Abhinav Kapur [00:00:00]:

Best of breed doesn't actually have to cost more. It's our responsibility as operators to pick the few solutions that we actually care about, like define what the most urgent problems are and go for the best of breed vendors that I can throw at those most urgent problems. And maybe. Sure, maybe instead of picking the five things that solve five problems, okay, I'll pick the three things that solve those three top problems really, really well, and I'll figure out what to do with those other two problems.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:31]:

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 Abhinav Kapoor, co-founder and CEO at Bikky. Abhinav, thanks for joining us.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:00:59]:

Of course. My pleasure to be here. By the way, I love the title of the podcast, WISKey and all its.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:05]:

I appreciate it.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:01:06]:

Yeah, it's really good. It's really clever, and obviously a lot of meeting behind it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:11]:

Exactly. No, I appreciate that. It's funny, we actually put a lot of thought into it. We had a bunch of different names, but that was number one. I think there was some other ones, but looking back, they weren't that good. I thought they were good, but there was one, I think that was WISKey business. But then I was like, people think we just do WISKey. And I'm like, I was way too confused, but that's awesome.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:33]:

Cool. So, look, obviously a great place to start is to give people a background of what is. Vicki?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:01:39]:

Yeah. Again, pleasure to be here. So Bikky is a customer data platform for restaurants at a high level. What that means is we pull in all of our restaurants data from point of sale payments, online ordering, reservations, loyalty, even some third party delivery sources. The idea here has been restaurants are in the business of hospitality. The only way they can really understand the guest is if they were like my mother in law, who would literally spend 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day, six days a week in the store touching tables, knowing her guest names their faces with, eat what they drink. That doesn't scale, right? So if you look at, you know, whether you're a five unit brand or a thousand unit brand, this idea of just truly understanding who is the guest, what's their behavior, how often do they come? What makes them loyal, what makes them churn? We try to get all of the data points that exist inside the restaurant and try to answer some of those foundational questions about the hospitality business. So we work with, you know, about 5000, close to 5000 locations now across the US, and big brands like Mod Pizza, Deep south, chicken bojangles, long John Silvers.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:02:39]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:40]:

Okay. Wow.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:02:40]:

That's who we are in a nutshell, yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:42]:

Wow. I love that. I also love to understand kind of the stories of why people do what they do. And so let's just go a bit back. Like, I love to understand a bit of your journey. Obviously, you know, I've done my research. I have access to your LinkedIn. So it's not like, I don't know, but for people listening, like, like what? Tell us a bit about your past and kind of what led up to kind of you co founding Bikky.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:03:04]:

Yeah, I always like to say my background is pretty conventional in that, you know, I worked in finance for about eight years, investment banking for four and a half years, switched to the equity research side of the business for about three and a half years, around 20 16. 20 15, 20 16. When startups were really starting to take off in New York, I said, you know what? Like, I've sort of done, I've built a career in finance. I like it, but it's not something I see me spending the rest of my life doing. So hunted around different startups within New York, got a few offers at some companies that are pretty big now to be early stage. But, you know, The mission for me if I was going to change careers, I really wanted the mission of what I do and what I dedicate my life to really resonate. And it just wasn't there. Even though, even though the jobs and the roles were good, the mission didn't really resonate with me.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:03:50]:

And at the same time, you know, my mother in law was a restaurant operator at that time for about 15 in New York City, she built a two star New York concentrated fine dining indian restaurant. And, you know, I walked in one day to get lunch. It was right around the corner from my office in midtown Manhattan. Walked in one day to get lunch and she's staring at a delivery tablet in the back. She's got a pen in one hand, notebook in the other. I'm like, what are you doing? And she's like, oh, I recognize this person's name on the tablet. So I'm writing down their phone number. I was like, why are you doing that? She's like, well, they're obviously a loyal guest, but I have no connection with them, so I'm just going to call them later and see if they had a good experience.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:04:23]:

