How was this content?
How Mr Yum delivered for Australia’s hospitality industry
“It was a clever idea, utilizing the user’s device to replace the payment terminals, and we started wondering how much further we could take that idea."
Great startup founders know that sometimes consumer needs change, and it can happen quick. The best founders can spot the opportunities in a changing landscape and pivot quickly to meet those new needs.
This was definitely the case for Mr Yum, a Melbourne-based startup founded in 2018 that began with the idea of enabling restaurant customers to order and pay for food by using their smartphones and QR codes on menus.
“I had seen QR codes used for ordering food in a busy restaurant in China, and I thought we should do that here,” says Mr Yum’s chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder Andrei Miulescu. “It was a clever idea, utilizing the user’s device to replace the payment terminals, and we started wondering how much further we could take that idea.
Building out their vision
Mr Yum hired a dozen people to help build out its vision. However, the company was only adding around one new customer each month. Venue operators were not keen on putting technology between themselves and their guests.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, interest plummeted—along with Mr Yum’s revenue—venues were forced to implement social distancing protocols and close their doors to the public during lockdowns. The company cut salaries by 20 percent, and the founders pondered their future.
The pivotal moment
This could have been an existential crisis for Mr Yum, but they saw an opportunity for growth. The founders added a new software module that would create a pickup and delivery option for its customers.
The new feature was built and deployed in less than 10 days, and offered a lifeline for struggling hospitality venues who could now offer takeaway and delivery options in addition to in-house dining.
The change led to rapid growth for Mr Yum.
“From March to December 2020 we saw a surge in interest, as social distancing led customers to adopt new technology solutions,” Andrei says. “Then customers saw that it was easier, and that led to hypergrowth.”
Solid foundations
Andrei says the pivot was an incredible learning experience—something he equates to “doing five MBAs at once.”
He says what held the company together was the tight relationship between its four founders, each of whom brought a specific skill set—Kim Teo in consulting, Kerry Osborn in marketing, Adrian Osman in sales, and Andrei taking on the technology role.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in the office together, like a family, and we are always talking about the things we could do,” Andrei says. “We agree about a lot of things, and respect each other a lot, and have a strong working relationship.”
Another critical factor was Mr Yum’s decision to choose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider. AWS provided the foundation from which Mr Yum could rapidly build and deploy its new software, while also helping the company scale to accommodate rapid rises in demand.
With AWS and its global infrastructure that enables entry to new international regions in minutes, Mr Yum is taking on the world through expansion into New Zealand, the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore. The company is also adding new features, such as a loyalty points program. New workflows are making life easier for kitchen and bar staff, and the company has signed a world-first partnership with the buy-now-pay-later provider Afterpay.
A global launchpad
Andrei says Australia proved to be the perfect launchpad for Mr Yum, helping the founders understand the preferences of local food lovers, and the pressures faced by venue operators, many of whom were willing to embrace new ideas and provide valuable feedback during the pandemic.
He says staying close to customers has been a critical factor in Mr Yum’s success.
“Venue operators who are so passionate about what they do,” Andrei says. “It’s their livelihood, but they do hospitality because they have a story - they love food, or family, or tradition.
“There have been a lot of lessons we have learned from starting here.”
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Amazon Elasticache
Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, in-memory caching service supporting flexible, real-time use cases.
How was this content?