Pitch Please

00:05.86
mike_flywheel
What'sever what's up. Ah I'm going to start that again. What's up everybody. It's Mike from the pitch please podcast. We're recording back again today. We've got the Cto of Dyne, parsa in the house.

00:05.89
Parsa Riahi
But but.

00:18.53
mike_flywheel
If you listen to few episodes back. You'll remember Dyne brought the energy we had in the recording studio and this team is moving at lightning speeds. So today. We're going to talk about some of the things that they're out to some of the changes. They've been making to their packages talk a little bit more about actually what their customers are saying. I think they've been up to a whole bunch of new product and feature releases that they want to tell us about so welcome to the show parsa if you want to give us a quick introduction about yourself or anybody rejoining for the first time and then we'll dive in from there. So.

00:46.20
Parsa Riahi
Perfect. Thank you Mike and great to see you again. I know last time we talked the podcasts went two and a half times over where it's supposed to so I'll try to keep it short for the viewers and listeners this time but my name is para the cto here at dine you may remember me as the guy who was off screen last time and now I got proper Mike and set up so hopefully can hear me a little bit better. But. I'm here sort of talking about today. All we're doing a dine for the restaurants and people in the hospitality industry that were helping out across the country and tell you little more how we're doing that so that everyone has a great idea. We can really expand this to to new heights.

01:18.89
mike_flywheel
I love it for anybody tuning back in maybe let's do a quick recap on what Dyn actually does so tell us a little bit about Dyn um, and who you service who are the customers that you help and what are the types of things that you offer for.

01:29.36
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, definitely so simply put dyn is the best Ai for restaurants and we really focus on 2 key areas automating marketing for every type of marketing manager and optimizing supply chains for every kind of operational task you can imagine so we really put that into 3 tiers that our restaurants have signed up to. First 1 being called drive as in driving traffic and really boosting your your stores energy energy around it and that's really directed towards marketing managers which looks to us integrating all your different social media integrations. Ah retargeting new customers and old and automating marketing campaigns across the board. So this really is useful. Making it so that your marketing costs go from 100 to 10 cutting it 90% down and seeing that we can extend your reach and better retarget every customer ah and get a full attribution loop of each customer so you can see when they click on the ad when they pay in your pos when they leave a review and connect all those points together in 1 software.

02:24.89
mike_flywheel
That's amazing. So that's some pretty powerful stuff so before we jump into into number 2 I want to just like pause on drive. So drive is for like mom and pop like I own a single restaurant does it also scale to people that have maybe twenty thirty restaurants maybe you'll talk about that in the other bits but who's like.

02:25.10
Parsa Riahi
And the cycle them. Yeah sure. Yeah.

02:41.14
mike_flywheel
Who can start taking advantage of drive. What is the smallest restaurant that could benefit from drive first.

02:45.56
Parsa Riahi
So what's really cool about the latest innovation in the dying technology is that anyone can take part in any part of the platform and so we initially designed the drive and the first tier for those mom-and-pop shops to boost the businesses. But we find that whether your mom- and-pop shop or a large enterprise these features really hit all markets. And so whether you have 1 store or a hundred these features can actually understand based on each of your locations. What people are coming in what differences they have between look store one and store 2 in terms of the different demographics coming in preferences. You know, ah demographics of of of people pay what the what was.

03:23.52
Parsa Riahi
Try it again. Yeah sorry.

03:23.77
mike_flywheel
That's all good man. You just take me through it What it. So like I think so if you think about that like in in a nutshell you've designed a product here that can cover a wide spectrum of customers even from its earliest. Package like you've really made this super accessible for everyone in the market because you truly believe as you were kind of mentioning before and I know you guys mentioned in the last recording. Um, you're really about connecting people and helping truly try to transform and power this space with tools that have. Previously been lacking for restaurant owners um talk to me then about grow where does grow fit in so if drives like my initial piece. Yeah for sure. Yeah, yeah.

03:59.98
Parsa Riahi
yeah yeah I want to on to spoken more about drive as well sort of and and really expand on what makes this a special thing for these restaurants so you know every restaurant owner and every person in the world has not heard about chat gbt and you know everyone's using it for the different you know task like. But they can Google for a recipe. Whatever it is but what we really do well is integrate enterprise chatchibity which allows you to have very secure access to this ai so that whatever you're building as a marketing campaign is never shared with your competitors and what you have as your own internal brand and datasets never gets shared with others. So what's really cool about Dyn's drive tier. Whether your mom andpop shop competing with a large chain or you're a big enterprise restaurant. You're never going to have your competitors you know creeping into your your datasets and seeing what you're doing and so that makes it a really safe way as oppos to chattchipuity to build marketing campaigns through our platform and that's why it's been able to scale so fast. Across these different types of restaurants because we have that ability to do social media management. You know ai generated campaigns. We have a coupon marketplace of different promotions and deals as well as influencers that go around and in film spots in the locations and tying that all into your existing loyalty integrations so that you can you know, connect all these points together. In a white glove service.

