
Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices - bhdzllr
https://www.flexiblepos.com/
======
pupdogg
Overall, very simple and to the point but not worth $219/mo. In your DEMO, the
"Order Status" page takes approx. 4.76s to load 205 orders...this seems like a
very poor architecture decision or a poorly written SQL statement
combined/rendering logic, especially in 2020. You are headed in the right
direction though! To compete with the big guns, you'll either need better
pricing or better features (including what others already offer). Make sure to
do your market research beforehand or lineup a paying customer in return for
significant discount. Best software is created when you have end-users using
it and providing you direct feedback.

~~~
jhowell
Is this advice anecdotal or from personal experience?

~~~
LordOfWolves
Lengthy load times are detrimental to UX. Just look at how people are
increasingly less likely to wait for a page to finish loading with every
additional second it takes to load [1, 2].

In regards to feedback from users, this is especially true when finding
product-market-fit (when an idea actually becomes a business). There’s nothing
better than learning what customers who actually use your product want in
future releases/improvements. It’s a case of building based off actual demand
versus based off a hypothetical in one’s mind (a very common “failing”, i.e.
learning experience, for first-time founders). Only when your product grows to
the point of attracting potential customers outside your target demographic
should you not place tremendous value on every single piece of feedback.

[1]: [https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed](https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-
speed)

[2]: [https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-
time/](https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/)

------
alaskamiller
Two perspectives: I worked and coded out on alternative POS solutions right
when iPad POS solutions became popular. But it's a dead end. It's too complex
and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it.

For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped,
all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for
tables. This is now dead on arrival.

Second perspective as a restauranteur: $219/mo is crazy expensive. I pay
$300/mo to Revel and $180/mo to Clover for two different types of businesses.

With the $300/mo to Revel they process thousands a day and I have 24/7 phone
support that within 2 min a live human handles my problems.

With the $180/mo to Clover they process hundreds a day and I have an easy to
use, to easy to service system that I can hack into and custom build Android
apps to do whatever I want.

Your $219/mo don't come close to delivering value like that.

Sorry.

~~~
bhdzllr
Thank you for your insights and suggestions.

I explain the thoughts behind the price a little in this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625906)

EDIT:

> From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order
> management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device
> needed).

I would like to add that this is the price for two days of rent.

~~~
wigl
Have also worked on POS programs and I have to agree with this sentiment:

> It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth
> it.

If you're not an existing system, the client interfacing and employee training
has to be factored into the costs on both ends. If your demo can't cover the
client's needs to a tee, that's either an immediate deal-breaker or you have
to build more features just to get considered. Then you have to market your
product, do customer service, and do sales.

If you take that all into account, your product is not worth it for you nor
the client.

------
tauntz
We've been using uniCenta at our restaurant for 4 years (the open-source
version). It's barely usable, all our employees hate it, the UX (and UI) gives
the impression that all the people working on it have never actually used it
themselves. It's dead-slow and sometimes you need to log into the mysql DB
directly to clear some tables..

The reason why we use it? We're not in the US - there's not too much room for
a commercial $$$/month solution for us at the moment and the switching costs
(retraining people, integrating our custom reporting and monitoring) would be
way too huge.

I'd definitely consider a different solution if I'd ever start a new
restaurant (highly unlikely though - it's hell. _Much_ harder than running a
startup of a similar size :)) but I'd much prefer a % revenue-based approach
(with an upper cap) than a fixed pricing model.

~~~
sh87
What seemed like a straightforward product turned out to be an intricate
challenge.

The problem with being a small shop selling POS products is finding customers
at the right time. It is very sales intensive process. You have to reach them
at the right time, once a restaurant is invested in a POS, it is almost
impossible to convince them to switch. They choose to just live with whatever
choice they made and focus on other things that matter. So now, as a
developer, you need to give them a good reason to switch.

Money is a good one. So now you are in a price race to the bottom; never a
good place to be as a small shop.

Another common ask is integration. They want to try out the product before
committing but they can't afford to train folks to use two products at the
same time. So now you need to come up with an integration strategy without
even having a clear API/structure to work with.

It's a nightmare. Unless you have customers ready to commit which to me seems
impossible in the retail business without already knowing people on the
inside.

------
hef19898
I have no experience with POS solutions, especially not for catering and
restaurant. So tak my opinion with a grain of salt.

General: As the site came up in German, I assume you at least think of
targeting this market was well. Germany made invoice copies for customers
mandatory this year, on top of the already somewhat crazy requirements
regarding auditability and compliance for POS systems. Quite a barrier for new
systems, but from what I heard out of the local start-up scene here, there are
not that many certified solutions out there yet.

I would talk to a tax consultant to get an opinion from that angle. And I
would aim for official tax certification, that will make life for your
customers so much easier and would be a true selling point.

Pricing: Kind of tied into the above, obviously a solution that gets tax
authorities of your clients backs has some inherent value to them. For the
upper range, 219 USD doesn't sound to abusive, depending on service levels and
support. I would just add a couple of tiers between hte free version and the
Pro one. And maybe limit functionality for the free version instead of tables,
by limiting tables lacals with less than 10 tables will never convert to
paying customers. And you are incentivizing toying the set-up to work with 10
"tables", depending on what exactly is a table.

I don't agree that a table based solution is dead on arrival, een if
restaurants are forced to close. Sure, a delivery, contactless, solution would
be great by now. But things will get to normal one day. And then an
affordable, certified POS solution like yours will certainly have value.

Marketing might be an issue, so. But maybe the corony crisis akes care of that
when a lot of competitors relying on VC money to get customers, well, leave
the market.

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fapi1974
On the pricing front, you may want to consider the fact that restaurants
generally don't grow by adding tables. That means that with this pricing
structure it will be very hard to move customers from free to paid. Your best
bet is probably a free trial in this instance.

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rladd
The linked page doesn't show the process clearly. Not sure about the target
market, but it could be very helpful to show each step visually:

1) Print out QR codes for every table

2) Customer scans QR code

3) etc.

(or if that's not how it works, I didn't understand it either!)

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aliswe
I really like this, looks very nice! Well done!

Also I've heard that using establishment-provisioned tablets results in greasy
screens, this solution alleviates that by using the patrons own devices :)

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ralphdas
I have to say that I was in the early stages of designing something similar.
Although POS is complex by nature I think most of these systems are pretty
static. I'm curious if you had feedback from potential customers and how you
got to your pricepoint. Feel free to reach out ralph.das[]gmail

