Checkmate: Redefining Restaurant Technology With Vishal Agarwal (Ep 231)
Empowering restaurants to thrive in the digital age, Checkmate offers a suite of innovative solutions. In this episode, Jaime Oikle chats with Vishal Agarwal, the founder and CEO of Checkmate, a tech game-changer for restaurants. Initially focused on simplifying payment processes, Vishal discovered restaurant operators' deeper challenges with managing orders from multiple platforms. That's when the lightbulb went off! Vishal and his team created a suite of tools that not only simplify payments but also streamline online ordering, kiosks, and even phone orders using AI. Tune in to explore the future of restaurant technology and the impact of Checkmate’s solutions.
Learn more about Checkmate at https://www.itsacheckmate.com.
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Checkmate: Redefining Restaurant Technology With Vishal Agarwal
Coming up on this episode of the RunningRestaurants.com podcast, I get with Vishal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Checkmate, and we cover just a lot of content around tech, mobile ordering, marketing, and more. Stay tuned.
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Vishal, you guys are in the restaurant tech space, of course. Tell us a bit about the company, and we'll dig in from there.
Sounds great. Thank you, Jaime, for having us. We're a restaurant tech company. We started this company back in 2016. The initial idea was to develop a mobile app that you could use to pay and split your check when you're dining in restaurants. That's where the name Checkmate comes from. I tried that for about a year and a half, it didn't work out very well. I stumbled upon this opportunity where there were multiple tablets on a counter. The restaurant operator said, "What you're trying to sell to me is nice to have, but come here, I'll show you the real problem."
He showed me, and I still have the picture, multiple tablets on a counter, and there were one or two people responsible for just managing those tablets and entering the orders. That gave me the idea to start with the solution of integrating multiple orders from different third-party platforms. In those times, you had Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, Caviar, Amazon was doing the delivery. A lot of different players were trying to integrate into the POS systems or work with the restaurant operators. Our product was integrating those third-party platforms into the POS systems. We've obviously evolved quite a bit since then. We have our own first-party online ordering solution.
We have a kiosk solution, we have catering, and in April of this year, we also bought a voice AI company, which will provide a phone ordering AI solution and a drive-thru AI solution. At the core of it, the underlying architecture for all of these solutions is the incredible and robust POS integrations and the menu management system that we have built. If you ask me, "Vishal, where do you position yourself as a company today?" We are the company that enables restaurant brands and operators to become digitally omnipresent. They all have their POS systems, but we enhance the capabilities of the POS by extracting the menu and pushing it out to all of these various digital channels so that brands and operators don't have to spend countless hours doing those integrations, experimenting, and not knowing what works and what doesn't work.
That's what we do as a company, we are seeing where the puck is going to be. Yum! Brands announced 50% of their revenue is already coming from digital. We have Firehouse Subs saying they will be 100% digital by 2025. Shake Shack says 32% of their revenue comes from kiosks alone. The explosion in the number of digital channels is not going to stop. What we believe is holding the restaurant operators back is, "How can I quickly experiment with what digital channel works for my brand, for my demographic, and grow from there?" That's what we are enabling, operators to be present on multiple channels.
It's got to be fascinating, the change you've seen from 2016. Eight years or so, I can picture the exact thing you're talking about. For a while, there were so many tablets sitting around and it was just a nightmare. A lot of that has been getting smoothed out. As a restaurant operator, you've got fifteen different companies calling on you: "Take our solution," and you've got to think, how does it integrate? How does it work? Because you don't want to pass up on any orders. You want them all to come in, but you want them to come in in an effective way. That seems like one of the biggest pieces that you guys are solving. But why restaurants? How did you guys even pick restaurants to work with?
I'm not from the restaurant background. Again, born and brought up in India, I moved here in 2012. I was the chief marketing officer of an e-commerce retail company. The idea came from solving a very apparent consumer behavior problem, which is when I go to dine in restaurants, I just have to wait forever to pay my check. It's obviously much better now with those devices. If you think about the steps, I'm done with my meal, and then I'm waving to a waiter like, "Can I get my check?" They're like, "Yeah, sure." They'll come drop your check, leave, you put on your credit card, and then you're waiting again. They go swipe it, come back, it's literally a three- or four-step process.
