Why I Built Seatd

Restaurant owners operate on thin margins, and one thing that always bothered me was how much of the risk falls on the restaurant.

A guest can book one of your busiest times and then not show up.

And the loss is bigger than just, "they didn't come."

The restaurant is usually going to hold that table for another 10 or 15 minutes because they don't know if the guest is just running late. They're also worried that if they give the table away too quickly, that guest is going to show up angry, complain, and maybe leave a bad Google or Yelp review.

So the restaurant loses again.

The table sits empty during one of the most valuable parts of the night. Once you start losing those minutes, it affects table turnover.

One missed turn might not sound like much. Scale that across busy weekends, months, and an entire year of business, and that can become a lot of money left on the table.

Meanwhile, the guest often has no skin in the game.

That never made much sense to me.

Then we turn around and tell restaurant owners to spend even more money on ads, marketing companies, AI marketing tools, and every other new thing that promises to help margins.

I kept thinking, why not start with the demand you already have?

If your restaurant is packed at 7:30 on Saturday night, that demand has value.

You created it.

Seatd gives the restaurant the option to take a small amount of that high-demand inventory and offer it as paid premium access.

Now the guest has some skin in the game. The restaurant gets more certainty. And the restaurant gets to participate financially in demand it already created.

I'm not saying every reservation should cost money.

I don't believe that.

Free stays free. Premium access is optional.

The restaurant decides which times qualify, what they cost, and how much inventory to release.

At the simplest level, that's what Seatd is.

Restaurants already did the hard part. They created the demand. Seatd gives them a way to stop giving all of that value away for free.

Because I worked in restaurants and kept seeing the same thing.

Restaurants spend a fortune trying to create demand. Then when they finally have it, they give the most valuable part of that demand away for free.

That never made sense to me.

I wasn't trying to reinvent restaurants. I saw an economic problem that I thought technology could fix.

No.

You're paying the restaurant for your food.

With Seatd, you're optionally paying for access, timing, priority, or certainty.

Those are two different things.

Airlines figured this out a long time ago. So did hotels, parking, entertainment, and plenty of other industries.

Restaurants should have the same opportunity.

Absolutely not.

I think that would be a terrible idea.

If Tuesday at 4:30 has plenty of availability, why would you charge someone for access to it?

Seatd is really about the moments where demand exceeds supply.

Friday night. Saturday night. Mother's Day. Valentine's Day. Big games. Concert weekends. Whatever creates real demand for that particular restaurant.

Free stays free. Premium is premium.

Some probably will.

I'm not going to sit here and tell a restaurant owner that every customer is going to love every new idea.

But we're not taking the free option away.

If you don't want premium access, don't buy it.

I think customers get much angrier when they feel like something was taken away from them. Seatd is designed to add an option, not remove one.

No, and I don't want Seatd to become that.

Paying for Express doesn't mean you walk through the door and steal somebody else's table.

You receive priority toward the next qualifying table.

If you're a party of six and a two top opens up, you're not getting it just because you paid.

The restaurant still runs the room.

Think about a restaurant with a 60 minute wait.

You have two choices.

Standard waitlist: Free.

Or:

Seatd Express: Paid priority access.

Express gives you priority toward the next qualifying table.

That's really it.

That's one of the easiest ways I explain the basic idea.

We're obviously not Disney and we're not affiliated with Disney.

But everybody understood the old FastPass concept.

You could use normal access, or there was a priority option.

And honestly, we already accept this idea everywhere without even thinking about it.

TSA PreCheck. Valet parking. Preferred parking. Airline priority boarding. Better seats. Express security lines. Hotel upgrades. Event VIP access. Faster shipping.

The normal option still exists.

You're just paying for time, convenience, access, position, or certainty.

That's really the same consumer behavior I saw in restaurants.

Some people have more time than money.

Other people have more money than time.

Let them choose.

Because people already pay for convenience all the time.

We just don't always stop and think about it.

TSA PreCheck. Valet parking. Preferred parking. Airline priority boarding. Hotel upgrades. Faster shipping. VIP access.

Uber and DoorDash have also trained consumers to understand that faster or priority service can cost more.

That behavior is already normal.

Americans are used to paying for convenience when it saves them time or reduces friction.

Seatd applies that same basic idea to restaurant access.

Some people are perfectly happy waiting.

