Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

[shaneliammurphy]

Hey HN, we are Shane and Mikey, the co-founders of Boostly (https://boostly.com). Boostly is a text marketing and feedback system for restaurants that works seamlessly with their point of sale, online ordering, and phone systems.

Restaurants live or die based on their ability to keep their customers coming back. However, with the rise of the third party delivery platforms, which charge 20%-35% commission on each transaction, restaurants are afraid that many of their customers will stop ordering directly from the restaurant (even if the restaurant can do their own delivery), and wipe out their small profit margins.

The delivery platforms also maintain ownership of the customer data. They know how valuable this is for marketing, whereas the typical restaurant owner is focused on the food and service, as they should be—and they miss out on being able to communicate directly with their guest as a result. With so many restaurants hanging by a thread these days, it’s more important than ever that they be able to market to their customers themselves, build relationships, and get their customers to order through their most profitable channels.

Customer data is notoriously hard for restaurant owners to access because it is scattered across different systems with various challenges. Even if they access it, they don’t have a way to manage opt-in consent for texting. And of course, most restaurant owners are non-technical and so none of this stuff is easy for them to begin with. We help restaurants access their data, get people opted-in to receive text marketing, and then put it all on autopilot.

All of this started when I (Shane) was running sales for Jolt, a restaurant operations software company, and saw the early stages of online ordering trends. Everyone was focused on the transactions, while customer data was largely getting neglected. Our insight was that this was leaving an incredible amount of opportunity on the table—to turn online ordering into a marketing tool for the restaurant, instead of just being an order taker.

Initially, we founded the company as an online ordering system with a few marketing and feedback tools. We thought that the only way for us to access the customer information would be to own the transaction. We sold that online ordering system to StrideQ, and through that experience we learned how to access customer data from the restaurant's point of sale, online ordering, and other systems. We’ve built Boostly's current tools to put that data to work for the restaurant.

Essentially, we work with the restaurant's point of sale, online ordering, and phone systems to ask for opt-in consent for the customer to receive marketing texts. For example, when ordering online, someone could check a box to opt in to receive marketing texts. Or when someone calls the store, one of the prompts that they can select is to “Press 1 to join our text club and get 10% off today’s order.” Once we have the customer’s permission, we put text marketing on autopilot for the restaurant, so that they can send weekly offers, birthday deals, and other reminders to their opted-in subscribers. We then track the usage so that a restaurant knows exactly how much revenue they drove through their text marketing campaigns.

Additionally, we collect feedback on the customer's experience and give an easy option to leave a review or to give internal feedback to the restaurant that the restaurant can use to resolve issues in real time and get the customer to come back and re-order.

I know some of this might sound a bit spammy, by HN’s demanding standards—one key thing we help the restaurants understand is that it’s in their interest not to over-text their customers. We are scrupulously opt-in, focused on asking politely for permission, and making sure that restaurants set the right expectations for how many texts the customers should expect.

Here’s a quick video that shows a bit about how it works: https://youtu.be/nG2iSFCnP7Q

There are a ton of SMS marketing companies out there. Five things differentiate us and make us good for restaurants in particular: (1) Ability to opt-in customers through point of sale, online ordering, and phone systems; (2) Fully automated experience; (3) ROI tracking; (4) Collect feedback on the customer's experience with the ability to resolve issues in real-time; (5) Giving customers an easy way to leave public reviews, without them feeling pressured to do so.

With your typical text marketing system, the only way to join is to text a keyword to a phone number. Also there is no automation, so as a restaurant owner, I have to go in and schedule every text that I want to go out. With Boostly, since we work with the restaurant's existing systems, we can facilitate opt-ins in real-time without customers having to text a keyword—for example we can ask them “Do you want to join our text club and receive offers from us” at the time that they order food. Also, it's completely automated (they can set up 6+ offers and it automatically rotates through those offers each week). Additionally, we collect feedback, encourage reviews on Google, and are able to track exactly how much revenue was generated through those offers (most texting services can’t do this).

As far as reviews go, we give everyone the opportunity to leave a review, including if they have a negative experience. What we do is also give the ability to send internal feedback to the restaurant, and then make it easy for the restaurant to respond and hopefully resolve the issue. This is good for both the customer and the restaurant, and we think it’s a much nicer solution than trying to just pump positive reviews or suppress negative ones. Most restaurants want to know when something isn’t right, and they especially want to be able to fix the problem so that they can keep you as a repeat customer. The review platforms make it hard to initiate a direct conversation with the customer (especially if you’re not eating in the restaurant (i.e. takeout or delivery), so in the end, nobody wins.