The idea was, what if, when you're done with your meal, you swipe a button on your phone and you can walk out? That was the initial idea. I spent a lot of time visiting restaurants, talking to operators, and then from there, this particular idea came about. I don't know if I can present something, but I can show you the exact picture that generated this idea for me. I always, for some reason, have it open on my desktop. This is a photograph taken by me. You can't read it, but the restaurant's called Taco Dumbo. It's in Dumbo, Brooklyn. I was trying to sell to this operator, and he's like, "Vishal, do you see this? This is a problem I have right now. Can you help solve it?" The incredible part is, you see that door in the background, a diner would walk in, and they would have to come to this counter, tower over the existing tablets, and then place an order. You're literally creating a wall between you and the customer. This is where the idea originated from.
Web Vs. App
That's a nightmare. I see technology as a pain point for restaurants, finding that solution. Let's go to the web versus the app first. I want to ask you guys your opinion. You can have a dedicated app that does the orders, lots of benefits to that. You can have mobile ordering that does everything you need it to do. Is there a stronger answer for one versus the other? What do you think?
You mean a web app versus a mobile app?
I guess what I mean is, you can order just on the web. That might be the only thing you can do. You could do it on your phone, or you could do it on a desktop, or you could have a dedicated app. Like, I pull up a little button on my phone, and it’s your restaurant app. That’s just the distinction I’m talking about. If you feel like there’s more impact than having an icon on a screen where you go into an app and so forth versus mobile slash.
There’s value to having both. I live in the city, there are two or three restaurants that I absolutely love. There’s MaLa Project, a two-location shop. I love Naya, which has obviously grown a lot bigger. You get your ice cream from 16 Handles, and I promise I’m not just trying to promote our customers, but these brands also have their most loyal customers. For those customers, it absolutely makes sense to have a dedicated mobile app, right on your screen, a dedicated button. It really depends on how much you’re spending to create that mobile app. If you’re a 500-location chain, a 1,000-location chain, you have a large set of loyal customers for whom it’s worth maybe spending a million dollars to create that mobile app. But for a 30-location chain, a 50-location chain, it is still worth it, but it’s absolutely not worth a million dollars.
That’s one of the gaps that we have seen in this industry, and that’s what we have developed a solution towards. You can have your own web app, you can have your own branded mobile app, and it does not have to cost you an arm and a leg, but it still services your most loyal customers in a very effective fashion. So it all depends. If your question is, is it worth it? Yes, but how much is the question?
Kiosk Trends
Good. Thanks for that. I’ve done both. We eat out a lot with the kids. School finishes, practice finishes. What are we going to order on the way home? Half the time, we order something in the car, on the way, on the phone, pick it up nice and easy. The other times, we go in like regular people and order at the counter. We do experience both of those things. I also have started to see more kiosks, and I know you guys do that. It’s a trend. It can be both a labor-saving trend, it can be just a quickness trend. What are you seeing on the kiosk side?
The way we are thinking about kiosks is, again, it’s not rocket science. It’s been done. It’s been solved before. What we’re really trying to present here is an interconnected system. What happens is, again, you talked about earlier in the conversation, there are multiple vendors and partners, and you have to talk about how does this integrate with this and how does this work with the other solution? What we’re saying is, we have your POS integrations. We can pull the menu from there, customize it to your brand’s liking, and push it to this channel called Kiosk. We have our own dedicated kiosk app as well. We are hardware agnostic, and it just works.
