ababa.bar – contactless food ordering system

The project idea

One summer evening, a few ababa.tech folks and I were sitting in Rock ‘N’ Roll Pub in Šiauliai, which was packed at the time. In our opinion, it’s the best bar in Šiauliai, so we couldn’t go anywhere else. Anyway, we wanted to order some beer (what else). We had to wait 20 minutes just for them to bring the menu. Then another half an hour for the drinks. Something had to be done! And just like hammers see nails everywhere, we programmers solve every problem with code. This problem was no exception, so we came up with ababa.bar on the spot!

Problem/Objective

So, what’s the problem? Ehm, obviously, you can’t wait an hour for a beer! Put more professionally, it sounds like this – cut the time customers with parched mouths have to wait from arriving at the bar until they get their drinks and snacks. OK, the problem is clear, so how do we solve it?

Hmmm, we need to free up the waiters so they can serve more guests in the same amount of time. Sounds easy? We asked friends who had worked as waiters and found out that they spend about half of their time handing out menus and taking payments.

So, with the right app, we could cut the waiters’ time by 50%???? That’s an insane amount. OK, let’s build that app!

The solution

And so we started building. It took us almost a year, because we worked slowly, after our day jobs and at weekends. We built Android and iOS apps for guests, a separate app for staff and a web management system for venue managers.

In the guest app, guests can browse the menu, place an order and pay. The staff app shows these orders, which the staff then prepare. And the manager’s system shows all the orders, menu management, prices, working hours and similar bits and bobs.

We built all that plus N smaller features. Then we said, well, now we need to talk to restaurant owners and let them use the platform. A few bars / restaurants showed interest, but since it was covid times, they said – and how do we check whether guests have COVID passes? OMG!

So what do we do? We build a COVID pass integration, so that guests can upload a valid pass, which we automatically check in the app, and if the pass is valid, we let them place orders.

Then a hotel says, could you make it possible to order products from hotel rooms? Another restaurant says, maybe you could do events? Or maybe you could make it so people pay through our system? Or maybe you could add our branding? Or maybe tips could be collected and split between the staff who were working at the time? Or could you generate automatic invoices? Bada bing, bada boom – we built all of these and a whole bunch of other requests!

Result and benefit

And what do you think happened? Nothing. The restaurants said, well, maybe after covid / it’s a lot for us to integrate / too much to pay and so on. In the end, nobody wanted our ridiculously well-built platform. Eh… we learned our lesson. We are great system developers but absolutely hopeless marketers. Now that’s a bitter pill we had to swallow without a drop to wash it down, hehe. We put about 30 thousand euros into this project. That’s what this lesson cost.

Buuut this money, our sweat and the time we put in didn’t go to the dogs. We built up a lot of code that we could reuse in other projects, gained a lot of experience and confidence in our own abilities and, most importantly, dared to turn this hobby into a company. So, want to know how much it costs to start an IT business? For us – 30 thousand and a year of our time.

Speaking of the app itself, after a lot of back and forth, we finally talked the PJazz restaurant into offering its menu through our platform. Completely free of charge, but it’s nice that such a chain appreciated our work!

The future

We’re absolutely convinced that contactless dining will soon become popular in Lithuania. We can already see restaurants quickly adopting cashless tipping and showing their menus online. And those are just a couple of the twenty or so features we built. We even launched a separate project, Versalios, with partners so that we could collect tips – we had the code, after all! Read more about the Versalios project.

Now we know what bars and restaurants need to use this platform, and we have a plan to come back to it!

Functions implemented in the project

• Sending orders to staff,
• Menu browsing,
• Complex QR code scanning,
• Leaving tips,
• Age verification,
• COVID pass checks,
• iOS and Android apps,
• Working hours management,
• Product administration,
• Product category management,
• Multi-location management,
• Notifications,
• Sending invoices,
• VAT rates,
• Order history,
• I could name many more, but a lot was done here, ha!