Niko Papademetriou

It's, again, winning and then deploying that 60th chain and then the 65th chain and then the 70th.

That's where it becomes very difficult.

And that's where things like tech debt, as we all love to talk about, and legacy approaches to certain things in your data model or in the architecture that you're deploying become.

They've held many companies back from ever being able to expand beyond 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 restaurants.

That's again, in the first case, that's our MVP.

But we really restacked the entire platform about seven years ago, six and a half years ago.

And that's really the birth of Q was about six and a half years ago.

And that one took us 18 months, about 12 months to get into our first few beta restaurants on the new stack.

And then another six months or so, getting it into the second and the fifth and the 50th restaurant with the whole new platform.

And it took us a couple of years while we were selling and deploying that new platform into net new customers.

It took us a couple of years to migrate all of our existing portfolio over to that new platform.

But yeah, that MVP, call it six, six and a half years ago, was a behemoth.

When now you have to build an MVP that satisfies dozens of chains and thousands of restaurants.

It's easy to go down a path of letting your next most exciting customer dictate that path for you.

And in many ways, it seems like that's the most natural and organic path to go down.

Keeps your customers happy and, you know, that sounds great.

The problem is that if you go down that path, A, it never ends.

Not that there's ever an end in sight regardless, but it never ends because every customer, every unique user has a different perspective on a thing.

Now, our ideal customer profile, the slice of the addressable market that we serve are fast, casual, and quick service chains, right?

20, 200, 2000 plus unit chain.