Dine Desk: An Initiative That Helps Restaurants Manage and Market Their Business

Founded in April 2014 by Ahmed Sharief, Hyderabad-based startup, DineDesk is a cloud based reservation, table management system and marketing platform for the restaurants. It covers every aspect of restaurant management with Online Reservations, Table Management, Wait List Management, Guest CRM, Feedback, Marketing, Billing, POS, Analytics and Statistics as its core features by working within a B2B model.

In an interaction with BWDisrupt, founder Ahmed Sharief says, “Our vision is to be one of the first startups to provide a unique platform to manage customer facing operations for restaurants worldwide. In countries like India and the US where we have access, we have our own sales force. In other countries, we have sformulated strategic partnerships and have a network of resellers selling for us.”

Functioning

DineDesk is unique in its solutions whereby it helps a restaurant business have direct control over their assets, accept bookings and promote activity using social media platforms, partners, their own websites, mobile websites, and apps. Essentially, DineDesk offers a centralized mechanism to manage restaurants assets. With DineDesk, a restaurant can configure reservation widgets, deals and menu widgets on their web, mobile and social assets. Using the DineDesk control panel, a restaurant may decide to post a deal, a coupon, an update or even a change in their menu and it automatically updates on the restaurant’ssocial media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Google), the restaurant website, mobile website, appand other partner websites. After which, the restaurant can start accepting bookings from multiple sources and use DineDesk’s table management and operation management tools to manage their business more methodically.

It offers additional services and solutions to restaurants not having their own website, mobile website or app by designing all of these for the restaurant, free of cost and integrating it with DineDesk. Social media services like Facebookare also closely integrated. If the restaurant is new to social media (Facebook, Twitter or Google+), as a part of the restaurant setup, DineDesk offers free social media setup and training.

Triggering Point

Ahmed Sharief met up with his friends who were restaurant operators over a few business lunches. They often griped of the operational and marketing issues that they faced. Enquiring further, Ahmed heard their complaints regarding a lack of automation in many restaurants. A lot ofrestaurants continue to rely on paper and pen in managing their operations. Ofthose restaurants which decided to go ahead and automate their operations, complained about heavy setup and exorbitant recurring costs they had incurred in the process.

"This made us wonder why there wasn’t an affordable solution out there. Which is when we decided to offer a cost effective and easy to use 360-degree suite of tools andholistic solutions that could assist in everything from managing reservations to operations and even feedback," Ahmed states.

Key Features

DineDesk provides uncomplicated and highly adaptable solutions to restaurants with key features like:

 Table Management (Accepting bookings from mobile website or app, restaurant website, phone, Facebook and so on).
 Deal management for better publication and marketing of deals.
 Guest Data, Feedback and History.
 Customer communication to boost customer fulfilment and loyalty.
 Reporting and Analytics to support management in taking informed decisions.
 Mobile/iPad compatible applications for increased productivity, wider visibility and better accessibility.
 Menu/Order Management, in house, take away, home delivery and pre ordering wait list for an improved dining experience.
 Marketing tools like social media, email marketing and third party integrations.
 Widgets seamlessly integratedwith any third party providers.
 Centralized control over information across chain.
 Effortless setup with no special hardware required. Can be easily accessed from laptops, desktops, tablets, mobile phones and any internet connected devices.

One of the most important features has to be the DineDesk Control Panel, which facilitates a centralized control of all operational activities. Offers, deals, coupons, menu changes, reservations and so on, can all be configured via this special platform. It seamlessly integrates with social media platformsto ensure that any changes made by a restaurantare immediately reflected on its various social media platforms, as well as on the restaurant and mobile websites.
An invaluable feature for small-scale establishments is DineDesk’s offer to set up and manage restaurant and mobile websites which serves as real boon. 

Another special feature is DineDesk's online Marketing platform which uses integrated email Marketing, SMS Marketing, Events, Deals, Menus, Social Media publishing and monitoring tools.

Point of Difference

"There is worldwide demand for quality restaurant management software and restaurant owners cannot ignore the need for it. DineDesk aims to move quickly into this space and satisfy this demand in all parts of the globe. We are pushing through in countries like Dubai, Singapore, Thailand and South Africa, where our American counterparts can't compete," declares a decided Ahmed Sharief.

Finances

DineDesk has previously raised seed round from angel investors. These funds were used to develop the product, develop technology, formulate initial business model, a marketing team, launch the beta product, generate partnerships in few countries, branding and marketing.

The startup is seeking another round of funding to scale up their business, refine its business model, grow a wider network of partnerships to ensure a launch of DineDesk to several other countries, build sales force across different geographies, expand team/management and an advisory board seen in Visista Advisory. Employing the services of Mr. K. Sriram, co-founder of Visista Advisory, DineDesk seeks to receive assessments, feasibility reports, business excellence services, enterprise risk, corporate strategy, organization strategy, business unit strategy, marketing strategy, funding strategy and financial planning.

Challenges & Opportunities

As a global company with a global perspective, it was a huge challenge for DineDesk to design its system to fits across geographies and be flexible in adjusting to the existing processes of restaurants.

Research estimates approximately 8-10 million restaurants worldwide, with about 1.4 million in Europe and 800,000 in the US. Currently DineDesk’s accessible market includes only restaurants that take reservations, promote themselves online or engage in social media.This is estimated to be around 290,000 restaurants.

Traction details

Within a few months of its launch, DineDesk has signed up close to 120 restaurants and 5 partners across UAE, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Philippines. It will be reaching to a figure of 1000 restaurants by the end of 2016. They have recently released the iPad and Android tablet version, which are currently in beta testing.

Future Plans

As DineDesk will be reaching a figure of 1000 restaurants by end of 2016, it is intended to further build its network of reselling partnerships across US, Australia, Japan, China, Latin America, Europe and Middle East in the coming years. “We would like to show a growth rate of around 45% in revenues and also refine our business model.” insists Ahmed. DineDesk currently operates in India, Thailand, UAE, Indonesia, Singapore and USA.

Advice to new entrants

Food space has lots to offer across sections of businesses and we have seen lots of food tech companies that have mushroomed over the years. Few have seen success and others have wound up after utilizing huge capital inflexed into them. Food industry is one that is growing at a very rapid pace. Restauranteurs are willing to invest in technology that helps them generate more business and organize it effectively. Proper long term strategy and patience are keys to success and DineDesk helps doing just that.