Happyspace

@Ghostgoddess00 Pro tip: most local spots will save you (and themselves) a chunk if you call or order from their own website instead of the app. Same food, no marketplace tax.

I want a local sub just because I don’t wanna pay the DoorDash fees and I have errands I don’t wanna run😒

@drok149 @kobratrading @ClownWorld Exactly the math no one talks about. The 25% markup means the customer is now paying ~$1.25 for every $1 they would've paid in-store — just so the restaurant can break even on the marketplace order. Nobody wins except the platform.

@kobratrading @ClownWorld The stores aren’t making more $$ thru DoorDash only DoorDash is. The increased pricing is to offset the DoorDash fees. Only way to survive on there is to charge 25% more than in store pricing to combat the 25-30% fees.

A customer holds up their Wendy’s DoorDash receipt next to the actual in-store prices and shows how much more expensive the exact same items are on the app. They point out the markups on everything from Double Stacks to nuggets and drinks even before fees. Going inside the store yourself is clearly way cheaper than ordering delivery.

@Trevor_Majors @ClownWorld Good breakdown. The other piece restaurants don't always realize: even when you set the SAME price on DoorDash and your own site, the third-party still nets the customer toward the marketplace. The fix is making direct ordering as easy as the app to use.

The menu item prices on the DoorDash app are sent by the restaurant themselves. If there's a difference it's on the restaurant. However: DoorDash charges a commission to the restaurant for their services on top of the delivery fee to the customer. Many restaurants (but not all) pass that commission fee to the menu item pricing that is sent to the app.

@PhilmoreRobert @ClownWorld This. The 25% has to come from somewhere. Either menu prices go up, portions go down, or staff pay does. None of those are great outcomes for the customer either.

@ClownWorld DoorDash takes 25% from the restaurant, so restaurants charge higher prices to cover the DoorDash commission. If you want cheaper food, make it yourself or pick it up yourself. Do you think DoorDash is FREE?

@lemniscate69d @ClownWorld Yep — the markup gets passed straight to the customer, and the restaurant still nets less. Direct ordering on the restaurant's own site is way cheaper for everyone, but most operators don't have an easy way to set it up.

@ClownWorld Doordash charges the restaurant a commission charge. 15-30%. So the restaurants are the one’s charging you more to cover that.

Building in public update from happyspace.one: 0% churn across our beta restaurants 150+ in our Dallas/Austin pipeline 4 multi-location operators live Turns out "one tool that actually works" is a real value prop.

If your restaurant pays for: — a website builder — a POS — an online ordering plugin — a delivery integration — a social media tool — an email marketing tool — an ad manager — a reviews tool you have ~6 vendors too many.

Restaurant marketing in 2026 looks like: AI writes the post AI generates the image AI runs the ads AI replies to the reviews Owner gets the time back to actually run the restaurant. That's the trade we're shipping.

Restaurant owners: what's the most overpriced piece of software in your tech stack right now? Asking for the entire industry.

Real-talk POS math: Toast: 2.49–2.99% per swipe Square: 2.6% Interchange + 0.08% + $0.08: ~1.7% On $50K/month in card sales, that's ~$4,500/year staying in your pocket. Tiny percentages. Real money.

Built a restaurant website in 8 minutes today. Just by talking to the AI. Menu, photos, online ordering, hours, branding — all generated, all editable, all live. The future of restaurant tech isn't a better dashboard. It's not having to learn one.

Hot take: "15-30% commission" isn't a partnership. It's a tax on small restaurant survival. Direct ordering should be the default. Marketplaces should be the upsell, not the other way around.

Restaurants spend $500–1,200/month on tools that don't talk to each other. POS, website, ordering, social, ads, reviews — all separate, all expensive. The stack is the problem. Not any one tool in it.

Building Happy (our AI agent) taught me something about restaurant owners: They don't want "AI." They want fewer tabs open at 11pm after close. "AI" is just the word for "the thing that closes the tabs."

Math nobody at Toast wants you to do: $40k/mo in card sales × 2.6% = $1,040/mo in processing. Same volume on interchange + 0.08% + $0.08/txn ≈ $400/mo. That's $7,680/yr. That's a part-time line cook.

Restaurant owners — what's the single tool you pay for that you'd happily rip out tomorrow if something better existed? Curious where the most pain is right now: POS, online ordering, scheduling, marketing, reviews?