05:18.30
mike_flywheel
That's cool. Obviously you and I are a little bit deeper than maybe the average person on chat Gpt or where I'm assuming you're gonna go when you were talking about enterprise grade can you talk to me about what is enterprise grade chat gpt and what.

05:21.34
Parsa Riahi
For sure.

05:34.72
Parsa Riahi
Definitely.

05:35.91
mike_flywheel
Yeah I mean you talked about it a little bit but why should that matter you talked about things around privacy security feeding back into models. Let's just talk about that I think for a minute because I think it's super special that you are already integrating this so early or so quickly in your journey. But for the average everyday person. They might not know what that means or what the differences are so let's talk about that for a bit.

05:57.50
Parsa Riahi
Definitely so you can imagine when you' using chat chipitity. It's super easy. There's a search bar you type in whatever you want, you know you you get the answer instantly and that's all true. But if I tell chat gpt let's say what my business's revenue is it's going to store that. And share it with everyone else and train its models again and what it means to train a model is that it's going to use what I know as my personal you know, private information to help other people and so I lose my business edge I lose the ability to have secrets about my business because I'm asking cha stupid any questions. It's logging and storing those and keeping it forever you know has an infinite memory. And so we want to make sure that as a business you're not leaching off your your your I p your intellectual property your your secrets to your competitors. So those who don't need to hear it and really focusing on how we can drive that value and drive those customers in in a safe way and so it's about that ethical piece of the ai and having it in a way that. You're not getting taken advantage of for using a tool that makes you faster smart or better and so in this way, you get all those advantages together and that's really done through our amazing partnership with Microsoft and having that backing of of their large technology and using it in this particular context that's essential. For restaurant owners to see that traffic boost without seeing any privacy loss.

07:10.38
mike_flywheel
I love that and you know I've I've got a post coming up soon about the differences between openai and azure open Ai and there's value extreme value in both undoubtedly but to your point if I have a secret recipe or sauce. And I actually want to write a marketing piece around that secret recipe or sauce because I want to post about it I actually don't want that feeding into other people's models but I want to tell it the full story so it can give me something but if I do that I could potentially ah potentially leak my secret sauce.

07:31.71
Parsa Riahi
Exactly.

07:44.80
Parsa Riahi
The best example is Cook Cocacola is never going to get their recipe leached with if they're using our enterprise Ai but if they use chat gpu tea. It's going to be there for everybody.

07:46.29
mike_flywheel
Um, or recipe that.

07:52.85
mike_flywheel
It could and so it's It's very much. It's not not enterprise great like businesses could use it really just depends what you're putting into it and it does get up and working really fast like the user experience is definitely amazing like props to chat Gp They definitely like when.

08:00.89
Parsa Riahi
Sure.

08:10.69
mike_flywheel
Everyone's sort of mass trying something. They've definitely made it super simple for the user but to your point there is a differentiated moment when businesses that are trying to do things for themselves. Do need to guard some secrets and have an extra layer of protection and so you're effectively ring fencing people. Within their environment or your environment so that that's not leaking into the broader data set of businesses out there.

08:30.63
Parsa Riahi
And 1 other really cool thing if I can talk about how we do this full attribution loop is that we actually tie together. You know the prompts you're putting into our chatship. Achieve version are based off of the reviews your customers have given you in the past they're based off of the things that people like on.

08:43.44
mike_flywheel
Wow. So.

08:48.60
Parsa Riahi
Instagram Facebook you know Twitter you name it as they go through your pages and interact with your your ads and your website all of these different data points tie into creating the optimal high ranking internet traffic ads through our platform and so you're getting both pieces. One is that safety piece of the enterprise ai and 2 is the best. Types of words that get grit you the largest amount of traction based off of what your customers actually want and not what you're guessing at so the guesswork is gone. The safety is there and the ai does it all for you.

09:18.40
mike_flywheel
It's that's amazing. So it's contextualizing information that exists about you as well pairing that with inputs that you're putting. So maybe I know there's a few packages and we'll talk about them. Maybe let's just talk about drives So we're kind of there already I'd love to talk about like what are the key elements of drive.

09:31.97
Parsa Riahi
For sure.

09:37.33
mike_flywheel
Maybe like kind of list them off so we can mentally prepare ourselves and then I'd love to talk about like the evolution. What are some special features that you feel really proud of that. The team's been releasing um over the last little while. So.