Like, oh, that's baller. Like, yeah, no one has ever called me after a delivery order. And so I kind of just filed that away. But, you know, later that weekend, we're at her house, and she's. She's like, help me with something on the computer. And she flips around her screen, and she's looking at all of her opentable data. And I was like, what do you need help with? And she's like, I'm trying to export everybody's email addresses so I can email them and see if they had a good experience, if it's their first time, if there's something we can do better. And I think that's really when it clicked for me that the restaurant business, and this is, again, 2016, 2017, the restaurant business is going digital, and there's going to be all this data that's coming into the industry, and there are people literally scrambling across all these different systems.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:05:05]:

She had ten years of phone numbers in her pos, ten years of open table data, a couple years of online ordering data, phone numbers off the delivery tablets. It's like, we got to find a way to help operator really use this data to understand who they're serving. And so that was the inspiration behind starting Bikky and really, again, like, helping operators adapt to this trend of digital transformation data, et cetera, all the stuff that is commonplace now, but was, admittedly, it was probably too early to start the business because in 2017, it wasn't as big of a factor. But the story and the mission have been consistent with powering restaurants to access, understand, and take action on their data.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:45]:

That's awesome.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:05:46]:

And I'm proud to say that's what we still do today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:48]:

That's awesome. And so I always like to imagine, like, what did kind of that mvp look like, right. The minimal, viable product. So, obviously, this idea strikes clear pain point, which is pretty common, similar with me. It's like, you see a pain point. I was actually working on a quick side note, I was working on another startup at the time at this venue. See them doing inventory at the end of the night, putting bottles on a scale and writing it down on a paper. Papers, like, full of liquid, because they're doing it at the bar, and I'm like, what are you doing? I'm counting my inventory.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:18]:

I'm like, how often do you do this? And I was kind of, like, a bit surprised. He's like, I do it every night. Turns out they were a club, so did it every night. But I was like, this is crazy. Let me talk to other people. And what I quickly realized, whether it was, like, a hotel or a fine dining restaurant, most people did it weekly. But they did it often. They did it, and they did it super archaically.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:35]:

Pen and paper, clipboard, whatever. And for me, that was my aha moment. I'm like, I wonder. I wonder if I could. What is it now? That was 2014. So basically, ten years later, I'm still at it. But the funny thing is, I started it as almost a challenge. Like, I wonder if I could solve this little problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:50]:

And turns out it wasn't a little problem. But. But, yeah, I'd love to know for you, what did that look like? What did that MVP look like? You get this idea. You kind of see the frustration, challenges your aunt is struggling with. What do you do as a first step?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:07:03]:

Yeah, it's funny. I think, like, from an MVP standpoint, this has always been one of those most challenging things with our business is how do you help them take action on the data? How do you help them use the data to actually strategically grow their businesses? And, you know, we the first MVP. I learned the hard way, you know, when I was in finance, your job is to literally build charts and tell stories with numbers. Right? Like, that's the job. Like, this is the chart. This is what the chart means. Here's why you should buy this company, or here's why you should buy this stock in a nutshell. Like, simplify.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:07:33]:

In a nutshell, it's great for what the job is. And so I came in with this with a foolish assumption that, like, hey, if we just give people some dashboards, they're gonna be able to understand what's going on. They're gonna be able to make decisions on it. And, you know, the MVP was that. It was the dashboard. Here's how many customers you have. Here's how much they spend. Here's how often they come.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:07:51]:

Here's some charts. They're going up into the right. That's a good thing. Here's how, you know, maybe you can figure out how to make it go up into the right faster. I think that's when we learn the hard way that especially with smaller operators, independent operators, they don't have time to sit around and look at charts. I like to always say they're working in the business, so it's harder for them to work on the business. My mother in law would get calls on a Saturday afternoon, and the delivery person would be like, I'm sick. I'm not coming in today.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:08:18]:

And she's like, I guess I gotta go in and make my cook do deliveries and I'll work in the kitchen and start just satisfy lunch orders. And if you're in that kind of like hand to hand combat kind of environment, almost like you don't have time to sit around and look at charts and look at numbers. And so the MVP solely, when we, after that key insight, we slowly started pushing into this direction of, okay, how do we help people proactively take action on this data?