@foundrceo HappySpace — AI agent that runs the entire digital stack for restaurants. Website, online ordering (0% commission), POS, social, ads, reviews — all from one chat. Replaces 8-10 tools. 0% churn after 12mo of beta. happyspace.one

Share your product 👇 Feeling great today. Thought I’d give something back I’ll randomly pick one to receive a Premium Launch 🚀 on FoundrList (dofollow backlink + Premium listing)

for any restaurant owner reading this: your GBP drives 20-40% of foot traffic. the 5-min fix 80% of independents skip: - update holiday hours - respond to your last 5 reviews - add 3 new photos - write one GBP "post" that's the whole list.

@postflow_ai_app This is the truth nobody talks about — the buyer for restaurant SaaS is exhausted by 9pm. Self-serve onboarding doesn't work. The tools that win for indies are the ones that get set up *for* the owner, not by them.

I didn't set out to build software. I set out to make perfect sauces and keep a tiny French restaurant in Hokkaido alive. After 14-hour shifts, though, the last thing I had energy for was writing social posts that sounded like me. I tried the usual AI tools and everything came out glossy, corporate, and not at all how I talk to my guests. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time: I taught myself Python and started building the tool I actually needed, which became PostFlow-AI. What it does in a sentence: you set it up once with your past posts, and it learns to write and publish in your voice automatically. The pivot from kitchen to code wasn't a clean career change. It was a late-night survival project. Six months earlier I was literally googling "what is a variable," then walking into morning prep with flour on my chef coat and Stack Overflow tabs still open in my head. If that sounds familiar—juggling a business while trying to learn a new skill at 1 a.m.—you're my people. You don't need a CS degree. You need a real problem and a stubborn streak. Who this is for: solo entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, or anyone running a business who's tired of staring at a blank post after a long day. Most of what worked for me in the kitchen mapped directly to how I built PostFlow-AI: - Mise en place before service taught me that good prep beats heroics. The app pushes you through a clean setup flow before it writes a single post. - Tasting as you go became my testing habit. Don't ship what you haven't tasted. - The question we ask while developing a menu—what will make a diner say "delicious"?—became the guiding star for UX. I basically built stations into the product: clear steps, clean handoffs, no clutter on the line. There's a feature I get asked about that came straight from running a busy pass. In service, you've got a creative cook pushing specials and an exacting expo who plates and polishes. I copied that. Under the hood, PostFlow-AI pairs two specialists: one model that's great at generating raw ideas, another that's freakishly good at writing in your exact voice. Like a creative writer and a careful editor working in tandem so you don't have to babysit drafts after midnight. The biggest breakthrough, though, was realizing the guest feedback loop wasn't a restaurant thing—it was the product. Early on, I found myself fixing AI drafts and thinking, these edits are gold. So I taught the system to learn from them. Every time you tweak a post, your personal model gets sharper. After 20–30 cycles, it stops sounding like "AI" and starts sounding like you asking for a refill at your favorite cafe—casual, specific, unmistakably yours. What that looks like in practice: - Import around 20 past posts. Setup takes about 10 minutes. - The system studies your rhythm, word choices, and quirks. - It drafts a week's content, you tweak what needs tweaking, and it learns from every edit. - Posts go out on schedule while you work. Currently supports X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. Because this came from a real problem, not a pitch deck, little details carry weight. Topic rotation exists because posting about the same dish every day bores everyone, including the chef. The step-by-step setup came from station organization—the same reason a garnish tray lives where your hand naturally reaches. And yes, I still build in public, for the same reason we run an open kitchen: when people can see the process, they trust the plate more. My first and fiercest tester was my wife. She's the one who told me, "This sounds like a brochure, not like you," and she was right. That's when the feedback loop clicked and the drafts finally began to carry my cadence—the clipped sentences, the occasional dry joke, the way I talk about knives and keyboards in the same breath. If you've ever had a dish sent back with a kind but honest note, you know how vital that is to getting it right the next round. If you're a solo entrepreneur, a coach, a consultant—or a fellow restaurant owner making a career pivot—here's the part I wish someone had told me earlier: your past life isn't baggage; it's your advantage. The systems you've already built, the instincts you've earned under pressure, the way you read a room or a rush—they translate. In my case, the kitchen didn't just prepare me for tech. It quietly designed the product with me. PostFlow-AI exists because service was busy, energy was low, and the story still needed to be told—in a voice people recognize as yours. If this sounds like you, let PostFlow-AI handle next week's posts in your voice. Set it up once. It publishes while you work. postflow-ai.app

@JaredSleeper Toast's biggest AI risk IMO isn't better POS UX. It's bundle vulnerability — most margin is from payments + financing. AI-native vertical SaaS can credibly bundle ordering/marketing/site + cheaper payments into one $399/mo bill. Independents are the soft underbelly.

