Almost all restaurants struggle with two basic challenges: bringing in new customers and dealing with low traffic during off-peak hours.
Many companies have attempted to solve this problem in the past, but the team behind Freevo thinks it’s cracked the code once and for all. Their fix? Just give food away for free.
“The goal was not to do something which is discounted, which has been done several times before,” says Freevo founder and CEO Anthony Miller. “The logic behind [our solution] is to drive traffic into these restaurants, particularly when they need it most.”
Here’s how it works: Restaurants list between five and 10 menu items to offer and can select at which times the deals go live. Freevo members get access to unlimited offers on the app they can only have one coupon active at a time.
Each deal must be redeemed within 45 minutes, and in order to gain access to new coupons users upload photos of their paper receipts.This allows the restaurant to see when they get a return on their investment.
“From the data we can see that consumers are using the app repeatedly, bringing several friends along with them and they’re actually purchasing items in addition to the free item off the app,” Miller said. “Our restaurants are making in excess of 300 percent return on their Freevo investment.”
Freevo is free to download, but eaters pay a $20 yearly membership fee to access the app’s deals. (For July that fee is waived.) Restaurants also pay to be on the platform. The cost for listing 200 offers is $200. Freevo counts 150 Chicago restaurants on its platform including Sayat Nova and Milt’s Barbecue for the Perplexed.
Miller is located in South Africa, where a portion of the Freevo dev team also operates. He said the Chicago team sits at about 10 people, and he hopes to hire 15 to 20 full-time salespeople by the end of August to get more restaurants onto the app.
As for why the South African founder chose to launch his app in Chicago of all places — the Windy City is currently Freevo’s first and only market — Miller says that decision was easy.
“The team was drawn to Chicago by the city’s world-renowned restaurant scene, and also the growing stamp in the tech industry. That in the combination with [Freevo partner] Restaurant Depot suggesting the city made it a very easy decision for us,” he said.
Image via Shutterstock.
Working on an app Chicagoans should know about? Let us know with a tip or a tweet @BuiltInChicago