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:42]:

Yes.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:08:43]:

And one of the first things we came up with was, you know, almost like a CRM marketing automation, help somebody send the right message to the right person at the right time using the first party data. That's a coming in, I would say from there, the insight there was that, look, most restaurants don't have a lot of first party data. The typical restaurant only has ten to 20% of people that opt into their loyalty program or order directly from the brand. And so if you're trying to help people take advantage of data, but it's only 20% of their customer base, you're not going to be adding that much value, no matter how good the ROI is. If it's a four to one Roi, five to one Roi, that five relative to the one is not high enough. The five is not high enough, and the one, you're probably pricing it low anyway because of the amount of value that you're adding to the business. And so increasingly, as we spoke with larger brands, you know, 1015, 100, 300 units, what they would say is like, look like on the CRM and marketing automation side, I'm actually good. I got a loyalty platform punch Patronix.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:09:40]:

Thanks. What I really need help with is 70% of my business is in store. And I have no idea who the in store guest is. I have no idea how many new people are coming. I have no idea how often they're coming. You know, McDonald's can say billions of customers serve. I have no idea what that means for my 60 unit business. And so that's why we started pushing in that direction of, like, there's so much data here outside of just first party ordering or the ten to 20% that order directly.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:10:08]:

How do we help restaurants use all of it? How do we give them insight into 60, 70, 80% of their guests and really let them tap into this data and this guest behavior to really understand the bigger questions that they have in the business, like the impact of a marketing campaign or a menu item, not just, again, on that smaller source of business. But I would say more holistically.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:29]:

I love that. It makes a ton of sense, and I think you nailed it. I think a lot of tech companies in general, but specifically in the hospitality space, realize this, too, the hard way. But it's like, there's no shortage of data to share. It's like, but how do you distill, number one, the important data, but number two, like, they almost just want to know, tell me what to do. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, just tell me, like, if this beverage caught, like, is this good? Is this bad? What should I do? Should I, am I ordering too much? Am I, like, on our end? You know what I mean? And it's. It's funny, the more we go to almost, like, just plain English and natural language and just be like, this is good, this is bad. Order less of this.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:03]:

It's like, that's more helpful than this crazy pie chart that they don't look at.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:11:09]:

Yeah, I mean, half the battle is, is taking your product and your vision and your expectations and mapping it to the customer's reality, you know, and understanding the way they talk about it and the way they. Because something we always say is like, what questions do you have? The answers are there in the platform, in the data. It really comes down to what questions you have. And that's, in part, like a challenge to the restaurant of, like, what are the things that you care about? Please share those with us. But two, also a way for us to better understand how do we frame the value of our product in the context of your actual current problems as a business. So I'd like to take that one step further. You know, something that we help a lot of brands with today is menu item analytics. As an example.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:11:53]:

One of the things that we help folks with is when they launch a new menu item, something they always look at is percentage of sales, 3%, 4%, 5%. And they're like, is that good? Is that bad? It could be good, it could be bad. Who knows? But the important questions are, is this bringing in new customers? Are those customers coming back? Is it changing the habits of my existing customers? Is it cannibalizing anything else on the menu? And when you just have sales level data, sales good, sales bad, it's a lot of work on the back end to really figure that out. And some of those questions can't even answer. But when you have customer level data, you can actually say, you launched this chicken sandwich and it brought in 50 new guests per store, per week, and 20% of those guests came back, which is better than the 50% of guests that normally come back when they order any other menu items. Now we're starting to get into the important questions that really help you understand whether or not this decision you made was a success. And when you got another decision like that to make in the future, is that also similarly going to be a success?

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:51]:

I love that. That makes a ton of sense. And I'm curious, like, how do you guys, like, you know, not to get too, too technical, but how do you guys kind of collect this first party data? Like, tell me more about, like, how Bikky actually works, right? So we have restaurant operatives listening in. They're like, all right, this sounds good, but, like, what do I got to do? What am I installing? What am I doing physically to kind of start using Bikky?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:13:12]:

