How Speeding Up The Way Customers Pay At Your Restaurant Can Make A Big Difference With Christine de Wendel (Ep 133)
Technology is changing so much for restaurants. What's great is it's helping restaurants run more efficiently and thus also helping to increase the potential for profits. Jaime Oikle from RunningRestaurants.com checks in with Christine de Wendel, Founder and CEO of Sunday about her new company and the $24 million dollars they recently raised to grow out their fintech solution will help restaurants around the world. Exciting stuff!
Find out more at https://www.sundayapp.com & https://www.runningrestaurants.com
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How Speeding Up The Way Customers Pay At Your Restaurant Can Make A Big Difference With Christine de Wendel
Sunday
Coming up on this episode, I interview Christine De Wendel of Sunday, which is a restaurant FinTech startup that raised $24 million and is bringing its payment solution to restaurants in four countries. Exciting stuff for sure. Check it out.
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Welcome to the show, where we bring you the tips, tools, and techniques you need to make your restaurant more profitable and successful. We have a great episode featuring Christine De Wendel, founder and CEO of Sunday. Christine, welcome. Tell me a little bit more about your company.
Thanks for welcoming me. I'm delighted to be here. I have co-founded Sunday, which is a new payment solution for restaurants. We have been hitting the ground running for about a month. We've raised $24 million, which is one of the largest seed rounds ever in the food tech space. Our objective is to disrupt the way people pay in restaurants. We want to be the fastest way in the world for restaurants to pay, and for customers to pay in restaurants.
We also want to be the simplest and the cheapest. We are launching in four countries simultaneously. The US, France, Spain, and the UK. I'm co-founding Sunday with Victor Lugger, who is a successful restaurateur in Europe and who has a pretty famous restaurant group called Big Mamma, which are Italian restaurants in Madrid, London, and Paris.
First, let's go back because a lot of stuff you touched on there is hot stuff and we're going to get into a bunch of that. The raise is, as you said, very significant. That $24 million is going to give you a lot of runway there to start working and expanding. Let's go right to the founder's story of buying restaurants and building restaurants toward the solution that everybody has. I want to get out of this darn restaurant. I cannot find my server and I want to pay. I got to go. It's a movie or it's a kid's game, whatever. It's that pain point. How did that come about? How did you guys decide this is the thing to go after?
I love this story. My co-founder, Victor is running fourteen very successful and busy restaurants. When COVID hit, he thought we had to innovate. We needed to find solutions to have payment go through much faster and have no touch payments. The real birth of the product is this summer where a small team of engineers built a simple proof of concept. The idea was to put QR codes on people's tables in frames, stuck on the table, whatever the best format is for that restaurant. Let's have people pay via the QR code.
The beauty of the Sunday solution is that you don't have to ask for the check anymore. As you mentioned, Jaime, it's connected to the POS system. It allows you to scan that QR code as soon as you want to go. Be it at the end of the meal or if you're in a rush and you don't have time to get coffee. You scan that QR code and your bill pops up. You can split the bill. You can add a tip and you pay. You don't have to download an app. You don't have to sign in. It's a process that takes ten seconds. People loved it.
In the test this summer, we had over 80% adoption, 40% more tips, and 15 minutes faster table turn time, which from a restaurant operator perspective is phenomenal. Victor who owns this restaurant group Big Mamma said this product has so much traction in the market, we need to make a company out of it.
He came to see me in December and said, “Christine, we have an incredible idea. We've tested it on 75,000 tables. We're getting enormous traction. It's in our restaurants. Customers love it. Waiters love it. Managers love it. We think it has enough legs to become a real company. Why don't we get together and create a FinTech? Let's make it an American company. Let's incorporate the company in the US and let's launch in the world's biggest restaurant market.”
That's where I joined the adventure since I'm based in the US and I have tech scale-up experience. We're building a solution that is built by a restaurateur for restaurants but with a tech lens. That's also how we were able to raise $24 million which is a big raise for a seed round. That's giving us great insights on how to crack the market and how to build a solution that restaurants are going to love.
