DC Start Up Venga Pivots To Add More Of The Restaurant In Their Restaurant App Business

Venga is a Washington DC start up that is part of The Fort accelerator based in the nation’s capital. When they came onto the scene they wanted to offer an app that was a little more upscale than Urban Spoon or Open Table. They were able to get their product launched and actually launched it simultaneously across iPhone, Android and Blackberry at the same time.

Restaurant apps have many avenues they can use to get off the ground. Although most avenues are very time consuming, the easiest way to a restaurant app is to draw from a location based API, crowd source reviews and voila. Well apparently that strategy didn’t set well with Sam von Pollaro or Winston Lord, the company’s founders. They actually went out to restaurants and got feedback for their app, what a novel idea.

More after the break


What Venga took on after talking with restaurant owners was probably a lot more than they imagined. It caused the business to pivot ever so slightly from a consumer focused restaurant discovery app to a business that’s more of a “guest management platform” which is equally, if not more so, valuable to the restaurant owner and the end user/guest.

When Pollaro and Lord took to the streets to talk with the restaurants themselves they found that while traditional restaurant discovery apps could provide spikes in traffic, they weren’t receptive to the restaurant themselves. Apps like Open Table weren’t talking to the restaurant point of sale systems so there was no way the restaurants could take advantage of the well procured background data on the users.

It was apparent that restaurants wanted apps to be a two way street and ultimately a way to promote loyalty.

Venga, with the help of Fortify, embarked on a new product to create mobile centric loyalty programs for customers. Now surveying customers on exits, and even rewarding them isn’t new however working it all back into a mobile focused program to benefit the customer and the restaurant is.  Venga now has a tool that helps restaurants keep track of customers, their likes and dislikes and their service experiences. The restaurant takes that information, along with order information and then they can send each customer more targeted offers via email rather than a generic email blast.

In all of this their software also integrates with the two most popular restaurant POS systems, Micros and Aloha.

In addition to actually listening to restaurant owners Venga has an advisory board that includes Top Chef’s Spike Mendelsohn, Mike Isabella and Jose Andres’ along with THINK food group’s CEO Rob Wilder.

for more on Venga visit here

Information from TechCocktail contributed to this report

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