Our pricing model is simple: we have a pay-for-what-you-use approach. Restaurants pay $0.08 / SMS and an additional $0.04 / MMS (includes a picture and/or more than 160 characters). We want to earn the restaurant's business every month, so there aren't contracts, unless the restaurant decides to commit to specific monthly texting volumes in exchange for a discount. We have over 400 restaurants using our system so far.

Running an independent restaurant is getting harder and harder as non-technical proprietors are getting squeezed by Big Delivery, inflation, and staff shortages. We think that helping them build better direct relationships with their customers, and getting that relationship right for both sides, is one thing that can really help here.

We’d love to hear your feedback as well as to hear about any experiences that you’ve personally had with text marketing that you wish had been different. Many of us have been on the receiving end of poorly executed SMS marketing campaigns, and we are sure that we can learn from your experiences to continue to help restaurants do it right for their customers! And if any of you have experience in the restaurant business, we’d also love to hear about your thoughts or experiences from that side. Looking forward to the comments!

[cjbconnor]

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a big turn-off for me. The thing that keeps me coming back to a restaurant is the quality of the food, not their marketing. What I've experienced is that as the quality of the food goes down, the number of marketing notifications goes up. I've gotten an email from chipotle every 2-3 days for the last month, but the last time I went there the food was terrible.

Also, your privacy policy isn't very confidence-inspiring. Sharing name, phone, and physical location with third parties shouldn't happen. I'd never use your services for that reason alone.

I wish you the best of luck, but I can't say your services are for me.

[mikeylikey]

A hacker after my own heart (Mikey here, Technical founder ). Thanks for you diplomatic critiques.

This was/is the sentiment of myself and a majority of our developers from a consumer standpoint. It's a curious experience being your product's chief skeptic. It's also been interesting to observe the number of consumers eager to participate, along with the degree to which it works on behalf of our restaurant customers. A few months ago my skepticism decreased when one of my favorite local pizza joints became a customer and I found myself ordering a lot more with them despite my aversion to being "marketed to". Fortunately, food quality appears steady so far .

One of the things I look forward to with more bandwidth and runway is to craft the product in a way that may even appeal to the segment of the market that shares our preferences. In the meantime, thanks for taking time to share your perspective.

[stevekemp]

I went to visit a doctor recently, and booked the appointment online. As a result of that I received:

- An SMS confirming my appointment.

- An SMS the day before reminding me of the appointment.

- An SMS the morning of the appointment inviting me to checkin.

- An SMS after I left asking me about my experience on a scale of 1-5.

That's four SMSs relating to one appointment/visit. The moment I read this post I could just imagine a similar situation - I make a reservation online for a table, and I'll get spammed indefinitely about offers, and invitations to leave a review.

[pluc]

You could say the same about virtually all marketing. A product should let its product speak. Marketing is the art of shoving a sub-par product down users throats despite better alternatives existing.

[shaneliammurphy]

I hear you on the importance of food quality. If you don't have good food or service, no amount of marketing is going to save you. I also think that there is a fine line that you don't want to cross when it comes to the number of marketing messages that you send to customers. Every 2-3 days would annoy me personally as a consumer too. Anything more than once per week is way too much for such a direct channel

Since this is an opt-in program, only the people who really want to receive texts from a particular restaurant will participate. If that's not you, that's totally fine. Either way, we appreciate you sharing your thoughts!

[smt88]

Consider this:

No consumer wants these messages. I understand why restaurants need them and why they are profitable, but actually recipients will be irritated (even though they "opted in").

My concern is that these will turn SMS, one of the last (mostly) clean communication channels, into another cesspit like email and the web have become.

I'm not asking what you're doing to prevent that because you can't build this into a successful company without moving the needle in that direction.

I just want you to question why you're doing this and whether your business is creating a world you actually want to live in. To me and everyone who isn't profiting from it, it's pollution of our personal lives.

(Unrelated: I started a company years ago with restaurants as customers. They are by far the worst people I've ever had as clients, if you could even sell to them. It's basically impossible to build a profitable software business with restaurants as customers -- even "Big Delivery" is unprofitable).

[mikeylikey]

I appreciate the way you framed this.

