A friend was going to sell his restaurant.
He did it the way you are supposed to. First one in, last one out. The food was good and people came back for it. On paper he had the thing every operator says they want, a place with regulars.
He was still going backwards.
Not because he could not cook, and not because nobody wanted his food. By the time an order reached his kitchen, somebody else had already taken a third of it. His regulars, people who had eaten his food dozens of times, were ordering through an app that charged him for the privilege of serving a customer he had already earned.
He was renting his own customers from a company that had never cooked anything.
He was going to sell. He did not have to. We moved his ordering onto his own site, and he is still open.
That is when this stopped being a favor and started being a company.
I spent three years at Swiggle working alongside local restaurants, more than 300 of them. You hear the same story in every one of those kitchens. The commission is heaviest on exactly the customers a restaurant works hardest to keep. Nobody was fixing it, so I did.