09:45.91
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, definitely so. You know we started this with a look at how we can just simplify a few pieces in marketing. You know, can we track social media performance. You know, have some simple marketing services like ads running through our platform you know automate the scheduling in some way and these are features that. Restaurant owners are sort of already learning to do just by the nature of this digital economy that we're a part of by having everyone connected via the internet is important to use that as a platform to boost your business but it's really not the core interest of a restaurant to focus on you know, social media. It's it's kind of a. And add-on. It's a thing that you need to do but you really want to focus more on the cooking you want focus more on building the business and so you find people will hire a marketing manager for that and maybe the market manager doesn't have the same interest in and motivation to boost that business as you do as an owner and so we want to give that ability to both the owner and the marketing manager to make the process more simple and so we started around this social media management piece. But of course with the large scale evolution of these ai models in the last you know six months to a year we've seen a real ability for us to automate out each step of the process. So whether you're creating a new campaign. We look towards your existing. You know, social media pages I understand what your brand looks like what your color schemeema is what the keywords you use are we look towards what your customers are so are talking about you. We look towards where you want to expand into with new demographics. We look towards what your pos orders are seeing what your your social media clicks are seeing and tying those together and so through all of these.

11:12.32
Parsa Riahi
ate these Ai generated campaigns and not just text like chat gute but images to in being with us should deploy these optimally at the right time with the right content for the right users so you get the maximum traction and so you can of course.

11:24.33
mike_flywheel
So You even get like a content calendar out of this yeah like it sounds like it's picking up a bunch of external information. Um, and I'm not like I almost imagine a world where I have you know a hired social media manager. Maybe it's like hey hostess. That's full Time. Can you also do a little bit of this off the side of your desk you're saying listen we're going to go look at a whole bunch of external factors. We're going to allow you to input some of your own elements to help support it but we can help you along the way and this could effectively be robust enough because it will. Build a campaign and a calendar to deploy yourself or because I think it's important right? Like if you have a marketing manager or social media manager This is not coming to replace your job. This is coming to support. You. Yeah so.

12:09.79
Parsa Riahi
Um, it's actually allowing you to become of course like it's it's making ah every part of your your job more simple because there's less guesswork. You know you as ah as ah as a marketing manager especially in these smaller mompop shops don't have enough time to read through all these different messages and comments and you know trending hashtags it's it's impossible. You know we've tried it ourselves. And the reason we built this is because we've been helping these restaurants for you know, 2 years now. We've seen the pains that they have and so you know of our you know thousand odd restaurants that we're helping every one of them is using the drive tier every single one of course some of they use to grow and the expand as well. But they all start here because it's the most immediate pain point and it's so. Simply solved through our platform.

12:47.82
mike_flywheel
Now we're talking about this like it's super simple and it's always existed. What are some of the features that we've either talked about or haven't talked about that are like new and fresh and things that are like on the cutting edge of what you're doing and maybe even that have evolved since we talked I don't even remember it might have been a couple months ago but

13:05.46
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, so there's 2 Yeah, there's 2 super cool things. We've been adding in the drive tier. The first one is around loyalty in how you connect your existing loyalty and Crm platforms.

13:06.18
mike_flywheel
Things are moving that fast. What what's sort of like the things that people should be like Holy cow if I want to be bleeding edge I need to to try dying and.

13:23.60
Parsa Riahi
To your marketing campaigns and in tracking where each click converts to so I can see if 10000 people see my ad and 1000 people click on it and maybe huj gets at the website's you know preservation page how many of those I should to come to my pos and then place a review and each one of those steps is tracked with the number and so. You don't have to do any guesswork with Google ads and saying okay well I get this ad out and had a certain clickth throughugh rate and I don't really know what it means and I saw some you know the fluctuation of my pos orders but I don't really know if I got any answer with Dne. You're getting that direct insight through our platform and make it super visible so you can see every step. And that's really been a valuable piece for these marketing managers and for these especially smaller restaurants to see the effectiveness of the spend they put on ads and so our cost of as a platform is immediately visible and so we're actually not performing as well as your ad is we won't charge you for that month you know because we want to be kind to these to these, especially the small business owners. Who don't have that large budget for a marketing campaign. Let's say a Starbucks might have especially people of course to help Starbucks you know there's different markets for these things we want to make sure that we're we're kind to especially our first you know thousand 10000 customers who are using this and really helping us to build this to a scale where it's ready for the whole market in the whole world. So that's piece one loyalty. Piece 2 is around image generation. This is something that's you know, very very new in the space and how we can actually create the content of the images for every one of your social media posts your advertisements you name it and that's all by understanding your existing social media content. What what competitors in your space are doing your color schemes your keywords you name it.

14:53.47
Parsa Riahi
And using that alongside those ideal texts and that ideal timing to get your campaign much more reach and so there's no more graphic design needed it understands what you've already done even your menus we can design a whole new layout based off of what's optimal for your business and so this kind of image generation saves hours and hours and hours every quarter for these restaurant owners and it's essential.

