Totomenu

- 8/2019


Visit toto.menu

August 2019

The company were Antoine worked (Abbeal) lunched a incubator and Antoine (20 years old at the time) decides to apply with EasyResto. A simple SAAS to make restaurant websites.

The pitch was like: So many restaurants make their websites via a agency, that costs a lot. And most websites still suck even at the basics.

By making a landing page generator only for restaurants we can make sure the basics are always good: restaurant contact, opening hours, location, menu and some pictures of the place and dishes.

The restaurant only has to fill in the blanks, no need for a designer and developer.



September 2019

Antoine thought the domain name was very important, so he bought the very expensive ‘mon.rest’ domain name (spoiler: it was a big waste of money).

The idea is to make short URLs for restaurants so that restaurants don’t have to buy domain names.

In french “mon” means “my”, so is like “my.rest”.

Here is a link of the first prototype.



Novermber 2019

The idea is rejected from the incubator, and Antoine abandoned the project to focus on his studies at 42.



May 2020

Our parent’s restaurant wants to do deliveries (because of covid). They want to do the deliveries themselves and not pay a comission. So Antoine starts developing it, and Xavier (18 years old at the time) starts doing physical deliveries and managing all the logistics.

All the development is done only for that restaurant, no intention to sell it to others (yet).



July 2022

2 years passed, the app kept running fine. Antoine was about to finish his studies, so we asked ourselvs what to do about this app.

Our parents restaurant wanted more features to be added, and now they had to have a digital menu because paper was not allowed. We were



November 2022

Antoine and Xavier at the Radio Universo Studio

Antoine and Xavier at the Radio Universo Studio

December 2022




January 2023

We join the 42 Statup Club incubator at Station F

Xavier in our offices at Station F

Xavier in our offices at Station F


March 2023



September 2023



February 2024

We move to Chile in our parents basement

Our parent's basement

Our parent's basement


May 2024

We reached $500 in MRR with 30 clients. If you do the math with our pricing this number should be a lot higher ($40/m * 30 = $1200), but most of them are on a yearly plan (~$30 per month) and many have a group discount (50% on your second establishment). Most of those deals came out of desperation, and 0 knowledge on sales and negotiantions, we are learning.

It took us 19 months reach this, a lot more than we ever expected. But the good news is that we are already in talks with many restaurants, and we predict to reach the $1000 MRR in less than 3 months.



The QR Backlash Has Won. Restaurants Are Ditching Them for Good.

a picture of a news article about QR menus being over

a picture of a news article about QR menus being over

Also this month many people told us about this article by the Wall Street Journal, printed by “El Mercurio”, one of the biggest prited news in Chile.

The article sites a handful of restaurants in the US that are deciding to go back to paper, but in never mentions all of the ones that are staying with digital menus.

Ocationally we receive complaints of people saying that paper was better and that QR menus make restaurants look low quality and with bad service.

We of course don’t agree, we believe that scaning a QR code is a cheap price to pay for a menu that is always up to date with a lot more information that paper could ever provide.

But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we belive or what a journalist at the Wall Street Journal believes. Restaurants are the ones that decide what menu they want. And our mission as a company is to make the best QR menus for the ones that decide to take this route.



June 2024

$600 MRR.

We completely refactored the codebase to use Server Side Rendering (SSR). The menu was loading very slow, the app had many bugs and it was unpredictable. We are still not fully done with the refactoring, but google already noticed the changes:

a screenshot of google search console showing numbers going up

a screenshot of google search console showing numbers going up



July 2024

Daniela (Antoine’s wife) joined the team, she is helping off load the client support, and uploading the menus to the platform (currently a manual process that can take a long time).

Also we upgraded our office furniture, but still in our parent’s basement.



September 2024

$1000 MRR, finally.

We kept reaching out as much as we could, asking for referals. Having clientes made it easier to sign new ones, restaurant owners are not good “early adopters”.

But besides that not much. There is no feature or anything particular that is making selling easier.



November 2024

$1150 MRR.

We have a new project that we started a couple of months ago, Parlamento AI that is picking up really fast. We shifted all of our time and attention to this project.