San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

The tip network,San Diego startup,California startup,startup,startups,paypal,startup interview,founder interviewAlthough restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank  (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

What is The Tip Network?

We are the PayPal for the $63 Billion dollar service industry.

Simply put: Restaurants currently track tips on paper and complex spreadsheets, which is labor intensive and prone to error adding exposure to wage/labor lawsuits and IRS tip audits. In addition, staff at these establishment are inconvenienced by having to drive to the bank to deposit their tips, they spend them before they get to the bank, and have no means to easily save.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road …

In layman’s terms, how does it work?

The person in charge (manager, captain, etc…) will access www.thetipnetwork.com via a smartphone, browser, or tablet. They set up their days via shifts (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and they create buckets where they can add their employees to their designated position & shift. They also set up tip amounts for each bucket. Employees and positions can be pooled or individual. They can earn tips based upon hours worked or a weighted total. The system is flexible to account for most all tip out systems that occur in restaurants.

Once this is all set, restaurants and bars and can go about their normal day. When a server or a bartender will check out, there will be no more paperwork that they will have to fill out and hunt down a manager to check out. Everything will be digital, a manager access the ‘Checkout’ portion of our cloud based software and they can allocate their money to their support staff digitally. No more paying your support staff to wait around to get paid out by the servers or bartenders. You also eliminate support staff coming back to work just to pick up their tips the next day or their next shifts. Emails and text messages will also be sent for notification and verification purposes as well.

The coolest part is all the money is now distributed virtually, each employee has their own unique dashboard where they can view heir current balance, a historical view of their earnings, and they have the ability to withdrawal their funds to any account, at any bank. They can even send money to anyone in the network! And do many more things down the road … but those we will keep in our pockets :)

A Point-of-Sale (POS) and Enterprise level product is also in it’s development cycle but an official launch date has not be released.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Greg Crisci is the founder/CEO of Tip Network. He was a former server, while going to San Diego State University and he was able experienced first hand how archaic restaurant tip procedures were. Greg worked in the solutions department at Digitaria | a JWT Company before making the leap to full-time right after a promotion where he gain his digital experience in all aspect of web application development.

Greg may be the only official founder at this point in time, but there are many other people who have come and gone that have helped shaped Tip Network to what it is today. In addition, there are many people who are helping day-to-day or who are advisers/contractors, while working full-time jobs, who believe in the mission.

Where are you based?

We are located in sunny San Diego, CA.

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

It’s great, there are some awesome companies that have come out of San Diego. A company that we enjoy is MOGL, they are a cool cash back gamified app that rewards customers for eating out. Maybe that is biased because they are in the same industry we love. San Diego is no Silicon Valley, but they have some very active entrepreneurs and a good amount of incubators all over town.

We are starting to see more and more interest incubators popping up all over San Diego, but the investment community down here is not like what it is up north. In San Diego, you have to prove yourself twice as hard to get funding. There are quite of bit of high net wealth individuals here and getting introductions to those people aren’t rare, but early stage funding is quite difficult.

How did you come up with the idea for The Tip Network?

I was a little different than most waiters, waitresses in a sense that I went to the bank right after my shift. I didn’t carry it around or go to the bars (only sometimes). And the reason was, was because all my bills were digital. So the first restaurant I worked in had a bank conveniently down the street where I could drive thru. That restaurant location closed and I ended moving to a restaurant 30 minutes farther away that didn’t have a bank.

So one day I was driving up the cost with about $800 in cash and I realized that I had forgot to pay my credit card and phone bill. I freaked out because of all the late fees and that’s when it hit me. I said to myself, “With all the available technologies, money transferring, digital money, virtual money, why couldn’t I just leave it at my restaurant.” And that was the beginning of Tip network.

Then, through prototype development, we realized that not only did the staff have trouble with having to take their cash to the bank, cash inherently made tracking and reporting for the restaurant cumbersome. Most places track tips on paper, which is very erroneous and time consuming.

So we digitized the tracking and provided a safe and convenient way for restaurant staff to send their money to any account, at any bank.

How did you come up with the name?

I felt that the word ‘tip’ needed to be in there somewhere because I started this company knowing it wasn’t a lifestyle business. It’s a niche product for a niche market. And there’s so much you can do with tips. Tips are the backbone of many employees lives. We use them for everything. And since we are bank agnostic and we believe in tips being flexible and frictionless, meaning we shouldn’t tie a waiter down to receiving their tips in one format and allowing them to send to each other, we wanted to emphasize the ‘network’ that we are building.

The ‘network’ concept is our longer term vision that ties together not only restaurant and staff, but restaurant and restaurant, or restaurant and supplier, restaurant and community. To see the network in action when it’s blooming will be a beautiful sight J

What problem does The Tip Network solve?

We see Tip Network as the answer to today’s archaic tipping procedures. No more coming the next day or next shifts to get your tips. Extra labor hours will not get incurred due to streamlined process we will provide. Constant trips to the bank to grab cash will be cut down to a minimum. The checkout process will be quick and easy. You can also eliminate hours paying outside contract work for duties such as tip reporting done by CPAs or establishment accountants. Say goodbye to servers and bartenders having to fill out paperwork, they can now just doing on a browser. The emotional aspect of the work environment will become less of an apparent issue as well.

What’s your secret sauce?

Our secret sauce is our vision, our core values, and our experience. Combined we represent 25+ years in the service industry, from front-of-house roles to back-of-house, from chain to independent industries. In addition, our background in digital has lent itself to our core digital mission of being free & frictionless, beautiful design & user experience is mandatory, social, mobile, and analytics need to be core to our build.

Competition can come in and copy our features, but will never know where we are going. We have a strong core with a solid vision.

What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?

Recruiting and retaining talent with minimal funding and the unknown of equity. We are at a unique stage where we are in prototype development and have beta clients lined up, but in order to get to beta, the product needs to be built. To get it built, unless your founding team is technical and you are the business guy, you need to find, inspire, and retain those people to help build this. However, with minimal funding, you really only have equity to barter. And, without doing any deep dive into valuation, I believe it would be an injustice to the company and to each person to issue out an equity position without knowing what it is worth.

One of our core company statements is that everyone will remain fair, honest, and humble. And with that trust, we have been able to build the team that we have today.

What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?

The challenge of getting up everyday and pushing forward knowing that the future is uncertain. The ups and downs, ebbs and flows, can really weigh you down if you aren’t prepared for them. In the AM you are on a high because you may have found a local developer willing to work with your terms, by PM they’ve changed their mind. You meet with an investor in the AM and feel like you did horrible, but get a call back the next week. Being able to manage the ups and downs without medication is a huge challenge and all startups need to be recognized for their ability to handle that stress as a strength, or shall I say trait, that many people do not have. Pat yourself on the back.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

All of my old co-workers at Digitaria | a JWT Company. Having worked through from part-time to a promotion into Accounts, I was able to meet some extremely, specialized talent. Some of whom have become advisors to Tip Network.

Stephen Jobs with his mysterious upbringing, unrelenting obsession of detail, and accomplishments.

Michael Librizzi, Tip Network’s General Business Advisor has been there for us all day, any day, any time. He helps us stay focused and motivated.

Mother Nature because being in nature is where we all want to be. We try and get out as much as possible because fresh air and new scenery will help spark creativity.

What’s next for The Tip Network?

Because we are being watched so closely by our competition, who have tried multiple times to get more information out of us, I’d like to just say we are going places. We are constructing a small army. Those stories where you hear of a small town startup that grew from a grassroots beginning, yea, that’s us. Nobody has the vision for this product like we do.

Linkage:

Check out The Tip Network here

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