Yeah, I think to that end, I think my team, we've done a really good job of building integrations with a lot of the major players in the space across point of sale. Like I said, on the payment side, online ordering, reservations, loyalty, Wifi, we have integrations with, I would say, most of the major players in the space there to the point where for some platforms, you can just go into the marketplace that they typically have on the back end, on the operator side, search for our name, flick a switch, and the data will start coming in. And so from that standpoint, it takes anywhere from two to six weeks to get it stood up, depending on how complicated your tech stack is. But I, by contrast, like, if a restaurant was trying to build this themselves and trying to figure this out for themselves, like, twelve to 24 months, easily standard McDonald's built their own sort of data platform and data warehouse. It took them twelve months. Yum. Which owns KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, has signed a deal two years ago, and all of their brands still aren't even migrated onto their shared data platform. And like I said, you know, we're helping brands with up to 1000 units go live within 90 days of signing up with us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:24]:

That's awesome.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:14:25]:

But again, that's the benefit of being focused on this industry, being focused on this specific problem is you can deliver these types of solutions that drive high ROI in a better way, in a faster way, and in a cheaper way than if someone tried to do it themselves.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:41]:

Makes sense. And as you were kind of like building Vicki in the early days, what were you saying? What would you say? Excuse me. Were some of maybe the bigger challenges that you faced?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:14:51]:

Some of it. I'll give you two things. One is, again, we talked about this a little bit from a product standpoint, finding ways to make sure the data is actionable, valuable, and driving consistent ROI for the operator. Right. I think restaurant tech is one of those areas, unfortunately, where people have been over promised and under delivered for so long, and that's not unique to, that's not any specific vendor, that's just as a category. You know, operators are talking about technology. They're jaded. They're like, oh, my God.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:15:20]:

Like every, every year there's a new solution that's promising me some magical silver bullet and it just becomes another part of the tech stack. And I'm not sure what it's actually doing here two years down the line. And so one of the things that we say is we are very direct. This is what we do, this is what, you know, we had a prospect ask us, hey, you know, like, could I use you guys to replace my loyalty program? And we were very clearly like, probably not. You know, if you just want to do segmentation and marketing communication, yes, but we don't do points, we don't do tiers, we don't do offers, we don't do digital wallet. If all those things are important to you. Now, we work with your current loyalty provider, or if you're looking to change loyalty providers, we work with a few others, but that's not something we do and that's not something we're gonna do. And unfortunately, that type of approach, while it has served us well and continues to serve us well, I think a lot, not a lot of restaurant tech providers operate with that type of philosophy, or at least maybe not a lot of the traditional ones.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:16:16]:

I think things are starting to change in the ecosystem, which is good. So I would say that's one thing, and the other thing is the messaging and cutting through the noise. It seems like again, every year there's a new trend within restaurant technology, and you've had within restaurant technology technology, and there's a race to, you know, to claim we do that, too. We do this, we're all in one. We can help you with that. And so breaking through the noise in terms of, like, who you are, what your mission is, what your value prop is, what you stand for, what to call it, who you work with within the organization is a lot of the battle just cutting through all that noise. And, you know, I think we've done, we could do a better job of it, but I think we've done a good job today, again, because rooted in that principle of we don't want to over promise and under deliver, We want to be true to who we are and be very clear about the pain point we solve and how we solve that problem. and where we fit in the life of an operator or a technologist.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:15]:

That makes sense. And it's funny that I agree with you. Generally speaking, it's not targeting anyone, but generally speaking, there's a lot of over promising and under delivering. And it is changing, but it's hard. The truth is, and I tell restaurants this when I deal with clients, I'm like, look, it's hard to. Of course the dream isn't all in one. It's all in one system. But it's hard, like, and I'm like, think about it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:34]:

If we've been at inventory or back house inventory invoicing, recipe costing, et cetera, for ten years, and that's all we do, do you really think your pos that does a million things will do inventory well? And the other thing I tell them is if we integrate with 50 plus pos and a lot of the big players, they're also not dumb. They're not going to integrate with an inventory system. If they had top of the notch, you know, inventory. And it's like, it's not that they can't do it. They could just take a long time. They could do it. It's just at a certain point, it's very difficult to try to do everything really well. Like, at a certain point you got to pick your battles.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:10]:

And so I'm with you there. And then what ends up happening is he will over promise. Hey, don't worry. This pos has got everything. And then you're like, okay, no, I need a loyalty. I need a scheduling. I need inventory. And you start.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:18:22]:

