bravo is a simple app that allows restaurants to order faster and reduce delivery mistakes
Could you explain what your startup does in a few sentences?
bravo is a b2b eCommerce platform, connecting restaurants and food wholesalers. There are about 25,000 independent restaurants in Switzerland and close to 1,000 wholesalers, typically specialized in certain products like fish, vegetables, meat etc. Traditionally they do business via phone, e-mail and paper. We brought those processes online.
Tell us about your background? Do you come from the restaurant industry? If so, did it lead to identifying a gap in the market that you are addressing with bravo?
Oliver has a background in the restaurant industry. He experienced the inefficiencies in the current processes himself. This led us to look into how other companies in the industry are running their business. We discovered that processes across the industry haven’t improved much since the 1980s. They literally still use fax machines. We were convinced that a major transformation will happen in the next 5-10 years and that bravo could play a major role in this shift to digital in the industry.
Which is the most difficult part of having a startup?
Focus. There are always a thousand things that could be done, but very limited time. Customers and prospective customers ask us for dozens of features and we need to prioritize. Companies from other industries have asked whether we could build something like bravo for their industry. We had to make sure we stay focused on our vision and the things that get us there.
What are your long-term goals?
We are currently very focused on solving one problem, offline ordering processes. And we are doing this in Switzerland only. In the future, we want to offer tools to simplify additional processes like payments or logistics. And we might go beyond Switzerland. But that’s further down the line.