15:12.76
mike_flywheel
I Love how easy you're making this sound and I think what's crazy is like as I listen to you talk through it I imagine myself in someone's shoes where they create an image maybe in photoshop maybe in Canva and they post it and they boost it.

15:13.33
Parsa Riahi
Get that maximum traffic. Yeah.

15:32.30
mike_flywheel
And they measure the number of views it got and the number of clicks it got and maybe if they've yeah like it's not connected right? It's not contextual. You're contextualizing this.

15:37.12
Parsa Riahi
And none of those numbers mean anything to a restaurant owner. It's like how many steals that I might there's no meaning oh I got got 10 clicks well, where's the orders. Where's my where's my return on investment. You don't get that number you know of through dying. You can see the full attribution loop and so that's like essential to seeing.

15:48.00
mike_flywheel
How yeah this got it. So so retention. Big new hot feature and the other is specifically around image generation to help speed up how this is how this is done are there other.

15:54.21
Parsa Riahi
If your spend makes sense.

16:05.60
mike_flywheel
Key components of the drive that you want to make sure we like cover off today and people should think about and.

16:06.77
Parsa Riahi
Well the last piece that you know sometimes we want to make sure that people understand this is not just an ai tool. There's a whole team of people working behind this and so what we usually do is we combine that automated piece of the ai the content generation your image generation that connections to your loyalty pieces with our influencer marketplace and so we have hundreds of these foodie bloggers and influencers.

16:13.54
mike_flywheel
And.

16:26.34
Parsa Riahi
Go into these restaurants and film content to add that more of a human touch and so all these Ai models are getting there. They're not there yet and so right now we have a very strong team of people who are dedicated to boosting that industry seeing that restaurant industry really bounce back. You know during the pandemic 271000 jobs were lost in Canada and over two point six million jobs in the food industry in the us. Which were never gotten back and so there's no one to do this kind of work and so there's a real shortage one which this is why we built this ti is because there's so many jobs lost and there's no one doing this kind of work and it needs to be done to boost that traffic back. Otherwise you know we're we're out of luck and so right now you'll see There's a new industry report that came out which said that about 50% in Canada. 50% in us give me 51% in Canada of restaurant owners people in the hospitality industry are looking for new automation tech in the next two years and so we're sort of uniquely poised in this market where we can tap into not just the sort of chat Gpt spinoffs that everyone else is making but stuff that is really connected to your existing restaurant tech stack stuff that keeps your data safe. And stuff that makes your decision making processes much faster, much easier much simpler so you get the maximum traffic into your into your restaurant.

17:29.52
mike_flywheel
So that's super cool I love that you added that element where there's like a platform element to what you offer, but there's like some elements where you can help extend those capabilities with people with authentic foodies and bloggers and vloggers that can round out your strategy and. They don't need to go out looking for them like you have these people on your roster across Canada and I presume expanding if not going to be expanding into the us. So super critical. We talked about um supply chain. Earlier on is that in drive or are we now starting to go to the next package or supply chain a component of this drive package this first initial got it. So we're in grow now we should talk about grow a little bit yeahp. Yeah.

18:09.20
Parsa Riahi
So supply chain is all about grow so grow and expander all about supply optimization. Yeah, and we'll take a quick positive is reset the camera get right into that perfect. Yeah, give me 1 sick.

18:43.81
Parsa Riahi
Okay, sorry about the initial gaff that was silly.

18:48.20
mike_flywheel
You're ready.

18:53.71
mike_flywheel
That's good man that's is real like that's real authentic dialogues that's stuff happens. Okay so I'm gonna kick us back off, you're ready to go then. Thanks.

18:58.10
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, give me 2 seconds just want to make sure I know my what I'm talking about.

19:26.71
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, let's do it I want to speak a bit more about ah sort of the integrations and the partnerships we built and how it connects to staffing inventory pricing procurement these sorts of things.

19:36.86
mike_flywheel
So perfect. So.

19:42.97
mike_flywheel
Okay, parsa. So let's talk about grow a little bit tell me about so a clear drive drives a package that supports your marketing customer loyalty very robust. There's elements of Ai. There's elements of people um, and bespoke elements to that package and people can go find out more and we'll tell more to go after let's talk about grow tell me about what the grow package entails.