> No consumer wants these messages.

While I personally resonate with this sentiment, it's not accurate in my (very skeptical) experience. "many" consumers? "most" consumers? maybe. but I'd be slow to underestimate the size of the market here.

> My concern is that these will turn SMS, one of the last (mostly) clean communication channels, into another cesspit like email and the web have become

Valid and well articulated. I don't have a great response on the broad concern (we've demonstrated as a society/culture why we can't always have nice things; e.g. robocalls) beyond knowing the degree to which this medium gets regulated by the big 4 utility companies (and government). They are quite sensitive to their customer's (and constituent's) preferences to not have this personal space invaded. As for boostly, I think it will only shoot ourselves in the foot to overstep (or even get close to) these important boundaries.

> They are by far the worst people I've ever had as clients, if you could even sell to them

Certainly not the easiest lot. We do view the ability to sell to them and meet needs as a competitive advantage of sorts.

Thanks for your informed feedback!

[lucky_cloud]

> any experiences that you’ve personally had with text marketing that you wish had been different

I wish I'd never received one single marketing text or notification ever in my entire life. I wish I could purge the entire world of such things.

[shaneliammurphy]

Did you originally opt-in to receive the texts that you're referencing? If not, that would be incredibly annoying (not to mention that the government frowns on that). I've received spam texts in my time (soooo many "UPS package" scams), and those have left a bad taste in my mouth. That's why we've taken the approach of "expressly opt-in" and "easy to opt-out."

[RunSet]

"I like the way you framed that. Very articulate. I wouldn't be so quick to underestimate the demand for SMS marketing based on your entire lived experience."

[bmismyname]

This is why I use a fake phone number when I'm forced to provide one, especially when ordering stuff off the internet. Good luck with your business, but I don't want to be in your database. It's quite annoying how every retail establishment tries to onboard you into their data harvesting scheme with their "points" and "rewards". No thanks, if I have to pay extra I'll do that. Phone numbers are terrible in particular because they are PII and can be used to link various data sources together to "enrich" them when selling that data to the brokers.

I do miss the days when you could just go through life not feeling like an NPC in someone's scheme to extract money from your pockets.

[codalan]

I use a burner number in Google Voice, but even that has issues. I've had some retailers reject the number because they're able to tell that it's not tied to a cell phone.

[codegeek]

You are getting hammered by the HN crowd here but there is merit to stuff like this. I will tell you what I do want as a customer:

- Ask me to opt-in but only the 3rd or more time I am ordering from the same restaurant. Asking me to opt-in right away will seem more spammy. If I am coming to a restaurant for the 3rd time, I probably like the food and will be open to receiving some marketing stuff if it helps me as well

- Send me targeted messages and not generic. For example, lets say I frequently order "General Tso's Chicken", perhaps send me an offer that mentions it. I would be more inclined to act.

- Do not over text/SMS. You mentioned this already but cannot be understated. Thi is where you have to teach the restaurants. I would even say put technical limits ( a restaurant cannot SMS same customer more than 2 times a month etc) even though you charge by the SMS. It is in your long term interest that customers are not turned off by too many messages.

- Make it a bit fun and not all marketing/money. Send me interesting stuff on the food I just ate (may be how it was made etc).

- Coupons would be awesome if I haven't visited for a while and it could get me to order my fav. food again.

[shaneliammurphy]

These are great suggestions! I especially love the thought of going the extra mile to make it relevant to you as an individual. I like the idea of eventually allowing the individual consumer to set the limits on what they receive, such as frequency, type of content, etc. (For example, I only want to receive messages about events happening at this restaurant and no more than 2x per month.)

[bierjunge]

Can you please explain why are you faking the signup popups? They repeat every few minutes with the same names and cities (e.g. I saw the popup for "Sg from Hamden, Conneticut signed up for Boostly" at least 3 times now). This looks very sketchy to me.

And a second, more technical question. Why are you loading "font-awesome.min.css" (Cloudflare) and the IBM Plex font (font.google.com) every time you show the popup?

[mikeylikey]

(Technical founder here)

Pretty boring answer here: Shane (non-technical) was left to put together the website and I think he just picked a wix template that happens to do this.

We are b2b and a majority of interactions with customers take place over the phone, including signing up to be a customer. The website, up to this point, has relatively little utility compared to other company websites. We've prioritized placing technical time and energy on the actual product. We did have a designer spend an hour on making it look better than it use to though.

