Chowly is a cloud-based solution that helps restaurants of all sizes integrate third-party online ordering systems into point-of-sale (POS) systems to manage orders, payments, billing, and more.The end result is a technology that saves restaurants time and money. Earlier this year, Chowly launched its Restaurant Control Center, which serves as a centralized hub for integrations and empowers restaurants with consolidated data and business insights. Sterling found that a lot of online ordering systems had great consumer experiences or great operations and back-end experiences for restaurants, but not both. Chowly’s acquisition of Koala allowed them to offer superior experiences to both consumers and restaurants. Sterling predicts that dynamic pricing will take off in 2023, with companies like Sauce, Pricing and Juicer leading the way. Apps need to provide an intrinsic value. They can’t just be used to check a box. Dynamic pricing will be a shaky system at first, but after 18-24 months, it will have found its footing and be widely accepted by consumers. Quotes “Co-opetition is wild in the restaurant space. The amount of overlap of features from point-of-sale to online ordering companies to loyalty systems to marketing systems – everyone’s got overlap of features.” (Sterling) “I feel like the restaurant industry is going through a bundling cycle right now. It’s not uncommon to see industries go through bundling and unbundling cycles.” (Sterling) “The consolidation has to make sense. It has to pair well together. Consolidation for consolidation’s sake isn’t helpful to anyone.” (Sterling) “The first question to ask is, ‘Do I need another app on my phone?’ I’m at the point now where the only time an app really matters is if it’s completely built with the customer in mind.” (Joseph) “Half of the restaurant industry is small operators and independents. We don’t have the same big-player mentality (as the travel industry).” (Sterling) “You can’t commoditize a really great burger. The airlines are very much commoditized. The experiences are very similar. In a restaurant, they’re completely different.” (Sterling) “As digital threatens the viability of restaurant dining rooms, the question becomes, ‘What makes my dining room worth sitting in?’” (Joseph) “Restaurants need to meet consumers where they are. I don’t think on-premise is going away, no matter how much I love the convenience of getting my food delivered to me.” (Sterling) Quotes 00:00.55 vigorbranding Hey guys today I'm joined by my new friend sterling Douglas he's the co-founder and Ceo of Chali which we're gonna dive into a lot so many things happening over there and just so you know we've been chatting for about 10 minutes on all things. So I think it's gonna be great episode. Ah. Sterling say hello and give up a backstory. 00:17.83 Sterling _Chowly_ Hey Joseph thanks for having me on I'm excited to kind of dive into a bunch of these topics that we were getting into yeah cofounder Ceo Chali where digital platform that enables restaurants to expand their off-prem capabilities before. Chaey I used to be an actuary deep into data analytics and just found that data really wasn't moving cleanly between restaurants and you know that really prompted kind of the founding for chaey so that we could take data from you know uber eats grubhubs of the world and help restaurants kind of adopt this new technology without. You know the operational headaches that a lot of them break. 00:56.73 vigorbranding Yeah,, that's Amazing. So Let's actually just dig right into that founding a little bit. Um, suffice to say online ordering and the tech that you got into there's a lot of players out there. So what. Really prompted because it seems like a big risk right? It's like I'm going to launch another online ordering platform you're going into a C of a lot of varying degrees of competition from the old guard to the