I built Zayos because a friend
almost lost his restaurant.

I did not set out to build restaurant software. I set out to help a friend who was about to lose something he had spent years building.

He did it the way you are supposed to. First one in, last one out. The food was good, and people came back for it. On paper he had the thing every operator says they want, a place with regulars.

He was still going backwards.

Not because he could not cook, and not because nobody wanted his food. By the time an order reached his kitchen, somebody else had already taken a third of it. His regulars, people who had eaten his food dozens of times, were ordering through an app that charged him for the privilege of serving a customer he had already earned. He was renting his own customers, every month, from a company that had never cooked anything.

That is the part that stayed with me. Everyone knows delivery apps take a commission. What nobody says out loud is that the commission falls hardest on exactly the customers a restaurant works hardest to keep.

He was going to sell. He did not have to. We moved his ordering onto his own site, and he is still open.

That is when this stopped being a favor and started being a company.

What I got wrong first

I am not going to pretend the path was clean. I wrote the code, raised the money, hired, sold, and found a co-founder. I also spent months on things that turned out to be wrong, and the most useful mistake was assuming the pitch was the commission.

It is not. Every company in this category says commission-free. Owners have heard it so many times that it does not register.

What actually stopped operators from saying yes was simpler and much more human. Nobody wanted a second tablet.

Kitchens are already covered in screens. Asking a line that is mid-rush to learn one more system gets you a no, and it should. So Zayos sends direct orders into the tablet the kitchen already runs for the delivery apps, through Otter. Same screen, same routine, one queue. The direct orders simply stop carrying a commission.

That is the whole idea. You keep your regulars, you keep your margin, and your line learns nothing new.

Three things I believe

Where Zayos actually is today

Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is live and taking orders on Zayos right now, keeping more than $48,000 a year that used to leave as commission. That figure comes from the commission model run at 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their launches.

We are early. I would rather tell you that than pretend to be bigger than we are, because the operators I want to work with can tell the difference immediately.

I am not trying to build the biggest restaurant technology company. I am trying to make sure the next person who works that hard gets to keep what he built.

Abdallah Alyousef
Founder, Zay Revenue Group. Fort Lauderdale, Florida.