Other people value their time enough to pay for a better option.

Let the customer decide.

Nothing.

Keep taking care of them.

Seatd isn't supposed to get between you and the people who have supported your restaurant for years.

You control the inventory.

If Kathy and Dan have been coming in every Friday for ten years and you want to give them a free 7:00 reservation, do it.

Make the reservation.

Then reduce the paid inventory for that time slot by one.

That's the point.

Seatd is not there to tell an owner how to treat their regulars.

It's there to give the owner another revenue tool when they want to use it.

Protect your regulars. Protect certain tables. Protect certain times. Keep walk-in inventory. Give something away when you want to. Charge when demand supports it.

You control the room.

They don't pay.

They use the standard option.

That's the entire point of keeping premium access optional.

If someone walks in and doesn't want to pay, you can still add them to the regular waitlist just like you do now.

Are they going to be behind someone who already made a reservation?

Yes.

But that's already how restaurants work.

A guest who planned ahead and booked a reservation usually has priority over someone who just walked in.

Seatd doesn't change that basic system.

It just adds another optional access choice for people who value timing or priority enough to pay for it.

The free path still exists. The walk-in still gets on the list.

Nobody has to buy Seatd to eat at the restaurant.

You do.

It's your restaurant.

Seatd shouldn't walk into your building and tell you what your customers are worth.

We give you the technology and information.

You set the boundaries.

You don't.

Neither do I.

That's why I'd start small.

Maybe 5:00 is free. 5:30 is free. At 6:00 and 6:30, you test $5. At 7:00 and 7:30, maybe it's $7. At 8:00, maybe it drops back to $5. By 8:30, maybe it's free again.

Nothing crazy.

Put a small amount of inventory out there and watch what happens.

If nobody buys it, that's valuable information.

If it disappears immediately, that's valuable information too.

Then adjust.

Let the customer tell us what convenience is worth.

Because then everybody pays.

That's not what I'm trying to accomplish.

If one customer doesn't care whether they eat at 5:00 or 7:30, why should I increase their dinner price because another customer desperately wants Saturday at 7:30?

Charge for the thing that's scarce.

In that example, the scarce thing is access.

You already created the demand.

Seatd gives you another way to monetize a small portion of it.

You don't necessarily need another table, another server, another dining room, or another advertising campaign.

You're creating revenue from something that already exists:

people wanting access to your restaurant.

And the economics are straightforward.

On paid access revenue, the restaurant receives 60 percent and Seatd receives 40 percent.

Yes, Seatd makes money too. Somebody had to build the system, operate it, process everything, support it, and keep improving it.

But the important part is that now the restaurant is making money from demand it created in the first place.

Then nobody buys it.

That's not failure. That's information.

Maybe the price was wrong.

Maybe the timing was wrong.

Maybe your restaurant doesn't have enough demand for premium access.

That's okay.

Seatd isn't supposed to manufacture scarcity that doesn't exist.

And you're not betting the restaurant on this.

The platform is $100 per month.

The idea is to give restaurants a serious operating platform at a cost that can be considerably less than what many restaurants already spend on reservation and restaurant technology, while giving them the opportunity to generate revenue from premium access.

If the demand is there, capture it. If it isn't, don't fake it.

Then we have to protect it.

You can't sell unlimited priority.

If everybody has Express, nobody has Express.

Restaurants control how much is available, and Seatd needs to protect that scarcity.

I'd rather sell fewer Express spots and have the product work than oversell it for another few dollars.

Not much at all.

Seatd isn't another company that put AI on the homepage because everybody else did.

We built a pretty impressive algorithm with some genuinely interesting math behind it.

The algorithm does the work. AI helps process the information in real time.

AI isn't running your restaurant.

It isn't replacing your manager.

It isn't randomly deciding what your tables should cost.

You establish the rules and boundaries.

We built the system and the math. AI helps us process the information fast enough to react to what's happening right now.

And frankly, half the old-timers in this industry wouldn't touch, as my dad calls it, "a Chatter GPT thingy," if their life depended on it.

That's fine.

Seatd doesn't need AI to be the product.

AI is a tool inside the product.

Seatd isn't adding extra seats to the dining room.

The kitchen is already built to serve a full restaurant.

We're not doing what delivery platforms did, where you suddenly layer another stream of orders on top of the dining room and hammer the kitchen with demand it was never designed to handle.

