Poloniq

Poloniq - the app

Inspiration

It all started from the fact that I personally do not like placing phone orders or make reservations to restaurants by phone. So, we first started in 2018 with reservations platform - a SaaS solutions for restaurants offering either a landing page for online reservations or a widget for them to place on their website. As the coronavirus crisis appeared, we pivoted to online ordering to help restaurants build their own e-shops.

What it does

The platform allows restaurants to manage reservations and orders on their website or on a landing page created with Poloniq. Basically one can say it is a "Shopify for restaurants".

How we built it

We had our own team of developers to create an MVP. We validated our MVP by going to 2 local startup competitions in Romania, where we received some prizes. We continued improving the product by adding functionalities asked by our clients.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the sales part, as technology is not really a strong point in restaurants, thus understanding of the benefits of the platform was low in the local Romanian market. This is why we aim to choose an external market and we are looking right now at UK and Spain. Pricing is also a challenge that we are still facing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that we managed in one week to pivot and help our clients sell online during the coronavirus crisis. It is important to us to really solve their problems and this one was really tough and unexpected.

What we learned

We learned that it's not about the product functionalities, but about solving a real problem of the client. We learned that we need to better define our market and narrow it to a specific type of restaurant owner, so we better defined our persona.