20:03.50
Parsa Riahi
So first of I'd say that grow is my personal favorite package. The amount of easy to use tech in this that simplifies decision making beyond marketing is industry-leading and incredibly incredibly new to this space and so it really hasn't been done before. We're doing stuff like understanding what the ideal price point is for every single menu item across every single store on a minute-to-minute basis. What uber does with search pricing. We can easily do for restaurants whether that's on a daily monthly quarterly basis. You name it. But that's there we understand exactly when your inventory will be overstocked or understocked two weeks in advance look at how your your staff can be ideally placed based off of upcoming events around your city with tracking over 100000 people as foot traffic in each province in Canada and each state in the us and so there's a very large amount of data that we're processing from not just. Ah, restaurants own internal operations but from the large scale information about what their this and what their locality is is producing it terms of events and people's interests that factors into how we can ideally optimize the supply chain. What does it mean to optimize a supply chain. You're going to ask it means that when I have any sort of procurement order I want to order? let's say. Um, to 10 steaks for next week I need to understand exactly how people are going to come in next week to order those 10 staks if I over order I'm going to be you know, ah throw a stak out and that's not great. So there's a food waste element there if I am looking at you know large scale decisions on make sure that I'm not overstaffing so my margins are decreased because I don't have enough money to pay back.

21:35.70
Parsa Riahi
My people and so the real point of this tier is directed that operations managers who make these decisions and it's about growing these proper margins optimizing this staffing and inventory and integrating with each piece of the restaurant tech stack from the pos to the staffing and inventory to the reviews. The reservations you name it and so some of these functionalities that even unlock new features in in tier one and in that. And drive tier. You know when you have reviews Integrated. You're able to get better insights on your marketing. But of course it really ah unlocks a new level of ideally managing each flow of your people of your inventory and of your prices across each location all at once.

22:11.28
mike_flywheel
That's cool. So you talked about a few things there. So I heard elements of supply chain elements of staffing elements of reducing food waste so it sounds like you don't just have to rely on like oh my. Knees start to hurt and Tingle and it's going to rain this week like you're bringing some some data and I think what's important here is like at the end of the day. The restaurant owners and operations managers are empowered to make the final call but you're giving them information and predictability that they can make the final call. You know my gut says that's not perfectly accurate, but that's fine. It's guidance and over time you layer that with knowledge and industry expertise and holy cow that's powerful. Um, are there other elements so you know or maybe we want to talk through a few of those.

22:54.72
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, those sort of 2 customer types really who use this this tier. There's those who have never touched the sort of dataset stuff before in the lives your mom and pop shops. You scale. They're just getting into this stuff. They're just starting to track these metrics and you know more power to they should really really be tracking because it's important stuff. And there's also have been around for the ten years to actually have a large amount of data that they actually process and track and we plug into any that sort of information they have so they're neverre actually replacing any tech. They don't have to like find a new you know way way of doing things. They just plug things in it's a 1 click integration into our platform for each other platform for each other tech and so we just.

23:28.54
mike_flywheel
So wow.

23:32.97
Parsa Riahi
Take all that data and usually what these guys do is they spend hours and hour hour hours and hour hour hour s and hour hour hours each week trying to understand what the financial numbers mean what to do with next you know quarter in terms of pricing what to take from the previous week to predict the next week but what I always tell people is that we process so much data and we we have up to three months of forecast of information about what people are actually going to be doing and who's coming into your restaurant. And so it's like I can take my historic data and predict tomorrow. But it's like if it rained yesterday is going to rain tomorrow I could flip a coin and I'd be right half the time you know it's sort of like a real guessing game. Even the weather's not right all the time on the news and so we actually find find what the different foot traffic patterns are that are going to be coming in. We see how social media trends boost.

24:00.40
mike_flywheel
So yeah.

24:11.45
Parsa Riahi
You know your revenue there's there's always a really fun example. We have this one rings wings restaurant um in British Columbia and whenever there's a new hot ones episode online that trending hashtags for hot wings goes up and so we're able to actually price their hot wings higher during those peak times and see the profit margin on those increased two and a half fold and so there's cases like this across the entire internet. And no one is making those decisions manually, it's all automated by the ai and so no owner has to spend hours and hour hours and hour hours each week thinking about what the next decision is because that's made instant but it's at their fingertips. They never are automated out of the process. They're given the options that are optimal and they choose whether not to make them and if they choose to make them well then everyone's happy.

24:47.47
mike_flywheel
So a couple questions jumped to my mind. Um, the first is you talked about this dynamic pricing tied to menus. Um I assume this is I've noticed this everywhere I go most restaurants have gone away with or rarely use physical menus anymore. It's all a.

24:49.93
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, yeah.

25:06.42
mike_flywheel
Barcode thing. So what you're saying is that barcode is tied with their digital menu and you can hot swap that pretty quickly a time-based date based and allow these restaurants to fluctuate or surge if they see. Yeah.

25:20.10
Parsa Riahi
Um, most restaurants you know most restaurants even know what this stuff is called like in restaurants call this happy hour. We're just able to do that at each hour of the day based off of that demand and so whether it's you know a business sector where there's and a lunchtime rush or there's a.

25:26.82
mike_flywheel
So now.

