Idea: Work with restaurants to track and optimise repeat restaurant customers. Repeat restaurant customers help restaurants understand their business’s health, and give them a metric to optimise for. You can then go onto upsell consulting services to optimise marketing, user experience, branding, and drive customer loyalty %.
Problem: The majority of a restaurant’s business comes from repeat customers, yet their ability to understand who repeat customers are or what they want is limited.
Insight: The principle leading success metric for a new F&B business would be customer loyalty. This would convert to referrals, and repeat business.
Validation method: Approach 50 new F&B restaurants with a sales brochure and offer to track repeat customers over the course of a week. Text could be: “Cafes in Tiong Bahru with customer loyalty less than 37% go bankrupt within 1 year. We will calculate your customer loyalty rating for just $20.” Unfortunately, this is where it gets a bit more laborious. Ask restaurants if you can review all the customer receipts over the last week. You should be able to see repeat credit card usage by looking at the first four and last four digits of all card payments.
Notes: This idea needs a lot of work on the ‘how’ side. It’s not clear whether we are allowed to keep, and track customer payment data. There are some cafes that are using facial recognition or loyalty cards to keep track of regulars, but there should be a better method that is less ‘opt-in’ and accounts for all customers. The current validation method is also a bit laborious. There probably is a better way.
Why am I doing this? I’m an innovation consultant who helps businesses build new products, and ventures. And I want people to see how easy it is to build, and validate an initial business idea. Hopefully inspiring them to start their own business.
Am I worried that people will take the ideas? I hope they do. These ideas will hopefully make the world a better place. Just remember, “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything”What’s most likely is that within a month of testing the idea, the idea would have completely pivoted, but this is a starting point.