[madelyn]

Hey, first impressions- this looks great! I work in the space and know that HN can be quite rough for sms marketing tools. Couple quick questions:

How do you handle offer "staleness" if you're rotating through a set every so often? And additionally do you have tools that automatically remove unengaged numbers?

Is the long term plan to offer Boostly to larger businesses or chains?

[shaneliammurphy]

Offer staleness is a very real thing! We generally encourage a restaurant to start with 6-12 offers, and then every 60-90 days, we review how each offer is performing and optimize their rotations. That way things that aren't resonating get removed, and we can track the trends. We also encourage variety in the type of offers as well (i.e. you don't want to send a % off offer back to back). Generally, you want to refresh your offers on a regular cadence.

Initially, this has been built for the SMB restaurant or the franchisee to do local marketing rather than large brand based marketing.

[samch]

I can summarize my SMS marketing experiences in one word:

stop

[shaneliammurphy]

That's precisely why opt-in practices need to be observed. If you don't want to be in the club, you shouldn't receive texts and you should be pestered to join. If you did join and then you decided later that you don't want to be in, simply replying "stop" will remove you from the program. We actually include those opt-out instruction on every text, because it should be easy to know how to leave if you don't want to continue to receive those texts.

But if you really like a place and want discounts to them, this could be a good option.

[mikeylikey]

I see what you did there

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> to ask for opt-in consent for the customer to receive marketing texts

This is the one thing that might make it acceptable to me, but it also begs the question: Who is opting in to getting spammed? (Intentionally, I mean; I'm going to assume you're not using dark patterns to pull one over people while still claiming to be "opt-in")

[mikeylikey]

> Who is opting in to getting spammed?

Generally they're opting in to save money and get good deals at their favorite eating establishments. For some, getting this via text is a preferred method and less friction than downloading an app or alternative medium.

> I'm going to assume you're not using dark patterns to pull one over people while still claiming to be "opt-in"

these wouldn't hold up very well in a lawsuit even if you wanted to do this

[jlokier]

Last time I recieved a series of marketing messages over SMS, they implied I'd opted in, and included links to opt out. This went on for a year. Not often, about once a week, varying.

I thought I must have "opted in" non-consensually on some website (dark patterns abound), but I couldn't figure out which one. After a while I decided they were spam and it was best to not click the product links or opt-outs. Same reason we were taught to not click the opt-out links in spam email: Telling them a real person is reading increases your address's value as a target..

It took over a year before I spotted on my mobile bill that these were incoming premium rate SMS. This is in the UK, where incoming SMS is normally free, but each of these messages added a few £ to the mobile bill. They weren't spam, they were designed to look like spam! So the recipient would just ignore them if they were infrequent. They took about £100 total.

When I spoke with the mobile service provider, they said I must have agreed to receive them and I should contact the sender. As if I could figure out who they were and as if scammers would care. Later the provider said it was a known, common form of fraud but sorry, they couldn't block it or compensate.

Needless to say, I'm wary of incoming SMS that seems like marketing now. Even a message asking if I'd like to opt in would have me checking my next bill to see if it was SMS fraud, unless I recognised the connection to somewhere I agreed to receive messages from.

[shaneliammurphy]

Yikes! That sounds like a nightmare. I’ve never seen that here in the states, but I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of bad actors who truly are spamming. No fun.

[tmpz22]

> we can ask them “Do you want to join our text club and receive offers from us” at the time that they order food

So let me understand this.

* I order food through a self-serve PoS or website, or cashier/waiter, whatever

* Presumably the interface collects my phone number - potentially a checkout process which previously did NOT collect my phone number

* Immediately after I receive a text from you, a third party that I may never have heard of, not attached to the restaurant, and this text asks me to opt into marketing for the restaurant I just ordered from

Questions:

1. In the initial SMS will you identify yourself as a third party not affiliated with the restaurant?

2. How do you plan to identify and report success metrics for your customers marketing campaigns? Tracking links in the SMS that mark as conversions when clicked?

3. If your company succeeds and you get a whole bunch of big chains to do this, how will the average dining experience change for a customer of the restaurants you partner with?

[mikeylikey]

Well-structured line of questions. Thanks!

Clarification question for you to help me answer:

Why are you asserting we aren't "attached to" or "affiliated" with the restaurant?