Benefits Of The Sunday App
I'm going to jump out to your site for a second because I want to show that little page that highlights some of the things you showed. Does that work for you? Do you see the whole 15 minutes 40% thing?
I can see it.
I love their site, first of all. It's right here. We see it's SundayApp.com. Make sure you check them out.
SundayApp.com, go visit us.
What's fun about it? It’s super irreverent. The copy on here. It's funny to go through. It's funny to read. When I got to this section of the site, I paused. The time savings, we already touched on that it wasn’t a waste of time at the end. You feel like you're about to finish and you're not. That I think is a big deal. I was surprised by two things. I assume by average basket, you mean they're ordering more stuff. They get more stuff. That was good to see. You have fun with the French people here, but 40% more tips, that was a fascinating find. Was that a surprise?
The reason we've seen such great tip uptake is that it's easy to tip. In our product, when the page opens up on your phone, you can pre-fill in the different options. Do you put 18%? Do you put 20%? Do you put 22%? Do you put 25%? What we observed is that naturally, people go for a larger number than if they have to do the tip themselves. The fact that we can orient people in the different tip options has a big impact and it becomes so easy to pay a tip that tips on average go up significantly.
Naturally, people opt for a larger number than if they had to calculate the tip themselves. The fact that we can guide people through the different tip options has a big impact.
This makes waiters love it because they know they're going to get more tips. One of the success factors for this to work is you need people to adopt the tool. You want everyone who comes into the restaurant to use Sunday as a payment method. Because waiters love it, they're encouraging customers to use it. The latest data we have, which you don't have on the website, is exciting. We launched in London two weeks ago and we're getting 96% adoption. It is phenomenal.
It means everyone going into those restaurants is paying on the Sunday app. The reason is that it's so easy and because the waiters are pushing for it. You don't have the statistic on here, but we're seeing that, on average, waiters have 30% more time to focus on upselling, chatting with customers, and building a rapport. That's where that 10% average basket comes in. The waiters don't have to focus on closing the bill and dealing with the payment process. They could spend more time recommending dishes, arriving when a person wants to order a coffee, and making sure that they're getting as much as possible out of that order. Great numbers. That's also why we have so many restaurants that are expressing interest in this and want to sign up right away.
If waiters don't have to focus on closing the bill, they can spend more time recommending dishes.
Revenue Model
One of the things that if you try to do this maybe 15 years ago or 10 years ago or so forth, you wouldn't have had the uptake, but now everybody has the phone ready to go. They see the code, they know how to do it, and they know how fast it could be. I think the timing is perfect. While I'm here on the site, I'll close screens here in a second, but is there anything else we should poke out real quickly while we get the site up? What do you think? Anything you want to say?
I encourage everyone to go see the site. You have a great demo where you get to see what it looks like. You see how easy it is. We filmed the footage in my co-founder's restaurants, which are gorgeous and you can see how attractive it is. Now we're looking at the screen and I think what everyone should understand is, how do you pay? It opens up on your phone. As I mentioned, no app, it's a web app, so you don't have to sign in. You can pay with Google Pay, Apple Pay, and all major credit cards. It's an easy process.
We've seen that if everything is running smoothly, it takes 10 seconds. That's why we're claiming that it's the fastest way to pay in a restaurant in the world because it's that seamless. That creates a great customer experience. Now you've seen it in action. We also have features that allow the restaurants to customize the experience that people love because whether you're a Mexican restaurant or a fine dining Italian restaurant, you're able to adapt and make sure the look and feel fit your brand identity.
I was laughing at some of the stuff you guys wrote on here. The part at the top. You are butchering Wednesday giving them a hard time. It's tough. It’s tough being Wednesday, but good stuff here. I'll jump out and we'll talk a little bit more about the business as a whole and where you guys are going. The features like saving time, people spending more, and generating more tips is a good sell. I saw somewhere on the site no setup and no subscription. What is the revenue model? What's the business model? What are you guys doing for restaurants? How does stuff like that work?
