From Zero to $1M ARR in 12 Days

I'm lucky that I wasn't first because it would have thrown me off a lot more if I wasn't prepared for it. We launched 6 weeks ago on January 29th, was our pre-launch. We hit $1 million in annual revenue in 12 days. We are on track to hit $2 million now, and we're aiming to hit $10 million by the end of this year. My name is Alex Holt.

I'm the co-founder CEO of AYO, the world's first all-in-one AI platform for restaurants. So I followed first my dad, he was a hockey player.

Followed his footsteps.

And go away.

So I knew something big was going to happen, just not what. My wife was thinking it can't get worse because I was never home. I was always working. And the bad thing about restaurants is that you're working when everyone else is off, on the holidays, on the special occasions. Those are your biggest nights, and that's when you want to spend time with family. So I think she was excited to be together more on the holidays, but yeah, she's getting used to it, I think. The only reason why we have built this all-in-one system that we have is because I was not technical enough to know how hard it was. If I would have known how hard it was and how much time it would have taken and all the problems that we faced, probably would not have done it. I would have just like focused on one thing. That was the advice we got from all the VCs in the beginning. Just focus on one thing and do it really well.

And I was like, well, our name of the company is AIO, all-in-one.

We can't just do one thing. We need to solve this problem. My co-founder is crazy enough to believe in this vision and push through, and it's been hard. We've been working around the clock for 2 years.

It's a wonderful experience. There's always people coming to Vegas having a good time, and we try to provide just that. We call it the Triple the Fun Vegas Experience because of everything being served in flights of 3. I think Vegas is a really cool city. A lot of people obviously come here to have a good time. There's great conferences. It's very easy to get to, get around. Formula 1 is here now. Raiders have a team here. A lot of sports events are coming to town, which is really cool for the area. There's so many good restaurants. The best restaurants in the world is right here on the Strip. Las Vegas is a very business-friendly city, so more and more companies are coming here. The housing is still reasonably priced, so there's a lot of opportunities in Las Vegas.

I'm pretty used to TV. I was a pro hockey player for many years. I did a lot of interviews.

Okay, give us your pitch.

Let me tell you, restaurants are not easy. You work all the time. The costs have gone crazy, super expensive. So many problems you're facing. You need literally 10 systems to run a restaurant. One for POS, one for payroll, one for accounting, and so on. I set out on this journey to solve this problem, and I got really lucky and met my co-founder Zia, who was head of product at NVIDIA. He built iconic products for Motorola. What we set out to do is building AIO, all-in-one system for restaurants. So imagine everything you need to run one restaurant— payroll, accounting, marketing, website builder— everything in one system. And on top of that, we have 33 AI agents automating all these redundant tasks, saving restaurants so much time and money. You give your managers of the restaurant one system to log into. In that system, they can do literally everything from hiring, paying the employee, doing the marketing campaigns, watching the report, improving the product, everything you need, one-stop shop. And then those agents are automating all those workflows like laying a schedule, paying the bills, doing the books, running the reports, sending you the analytics on how to improve the business and whatnot, P&Ls.

How's your business going so far?

Lucky that I wasn't first, 'cause it would've thrown me off a lot more if I wasn't prepared for it.

So who are the big customers?

We're focusing on the independent restaurants first because it's a faster sales cycle.

So you gotta sell each one individually?

They actually come to us quite a lot, to be honest. This is a huge need in the space, and restaurant owners are really struggling with all of the products that they're using today. And we drive their cost literally down by 75%.

On top of that, we make the business more efficient, There are lots of workflow vendors, including Salesforce, for example.

Why wouldn't they get into this space and compete with you? You also briefly touched on driving more traffic. In this day and world, that's the biggest thing. So we'd love to understand a little bit more on that.

I think it's a very specific niche market. There's a million restaurants in the US. 60% of them are small business owners. And Toast, they only have 15% of the market. And the challenge for Toast is that they have purchased all these different companies. So it's really hard to build AI on top of all these systems segmented databases. So like if we dig into the product here, tableside assistance, so you can order with voice right at the table. AI marketing with a couple of clicks can generate an entire marketing campaign for the restaurant owner, which typically you need a full salaried position to do. Responding to reviews, like a lot of restaurants don't have time to sit and respond to all these reviews. Now it can be done completely automated. And then the biggest piece is IO Intelligence. You can literally query your own database and ChatGPT style spits out the answer. So that's super powerful. So no more running reports, No more like trying to figure out where you're at. You can actually have AI suggest what to fix and what to improve in your business.

What's going to differentiate you? Why are you going to be awesome?

One of the best things we did right away, we brought in advisors, 15 restaurant owners, managers, chefs, that every Wednesday morning for 2 hours we sit and go through the products before we even write one line of code. So by the time the product comes out, It's like, this is what we want. And that's why we're seeing why there's such a pull to buy it, because we're solving so many problems in one product.

Very impressive. Raising $7 million, the group you put together. When you're making your pitch or they're coming to you and saying, help us with all this, what are you charging them and what are they saving as a result of it?

The only real use case we have is, is my own restaurant here in Vegas. We went from having 5 salaried positions down to 2. We have increased our sales by 30%, and that's just one restaurant.

You wanna run some restaurants in a stadium?

Let's just make a deal today.

Yeah.

All right, Alex, thanks so much for being on Meet the Drapers. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Terrific. Thank you, Alex.

It's been great.

It was super fun.

Tim interrupts perfectly, so you just have to kind of be on your toes.

What did each of you think?

I like the fact that he's going after a niche. You know, he talked about his moat being the fact that he understands restaurants from end to end. I think how much money he can make from it is the question. I do personally think cost savings is great, but if you can increase the sales, I think that's a larger place to play.

John, what do you think?

You raised Toast, you have OpenTable, but they've got 180 people, programmers mostly, raised $7 million trying to solve these problems quickly. It might be a significant first mover advantage. And there are a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants out there that operate very inefficiently. I think it's pretty interesting.

You almost made a deal right there. Oh yeah, well, there might be other people in my organization. Okay, and Alex? You ran a restaurant. You had to watch every penny. Would you have bought something like this and why?

That's why I built it. You need exactly this. You are already paying for 10 different systems, and now by consolidating it into one, you're saving a ton of money right there. And then the efficiencies that AI creates, there's so much power. And I think taking a company from 0 to 1 It's hard, but taking it from 0 to 100 is really hard, and it takes a lot of different characteristics to do that. And I think we have all the puzzle pieces to really make it happen.