~~~
bhdzllr
I built the inital version for my own university project. Now, after a few
years I got it out of the drawer, adapted it and now it is publicly available.
It was mainly built for events.

Part of the university project was to make a quantitative survey, ask the
staff of events what they need, ask the customers what they need. Then I built
the application and made an event to test it. This enabled me to collect a
little feedback.

From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order
management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device
needed).

Until now only leisure clubs used it for events.

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kumarvvr
Pricing for Pro looks a bit steep.

I maybe wrong though.

~~~
king_magic
No, I agree - part owner of an independent bookstore here (obviously a
different kind of business). Waaaaay too steep. Could never afford that if I
ran an independent local restaurant.

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sidharthv
Adding a clear button to the product search might boost productivity.

Editing quantities from cart will also be helpful.

------
RememberEllo
Congrats! I applaud that you are productizing a barebones MVP-level
application. You have initial users, definitely pay attention to their
feedback. Both for technical improvements, but more importantly for any tips
on how you can market this.

As many other commentators have pointed out, you face an uphill battle. The
incumbents have way more features than you do and they handle more use cases
out of the box. They also offer support. Still it's important to not compete
on price - you need to differentiate your service, find your initial market
and aggressively pursue those customers. This is more marketing than anything
technical.

Some constructive criticism:

On the demo:

1\. It is not clear from the demo itself if the demo is for self ordering or
for waitstaff ordering. I would like to know how my waitstaff will manage
multiple tables? How do I switch tables?

2\. How does my kitchen or food runners mark an order as done? I try to click
on the order in the status page and it only opens the accordion.

3\. How do I input my menu? What is the admin panel like?

4\. If I run out of fries, can I scratch the item from the menu in real time?

5\. Feels like managing each location in a different instance will be a pain
point for multi-location customers. I would test this assumption with market
research. If the market share of multi-location users is small, and multi-
location management is painful I would recommend not targeting those customers
until you get traction and can afford to fix the problem or handle supporting
the customers.

On performance:

My load times for the status page were about 2s - which is still too slow.
Given that pupdogg experienced 4s load times, I am guessing that your backend
did not handle the HN traffic spike well. Definitely look for ways to speed
this up - most of your app's traffic will be concentrated within a few hours.

On pricing:

I agree with the other commentators that the pricing makes no sense.

Right now you have a freemium model, tiered by # of tables. 1\. Freemium is
great when you can tier by feature offerings or when you can tier by resource
allocation. For the former, a SaSS will offer Single Sign On for paying users
only. For the latter, the SaSS may give a free tier for personal use, (e.g. a
single user account).

2\. When we delineate by seats (in your case tables), we are making a bet that
as the customer scales up, our product will become essential to our customer
working at scale so they see the value in converting to the paid tier. This
has an assumption that our customers will scale up.

as fapi1974 pointed out, restaurants don't scale up like this. Their tables
are, for the most part, fixed.

Restaurants with more than 10 tables will likely not try the product, and
restaurants with less than 10 won't add more than 10.

Instead a free trial makes a lot more sense. Your product is not one-shot, it
is recurring. If a customer does the trial and invests the time to input their
menu and train their staff then there is a good chance they may convert after
the free trial ends. (in fact you can and should track free-trial usage and an
leading indicator of whether the customer will convert)

I would also think about unit pricing. $219 for 10 tables is very steep. $219
for 100 tables is a bargain. However, I would guess that the market skews
closer to the 10 table capacity.

Final thought. Think about how this helps your customers. Does it save more
than $219 a month? Does it increase value for their offerings (probably for
event organizers) When you sell to businesses remember they are economic
buyers - they need it to make business sense first and foremost.

Best of luck!

~~~
bhdzllr
Thank you for your congratulations and taking the time to write such a
detailed comment.

Yes, the demo is just the access point for guests, so changing the status on
the status page is not possible. It's an information for the guest about there
current orders. The interface for waiters is nearly the same, except they can
choose the table at the beginning and are able to checkout orders on a table
(mark them as paid).

Maybe a video with some examples would be helpful to understand the process.

Currently it is important for me to find real customers so I will definitely
work on the pricing model. I also thought about different pricing models (like
tauntz mentioned a % revenue-based approach with an upper cap). For starting
this MVP it was important to keep it simple so I decied to use a fixed price
per month. Maybe I should cut it to find real customers.

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hoten
How does this integrate with the inventory management restaurants require?

~~~
bhdzllr
Currently it focus on processing orders, but this would be a nice improvement
for the future.

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curtisspope
Great work. Let’s talk

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j45
I really like your pricing plan design. Hope it works well for you.

