Restaurant Tech

Playbooks and teardowns for restaurant SaaS: multi-unit motions, franchisee GTM, and how the category leaders scaled beyond single-location pilots.

• Case Study: OpenTable: How a Restaurant Reservation System Became a $2.6B Hybrid Growth Engine

  OpenTable pioneered the restaurant SaaS + marketplace model, connecting 60,000+ restaurants with millions of diners. Acquired by Booking Holdings for $2.6B, it remains the definitive case study in hybrid vertical GTM.

• Playbook: Restaurant GTM Playbook

  Master go-to-market strategy for restaurant technology. Complete guide covering POS systems, embedded payments, kitchen operations, buyer personas from owner-operators to enterprise VP Ops, and sales playbook for QSR to fine dining.

• Article: Toast GTM Strategy: Building the Restaurant OS

  How Toast's GTM strategy turned a restaurant POS into a vertical operating system through field sales, hardware, and embedded payments at scale.

• Case Study: DoorDash: How a Stanford Side Project Built the Dominant Merchant Platform in Food Delivery

  DoorDash evolved from a simple delivery app into a full merchant platform spanning storefront tools, advertising, drive-as-a-service logistics, and financial products. This case study examines how DoorDash built a hybrid growth engine combining marketplace network effects with vertical SaaS merchant tools to capture 67% US food delivery market share and $10.7B in 2024 revenue.

• Case Study: Toast: Building the Embedded Operating System for Restaurants

  How Toast built a $2B+ ARR Embedded Financial Services platform for 164,000 restaurants by bundling POS, payments, payroll, and capital into one vertical OS.