people that bought those things today, how many of them came back? And that ultimately became a problem that led to the creation of things.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:36]:

I love that. Yeah, I don't want to misquote, but there's some like super high statistic. You probably know it, but like what? I think it's like some. And correct me, but something like 70% of customers don't come back after the first time. Am I somewhat right? I know it's a high number.

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Zach Goldstein [00:03:50]:

It's pretty close.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:50]:

Yeah.

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Zach Goldstein [00:03:51]:

So the 80 20 rule is pretty consistent across most industries, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of guests. And in restaurants, our data suggests it's about 25, 75. And so 75% of revenues come from 25% of guests. If you do the math on that, you end up finding that a three time visiting guest ends up having a lifetime value of ten to twelve times more one time visiting guests. So you'd think, oh, they come three times, they must be worth three times more. They're ten to twelve times more. Because getting that third visit is so difficult in the restaurant industry.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:25]:

Super interesting. And so what are some tactics that you've seen that or maybe you guys implemented at Thanx to kind of drive that third visit. Right. If that's such a pivotal moment, what do you guys do?

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Zach Goldstein [00:04:36]:

There was a period in the restaurant industry where loyalty was a bad word and it was associated with discounts, and that was what I consider loyalty 1.0. That was what brands were doing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:46]:

The coffee loyalty. The ten coffee stamps of subway did it too, when they first came out. Right. They had the stamps. I vaguely remember, but, yeah, sorry, go on.

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Zach Goldstein [00:04:56]:

You're exactly right. So punch cards are a thing that were associated with discounts. And to me it deserved that reputation because rote discounts that you give out to all your customers do not equate to loyalty. The first element of loyalty is you got to have a good enough product. And so the in store experience and the actual product are important. The second piece is around convenience. And that's one of the things that's changed in the last couple of years. It's not just about where your stores are and are you delivering good service, but the actual digital experience of engaging with your brand has to be easy because digital ordering is no longer nice to have, it's must have.

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Zach Goldstein [00:05:39]:

And then the last piece, which is the part that we deal with is how do you communicate with your guests and give them a reason to come back to you? And the way we measure our success across all of those is, are we talking to enough of your guests? Are enough of your guests known versus unknown? Then the second is, are you activating those guests? How are you getting to a third purchase then? The third is are you retaining those active guests? What percentage of those active guests remain active six months later? And then the last is and what's the discount costing you to drive this behavior? Because if you're doing all of that at a super high discount rate, it may not be worth it. It. If you break down a loyalty program and your marketing into those things, you get a really good sense for where do I need to drive impact to ultimately result in lifetime value?

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:33]:

Super interesting. And so when you first started. Thanx. I'm just curious what the MVP look like, right? Because it's hard to maybe test a little light version of a loyalty program. So I'm curious to know maybe that founder journey, what did that look like?

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Zach Goldstein [00:06:47]:

Yeah, we set out to build things with two principles. They're two principles we've completely moved away from at a micro level, but the philosophies are the same. So principle number one, we want to solve this for the smallest of the small business because we know that they are the mom and pop is hard pressed to do sophisticated data driven marketing. We need to make it easy to do data driven marketing. So that was the first thing is we looked at the tools out there. They said, these are too complex, these are too difficult to use, they're not going to work for the small business. And the second is we looked at the landscape of point of sale and said, this is a heavily fragmented landscape. No one likes their point of sale.

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Zach Goldstein [00:07:33]:

It's a mess. But you got to be able to capture data. And so we said, well, can we set out to not be dependent on any one or small number of point of sale. Can we be truly point of sale agnostic? We solved the first by building really easy to use automations and marketing tools that stand out amongst our competitors as frankly marketing tools you can use without any training in marketing. We solve the second by building a proprietary piece of technology that tracks loyalty purchases through the payment card. So it's not point of sale dependent. We get better data capture with it. But we also broke the need to go integrate with 40 different legacy point of sales.

