What is Resy?
You might think of Resy as the pay-for-play reservations company. That’s where we started, of course. The idea landed us on A1 of the New York Times in June and in the New York Times Magazine in October. But, premium reservations was just a point of entry. I want to take 3 minutes to tell you about the business today.
The current restaurant technology stack is broken, plagued by incumbents like OpenTable, who prioritize technological innovation about as aggressively as public utilities tune their customer service. If you’re in the investment community, you’ve heard this statement ad nauseam from entrepreneurs like me. If you’re a restaurateur you’ve learned it the hard way. And if you’re a consumer, it explains why the tech experience around the restaurant one feels so flat.
But after two decades of stagnation, change is coming rapidly. Resy, the company I founded with Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Montero, is one of a number of upstarts meaningfully challenging the hospitality tech status quo for 2015 and beyond. We’re rethinking the technology in a way that can only be done by a world class team building from scratch. We’re changing pricing expectations. We’re creating more direct relationships between consumers and individual restaurants than any other reservations system on the market. Fundamentally, we’re empowering restaurants to behave as premium entertainment producers, which by all means they are.
To be specific, we offer restaurants floor plan, table and customer management, synchronized with a booking widget that works on any browser on any device in the universe. It can be deployed with 3 lines of code (less if you’re using our website builder partner, Bentobox). Plus, 2-way texting with guests is built-in, eliminating those annoying phone calls; we connect to any POS system in realtime, which sets up both the next generation of payment and loyalty management; we support fully customizable table type merchandizing, including integrated ticketing and events management; we offer a feature called ‘Notify’, one of several designed to capture guests beyond just those who successfully make a reservation; and we offer direct access to our engineering team for those restaurants with product ideas of their own. We’re doing this while lowering the price restaurants pay for their reservations software — in many cases to $0.
All of this — the Resy Platform, which also includes a consumer-facing app and an open API — is deployed in the best restaurants around the U.S. They include: 1) the quintessential downtown New York restaurants Estela and Charlie Bird, two of our earliest partners. 2) Otium, Bill Chait’s new Downtown Los Angeles blockbuster. 3) Dominique Crenn’s two San Francisco restaurants Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn, the first of which holds two Michelin stars. 4) Hillstone, arguably the best large-scale restaurant group in the country, with whom we’ve begun testing the product in their New York City locations. 5) The Mina Test Kitchen, Michael Mina’s public R&D lab. 6) Gabe Stulman’s Happy Cooking Restaurants, known for their unyielding focus on a branded hospitality experience. And 7) Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s Los Angeles restaurants, Jon & Vinny’s, Animal, and Son of a Gun. At these restaurants we’re replacing OpenTable or Yelp SeatMe or we’re converting them from pen and paper.
In December, more than 120,000 seats will be reserved via the Resy Platform. The restaurants that work with us have a competitive advantage: they’re saving thousands of dollars a month and getting better tech than the guy next door. Our restaurants also have a partner for content, marketing and sponsorship initiatives, something we want to do much more of in the future. We are helping our restaurants thrive. The past is prologue, of course, and the future is coming. It’s a very bright future, indeed.
If you’re a restaurant interested in learning more, drop us a line or visit our website to learn more about our restaurant reservations software.