If you’re looking for the absolute top-class, best-in-category with that 0.02% of the feature set that is required, we probably don’t have that, although our kiosk has gotten extremely advanced. But for the vast majority, for the 99.8% of people, it just works. It’s functional, it’s fundamentally sound, and it serves your customers and reflects your brand in the best light. That’s how we’re thinking about kiosks. Whether you have your own first-party solution on web or your mobile app, or your kiosk, your phone ordering AI, your drive-thru AI, it’s all one interconnected system so that you don’t have to worry about the integrations, we take care of it.
I was in a brand this week that was kiosk only, and several brands are kiosk only. What I was surprised by is, the customers that walked in right at the same time as us were in their 60s, 70s, older. I was like, this is not going to work. They’re going to ask for people, but no, they went right to the kiosk, did their thing. In fact, they ended up helping me with the soda machine that had a text QR code. They knew what was going on. It’s no longer really a barrier and a comfort level, and I still have that thought in my head as well. Anyway, I wanted to share that story because I thought it was funny.
One quick point on that. We visited a very large brand in Miami, visited one of their stores. They told us a really interesting fact about kiosks that we hadn’t looked at. They said, "We’re not looking at this as a labor-saving [measure]. We’ve got three kiosks in our store. When a customer walks in, the people who used to stand behind the counter are freed up and are on the floor." To your point, if there are people who walk in who are not comfortable with using kiosks, these people are there to assist them if you need assistance. Otherwise, go ahead and do your thing. It’s actually enhancing the customer experience without adding labor costs. With kiosks, you get more data, you’re able to upsell, so those are the fundamentals that we are focusing on.
It’s about enhancing the customer experience without adding labor costs.
Online Menu Optimization
Good. I want to talk about data in a minute. I want to talk about menu because you’ve brought it up a couple of times. What have you seen? What have you learned from doing online menu ordering, picking the right items, featuring the ones that have the best profit? What are you learning there that can make restaurants more profitable?
I think our menu management solution that we have, which we call Everywhere, is absolutely one of the strongest solutions we have. The core feature of this is, we build the menu that utilizes the maximum functionality for every channel that it is being sent to. What I mean by that, again, is, let’s say you have a third-party platform that doesn’t support nested categories, for example. You shouldn’t be stuck using the lowest common denominator in terms of the functionality of a menu and sending it to all of the other channels that can accept more, that can accept better, but you’re not able to send to them because the lowest common denominator, that is the base-level menu that this least functional platform accepts.
That is why we’ve developed this Everywhere solution, which allows a brand to create the menu that suits that particular channel the most and the best. A kiosk may actually support a different layout of your pizza vendor than what your third party could, or what your mobile app could. It could be completely different when a person is calling in to order a pizza or when they’re creating their own burgers or creating their own salad. That’s one of the fundamental bottlenecks we had seen when brands wanted to explore different channels. For example, if you want to have a specific menu item, a hidden menu item on kiosks because you want to encourage people to go to kiosks, you should be able to do that with the click of a few buttons. It’s a new channel, I’m just putting this item on this channel. That’s it. That’s what we have solved for in terms of multi-channel management.
Tell me what you’re learning about the upsell feature, creating a higher average check size, increasing that, because I find that especially, I’m an Amazon junkie, you like this, get this. I’m seeing restaurants start to do that better, making suggestions based on order history, making it easy for me to find my favorites. Any learnings you’re seeing there in particular?
We are just venturing into the machine learning recommendations algorithm very shortly. The beauty is, we have data across multiple brands who use us for their third-party channels, GoDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats. They use us for first-party, they use us for kiosks, they’re getting our voice ordering. We have this entire interconnected system, so no matter which channel you come to us with, we have the best information to be able to recommend something that we hope you will like, with the biggest propensity to convert. We are absolutely investing quite a bit there. Again, in April of this year, we bought a voice AI company. How I thought of that when making that purchase is, we're not really buying a voice AI company or a product.
What we are bringing in-house is AI expertise. We are looking to infuse the buzzword that is AI these days into every aspect of the solution in the real and most practical manner. AI-based recommendations, AI-based analytics, AI-based marketing solutions and segmentation solutions for our customers, AI-based personalization. When every customer comes on board, opens the page, can I not customize the entire menu based on what we think they’d like? Infusing machine learning and AI solutions into all aspects, including upsells and recommendations, is a big focus for our company in the first half of next year.