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Zach Goldstein [00:08:13]:

Fast forward to where we are today. The philosophies are the same. We want our marketing tools to be super easy to use and we want to not be dependent on getting data from the point of sale. But we now work with much larger brands and we tend, now that we've built out a broader stack, we tend to disproportionately focus on mid market and enterprise brands. I hope to return to the mom and pop SMB in the future. And second, we have integrations with tens of point of sale. So despite that vision, we have now integrated with many of the point of sales to deliver better and better functionality.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:49]:

Got it. I love that. That payment approach makes sense. Yeah, we're on the back office side, so inventory and all that good stuff. And for us that was super important because one of the things you need is your menu items and your cost of goods sold. And to get that, that was. Now it's not as bad because a lot of these poss have APIs, but when we started, some of these poses were a nightmare to deal with. Now things have evolved.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:11]:

It's not too bad to integrate with some of these newer guys. That's super cool to hear. And so what excites you most about like the, you know, what's next for Thanx. It sounds like, you know, you went from, you had this vision on simplicity, on really helping these restaurant operators get that guest come back, you know, more than two times and then, you know, create loyalty, what does it evolve to? Obviously I know you went more upmarket so we could talk a bit about that and mid market and enterprise and what is the tech stack look today and where are you guys heading? What would you like to see next? I guess is my question.

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Zach Goldstein [00:09:44]:

Yeah. So when I say guest engagement at the top of the show, we think of that as four elements of what we do. The first is your loyalty program. We build best-in-class loyalty programs that are not discount-dependent and that are driven by status, exclusivity, and really more dynamic, more option, more choice for the customer than the traditional loyalty program. The second is A loyalty program is only as good as the data you capture. And so, capture that data and turn it into really robust marketing automation across channels to send the right message to the right guest, at the right time, in order to drive them back. One of those channels that we think is underutilized by loyalty programs is the actual digital ordering experience. And so if you have a lot of data about customers, the actual ordering experience should be different for every customer based on what they've ordered previously, based on what rewards that are eligible for.

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Zach Goldstein [00:10:39]:

And so we've become best in class at building user experiences, app and web ordering experiences that sit atop the brand's first party ordering platform and really become an extension of the loyalty program to personalize that experience. And then the last piece is that the data is owned by our customers. And our customers increasingly want that data routed to all kinds of different places. So we've built a modern data platform to visualize the data and easily route it to other systems. We consider that core to our platform super interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:13]:

And so let me ask you this, just to maybe paint the picture for our listeners who are, you know, like I said, first of all, mid market enterprise. So just to get a sense, do you look at number of locations, do you look at, you know, primarily QSR and fast cat just to get, just to paint a picture of, like, people listing who would be a good fit for Thanx. And then I'd love to go through maybe like the customer experience, but let's start with the fit. So who would be a good customer for Thanx?

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Zach Goldstein [00:11:36]:

The mid market in restaurants is the thick middle of the restaurant industry. We kind of serve five to 2000 locations today. And that number on the high end is moving up, up, up. We're not currently focused on one, two location businesses that plan to stay there. A big tech stack for those businesses. And there are other kind of even lighter weight solutions for them. And we're not focused on, you know, the top 1015 national international QSR chains right now. That's, that's kind of not currently in our target customer, but everyone else in the middle that's running a restaurant from quick serve all the way to kind of polished casual dining and, you know, probably not quite fine dining.

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Zach Goldstein [00:12:26]:

Everyone else there is a target customer for Thanx and someone that we're driving a lot of value.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:31]:

Okay. And so let's walk through the customer journey, right? So for people listening in or maybe watching this online, they're interested. They got 15 locations. Let's take Angelo's Panini shop. I got a panini shop. I got 15 locations. What does the experience look like? I sign up to. Thanx.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:47]:

What? You know, walk us through the journey just to kind of paint the picture.

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Zach Goldstein [00:12:51]:

Yeah. So the journey depends on where a brand is. But generally a restaurant will come to us with one of two problems. The first is someone who's playing catch up. That brand is making an investment in sophisticated first party digital ordering platform for the first time. Whether that is app, web, kiosk, maybe all of the above. And perhaps they're even launching their first loyalty program for the first time. They have been reliant on third parties.