25:33.59
Parsa Riahi
Um, you know a mom and pop shop that really sees a lot of elderly people come in. You know on on the Sunday afternoons. We understand how these flows work and we don't just increase the prices in a way that maximizes the restaurant's revenue because that decreases customer loyalty. We have a really strong balance of how we connect this dynamic pricing piece to that marketing campaign to the staffing and inventory piece that manages these things. In a sort of considerate way. We're not here to just be. You know, greedy capital is but we can always increase the margin of ah the cost of the food a little bit without seeing any customer backlash and so we really balanced that and learn from the experiences of all of our restaurants and in in informing those decisions. Ah, for each one of the new customers that we bring on so there's never a loss in customers. There's only a gain in the revenue. Yeah yeah, of course.

26:14.47
mike_flywheel
All right? So second question because I know someone's asking it. Someone's skeptical. Someone's skeptical on your accuracy. You're predicting my supply chain. You're predicting my staffing. You're predicting you know. All these elements of my business that I've been doing for 35 years and that's fine I'm sure they're really good at what they do. They definitely have like owners intuition and understanding of that space. But I'm skeptical. How accurate is.

26:36.10
Parsa Riahi
Um, of course and.

26:41.23
mike_flywheel
Are your predictions and how do you make sure that they're getting more accurate. How does this work and and you don't have to share all your secret ingredients if you will but tell me a little bit about it. Let's help people through that skepticism.

26:49.34
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, definitely so you know dime processes right now about 30000000 daily data points now that's a mean number that means nothing to most people. But if you think about $30000000 can you count each dollar every day I don't think so you know if it's stack a cash in a room. It's really hard to sort of measure what that all means and if each. Dollar has a different you know let's say a color if you think about monopoly money or each one has a different color you have you got to count how many of each color there are just that is an impossible problem to do in the day and so you know while we have so many so many so many smart restaurant owners and managers who understand it from an intuition standpoint. It's hard to catch all the nuances. Come on that daily basis those you know one-off events that only happen ah in a group chat somewhere off in the middle of the internet 5 hours before you know a big event and then all of a sudden you see a rush and you don't have enough staff to handle it. We seek edge cases like that all the time in each one of our restaurants and so it's not a matter of trying to say we're better than but. No it' just there's there's an ah impossible task of measuring all the different datasets that exists. You know we plug into stuff like events for traffic weather data rest information. You know we plug into the p os we plug into your procurement your your Cisco or Gordon Foods you name it staffing platforms like 7 ships in 7 rooms. You know we're not here to sort of guess we're. Connecting to the datasets where they are. But of course we have a very strong and sort of proprietary tech behind it that helps to create those insights that understand the differences between you know, a hot day and a cold day. But at every moment of the day and seeing you know how those demands fluctuate and connecting that 2 years of supply providers.

28:25.83
Parsa Riahi
So you can actually you know for example, automate the order of the next inventory through our tech when you see there's going to be a shortage or you can reallocate your staff to different stores by plugging into 7 shifts. Let's say and whenever we have that you know staffing overage you just allocate into the other store and so there's a real piece of what we call supply chain optimization. And moving these things around different stores based off of the demand and connecting that to your supply size. So you're never actually overstaffed understaffed oversupplied undersupplied. You're making the optimal margin and that makes you grow into and over profitable business.

28:58.49
mike_flywheel
And it's really impressive. So like I don't even know if everyone caught that. But what was super special to me is Dyn is definitely a powerful tool. Um, but 1 of the biggest things in any industry is change management. And what you're telling me is because of your 2 wo-way integration so much of that change management is taken away. It's not like hey dyn is going to predict and tell you how to think about your staffing and then you need to go take that and put that into a bunch of tools or call a bunch of people you're telling me these things are integrated with your primary for the most part. Supply chain vendors for food shift management ordering systems menu systems. You've integrated a whole bunch of this so that people can live where they're typically used to living but with a layer on top of it of advice that they can.

29:42.84
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, yeah.

29:45.61
mike_flywheel
Plug in and make these decisions and connect back with the systems they're used to very quickly. So.

29:47.45
Parsa Riahi
And what's super exciting is that you know like we have like probably seventy seventy five integrations so far into the restaurant tech stock. We're adding like 8 new ones every month so about Twenty five a quarter that we're adding right now and it keeps growing so you know if there's any restaurant who sees like oh yeah, well they have this but not what I need.

29:55.11
mike_flywheel
Wow.