Loyalty And Marketing
It’s certainly the buzzword that’s flying around everywhere, and it’s making things smarter, making things faster. Listen, if you can make recommendations that make my life easier as a customer, I love it. I want that. I like the direction that’s going. I hope that we remain and continue the human piece of the restaurant business because that’s so important, but where can we layer in the technology to make the experience better as well? I’m all for it. We hit on the kiosk, mobile ordering, the voice AI. I want to talk about loyalty and marketing because I saw that as also a bucket that you do. I find that stuff fascinating in terms of what a restaurant can do to encourage someone to come one more time a month, two more times a month.
You’re in New York. We were talking before we started recording. I was there just a couple of weeks ago, and I forgot how many restaurants are in New York. We were walking down the street and my daughter goes, “How do you choose where to eat?” I said, “You just go somewhere and then you go somewhere else.” That’s a bit of an anomaly, but in most marketplaces, even where I am in the suburbs of Orlando, I have 50 choices for lunch, 50 choices for dinner. Why am I going to choose you? How are you going to pull me in? That question continues to just rattle in my brain. How do you guys think about loyalty? How do you get them to come back? What are you guys doing in that realm?
One of the fundamental things we've always lived by, Jaime, is we are not a technology company. We are a solutions company. Technology is a way to provide that solution, it’s not the entire solution. The formula that we always have is technology plus service equals our solution. Today, loyalty and marketing, it is such a broad term and a broad phrase. Honestly, even your midsize operators, 10 or 20 locations, all the way to 100 locations, they don’t really have the team, the department, the capacity to manage loyalty and marketing on their own.
Technology is a way to provide that solution. It's not the entire solution.
What we are providing, in addition to the tools, the automation, and the solution that we have, the platform, we have a fully-serviced, fully-baked-in-cost-wise service layer that sits on top of these tools, working closely with the restaurants to optimize and achieve their objectives. We have a team that works with the restaurant operators and says, “What is your objective? Is it to get your loyal customers to come one more time? Is it to get new customers? Is it to get rid of your old inventory? Is it to maximize profit, maximize sales?” You do your loyalty and marketing based on those objectives.
Loyalty has become a very common thing, like, how can I get the people to buy more? As we’re working, we have a first-party marketing team that’s done this for a very long time. They’ve done this in previous companies, they’ve worked as agencies. It’s like, “Vishal, loyalty and marketing is not the common thing that everyone is painted with. It could mean very different things to very different people. This person is a loyal customer, but he or she only orders one side and one drink, it’s not really a high-value customer. What I really mean by loyalty is high-value customer, but do you mean high value or do you mean high profit?”
What is my objective? I’m at twenty locations, and I want to grow franchisees and I want to show increased sales to attract more franchisees. Your loyalty and marketing campaigns are structured around those objectives, and we have a team that works with the operators to understand those objectives and run campaigns accordingly. That’s our focus and area of growth.
Everybody wants to send a newsletter, everybody wants to send a text, everybody wants to do this, but we get bogged down, and so the more that stuff can make sure it happens, it’s important. It spins into the same conversation of, you’re collecting all this data, however you want to say it, from the transactions, from the customers. I don’t know how you share it, but you have all these restaurants collecting data across the spectrum as well. You’re probably seeing a lot of data points, but specifically, if I’m a restaurant, what am I not doing now that I should be doing based on the data that I have in my location or locations?
A lot, but I don’t blame them. This was back in 2018. I think I was on a panel at a food-on-demand conference, and I was on a panel and there was a huge hue and cry in the industry where the operator said that if a customer buys food from my restaurant, but does it through DoorDash, I own that data. I should own that data. My stance on that podium, for which I got a lot of boos, was two things. One, no, you don’t. The platform that got the customer to pull out the credit card and enter that information, that’s the platform that owns the data. You don’t. Number one. Number two, even if you had all of the data, you would not know what to do with it. After that panel, I met with a gentleman who used to work at Pizza Hut. He said, “Vishal, we had all the data in the world. You know what we did with that data? We ran a Super Bowl ad.”
