Owner is already a substantial business, and is on track to 5x (again) in the next 2 years.

In the 3 years since raising pre-seed financing – we’ve reached thousands of restaurants across hundreds of cities in the USA, millions of their guests, and hundreds of millions in payments. Notably, over 2,000 restaurants and 3,000,000 restaurant customers have used our product and collectively processed hundreds of millions in revenue –– in just 3 years.

The best part? Over 70% of our restaurant customers have come inbound. That’s rare in an industry where every incumbent scaled using armies of outbound salespeople.

Scaling SMB software is hard, but we think we’ve cracked the code. It’s hard because they can’t afford to pay much, and inevitably churn at high rates.

Now let's dive deeper:

Learn more about the Owner journey, and the forces that drive our business.

10 years ago, you could build a successful restaurant by “just” providing great food and great service. Those things are hard to do on their own, and rare in tandem. So when restaurant owners got those 2 things right, they'd get a base of loyal customers.

But over the past 10 years, the world has irrevocably changed for restaurants.

Most of the guest experience has moved online. Guests discover your restaurant on Google and Yelp and judge you by reading your reviews. Guests make instant decisions based on how fast your website loads, how it looks, and how you've set it up.

How they order is also moving online. And their expectations are shaped by billion-dollar companies. It doesn't matter that you're a local restaurant that doesn't have the same resources. Guests compare your online ordering system to DoorDash and Starbucks.

What was once a nice-to-have for tech-savvy guests is now the center of the guest experience.

If you interview 100 restaurant owners, at least 90 of them will tell you that their #1 worry is that they’re being left behind online.

Restaurant owners have tried to adapt. They’ve cobbled together 15 different solutions to power each piece of their online presence. Wix for their website, ChowNow for online ordering, MailChimp for email, FiveStars for loyalty, and so on.

But their efforts have led to a time-consuming, expensive mess of complication — not growth.

That’s why we’re building the solution that makes winning online easy.

Where we came from

Adam Guild was inspired to start Owner after an experience he had in saving his mom’s business. She was struggling because she didn’t have the right tools to grow her dog grooming business. She asked him for help, and he built the first version of Owner for her business.

He never thought he’d be able to raise capital as a 17-year-old high school dropout who knew nobody in the tech industry, so we were bootstrapped and profitable for the first 2 years.

The first version of our product was a website-builder focused on helping restaurants drive dine-in. Then COVID happened, and almost killed our business. Dine-in was wiped out overnight.

Unexpected product-market fit during COVID-19

The pandemic was initially devastating to us. It felt like it reset years of progress overnight. All of a sudden, our customers couldn’t afford to pay us. We had spent 2 years acquiring them and making them happy, but now everything we’d done was irrelevant. That felt like a death sentence for us as a bootstrapped startup, because we only had a few months of cash, even after we cut down to a team of 2.

We called all of our customers and asked them how we could help them through this time. The thing that they kept screaming into the phone over and over again was how they were being screwed by delivery apps like GrubHub. They needed a fair way to drive direct online orders—one that didn’t eat up all their margins.

So we built it. We launched it in May of 2020, praying to God it would take off and work.

Thank God, it did. We began to grow fast.

But it became obvious that Owner needed a great co-founder and CTO to realize its potential. The first name that came to mind was Dean Bloembergen, an extremely talented CTO and happened to have years of experience of building software for restaurants. Adam and Dean had been friends for years, but didn’t know when they would work together. The time was now.

They partnered up as co-founders. This accelerated the company even more. The product quickly went from janky to good.

Within 10 months, we went from being about to run out of money to hundreds of customers, millions in revenue, and over $10,000,000 in venture-capital.

Becoming all-in-one

The common wisdom says to focus on being the best at one product. In 2020, our online ordering system started taking off.  So, most people thought we should just focus there.

But our customers were begging us to do more for them. They hated having to duct-tape together over a dozen solutions just to keep up with guest expectations.

So we expanded. We decided to become a compound startup that has everything they need to succeed online. We built an integrated website builder, CRM, email marketing platform, text marketing platform, and job board.

Importantly, we complement (rather than compete with) existing POS solutions. There’s a little overlap in product, because they all offer online ordering products. But the users view adopting Owner as “upgrading” their online presence.

It’s still day 1 

We have thousands of restaurants and millions of guests already using the product.

And there’s a lot more to build.

Over 80% of our website traffic is international, and we haven’t even begun to expand outside of the USA.

AI has enabled breakthroughs for us.

Restaurant owners use our AI email marketing product to create the perfect emails for their goals. The process that used to take them 30 minutes in Mailchimp now takes 30 seconds. You can see it in our latest product update below.

There’s a lot more where that came from. AI can level the playing field and help mom-and-pop owners operate as if they had a team of online marketers and engineers.

Local business owners are heroes to us. 

They risk everything – years of their lives, their families, their savings – to pursue their dreams.

They create jobs, give unique flavors to their neighborhoods, and inspire people around them by showing them that owning their own business is possible.

They remind us that it’s possible to rise from being an entry-level worker to becoming a business owner one day, as 70% of restaurant owners do.

But local business owners are on a path to extinction.

You can see this most clearly in restaurants. Just 20 years ago, 60% of the restaurant world was owned by independent mom-and-pops. Today, that number is 40% and dropping by the year. National and global chains keep taking over, while local restaurants keep shutting down.

This is not a world we want to live in.

We build because we believe that local businesses are the core of our economy. They create the majority of new jobs. They are the beating heart of our communities. They represent hope and optimism for the future.

We build because we believe a world with more local businesses is a better world.

We build because the chips are stacked against them, and we're on their side.

We build to give the superpowers of large corporations to local businesses.