I noticed how much friction there still is in small Indian restaurants — customers waving down waiters, mixed-up orders, and manual billing that slows everything down during rush hours. A simple QR-code-based ordering system felt like an obvious fix that most small restaurants in India still don't have.
Two things: for customers, a faster way to order without waiting for a waiter to be free — scan the table's QR, browse the menu, order, and pay, all from your phone. For restaurant owners, less staff load, fewer order errors, and a live view of incoming orders on a simple admin panel — without asking them to force customers into logins or apps.
I started by just building — Next.js/TypeScript frontend, Go/Gin backend, Postgres — and made a deliberate call early on to skip customer login entirely, using just table number + session ID, since I knew adoption would die if customers had to sign up. But the real shift came in how I sell it, not build it. I went out and physically pitched restaurants and got zero traction — owners were never around, and there was no way to even get their contact. That pushed me to rethink distribution: build a self-serve demo landing page instead of relying on in-person pitches, so a restaurant can experience the product with a link before I ever need to meet them in person.