There you go.
That is the entire crux of why we have the service layer with our loyalty and marketing component that we are offering to our restaurant operators. There is all of this data, but you won’t be able to use it because you don’t have the team, the expertise, the people, or the time to spend on this. We have the tools, we have the platform, we have the data. Let us work with you to achieve your objectives. Because, by the data per se is not going to mean anything unless you do something with it. Again, like I said, it’s not their fault that they can’t do much with the data. It’s not what they are. I was the chief marketing officer for the previous company that I worked with.
The data per se is not going to mean anything unless you do something with it.
I knew nothing about marketing, but I knew a lot about data and analytics. When we talk about loyalty and marketing, the underlying core of that is data and analytics and how you leverage that to target better, to segment better, to analyze better. That’s what we are offering. We’re offering results. We’re not offering tools to our operators. We’re saying, “This is your objective based on which we did this, and these are the results. Let’s do more.”
Personal Interests
So many opportunities inside of that. Let’s go to some personal stuff. I see you got a tennis shot in the background. Is it you? Are you a tennis fan? What’s going on?
No, I don’t play tennis, but I’m a huge tennis fan because of Roger Federer. This was a gift to me, a previous birthday gift from my sister-in-law, because she knows I literally worship the ground he walks on. Love tennis, love sports in general. Before this call, we were on our engineering call, and only towards the end it gets, “Let’s talk about something personal,” very similar to what we’re doing here. I was at the Mets game, not in this series but the one before that. They’re like, “Vishal, are you going to go to another one?” I said, “We’re getting hammered. I don’t know if I have the courage to go to that one,” but just love sports in general.
Business Advice
You’re in New York. This is going to air at a different time, but in New York, you’ve got the Yankees and the Mets fighting for a chance in the World Series. We’ll see by the time this airs, we’ll know the result, but an exciting time to be a sports fan in New York. Let’s go to the advice side on the business side. You’ve been in companies, run companies. What’s a good piece of advice you’ve received in the past?
Again, I love to read and understand what other founders and operators have gone through. When I go through a hardship, I’m like, “This is nothing.” Phil Knight, the founder of Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, had contracted with a factory in China, and he had already made the sales, but that factory decided not to ship his goods. In those days, he had to fly to China. Compared to that, I have it easy. Just some perspective, I always like to definitely follow a lot of the advice and principles of Jeff Bezos and how he operated, getting his family to a warehouse packing on the eve of Christmas.
Again, my thing is like, I’m not the first person doing this. Let’s learn from experience. The one thing that I live by is just discipline and consistency. The only way you grow and the only way you move ahead is, first and foremost, you have to show up every day. Some will be good days. Some will be bad days. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is showing up and putting in the hard yard, because at the end of the day, every single one of those yards counts and helps you get ahead.
The only way you move ahead is first and foremost, you have to show up every day.
There’s a good saying right around that where even a bad workout at the gym is a good workout because you showed up, and sometimes that can be the best. Just keep making progress. You talked about books. Let’s go there. Is there a book you’re reading or a recommendation you’d like to share with folks?
Yeah, sure. One of the books that’s really influenced me is from the founders of Pixar, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. The way they ran their company. He had a really good saying “I give stock options to my employees, and they vest on a monthly basis, not on a yearly basis.” His rationale was, if somebody wants to check out after 8 or 9 months, they would stick around for another three months and poison the atmosphere of the company just to have the shares vest. I don’t want you in my company. You have monthly vesting, you can leave whenever you want. That’s the philosophy we follow too.