The revenue model is that we take a small commission on each one of the transactions. However, because times have been tough with COVID and we want to make this an attractive offer, we're offering a solution for free for the first 45 days. I think that's an important point. We want people to try it. There are no setup costs. There's no subscription timeline. You can cancel whenever you'd like. We're offering it completely for free at the beginning.
Down the road, how do we build a strong and robust business is we take a very small commission on each transaction. What we've seen is because we're able to negotiate more attractive payment processing fees than a lot of small restaurants, we end up having a cheaper rate. Payment processing is less expensive for most small restaurants than it would be if they did it directly. That's very attractive for smaller restaurants because we bring them not only a great operational solution and an awesome customer experience but also a more affordable payment processing fee.
What about the logistics, if I was a restaurant and I said, “I use this POS, I use that POS.” You've talked about the QR integrating with the POS. What happens there? What are the logistics? What's happening behind the scenes?
How does the signup work? Either you saw the solution, you heard about it on this show or elsewhere and you want to sign up. You go to our website and then you get contacted by one of our sales team members and they explain it to you, go through the process, and we demo it for you. We sign a contract, which it's super simple because you can cancel it anytime. Anyway, the first 45 days are free. What we do is make sure that the POS you're working with is integrated.
We're now integrated with most major POSs. If you're using Micros or if you're using Brink, all the big classic POSs we're working with, then what we do is we have someone from our customer success team get in touch with you. It takes about 30 minutes. We explain to you how it works. It's an extension of the POS system. The only physical hardware piece that we need to send, it's not hardware, but we need to send you the QR codes. You have two options. Either we print them for you and have them sent or we have different display options.
We have lots of different frames that you can work with the different creative ways to make the QR codes look good on your table, or you could do it yourself and we can send you an electronic file. You map your tables to the QR codes and the POS, and you're good to go. So far, we've seen it's a pretty smooth process, For restaurants, as long as we've already integrated your POS, and we'll have most of them integrated within the next four weeks, then you contact us and our sales team takes over from there. We have a support team if you have any questions or if you need further training, but most people have found it extremely simple to get up and running.
You answered my next question. My next question was going to be that mapping the codes to the tables. There could be codes floating around and how to do which is which, but that process is a very important process. They are layout.
It's a critical process, so we have to have your table map. That's generally something that restaurants have anyway when they connect with the POSs. When we do supply the QR code printouts. We always give extras because you never know if that QR code is going to disappear and end up on another table. You will need to make sure that your mapping is correct to avoid confusion.
Future Plans
A couple of questions as we start to wrap. Again, the $24 million raise is a big deal. It must be very exciting to close on that and look forward to the future. What is coming down the road? I saw a note, whether it was somewhere on the website or elsewhere in a press release, talking about ordering in the future, and loyalty in the future. What else is coming down the road?
We've decided that the biggest pain point in the experience in restaurants and the area where we could most improve the experience is payment, which is why we're starting with that. We're launching payment again, as I said, in the four markets I mentioned, the US, UK, France, and Spain. Very quickly, we're going to be adding ordering features to provide a completely seamless experience. We're also working on loyalty and you can imagine down the road reservations. The idea is to start with payment. That's where we can add the most value and then progressively digitalize other elements of the restaurant experience to make it easier for restaurant operators to function on a daily basis.
The biggest pain point in the restaurant experience and the area where we could most improve the experience is payment.
I love where tech is today for restaurants compared to the past and the tools it gives them to make things smoother and more efficient. That's heading in the right direction. You guys are in an exciting part of your journey. Check them out, folks. Hit them again with the website, whether it's social or download something in an app store. What do you get for me?
SundayApp.com. Come visit us. You can sign up and we will get in touch with you right away.
That was Christine de Wendell of Sunday. You can find them as she said on the web at SundayApp.com. It's pretty simple. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service, people, and tech news, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. We'll see you next time. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.
Important Links
- Christine De Wendel - LinkedIn
- Sunday