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Tablehero — A restaurant management system that keeps tables full
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Hi Product Hunt,
I'm super excited to introduce Tablehero Reservations. It is a front-of-house reservation and table management system for restaurant owners, managers and hosts. It also comes equipped with a web widget which will enable your restaurant website to take reservations.
To drive more customers to your restaurant we have built a social connect platform in the app which broadcasts available tables to your social media channels. Now you can't be held hostage by expensive intermediaries like Yelp and OpenTable.
What's more to it
SETUP: Set up and start taking online reservations in minutes (vs days or weeks)
RESERVATIONS: Unlimited reservations from your restaurant website.
WAITLIST: Seamlessly manage your restaurant waitlist by sending customised mobile text alerts to your diners about their wait time or whenever their table is ready.
GUESTBOOK: Host your existing diners better by storing their dinning and table preferences.
TABLE MANAGEMENT: Get an eyeball view about the status of your restaurant tables at any instant.
RESERVATION REMINDERS: Mobile text alerts to diners reminding them about their booking, hence reducing no-shows.
You can read more about us here https://blog.tablehero.com/table...
We are always looking for feedback, get in touch with me at aman@tablehero.com
@amanmohla @tablehero Nice concept. Can guest book a specific table in the restaurant or it is random or to the host's discretion? I like the simplicity of the design although it could look nicer eventually... Thank you!
@cemedericarak @amanmohla @tablehero As of right now, not a specific table. That feature is certainly on the roadmap, although most restaurants typically will not make that promise.
There are a million hairdressers who could use a product like this. There's a side project for you! :D
There are products you like because they solve a problem you face and identify with ( Dropbox, Gmail, Evernote ). There are products you like because everyone around you uses them and it becomes impossible to go through your professional /personal / family life without someone asking you about it and you feeling missing out because you are not on this platform ( WhatsApp, Linkedin, Facebook). Then there are products which while they solve a problem which is real but which don’t affect you on the day to day level. But in spite of that, you look forward to using these products because for once you want to see an unconstrained, unadulterated, thoughtful design and product thinking moving beyond brainstorming, whiteboarding, wireframe, functional specs and translating into a real world product with bits and pixels.
Products like AirBnB, Cleartrip, Instagram, Medium, Paper (53), Square. It's hard to miss the functional elegance of such products and how everything from design to business to engineering blends beautifully in them and create a resonance. As a product manager, I can count the number of times I have seen that happening. One such place where I saw it consistently was Cleartrip. So When brain behind the Cleartrip UX put something for show and tell. I expect it to be amazing and what little I have seen so far I am impressed.
I have a very surface level understanding of TH's Domain. I don't know the expectations of a table management solution but as an end customer, I can say that this looks pretty cool and something which can add value to my Experience of a restaurant without me having to see the interface. for example, I eat out 2-3 times every week and I am yet to find a restaurant which asks me (while booking ) my dietary preference, Allergy etc. I have to repeat it every time. Even when I have been to the place more than once. One reason [I assume ] that such process doesn't exist because the right tool to enable such process were missing for such segment. Looks like TH can solve this. Looking forward to their journey. Best of luck
@prashant_singh Prashant - totally agree on the allergy/dietary needs part - I can't speak for all solutions but I can say that I recently saw a detailed demo of Yelp Reservations and it can definitely do that.
[totally agree on the Product comments]
This looks 'good' but that it's not good enough -
the reason OpenTable has succeeded with their outrageous pricing is because of their millions of users who search for tables/restaurants through their system and because of the OpenTable points system...
the reason Yelp Reservation is eating into their market is because they are considerably cheaper AND millions of users use Yelp to look up restaurants [and now can reserve right from the Yelp App]...
Until you have that piece of it, Tablehero Reservations just won't / can't be a force in the industry :/
Not trying to be mean, just honest/direct - there is a definite need for more competition so that small business owners aren't at the mercy of OpenTable ridiculous pricing...
Side note, at $ 49/month, you are still quite expensive especially compared to the current Yelp Reservations promotion(s).
@exlemor While the customer facing site for OpenTable and Yelp may have millions of users, but how many net net new diners are these sites driving to the open restaurant tables? OpenTable is charging exorbitantly for the diners which are already customers of that restaurant. Yelp has held restaurant owners hostage with a review/rating system which is quintessentially flawed.
Bigger restaurants with deeper pockets can afford OpenTable or get their way around with the Yelp rating system, but in this flawed system, it is the smaller family run restaurants that are getting screwed.
We at Tablehero are trying to build an automated platform, which is restaurant owner friendly and leverages on the power of social media to fill available tables. We deployed Tablehero sites, orders and reservations at a few beta restaurants and the owners are already seeing a sudden spike in new customers.
@amanmohla love to hear that and would love to see that... I couldn't agree more about OpenTable and Yelp...
ok so how exactly are you bringing people in with the power of social media?
I ask because I'm interested for a couple of local restaurants I'm helping - but if a business say has 696 likes on Facebook [let's just talk FB for the moment to simply the conversation]... so very likely most of those are clients already [i.e. the OpenTable dilemma of already being customers], how is TableHero helping to increase that reach? i.e. conversion into new diners?
That's the disconnect I'm not understanding and that is missing in terms of explanation for me on the website as well...
Also, your website is missing something in terms of making me feel like you are a local business that is going to stick around. It says when you dig around and find your Angelist page that you are Bengaluru and Sausalito based, yet you don't mention that on your website..
This knowledge would help convert local SF / Marin / Berkeley / Oakland business if you mentioned that you have an office in the Bay Area...
@exlemor Having been in the industry and after looking at every option out there, I disagree with these points. Getting people to learn about your place is a different problem than needing good reso software. There's actually a huge opportunity for someone with a great product for restaurant staff to use to manage this side of the business. The customer here is not the diner, but restaurant owners and FOH managers.
@brendonto
You're right about there being 2 different but yet very connected problems here: reservation software and getting people in the place ... All I can say is one thing that has come across over and over for restaurant owners/small business owners over the years is that they don't want multiple systems to deal with... both from a management, training or cost standpoint..
That's in part why OT and Yelp Reservations have been successful - because they work both sides of the coin - albeit at a great cost in the case of OT.
As a test tomorrow, I'll show this to a restaurant owner and see what he says without me prompting anything, I suspect he'll react the way I did which is 'how is TH helping me get customers in the door specifically'?
@exlemor I can see where you're coming from, though I would also propose that any owner who relies on the reservation software itself to generate awareness and interest probably isn't going to be a restaurant owner for very long.
To win you have to go for the low end of the market and scrape out profitability.
Make a low cost version $199 that includes an Android tablet and 1 year of service. When the restaurant sends you a simple seating layout chart (circles and rectangles with X for seats) and prepay 1 year you send them a ready to use system. Go after the restaurants that really only need reservations for busy times. Most restaurant owners can't handle tech so a simple plug and play tablet that takes reservations and is already setup is all they need. Add services like payment, telephone and web reservation booking with simple setup is key. Have more ideas if you go down this path.
@riptide360 checkout tablehero.com? Automation is our prime USP. We build automated websites with ordering and reservations as plug and play services. With a click of a button restaurant owners can enable reservations, online ordering, catering requests, social media push on their websites.
TableHero