Future Trends
I’ll grab this one because I just finished it. This was recommended by a recent podcast guest, the Netflix book, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. They talk about if you don’t want to be there, they want to push you out and they’ll give you a severance package. If it’s your time to move on, move on. Don’t stay and pollute our atmosphere. We only want people that want to be here and are on our mission with us going that way. Restaurant industry, you guys are in the thick of it. Trends are happening all the time. It’s changed dramatically in just the last 2 or 3 years. Where do you see things 2 or 3 years in the future?
It’s funny you mention, by the time this episode airs, things may have already changed from what you’re talking about right now. That’s how fast it’s going. I’m not the kind, Jaime, that says, “I can look into the future.” I’m more the kind that says that I can adapt very quickly. That’s what’s got us here. I never expected to be in this position. We are roughly about nineteen and a half million in ARR. We started from zero, and we have a path to grow and go ahead. In terms of the trends, we’re definitely seeing a proliferation of digital channels. That’s where our focus has been for the past two years, and how do we enable more brands to adopt and accept digital channels to continually grow their revenue?
COVID accelerated the flip of the ratio. It used to be 90% in-house, 10% outside your four-wall digital. That ratio is already coming to two-thirds to one-third, and very soon it will flip to more digital and less in-person. You made a comment earlier on, “I walked into the store and placed an order like a regular person.” Very soon it could be, “I walked into the store and placed an order like an irregular person.” The regular are the ones who ordered digitally. It’s a matter of time. That’s where we see the industry going. There is definitely my personal goal, I need to speak to at least one or two operators every week to keep my ears to the ground.
One of the common themes I’m hearing is, whatever we adopt, whatever solution we bring on board, does it make the lives of our operators easy or hard? The store manager, the staff, the franchisees, that’s a big focus for us whenever we are evaluating a new solution. That’s how we are structuring our business as an integrated solution that is user-friendly and is backed by a service layer. We are not just a technology company that gives you the solution and says, “Go do it yourself.” It’s like, you walk into a restaurant, you order a burger, and somebody says, “Here are the ten ingredients, go make your burger yourself.” You wouldn’t like that, would you?
No.
When you’re talking to a technology company or when you’re talking to a technology solution provider, they should provide you with a solution. I really believe in being in close touch with our customers. I onboarded the first 200 myself, they still have my cell phone number, my email. I always make sure to get back to my emails and am available for anyone and everyone to reach out. I would not have a case where a customer has reached out and I have not addressed the problems. I think that’s where the industry, it’s always been there. We’re looking for solutions that help solve our problems. Just do it in a humane way without telling us to go figure it out by ourselves, because you didn’t build a restaurant and we didn’t build a technology company. Let’s not reverse the roles here. Help us understand this and don’t call us ignorant for not understanding it.
We covered a lot. As we start to wrap up, is there anything we didn’t cover that you want to hit on? Anything you’re doing or anything else you see, or parting words of wisdom? What do you think?
No parting words of wisdom as such. We talked about a book, Attitude: The Warrior Way. One of the quotes, I have it written down here somewhere, I don’t know if I can find it real quick. It says, “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”
Good one.
Helps keep you, as an entrepreneur, as a founder, level-headed. Don’t let the joys make you overjoyed. Don’t let the downs get you too down.
Hard advice to follow, but excellent advice at the same time. Listen, send them to the website. Any socials? Do you maybe have a white paper or a report anywhere you want to send them? Let them know where to go.
Just ItsACheckmate.com. We have a lot of good content there. We put out some papers. They talk about us. They talk about our competitors. They talk about the industry. We have a good outline of the solution there. So do visit us there.
Good. I know. I did. I looked at the site. I know there are some articles on there, some reports, maybe some case studies and so forth. Good stuff there, folks. Vishal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Checkmate. You can see them on the web at ItsACheckmate.com. For more great restaurant marketing and service people and tech tips, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, do us a favor. Wherever you’re listening or watching, please hit the like button, subscribe, review us, rate us. That stuff is very helpful. I do appreciate it. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Vishal.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Important Links
- Vishal Agarwal’s LinkedIn
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
- Attitude: The Warrior Way
- Checkmate