There are those who have thrown up lucrative corporate careers to become restaurateurs. There are other entrepreneurs who have tapped the growing eating out business by starting portals that help you decide where to eat or order food online or comment on a restaurant you have been to or a dish you have liked or not liked. There are other ventures that help you book tables at restaurants of your choice.

Taking a step forward and hoping to bite into a large piece is 33-year-old Satish Medapati, who has launched a mobile app – aptly called MeDine – that helps you flip through menus and order food through your mobile phone so that it is ready when you go to dine.

An Honours graduate in mathematics from Andhra University and an MBA from REC–Tiruchi (now NIT), Satish worked in companies in India and abroad before starting TouchPoint Data Sciences, with MeDine as the brand. Satish’s business card itself looks like the screen of a smartphone and it gives his designation as Learner & Incubator.

It is early afternoon on a pleasant day in mid-June and The Moghul’s, a restaurant in HSR Layout in south-east Bangalore serving Mughlai food, is where Satish chooses to demonstrate how MeDine works. “It is still early for lunch in Bangalore,” explains Satish, as he whips out his Android smartphone and decides to place an order for lunch. Satish waves out to Ganesan Srinivasan, one of the owners of the restaurant, as he settles on a vegetarian menu.

The order for lunch for two is placed and an acknowledgement received on Satish’s phone. “You pay top dollar when you go to a restaurant to eat and they do not even know your preferences,” he says, on why he thought of the idea. The more number of times you place your order through MeDine, it will remember your preference.

MeDine started off as a browse-only menu. A basic version of the app was out in December 2012. From the beginning, unlike other players in the food business, Satish decided to keep MeDine a mobile app only business. It started off by digitising menu cards. Having browsed the menu, what next was the question. The logical step was to be able to place orders with the click of one more button. Thus, the ordering capability was built into the app last year and Satish quit his full-time job in the second half of 2013.

“We experimented with everything. This restaurant was one of the early adopters,” says Satish. There were many glitches that were set right and customer feedback obtained. In October, the app was completely revamped and TouchPoint Data Sciences started adding more restaurants. It now has nearly 300 restaurants, including multiple outlets of the same brand in Bangalore, signed up, and about 25 in Pune.

Revenue model For the customer, the MeDine app is a free download. Satish’s venture gets its money through two streams from the restaurants. “On the app side, we take a commission based on the number of people per transaction. We take 5 per cent of the order value. The second part is the point of sale system, the software for it. That is on a subscription basis. There is no installation. We give them a user ID and a password. All this is on the cloud,” says Satish.

How does it help a customer? “Pre-order works miraculously well especially when you are running short of time. When you reach the restaurant and tell them that you have pre-ordered through MeDine, they will guide you to your table and with the order identification number, serve you your meal,” says Satish. Even when you are not in a rush, it saves a good 20-30 minutes, as this is what it normally takes to place your order and the food to be served. At any time, there are offers running on MeDine and customers benefit through this also. About 5,600 people have downloaded it on their Android phones and a few hundreds on their Windows and iPhone handsets.

What about restaurants, you ask him. “Let Ganesh explain that,” says Satish, referring to Ganesan, the owner of The Moghul’s. Whenever a customer comes through MeDine, it gives the waiters free time to handle other tables. “It doesn’t mean that I have reduced the number of waiters,” Ganesan says and adds that the restaurant industry is hugely short-staffed. About a third of his customers on an average come through MeDine; it is as high as 45 per cent on week-ends and just about 15 per cent during weekdays.

On expanding outside Bangalore, Satish says the app was conceived with the global market in mind. He wanted to come up with a fool-proof solution. “We always had this fail safe, fail cheap concept in mind,” he adds. “Now, we are at the cusp of growth. Till this time, we were just experimenting and learning as to how do we make it to x cities in x number of years, what does it need. That is why we have not ventured out of Bangalore.”

Expansion plan Satish’s plan is to hit 600-650 restaurants in Bangalore before stepping out. The success of the app depends quite a lot on repeat usage and that will be achieved only by increasing the number of restaurants that sign up for the app. The repeat usage now is around 50 per cent and this can increase only by having more restaurants using the app.

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