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Conversation
Highlights

 

Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech’s most innovative B2B founders. In today’s episode, we’re speaking with Meredith Sandland, CEO of Empower Delivery, a restaurant tech company that has raised $6 Million in funding.

Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:

  • Unique Founding Story: Empower Delivery is a spin-out from Clustertruck, the largest and most profitable delivery kitchen in the US, providing an innovative restaurant order-to-fulfillment platform.
  • Industry Insights: The restaurant industry is late to the digitization journey, unlike sectors like travel and retail. Empower Delivery offers a fully digital native experience from order to fulfillment.
  • Target Market: Empower Delivery serves restaurants with significant delivery volumes, focusing on those doing hundreds of orders a day from a single location, rather than categorizing by SMB or enterprise.
  • Thought Leadership: Meredith is a recognized industry thought leader, having written two books on restaurant delivery and hosting a popular podcast in the space.
  • Competitive Landscape: Empower Delivery aims to transform delivery economics by eliminating third-party fees, making delivery more profitable for restaurants and affordable for consumers.
  • Future Vision: Meredith envisions a future with increased delivery penetration, potentially transforming real estate and restaurant infrastructure in the US, similar to trends seen in other countries.

 

Actionable
Takeaways

Optimize for Delivery:

Restaurants should consider optimizing their entire process, from packaging to operations, for delivery to ensure high quality and customer satisfaction.

MVP Approach:

Always start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to get early feedback from customers, refining and improving the product iteratively based on real-world usage.

Customer-Centric Tech:

Build technology solutions that address the specific pain points of your target market, ensuring that the software integrates seamlessly into their operations.

Thought Leadership:

Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry can drive organic customer interest and open doors to valuable partnerships and opportunities.

Direct Delivery Benefits:

By focusing on first-party ordering and delivery, restaurants can save significant costs and improve margins, as demonstrated by Empower Delivery’s model.

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