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Zach Goldstein [00:13:21]:

They have done email marketing, but they haven't really had a first party digital experience and they haven't really had a loyalty program to drive people to that first experience. We launch that brand often in under 75 days. That brand gets access to some best in class digital ordering experiences. An app that's custom to them. We integrate with leading kiosk providers and so we can really help them upgrade their, their digital ordering experience so that it is competitive with the third parties. A loyalty program that's on brand. So come up with the right way to build a currency for that brand. You know, how do you earn points for making purchases? What are those points worth? Not just one single five dollar off thing, but a wide range, what we call the rewards marketplace, and then the ongoing automations.

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Zach Goldstein [00:14:10]:

Which brands can a b test on? How do you drive a repeat purchase after a first purchase? Or how do you reactivate a lapsed customer? How do you run a promotion? Or you test a discount and a non discount and you can see what kind of revenue impact it has so that you can be very selective when you apply discounts, not just universally giving out discounts, challenges around bonus points and multipliers so that you can deliver the right incentives. So often a brand says, you know, I'm slower during the week or I'm slower on the weekend, but I don't want to just tell my email list that I'm giving out a discount. I'd rather, you know, say, hey, come three Saturdays in a row and we'll give you bonus points. That's what we call that a challenge. And that's something that you can run on things and so ultimately you can become more and more sophisticated in driving your business outcomes. The other scenario is a brand that has been doing some of those things and they're not working. So we see brands that come to us with legacy loyalty programs and they just have a sense something's not working, but they don't know what? When we look at the data, we find that it's almost always in those buckets that I mentioned and sometimes multiple. They've invested a lot of money in their loyalty program.

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Zach Goldstein [00:15:24]:

They're given out a lot in discounts, and yet it only represents 5% of their revenue. You know, that's not worth your time if your loyalty program is some dinky little thing. And so that's about too much friction in your existing loyalty program or you're getting people into the program. But still, despite the fact that you have a loyalty program and that you're doing marketing, you have very few people converting to second and third purchases. That means you're underutilizing your, your current platform, which is often because it's too difficult to use. And then the third bucket that we see when we analyze these programs is actually our performance is okay. But wow, we had no clue that we were given 17% of top line away in discounts to drive that performance. And that's obviously a problem.

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Zach Goldstein [00:16:13]:

Most restaurants don't have the margin to be given that kind of money away.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:16]:

100%. Yeah, that's crazy. And so I imagine, obviously you have a ton of examples, and I know you have case studies on your website, but anyheendez call outs that you want to highlight in terms of like, a client win, that comes to mind. Like, you know, they implemented banks and the kind of a. Before and after?

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Zach Goldstein [00:16:33]:

Yeah, I mean, I can give you some, some examples of folks that are, that are interesting to me. Velvet taco is an edgy, fast casual brand growing nicely across the country. Set out to build a loyalty program that was not discount oriented and really leaned into the exclusivity of their brand. They've done some exciting stuff around with Thanx. Exclusive functionality around hidden menu access. So how do you gain access to an LTO that is early, before the rest of the population, and can you, do you want to redeem points for access to an LTO as opposed to a discount? Turns out people like exclusivity just as much, or in sometimes more than discounts. Velvet Taco did a cool thing with their VIPs, where they brought a number of their highest spending guests in the loyalty program to Dallas to do an exclusive event and meet the executive team and hang out with the chef, do some creations. That to me, is part of the future of loyalty.

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Zach Goldstein [00:17:38]:

This idea of really deeply recognizing your most valuable guests, not just treating them all the same and calling it a loyalty program. So, yeah, that's been a cool story. And they've seen massive success on all of those metrics.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:51]:

It's funny because two things. One is, yeah, the idea of community, like, we're seeing that with, you know, online communities in person and real life stuff, but like, coming to the restaurant world, it's. It's super interesting. Like flying people down, like you said, to Texas, and doing that live event is super interesting. I never thought of, but I can imagine, especially with, you know, people posting a lot on social media, the idea of having an exclusive menu item, I would imagine is somewhat linked to that feeling of them being able to post. And it's like, I haven't seen that on the menu, but like, you know, almost that status thing, which, yeah, I could definitely see how a status thing is worth more to most people than a small discount.