Seatd works with the demand and capacity that already exist inside the restaurant.

We're helping the restaurant manage who gets access to those existing tables and when.

If you have 100 seats, you still have 100 seats.

We're not turning that into 140.

We're changing the economics around access to the room, not increasing the physical capacity of the room.

That's an important difference.

Absolutely not.

Actually, a large part of building Seatd came from another problem I saw in restaurants.

A lot of the time, one of the newest employees, often one of the youngest and least experienced, is standing at the front door helping run the entire flow of the dining room.

Think about that for a second.

The first person your customer sees can also be the person trying to understand table status, reservations, walk-ins, wait times, servers, sections, and where everybody needs to go next.

So I wanted the Host Stand to be incredibly easy to understand.

I literally made sure my 12- and 14-year-olds could understand it and build a floor map.

That was intentional.

It's built around the way younger employees already understand modern software instead of making them learn some clunky system designed twenty years ago.

But Seatd still doesn't replace judgment.

The software might see a table.

Your host sees that the couple sitting there just ordered another round.

That human information matters.

Give the human better tools. Don't remove the human.

We're going to have complaints.

Every restaurant already does.

The important part is making sure we never sell something we can't clearly explain.

If someone purchases Express, they need to understand exactly what Express means.

If someone purchases premium reservation access, they need to understand exactly what they're buying.

I'd rather lose a transaction because we were extremely clear than make a few extra dollars by misleading somebody.

There have to be rules, and they have to work both ways.

One of the reasons I built Seatd was because I don't think the restaurant should carry 100 percent of the risk while the guest carries zero.

The restaurant chooses its seating guarantee window, up to a maximum of 20 minutes.

If the guest arrives outside the restaurant's stated window, they don't necessarily get thrown out the door. They can move to the regular waitlist, and the system can still help the restaurant get them seated as soon as operations allow.

Stuff happens.

But a true no-show is different.

If you purchased access, never showed up, and ate somewhere else, the restaurant held something valuable for you.

The access payment isn't refunded simply because you chose not to use it.

And fairness has to go the other direction too.

If the restaurant sells a paid seating guarantee, the restaurant has to honor its side of the deal.

If it fails to seat the guest within the purchased guarantee window, the access payment is refunded according to Seatd's policy, and the restaurant can be assessed the applicable no-seat fee.

That accountability matters.

The guest has skin in the game.

So does the restaurant.

You shouldn't just because I tell you to.

Make us prove it.

I'm not interested in locking restaurants into something they hate and then pointing at a contract.

Put Seatd into a real restaurant.

Run it on a real Saturday night.

See what your hosts think.

See what your customers do.

Look at the numbers.

The product should earn your trust.

I actually started by getting quotes.

One of my good friends was building software for the construction industry at the same time, and he had to hire people to build his.

For me, it honestly wasn't just about the money.

I'd be on the phone trying to explain restaurant operations to people who had probably never worked in a restaurant.

That bothered me.

If a restaurant owner tells me, "I need this button over here," I can move it.

If a host tells me, "I never use this," I can look at why it's there and change it.

I don't have to schedule a call with a development company, explain it to a project manager, wait for somebody else to interpret it, get a quote, and then wait three weeks to see the change.

I can build it.

And because I've worked in restaurants, I understand why some of those little things matter.

So I funded Seatd with my own money and built it myself.

No giant development agency. No pile of investor money paying people to figure out whether the idea works.

I wanted a real platform before I started making big claims about it.

Now we have one.

The next part isn't about telling people what Seatd could do.

It's putting it in restaurants and proving what it actually does.

I want to answer one question with real data:

Can restaurants capture the value of their demand without hurting the guest experience?

Not in a spreadsheet.

Not in a pitch deck.

In actual restaurants.

I want real Friday nights.

Real hosts.

Real customers.

Real purchases.

Real complaints.

Real refunds.

Real repeat customers.

Real revenue.

And there's one number I'm particularly interested in.

After a restaurant has used Seatd long enough to understand it, does that restaurant voluntarily give Seatd more inventory?

If they do, we're creating value.

If they don't, I want to know why.

That's the stage we're at.

Build it. Put it in the real world. Listen. Fix what needs fixing. And let the numbers tell us whether we're right.