Founder Market Fit: How to Create Painkillers Not Vitamins
I love restaurants. I love reading about them, I love watching Netflix documentaries about them, and most of all I love eating at them. Do I have any business starting a company in the restaurant industry? Not really. I am merely a fanboy. The most time I’ve spent behind the scenes of a restaurant operation was when I was a delivery boy in high school for Lotus Garden in New Jersey. That does not make me a domain expert by any stretch of the imagination. When I started my current company Pared, I was like most entrepreneurs out there, looking for a problem to solve. I would go into restaurants in my neighborhood and talk to operators about my ideas. Inevitably they would all shoo me away as another techie who was only going to add to their already cluttered counter of tablets for delivery, POS, loyalty programs, etc. These were all vitamins. They are nice to have and may very well help them improve their business, but they don’t cure the real pain crippling restaurants today: staffing challenges. As an outsider, I was oblivious to their biggest problem and clearly had no clue how to fix it.
Most consumer companies are started by people filling a gap in the market that they…