Maybe there is a misunderstanding of the relationship here.

[I_dev_outdoors]

What about a flow that works like, "Please enter your phone number to leave feedback about your service today and we'll send you a free gift for your next visit."

[throwoutway]

My first reaction was “Geez. Please no” but I’m glad you are scrupulous about opt-in. But you also need to make it easy to opt-out and seriously-no more than one text per week from your platform. Just group 2-3 offers in one text because inevitably you’ll be spamming 1-2 texts a day if I sign up for 10 places.

[davewritescode]

In general, you have to be scrupulous about opt-in in regards to SMS.

It only gets tricky when you want to have portability between SMS marketing vendors.

[shaneliammurphy]

I totally agree with you on not texting more than once per week. We coach our restaurants that over-texting is a huge turn off. Every text that goes out has the opt out instructions to "Reply STOP to opt out", so we let restaurant owners know that they need to be respectful to their audience, otherwise they burn a bridge.

[mikeylikey]

haha. Same. (Mikey here, technical founder )

It's not uncommon for new restaurant customers to see quick results and want to start texting more than once a week. Fortunately, we

a) know the short-sightedness in that b) have a white glove experience where we have tight control over what gets texted and how frequently. The system automation is literally constrained to a weekly texting pace

Love the grouped offer suggestion. As a consumer that's more in line with my personal preferences. I think eventually this would be a nice feature in an effort to give the consumer power to customize their notification preferences.

[dominotw]

> but I’m glad you are scrupulous about opt-in.

There are laws against this unlike email.

[aldebran]

Unsurprisingly, HN is going to be tough on an offering like this. I know there is a need for this tool though.

Questions:

1. How do you capture phone numbers even for optin? Does the restaurant port over their phone number to your automated answering before reaching a member of the staff? 2. What POSs do you integrate with and how? Does the server need to ask a customer for their phone number and enter it in the POS which then you pull periodically from? 3. When a customer redeems a promo, do you process orders or let the POS/server/other online ordering do it? 4. Do you tie promos to specific items that the business has higher profit margins on?

[thiscatis]

> “Do you want to join our text club and receive offers from us” at the time that they order food

No.

[tlogan]

The biggest problem when running restaurants is staffing. The biggest. When owner fixes that (you have good chefs, waiters, bartenders, etc.) quality improves and customers just come back.

I know a few friends running and owning restaurants. Nobody would have time to work with anything related to sms marketing.

But let’s see if this will work: I saw a couple companies come and go doing this.

[mikeylikey]

oh man yeah if we had a dollar for every time an owner passed on "more orders" because they didn't have the staff to handle more... we'd have another compelling revenue stream.

> Nobody would have time to work with anything related to sms marketing

That's actually one of the value propositions: we know you don't have time so let us do it for you. Just sit back and see the results

> But let’s see if this will work

The famous first words. So far we've been pleasantly surprised to see it does. I guess we'll find out to what degree and how far we still have to "go"

[dominotw]

I would love for a list of restaurants that i can trust to

1. actually cook food ( most don't??)

2. Don't use chef Mike ( no fresh frozen)

3. Don't use harmful oils and ingredients

4. Offer basic menu with 10-15 items, nothing weird.

Where can i find a such a 'no kitchen nightmares' restaurant list near me.

[zenith035]

I don't like marketing SMS and I don't like when a business messages me on WhatsApp. I am used to dealing with emails like these though.

[chasebank]

I’m genuinely curious why yc would fund this. They already have fivestars in their portfolio that does the same thing from the yc11’ batch.

[eaglehead]

Fivestars got acquired..https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/european-point-of-sale-pro...

[jjtheblunt]

SMS pestering is anything but universally maligned?

[coconut_t1]

Interesting take. Opt-in def the way to go about this.

[shaneliammurphy]

We couldn't agree more!

[nickphx]

That's quite the markup on per message costs.

[simonebrunozzi]

Fantastic. All I needed was some more texts/SMSs from restaurants I visit.

Good luck to you guys, but I hope you'll find a way to make this less annoying than I expect it to be.

And please allow for a simple general opt-out.

[shaneliammurphy]

Absolutely. The general rule of thumb is to not over-text (annoy the customer), give them what they came looking for when they signed up to join the program (generally compelling offers and promotions), and always make it easy for them to opt-out if they aren't interested anymore (every text includes the instructions to "Reply STOP to opt-out" to make that simple).