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Zach Goldstein [00:18:30]:

So there are examples of it at some of the big brands. Chipotle's done guac mode, kind of in this vein. Taco Bell has launched some of their ltos with early access to loyalty members. So you can only get them if you have a certain status. And so these are good examples. The part that people don't really often believe, but we've shown it in our data, is if you give someone the opportunity to redeem 100 points for early access to an LTO versus $5 off, sure, some people are still going to redeem $5 off, but a remarkable number of them would redeem for access to the secret menu. And when you think about that, you think, wait a minute, if the goal is to drive repeat purchasing and drive discounting down, that checks both boxes at the same time. We actually worked with a casual dining brand that did something similar.

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Zach Goldstein [00:19:22]:

They had a seasonal menu that they launched every quarter. Not their whole menu, but a portion of it that is a seasonal menu. And they hired a focus group and they were paying for a focus group to test those menu items. They realized they could do something similar to what I just talked about. They invited some of their local vip's to be the focus group. They didn't pay them. They gave them access and free food. And now they stopped paying the focus group and they turned VIP's into social media influencers who were all previewing the upcoming seasonal menu to their friends.

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Zach Goldstein [00:19:56]:

That's what a loyalty program should do.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:59]:

Awesome. That's smart. And so obviously, I know you guys do loyalty, do it really well. You also touched on the CRM aspect, so maybe just to jump a little bit on that side. What does that look like? So we spoke about signing up and then creating these things and ramp up time. Once a restaurant's set up and hopefully they're getting some of these results. What does the CRM now do? How do you guys leverage that side of the business?

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Zach Goldstein [00:20:22]:

Yeah. The historical concept of CRM for restaurants has just been an email list, effectively. And that's not a CRM, right, that's a newsletter. And so we've worked with brands that have tens of millions of people in their email list. And so it's a big list. But is it directly driving behavior yet? Well, yeah, when you send out a discount to 10 million people, you're going to see traffic go up, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're building sustainable lifetime value. A CRM understands who all your guests are and gives you the ability to segment and talk to them personally. And so when we think about the future of loyalty, it starts with understanding guests as individuals, and we call that loyalty 3.0.

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Zach Goldstein [00:21:09]:

And so I mentioned a dynamic that we think is pretty exciting, which is the challenge is dynamic. You and I may have very different visit frequencies at the same restaurant. Right. Someone may be a five times a week weekday lunch buyer, but never comes in for weekend dinner or brunch. Someone else might be a regular Friday buyer, but only one Friday a month. And that's kind of all you'll ever think of them. The first one sounds more like someone who gets their healthy food for at work. The second one sounds like your pizza family buyer as an example.

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Zach Goldstein [00:21:53]:

Those People need completely different marketing in order to change their behavior. And it turns out that if you can talk to them personally, you can drive that behavior. If you can get someone to try you at a different day part and then they like it, you might have just doubled your frequency from that customer. If you can get someone to think of you not as a monthly habit, but as a bimonthly habit, you have doubled their frequency. And so to say that a person that comes in one Friday a month come in three times next month, and we're going to give you an incentive. You flip the dynamic of a traditional marketing program, which is we're going to give you $15 if you come in next week, and then we're going to hope you come back again after that. Let's flip it. Come in three times in July, then we'll give you the $15, which likely then drives your behavior into August to keep that consistency going.

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Zach Goldstein [00:22:53]:

That's a smarter approach to marketing. That's just been too difficult for lean marketing teams to execute. And you can do that on Thanx with a couple clicks. And that's really where we see our bread and butter.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:05]:

That's awesome. Yeah, I know. You said it best. Hope is not a great strategy. Right? So like, I like that idea of flipping it and thinking of it differently that, so if you were, if you were to come up with, you know, you're talking about kind of loyalty 3.0. So if you were to come up with a game changing feature that maybe is not totally possible today, like, we're seeing things are moving fast with all this AI stuff. Not to just use buzzwords, but chat, GPD and all these other models, things are moving fast. What would be a feature benefit you would love to maybe see in this kind of evolution of the loyalty world?