Yeah, no, I mean, this is an age old battle, not just in restaurant tech and software in general. This idea of all in one versus best of breed. And, you know, the way I like to think about it is best of breed is it might call it. There's two ways to think about it. You're either going to spend more money on picking best of breed providers to solve specific problems. But typically, if you spend more money and you have specialized players that work well together, you're going to get a higher ROI. Right? It's not necessarily about the upfront dollars. It's about what's the ROI of the stack that I am building, what's the payoff, what's the improvement? And so I think, like, you know, while best of breed may cost more upfront or people might think it costs more upfront, you have to frame it in terms of what's going to be the ROI for me longer term, that's one.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:19:05]:

The other thing I'll say, and this, I'll give a shout out to Wade Allen, who's the president of Costa Vita. It's about 100 unit brand in Utah. This is one of the things that, that he shared with me was this idea of, like, Vesta Breed doesn't actually have to cost more. It's our responsibility as operators to pick the few solutions that we actually care about, define what the most urgent problems are, and go for the best vendors that I can throw at those most urgent problems. And maybe. Sure, maybe instead of picking the five things that solve five problems, okay, I'll pick the three things that solve those three top problems really, really well. And I'll figure out what to do with those other problems. Yeah.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:19:46]:

And then I'm getting three best of b providers, higher Roi within whatever my budget happens to be.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:51]:

Right.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:19:52]:

I think that's just a really smart way of just, like, thinking about, you know, which direction you go.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:58]:

Yeah, I think. I think you nailed it. Because the truth is sometimes I see people make that mistake because they'll look at, like, friends in the space and be like, what's your? But it's like, you gotta also look at what you are as a business and what's important to, you know. I'll give you a good example. If you're a, let's say, mid market slash, you know, full service restaurant, you have a big wine collection. All of a sudden, something like this probably makes sense because we do really well in the liquor wine space, and the ROI is like a no brainer when it's like liquor and wine, it's where you make most of your money, so. But if you're a mom and pop shop, you're selling, I don't know, pizza, and you have two types of beer. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:31]:

Okay. Maybe you don't need the best in breed liquor.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:20:33]:

What?

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:34]:

So, so I think I sometimes what I find is restaurants make the mistake of just looking at their friend, but their friend could have a very different business. And it's like, hey, maybe for them, scheduling is ten times more important, but for you, it's like you can get away with the basic scheduling app, let's say.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:20:49]:

Yeah, yeah. That comes bundled with your pos or something.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:52]:

Exactly, exactly. I'd love to know from you, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Vicki recently raised or completed a 5.25 million seed round. So I'd love to maybe just quickly chat about that. Number one, congrats. Not easy to raise money. And, like, what, what impact will this have on Bikky? Like, what are you planning to do with this money?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:21:12]:

So actually, just one update to that. So that was the seed round we raised or the seed round we announced in 2022, I believe it was. And then we just actually raised our series a earlier this year. So we raised a little over 8 million. Yeah, we raised a little over 8 million. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the way I think about it.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:21:33]:

Thank you. Yeah. And the way I think about it, right. Is, you know, restaurants used to be 20% margin businesses 20 years ago, and now they're 5% margin businesses. But if you look at the brands that have consistently had access, the technology, the tools and the resources to use their data to strategically grow their businesses, they've all maintained 20% to 25% level margins. Right? Kava, Chipotle, Sweet cream, Taco Bell. Like, all of these brands historically, over the past couple decades, have invested in the tools, the team and the technology to, again, access data and use data to drive their business decision. And what I think about, you know, not in the context of the raise specifically, is how can we help the other 99.9% of restaurants out there have the exact same capabilities as the bigger brands, as the 0.1% of restaurant brands out there.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:22:27]:

And by that, what I mean is, you know, like, we want to build the standalone data platform for this industry. And I think, like, customer data is the perfect place to start because that's where, a, the pain is the deepest today, and B, again, like, in the business of hospitality, it's. It's crazy that you don't know who is the person behind the check. And, you know, the person that you are serving every day. You should have some insight into who they are and what drives their behavior. And so I think, like, first customer day is sort of the perfect wedge there for us to start. And I. And on this journey of, again, like, empowering brands to leverage their data.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:04]:

Right. And out of curiosity, who do you guys. Who is Bikky perfect for? Is it quick service, full service? Is it everyone? Like, where do you guys find your sweet spot where you can really provide value?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:23:16]:

Yeah, I think, you know, it's ten locations and up. But, you know, in terms of, like, segment, most of our. Most of the brands we work with are, it's about a 60 40 split between QSR, fast casual and casual dining. And so it's pretty evenly balanced. Here's the thing, right? I think when we started the business, especially pre pandemic. We were definitely more attuned for QSR fast casual because high volume businesses, a lot of data, thinking more strategically about their digital journey and their digital footprint. I think the pandemic changed that completely and made of digital from a nice tag to a need to have for every restaurant, including the casual dining players. Like, you're seeing increasingly more casual dining brands talking about their loyalty program, their digital efforts, their partnership for third party delivery.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:24:03]:

And so it's interesting, I think, that our customer base specifically became much more balanced since the pandemic, as we've seen casual dining brands step up their level of engagement, interest and investment in building their own sort of digital ecosystems as well. So that's why we say it's like ten units plus. You know, we focus on marketing typically, I think what we find is when we start to demo the product, people across the organization finance is interested because they say, oh, well, now I help price out that LTO. Now I actually know what the Roi of that LTo is. Or now when marketing runs a campaign, I actually can tie it back to incremental sales. I can understand how that campaign grow. Incremental sales. Right.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:24:44]:

Culinary care is because they say, what are the menu items that are top sellers that maybe don't think people back as frequently? Or what are the hidden gems on the menu that only loyal guests really start to order? And what can we learn about them? And so it's interesting where it's like we start with marketing, and then over time, we try to build this sort of shared source of truth, the shared language for every function, for them to understand how their decisions influence the success of customer traffic, customer frequency, customer lifetime value. Makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:12]:

And it's funny because I would imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine on the kind of, you know, full service, so, you know, reservations are needed. And so obviously, that reservation data is amazing because it's, it's, it's the name of the person and when they come in and their party size. How do you guys think about that on the QSR level? Like, where do you guys, like, what's the best source? Because obviously it's not reservations. What's the best source when it comes to maybe the QSRs or the fast.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:25:35]:

Casual, in terms of the data that we pull in and, like, identifying a guest or. Yeah, it's definitely the point of sale or the point of sale or payments data, for sure.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:45]:

Okay, okay, okay. Got it. Got it. Right. Cause you have, like, so, like, we.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:25:48]:

Got a credit card token as an example. So, like, if I walk in, I swipe my credit card, and this is. I would say this is true of casual dining as well, where. Yeah, it's like, if I walk in, I sit down, I swipe my credit card. The point of sale provider or the payments provider will pass us a token on that guest, and we'll build a profile on that. Say, oh, we've never seen this person before. But then if I go online and I order online from that brand and I use the same credit card, we'll say, oh, look, Abhinav came back, and we'll update his profile, not just with the transaction, but with the email address and phone number provided on the digital order as well. And so, again, we're able to build sort of this, you know, unified, holistic profile of every guest.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:22]:

Makes sense. Okay. Okay, okay. That makes sense. That was, like, obvious now that you said it, but okay, that makes sense. I'm happy to clarify. Maybe some people were thinking same thing. So that's awesome.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:32]:

And I love to know, kind of, what's next for you guys. So, you know, first of all, apologize for being late on the news. I was still on. On the seed round, but in terms of this, you know, $8 million round, what. What's next? What are you hoping to invest in? Like, what's next for. For you guys at Bikky?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:26:48]:

Yeah, I think for us, it's just. I mean, obviously, in a very fortunate position to raise at a time when the market in general has been tough. But, yeah, I think that's a testament to the product we built, the team we built, and the pain point that we're solving here. And I think it's just, you know, accelerating, just capital to accelerate investment across all three of those fronts. You know, continuing to invest in the product, continuing to try and be a best in class data partner to the restaurant industry, new ways to leverage that. I mean, there's still so much surface area that we haven't touched yet. Like, as an example, one of the things that we are. It's in beta right now, but one of the things we recently rolled out is an offers dashboard, and what that means is, when restaurants send out an offer, the only way to measure success of that offer is the number of times that redemption code was used.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:27:33]:

Oh, we had 30 conversions, and here's the revenue. That doesn't tell you anything about the impact on a guest behavior, right. You don't know if you're bringing in new guests. You don't know if it's repeat guests that are using them. You don't know if the frequency or the spend of someone changed in the 30, 60, 90 days after they used that offer. And so continuing to, you know, I think the way we view the platform is we're adding a lot of value. Some of the data is eye opening for some of the partners we work with, which is incredible, but it's still just early ends for us in our journey. And so investing in the team, investing in the product, and really trying to scale the business, and that's really it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:07]:

And any interesting industry trends that you're seeing or maybe you want to predict? I know obviously there's so much happening with AI this, AI that, but not to just use buzzwords, but really, like, what are some maybe industry trends that you either see or are excited about or predict?

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Abhinav Kapur [00:28:24]:

There's two that come to mind. One is, I would say, in current event, I would say, is this idea around pricing value discounting? I think restaurants have raised prices pretty aggressively over the last twelve to 24 months in response to inflation. And I think we're still really waiting to see. I mean, again, the typical way to measure the impact of something like that is traffic went down, average check went up, and here's the net impact on sales. But I think there are more longer term impacts around customer frequency. Like, hey, we're loyal customers who came once a month before we raise prices. Are they still coming once a month, or are new customers who become loyal customers? Do they start coming once every two months now instead of once a month? Like, there's all these sort of nuanced knock on effects on customer behavior that we haven't explored yet. And so that's one thing that I'm watching.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:29:14]:

And, you know, to give you a sense of, you know, I think we looked at the average entree price in our data over the last two years, and it's gone up anywhere from 6% to 25% over the last two years in particular. And over that timeframe, retention has gone down by two to three percentage points. Like, new guest retention has gone down by two to three percentage points.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:35]:

Okay, wow.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:29:35]:

So there's something there. You know, I'm not gonna say causation correlation, we'll say, but there's something there where raising prices so aggressively is having a knock on impact of people coming back to the restaurant less often. And that could be it could be it's expensive, it could be it's a value thing where it's like, I just want to go out once a month or, you know, once a quarter or once a year and get a lot of bang for my buck. Or it could be more. People increasingly feel like it's too expensive and I'm just going to, you know, make groceries or buy groceries and eat at home. So I would say that's one current thing that I think is really interesting and curious to see how different brands are navigating it. Pricing and discounting is always the easiest lever, but that's a slippery slope. But that can really hurt your brand.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:17]:

Yeah.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:30:18]:

And so that's one thing where I've been spending my time. And the other thing too, I would say, is, you know, if you look at the, I think restaurant, there's still some 25% of restaurant transactions are digital today, which, you know, look at the growth rate.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:30]:

Yeah.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:30:30]:

So if you look at the growth rates, like, we're not going to have a majority digital business until almost 2050. You know, if you look at the percentage of transactions, that's assuming everything continues to grow at the same rate.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:43]:

Right.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:30:44]:

And that's incredible. Incredible headroom for like, where the restaurant industry can go on its path to digital growth, digital maturity. And that's obviously, like, we're just riding that wave at the end of the day. Like, that is one of that is the meta wave that our business in particular is riding is as digital penetration grows, so does the amount of data coming in, so does the need to leverage that data, so does the need, or so does the value of using that data to get ahead of the business. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:12]:

Wow. I love that. Great answer. Great answer. And last but not least, you know, as we're wrapping up, I always like to just give it, give an opportunity to just plug things away. So really, like anywhere that you want people listening, and we'll put in the links and all that, too. So don't, no stress and forget something. But LinkedIn or websites or podcasts, whatever you want.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:31:31]:

Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. You can email me directly, abnathiki.com. and if you're curious to learn more about Vicki, just go to Bikky.com and, you know, reach out. Happy to chat with folks.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:44]:

Awesome. That's bikky.com. bikky.com. Abhinav, this is great to have you on the show. Lots, lots of knowledge and interesting data you shared. So thank you for joining us on the whistling it all pod. I really appreciate it.

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Abhinav Kapur [00:31:58]:

Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:00]:

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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