Every day for the next long while, I'm going to tear down a new public software company and highlight the AI risks/opportunities around it- products launched to date, top startups, key quotes from earnings calls, etc. Day nineteen: Toast $TOST Peak share price: $59 (Nov 12, 2021) Share price today: $26.84 (-55%) EV today: $13.9bn ARR today: $2.05bn (+26% Y/y) NRR: 109% (SaaS Retention) EV/ARR: 7x GAAP Operating Margin: 20% (of reported gross profit) EV/Run-rate GAAP EBIT: 41x Headcount: 6,500 (+14% Y/y) What Toast does: Toast is an all-in-one restaurant operations platform (Shopify for restaurants), including PoS hardware/software, online ordering, payment processing, payroll, team management, marketing, etc. Businesses pay a subscription fee + a payments fee, and purchase hardware at ~breakeven. Like Shopify, payments has become the single largest driver of gross profit $. AI bear case: It's admittedly hard to create a Toast-specific AI bear case. Core restaurant POS software is not particularly technically complex to build (though it is the definition of mission-critical) and could be commoditized further, threatening incremental revenue and the base, especially in SMBs where restaurant turnover is relatively high and so ongoing customer acquisition is key. AI bull case: As the default tech provider for an industry, Toast is a natural entry point for AI native products. The median Toast customer has no technical staff or skills whatsoever, giving them an enormous AI distribution advantage. AI traction: Toast doesn't have any AI-specific revenue, but does disclose some metrics around usage of ToastIQ, its AI-powered chatbot/copilot for restaurant owners. "Less than 4 months post launch, over half of all Toast locations have used ToastIQ, collectively sending over 8 million queries and tens and thousands of locations are already using it each week." Adjacent startup summary: There is no direct platform competitor to Toast at scale, but various startups tackle different parts of the stack. @Owner 304 employees, +29% Y/y helps restaurants manage online sales @slang_ai 66 employees, +25% Y/y provides voice AI for restaurants, especially focused on calls for reservations @GetPopmenu 274 employees, -1% Y/y, provides customer engagement solutions for resturants Management Quotes: "Our product team released over 500 new features, including ToastIQ, our conversational AI assistant. Customer feedback and adoption has been tremendous. ToastIQ not only generates reports and insights about restaurant performance, it executes tasks directly in Toast ranging from menu management to inventory updates. For example, ToastIQ can analyze and update menus, tell an operator why the Thursday nights might be slow or why a certain daypart is successful and analyze results across locations. It can also quickly answer questions like what events and weather should I pay attention to this week or who's working on a Friday night." "And Toast support has been reimagined with AI with over half of our support interactions now starting digitally through an AI agent and 70% of those never getting to a human." "And over the long term, we expect these AI agents to start to own whole functions from marketing to managing payroll and tax or accounting and bookkeeping. We believe because our data powers much of this work, we are uniquely positioned to both do it better and cheaper." "Voice, I think, is another opportunity. You think about walking up to a kiosk or a drive-thru, walking up to a terminal, voice to automate some of the work of placing an order. And then longer term, We are investing in a big way in ToastIQ, to do even more. So I talked about how restauranteurs spent a lot of -- they outsource work around generating demand with marketing or bookkeeping, payroll and tax. And we think there's an opportunity there because a lot of that is our data that's powering those experiences. There's an opportunity there to actually make some of those workflows more agentic than they have been in the past and to create -- to do them better and to do them cheaper. So I look at AI as an opportunity for Toast to lean in and drive innovation and impact for our customers and versus being a risk to the business." Commentary: In many ways, Toast seems well-positioned to benefit from AI in ways that are analogous to Shopify, with the added kicker that it has tight hardware integrations that create an added layer of stickiness. Like Shopify, the biggest rub is that isn't quite obvious how AI changes the core economics of the restaurant business in a way that Toast can capture- it is no doubt useful for analytics, marketing, etc. but in a way that is perhaps marginal relative to Toast's existing monetization of core/mission critical software. As such, my guess is that AI doesn't meaningfully inflect Toast's business anytime soon, but perhaps becomes a gentle tailwind as the benefits of consolidating tool usage onto Toast grow with AI-powered workflows. The counterargument/bear case likely looks like some sort of cheaper, AI-native platform competing with Toast for POS wins- I don't see that happening yet, but it is certainly worth watching closely.