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Zach Goldstein [00:23:35]:

So we're working on a couple things that are not ready in this space, and some of AI is indeed just buzz, and that's what's making this difficult. But there's a couple things on the back end that we think are ready. When a lot of people talk about how do you take a great marketer and make them more efficient, they often think about some of the stuff that I think is just AI buzz. Like, how do you click a button and it writes your email copy for you? The reality is, I don't see that replacing good marketers, because if that were the case, everyone's email copy is going to end up looking exactly the same and consumers are going to tune it out. And so that's not the exciting application of AI. We saw toast announce that as part of their marketing suite. To me, you know, maybe that saves you time if you're a one person show, but if you're a sophisticated marketer, you're not going to use that. Where we see differentiation from the best marketers to the average marketer is they have intuition around what segments of customers are unique and deserve special attention and machine learning.

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Zach Goldstein [00:24:39]:

And some versions of AI can help. Look at a sea of CRM data and say, hey, look at this cluster of people. They seem to have some unusual behavior, you know, relative to your average guest. Their average purchase time is during an over, otherwise slow window. So this might be your late night buyers as example. You should talk to them differently. The idea of finding insightful segments is really a good application of machine learning and something that I think is coming soon. The other is asking questions.

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Zach Goldstein [00:25:17]:

So, querying your data using natural language, I call this the CEO hallway problem. Everyone's had this problem. If they happen to walk past their CEO in the hallway or the elevator, and she says, hey, I was just thinking about blah, blah, blah, could you send me some data on that and your day is ruined. And I do this. Your days ruined a or week. Exactly. Spending your time crunching data. To answer this one question that the CEO asked, we're approaching a world where that actually can be solved through AI, and data connections can be made through a simple natural language query.

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Zach Goldstein [00:26:00]:

And I think that's really going to help restaurants get smarter about using their data because it will lower the barrier to pulling insights out of the data.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:08]:

Super interesting. I love that. And, you know, one topic that I see come up is obviously the, the whole idea of, like, you know, I guess maybe some line between, you know, personalization and just having a better experience and then just like, feeling, you know, like maybe the company knows too much about you and it feels maybe a little, you know, creepy. How do you guys maybe draw that line between obviously helping the restaurant and ultimately helping the guests too? Because the guest doesn't get a generic discount, but gets something they actually care about, but also maybe not going, you know, too much over the line, you know, and I guess the precursor to that is do you think there is a line or, or do you think, like, personalize as much as you can at all costs?

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Zach Goldstein [00:26:46]:

I think there is a line. In other industries, we've seen movement towards piecing together data that is gathered about guests from third parties, third party attribution, third party data appending, and you end up building really detailed understanding of demographic data and what's often called psychographic data, etcetera. And you can see why that matters if you're target and you sell 50,000 different items.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:16]:

Right?

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Zach Goldstein [00:27:17]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:18]:

Yeah.

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Zach Goldstein [00:27:18]:

Like you can kind of get a sense for why that matters. But done wrong, it really approaches creepy. The nice part about working in the restaurant industry is that our guests tell us to directly with their purchasing who they are and what matters to them. You don't actually get a lot of predictive value from knowing man, woman, Gen, Z, millennial. It doesn't generally tell you what someone's going to buy. What tells you what they're going to buy is what have they bought previously? And is it always the same thing? Is it different every time? Do they go to one location? Do they visit four of your locations? Do they come during the day? Do they come at night? All of their previous purchasing behavior is actually highly predictive of their future behavior. And as a result, if you're using that to personalize, it's very clear to the guest where that information is coming from. It's coming from the loyalty program.

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Zach Goldstein [00:28:17]:

Therefore the guest understands it and actually values it. I think where guests become a little concerned is where you know something about them that they didn't tell you as a brand and you got it from some other source about them that starts blurring the line. And I don't see a lot of value of doing that for restaurants. And so luckily, I don't think there is a risk of restaurant loyalty programs moving in that direction.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:41]:

Interesting. No, well said. Well said. That makes a ton of sense. And I guess, you know, when I think about the space in general, I always like to give advice to. We have a lot of restaurateurs listening, and so, you know, kind of walk them through the product and challenges that you guys are solving and how you're helping to these restaurant groups of five to 2000 locations. One of the things that I have empathy for in terms of the restaurant space is they're bombarded with tech solutions. WISK being one of them.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:08]:

We're in the back of house side, but we're one of them. What advice would you give to these restaurateurs when it's like they might fit into one of the two buckets you mentioned, and maybe they either think they need a loyalty program or they're in that other bucket where they're not happy with theirs. What advice do you give them when, like looking at solutions out there?