30:04.40
Parsa Riahi
Takes us about you know three weeks out of your integration and it's super fast for us to build it in because you know we've been doing this for for years now and we really understand what the important pieces of data are so we're not trying to you know, get everything about your your data set is what what makes the decision making process simpler and so you know we call this thing next. Best action recommendations in our platform and how you can understand both. Qualitative your reviews you know stuff that people are just talking about as well as quantitative insights stuff that's coming from your pus trackers. You know, different numbers in your in your dashboards you name it ah help you make about decisions for your business It's really tailored to each level of the user. So the marketing manager who logs in sees. Ah, things that are relevant to them. The server sees recommendations that are relevant to a server the owner might see relevations. They're relevant to pricing or creating a new menu but we actually target it to each different level of the organization. So each person in the in the restaurant can use the Dyn's next best action recommendation to improve their overall. Ah behavior with with customers to improve their differentiation against competitors and to grow the business overall so that it can expand to more locations so it can create more of a buzz. It can create more of a customer base and really see it become a staple of each of their cities.

31:09.14
mike_flywheel
So you're talking about a few things there you you talked a little bit about customer sentiment analysis at scale. Um like actually knowing not just reading your Google reviews like a broader set of what are people talking about goods and bads online and then there's the next logical action which are like.

31:16.27
Parsa Riahi
Um, yeah.

31:19.76
Parsa Riahi
Yeah.

31:28.13
mike_flywheel
I Guess recommendations based on the data that that.

31:30.65
Parsa Riahi
Exactly so really, you know customer sentiment is like um if I if I'm typing something is that a positive message or a negative message. That's the simplest version and that's what most you know people will do anyways. But what we do really cool is we understand what keywords are being talked about. So am I talking about burgers in a positive or negative light. How many food topics I'm talking about positively or negatively or drink topics or service quality or the ampiance of the restaurant we have about 10 different types of indicators that allow us to see not just how your restaurant is doing but how each facet of your business is performing based on your your your customer s feedback. And so this allows us to get a lot more granular with the ns we provide and these action recommendations that we give we're not giving you 10000 recommendations. It's use a platform for 5 minutes a day get 3 key insights that you can deliver on that day and if you do them, you'll see you'll see improvement if you don't your money back. That's sort of the way we work.

32:24.17
mike_flywheel
That's super powerful. Um, so those are the key components of grow. So we've cleared drive now you've cleared grow 1 question before we move on and you said there's 3 packages I think perfect. So before we cover expand if I buy grow.

32:34.75
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, the third one is called expand.

32:41.81
mike_flywheel
Do I get all the features of drive or do I stack them like I buy drive but I can also buy work.

32:42.76
Parsa Riahi
Of course. Yeah so what's super cool about the what what we do is that first of all, if you use drive you're going to get you know it's great for your sort of mom and pop shop who doesn't have to necessarily all the different datasets of the growth tier but drive helps you turn into a restaurant that will be you needing grow. It gets you those extra you know the revenue you need to. Boost into new locations and they buy those new to software platforms that enable grow to be most optimal when you get to grow the data says that you're plugging into whether it's the the reviews or whether it's the pus data. They all inform the features from drive your automated marketing piece but they also enable new features around dynamic pricing. Inventory and staffing demand forecasting customer sentiment retargeting and next best action recommendations that add a new layer of act of recommendations and insights and things that build your business and similarly with expand what we're doing here is taking it from a model which is really great for one location at a time and understanding how we can look at. All of your locations as a scale uppressant with multiple locations or as an enterprise with hundreds across different. You know, states and provinces and how we can manage those supply chains at scale in understanding competitor insights and understanding where to place your next site for a new expansion and in looking at your current locations and how we can. Actually visualize all the different supply chain flows on a map screen and see when things are going to be coming in when things are going to be running out and making simple like simple click you know actions to optimize those chains.

34:07.49
mike_flywheel
So drive and grow are really for everyone like this a single location could use both drive and grow if I'm paying for grow I'm inherently just also getting all of the features of grow plus drive I don't have to pay for package a and package b Okay, so now if I go to expand.

34:15.70
Parsa Riahi
Um, for sure.

34:23.19
Parsa Riahi
Um, exactly.

34:27.30
mike_flywheel
Um, does that mean when I go to expand I'm paying for expand but getting drive grow and expand is that sort of how the packages work.

34:31.52
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, of course you you get all the features that we've talked about in drive and grow inside of expand but you get it in a way that is much more visual for a multilocation restaurant those guys who are trying to expand excellent.

34:40.84
mike_flywheel
So so expands for multi-location like if I have one location unless I'm thinking about expansion which maybe is a component. So.

34:48.93
Parsa Riahi
And if you want to think about expansion. We have the the best next site picker in the expand tier to help you find that second third and you know twentieth thirtieth location. Um, you name it we understand essentially what demographics you want to expand into whether it's the. Square footage of the restaurant whether it's has parking spots. How much people are earning in that area. What the population density is and about 10 other factors that really allow us to inform what is the ideal place for a new location and cross-reference that with existing real estate offerings pre-sale construction offerings. As well as your competitors' location so you can bid on so you can see the whole market of where the next best location is and we can allow you to then contact the relater for those spots and get into a discussion. You know about 60 to 70% faster than if you go through an expansion manager if you go through you know a traditional process in the space.

