Two perspectives: I worked and coded out on alternative POS solutions right when iPad POS solutions became popular. But it's a dead end. It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it. For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped, all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for tables. This is now dead on arrival. Second perspective…
Thank you for your insights and suggestions. I explain the thoughts behind the price a little in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625906 EDIT: > From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device needed). I would like to add that this is the price for two days of rent.
Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#22Overall, very simple and to the point but not worth $219/mo. In your DEMO, the "Order Status" page takes approx. 4.76s to load 205 orders...this seems like a very poor architecture decision or a poorly written SQL statement combined/rendering logic, especially in 2020. You are headed in the right direction though! To compete with the big guns, you'll either need better pricing or better features (including what other…
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#23Overall, very simple and to the point but not worth $219/mo. In your DEMO, the "Order Status" page takes approx. 4.76s to load 205 orders...this seems like a very poor architecture decision or a poorly written SQL statement combined/rendering logic, especially in 2020. You are headed in the right direction though! To compete with the big guns, you'll either need better pricing or better features (including what other…
Is this advice anecdotal or from personal experience?
In regards to feedback from users, this is especially true when finding product-market-fit (when an idea actually becomes a business). There’s nothing better than learning what customers who actually use your product want in future releases/improvements. It’s a case of building based off actual demand versus based off a hypothetical in one’s mind (a very common “failing”, i.e. learning experience, for first-time founders). Only when your product grows to the point of attracting potential customers outside your target demographic should you not place tremendous value on every single piece of feedback.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#24Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#25Overall, very simple and to the point but not worth $219/mo. In your DEMO, the "Order Status" page takes approx. 4.76s to load 205 orders...this seems like a very poor architecture decision or a poorly written SQL statement combined/rendering logic, especially in 2020. You are headed in the right direction though! To compete with the big guns, you'll either need better pricing or better features (including what other…
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#261) Print out QR codes for every table
2) Customer scans QR code
3) etc.
(or if that's not how it works, I didn't understand it either!)
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#27We've been using uniCenta at our restaurant for 4 years (the open-source version). It's barely usable, all our employees hate it, the UX (and UI) gives the impression that all the people working on it have never actually used it themselves. It's dead-slow and sometimes you need to log into the mysql DB directly to clear some tables.. The reason why we use it? We're not in the US - there's not too much room for a comm…
The problem with being a small shop selling POS products is finding customers at the right time. It is very sales intensive process. You have to reach them at the right time, once a restaurant is invested in a POS, it is almost impossible to convince them to switch. They choose to just live with whatever choice they made and focus on other things that matter. So now, as a developer, you need to give them a good reason to switch.
Money is a good one. So now you are in a price race to the bottom; never a good place to be as a small shop.
Another common ask is integration. They want to try out the product before committing but they can't afford to train folks to use two products at the same time. So now you need to come up with an integration strategy without even having a clear API/structure to work with.
It's a nightmare. Unless you have customers ready to commit which to me seems impossible in the retail business without already knowing people on the inside.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#28As many other commentators have pointed out, you face an uphill battle. The incumbents have way more features than you do and they handle more use cases out of the box. They also offer support. Still it's important to not compete on price - you need to differentiate your service, find your initial market and aggressively pursue those customers. This is more marketing than anything technical.
Some constructive criticism:
On the demo:
1. It is not clear from the demo itself if the demo is for self ordering or for waitstaff ordering. I would like to know how my waitstaff will manage multiple tables? How do I switch tables?
2. How does my kitchen or food runners mark an order as done? I try to click on the order in the status page and it only opens the accordion.
3. How do I input my menu? What is the admin panel like?
4. If I run out of fries, can I scratch the item from the menu in real time?
5. Feels like managing each location in a different instance will be a pain point for multi-location customers. I would test this assumption with market research. If the market share of multi-location users is small, and multi-location management is painful I would recommend not targeting those customers until you get traction and can afford to fix the problem or handle supporting the customers.
On performance:
My load times for the status page were about 2s - which is still too slow. Given that pupdogg experienced 4s load times, I am guessing that your backend did not handle the HN traffic spike well. Definitely look for ways to speed this up - most of your app's traffic will be concentrated within a few hours.
On pricing:
I agree with the other commentators that the pricing makes no sense.
Right now you have a freemium model, tiered by # of tables. 1. Freemium is great when you can tier by feature offerings or when you can tier by resource allocation. For the former, a SaSS will offer Single Sign On for paying users only. For the latter, the SaSS may give a free tier for personal use, (e.g. a single user account).
2. When we delineate by seats (in your case tables), we are making a bet that as the customer scales up, our product will become essential to our customer working at scale so they see the value in converting to the paid tier. This has an assumption that our customers will scale up.
as fapi1974 pointed out, restaurants don't scale up like this. Their tables are, for the most part, fixed.
Restaurants with more than 10 tables will likely not try the product, and restaurants with less than 10 won't add more than 10.
Instead a free trial makes a lot more sense. Your product is not one-shot, it is recurring. If a customer does the trial and invests the time to input their menu and train their staff then there is a good chance they may convert after the free trial ends. (in fact you can and should track free-trial usage and an leading indicator of whether the customer will convert)
I would also think about unit pricing. $219 for 10 tables is very steep. $219 for 100 tables is a bargain. However, I would guess that the market skews closer to the 10 table capacity.
Final thought. Think about how this helps your customers. Does it save more than $219 a month? Does it increase value for their offerings (probably for event organizers) When you sell to businesses remember they are economic buyers - they need it to make business sense first and foremost.
Best of luck!
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#29Two perspectives: I worked and coded out on alternative POS solutions right when iPad POS solutions became popular. But it's a dead end. It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it. For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped, all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for tables. This is now dead on arrival. Second perspective…
Thank you for your insights and suggestions. I explain the thoughts behind the price a little in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625906 EDIT: > From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device needed). I would like to add that this is the price for two days of rent.
> It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it.
If you're not an existing system, the client interfacing and employee training has to be factored into the costs on both ends. If your demo can't cover the client's needs to a tee, that's either an immediate deal-breaker or you have to build more features just to get considered. Then you have to market your product, do customer service, and do sales.
If you take that all into account, your product is not worth it for you nor the client.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#30Overall, very simple and to the point but not worth $219/mo. In your DEMO, the "Order Status" page takes approx. 4.76s to load 205 orders...this seems like a very poor architecture decision or a poorly written SQL statement combined/rendering logic, especially in 2020. You are headed in the right direction though! To compete with the big guns, you'll either need better pricing or better features (including what other…
Thank you for your feedback. Of course I will check the status page, maybe there is something wrong with rendering.