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Zach Goldstein [00:29:27]:

I would give restaurants the same advice I challenge our team with. When we're buying software. We buy a lot of software. We're a software company, but we buy a lot of software ourselves. And so we think of the same thing. And I understand restaurants saying they're bombarded because my inbox every single morning is 15 salespeople trying to sell me the newest thing. And I don't know what to do with it either. So I get it.

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Zach Goldstein [00:29:50]:

I have a lot of respect for the grind of salespeople, and frankly, sometimes those messages break through. The feedback for restaurants is the same thing I would challenge our executive team with, though. What are your business goals that you're seeking to solve? And what have you seen from that vendor that gives you confidence that you will achieve those goals? Far too often in the restaurant space, we end up seeing what they call an RFp, but that is actually a feature checklist. I think it is a disaster of a way to buy software. We end up replying with, here's our list of checkboxes. Right. And what they're not successfully doing is understanding, will I be equipped to drive my business goals forward? Many of the lines on that feature checklist are largely inconsequential for driving results. And many of the things that are not on the feature checklist are actually the mission critical things that need to be evaluated across those vendors.

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Zach Goldstein [00:30:51]:

I mentioned data portability, right? How does it actually work to pull data out of our system and go into a bi tool? Is it possible? Or do I have to wait for my loyalty partner to write custom code to export the data? That's mission critical when you have the. I really need to answer a question for the board meeting that's often not addressed on an RFP, for instance, and then they're in pain. Or what happens when Apple updates their operating system? Do I have to pay you for that upgrade or does my vendor do it automatically? And so one of the questions that's often missed is not just the upfront cost, because brands will often try to compete on the lowest upfront cost, but how can I think about commitments on the total cost of ownership over the next couple of years and maintenance costs? And so all that's to say if you understood your business goals. My business goals is I want to maximize capture into my loyalty program. I want to maximize activation to third purchase, and I want to maintain my, I want tools to maintain my discount rate within a reasonable range. I want confidence that what I see on the contract is all I'm going to need to pay, not just for the duration of the contract, but in the second and third renewal of the contract. Right now we're starting to get to business goals. And those are good reasons to make decisions, not feature checklists.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:17]:

I love that. No, well said. It's funny because the feature checklist, we see it a lot, and it's one of the things, just on our side, we've been getting better at, but we struggle with, because it's like, and I always tell people, as an example, every POS system has inventory, but there's a reason they integrate with WISK or other competitors. Sometimes clients are like, no, but my Pos has inventory. I'm like, okay, we'll talk in two months. Once you try it and realize, you know, and it's this idea that on paper, everything sounds the same. And it's so it makes, but it, to your point, it pushes the, I think, creativity and like, how do you stand out from the marketing perspective as well, right? Like, how do you try to stand out in a world where on paper, you know, every solution might sound similar to a restaurateur, but you really got to stand out. So I love, I love what you guys are doing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:03]:

And I guess, you know, everything sounds great, but I always like to get maybe a little deep on, you know, some, some rocks you hit, you know, some struggles you had and so maybe when, while building. Thanx.

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Zach Goldstein [00:33:14]:

What do you find?

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:15]:

I mean, you know, being a founder myself, I know any startup, it's ups and downs daily. But from your point of view, what's like a big struggle that you guys had or something yet to overcome? Building a loyalty program. NCRM for the restaurant space.

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Zach Goldstein [00:33:31]:

The challenge with restaurants is often everyone is stretched thin. Therefore the evaluations are tied to, well, who else do you work with? And that is inherently difficult for new entrants into a market that was a pain for a long time, that's now a huge asset for us. We've been in market now for approaching a decade and so we have the credibility now. And so if you wait long enough, that switches, of course. But I don't think that's doing a service to restaurants, honestly, because it stifles innovation and it ends up giving market share to the longest tenured programs, which are not often the best. One big lesson I realized in this space is that we had underinvested in the value of the ecosystem. We believed that because we were focused on guest engagement and there are a couple key elements of it. If we just built the best solution, customers would come and, and then we believe, well, you know, we got to just make the best sales and marketing team.

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Zach Goldstein [00:34:38]:

And if you combine the best solution with a great sales and marketing team, customers will come. And what I missed is in many cases, the relationships in the hospitality industry, with your point of sale, with your ordering provider, with any number of other solutions, are long term relationships, and those relationships are influential. And secondly, that everyone's tech and partner stack looks different. There's no one size fits all in restaurants because of that. And so as a result, you really have to have the ability to be modular, to say, yeah, we offer marketing, but if you want to upgrade to another marketing solution, we can plug in there. Yes, we build digital ordering apps, but if you want to work with XYZ agency and build something truly custom, we have the APIs to support that, that level of yes, we offer it and we partner with someone who does it even better. That was a switch I had to flip in my head and it's pretty unique to this industry. I see a lot of restaurant tech companies miss the mark on that concept and either try to do it all themselves and miss out on integrating.

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Zach Goldstein [00:35:52]:

And unfortunately, there's too many different flavors of what restaurants look like to make that a winning strategy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:59]:

Yeah, that makes sense. It's very hard to be the best at everything, right? So that great lesson shared, I always like to wrap up with just like plugging. Thanx. Plugging how people can find you. So really like, I guess the precursor. That is what's next for Thanx. So anything you want to share? I know we spoke a bit about like maybe the machine learning stuff, but anything you want to share on what's next for Thanx. And then I'd love to plug, like, where people can find you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:24]:

Thanx. And all that good stuff.

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Zach Goldstein [00:36:26]:

This is a fun time. Our business is on fire right now, and I think it's because restaurants over the last couple of years were able to drive same store sales by taking price. And now attention is turning to traffic. And there are very few tools that are demonstrably proven to drive traffic, and we are one of them. And so as attention turns to traffic is the talk of the industry, we've been well positioned and frankly, we're helping our customers stand out. Not all of them are seeing positive same store sales comps. The reality is most of the industry is down, but they're seeing far better same store sales comps than their peers. And that's something we hang our hat on.

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Zach Goldstein [00:37:07]:

What's next for us? We believe that the legacy players in the loyalty space, and really there are two in particular. I won't name them, but everyone knows who they are, have not innovated in years and are doing a massive disservice to their customers. And we believe that there is an opportunity for a top notch, world class guest engagement solution for this industry, and not one that is, you know, designed for other industries, one that is built for restaurants. And we think we are that option. So we got more work to do. I've laid out some of the stuff that's on our roadmap that we're still working towards. We certainly have more work to do to earn that, but we're knocking down those conversions and we're helping brands who haven't had loyalty programs before Wade into the territory because they see that we do it differently than the established solutions. So that's our goal and continue to expand our partnerships across the ecosystem to help influence that idea of driving lifetime value in everything you do as a restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:12]:

Well said. And so for people listening that want to find you, obviously we're going to put all the links that you want to share with me. We'll put them in the videos and Spotify on app, all that good stuff. But for people listening just to the audio where can they find you? Where can they find. Thanx. Is there a chance to plug anything and everything, your website, your LinkedIn, your socials, whatever you want?

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Zach Goldstein [00:38:29]:

Our website is Thanx.com thanx.com. on LinkedIn, you can find me at. Zach Goldstein I do a lot of my writing and posting LinkedIn. Those would be the two places I would direct. Yeah, we're all over the conference scene and the socials, but you'll get most of what you need from from my writing on LinkedIn and from our excellent content posted on Thanx.com dot.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:52]:

Love it. Well, Zach, Thanks for joining me. Once again, founder and CEO of Thanx. Thanks for joining me, Zach. Appreciate it.

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Zach Goldstein [00:38:59]:

Absolutely.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:01]:

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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