35:37.54
mike_flywheel
So that's amazing. So you talked about it helps you so I guess if you're a single location and not looking to add more locations. Definitely you don't need to move past grow. You can benefit from drive immediately. You could also leverage grow and if you have data capabilities. You can. If. You've got more than 1 location. You should almost very much be considering grow. Especially if you have more than one location and if you have 1 location or multiple locations and you're looking to understand the market not just not just add more locations. But if you're looking to understand the market and or make new.

36:01.37
Parsa Riahi
Definitely.

36:11.97
mike_flywheel
Investment decisions in new locations expand is for you and you talked about the ability for this location picker which sounded really cool and then there's competitive insights and then you're talking I think about elements of like understanding the current location. For example.

36:20.52
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, so there's sort of 3 there's sort of 3 key features. The first one is that location picker that new location picker feature that allows you to see what the optimal next franchise spot or next. You know restaurant location is for your business based off of your existing customer base and what you want to go towards the second is current location analysis. So once you get past that 2 location Mark we want to see how we can optimize the staffing and inventory flows between your locations understand where the foot traffic is coming from in terms of the events happening around town. See when things are are going well or not based off of your pos data database of your reviews and seeing how we can create new deals for different customer segments based off of their geography in a way that's bit more fine- tuneed that what you find in. Let's say a Google ads or Facebook ads because it only looks towards ah sort of a radius around a given point but we we're able to see. Ah, for each location. What are the differences between them and the third piece is the competitor analysis and seeing you know how competitors are creating you know marketing material in your space. What price points that they're setting things on what deals they're running to make things sort of a bit more easy for customers to come in as well as seeing how much of your market are they taking away. And whether you want to either compete with them for the same market or find a different way to differentiate and to find a new market segment to tap into so whether you want to be you know the biggest fish in your pond or to find a new pont to expand into. We help both of those directions with this competitor analysis.

37:50.67
mike_flywheel
So this is cool now I should have maybe even asked this when we started with drive but these are monthly based subscriptions or I so I kind of buy six or twelve months at a time. How does that work. We'd have to talk pricing here I think we'll direct people to where they can find out more.

38:06.81
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can really do sort of ah monthly quarterly yearly what we always find is that the work the guys who book it yearly you know you get ten months or you get sorry twelve months for the price of 10 So like that's one of the many ways that we make it simpler for restaurants to to see the value.

38:09.40
mike_flywheel
Um, but how are the packages purchased monthly sent for.

38:25.80
Parsa Riahi
And we do work on a way you know, especially with these larger clients. We often. Do you know pilots for let's say 5 locations of the 50 that they might have and show some success metrics before we expand to the full 50 and imply expansion across all those locations and so we're not here to sort of price gouge we're not here to you know make the existing margins smaller every part of our business. Has a trackable performance indicator attached to it that shows how well the feature is working for your restaurant and so if the feature is not working well you can literally screenshot your dashboard and show the cost-saving calculator that's already in our features and say hey I'm paying x but you're giving me y and so that's not enough. You know you're giving me less than what I need but. If that number is really high. Of course we see that our customers have seen that a lot that when the number is much higher than the cost you're paying. It's really intuitive to sign up every location for dime whether that's the drive grow or expand tier. We apply this sort of visibility across all of it. We are not here to sort of make it. Harder to understand this Ai thing we're trying to make it really simple to understand. But really really accurate and so there's no better way to do that but than by showing the exact dollar to dollar breakdown of what we're doing for these restaurants and allowing them to sort of you know, keep us in check because we want to improve the product too. We want to make sure that it's. Optimal for every kind of restaurant whether they're a mom and pop shop a scale up an enterprise a qsr you know you name it and in this way, we've been able to grow really fast. You know last year around this time we had around maybe 30 clients and now we're you know over 80900 like that's a thirty forty x growth in a year and that's.

39:54.40
mike_flywheel
So wow.

39:56.87
Parsa Riahi
You know that's only because we have this amazing support of the restaurant community around us in really building this product with us and saying here's what I need here's what you're doing well here's what you're daunting well and our team is so devoted to this space and in iterating upon this value prop of creating that next level ai tool for restaurants that. Automates the marketing that optimizes the supply chain that makes every decision you know ten times faster and 10 times more impactful this is the place the place we're in and because of this large community be able to scale so fast and have so many great partners in this space and great customers. You know across the country and now we're doing a big us expansion and so this has been a really really fun place because we're able to see every kind of market across this space. Every scale of restaurant every type of customer demographic and fine tune these models for each one of our customers individually based off of their needs. And that's really cool.

40:51.49
mike_flywheel
That so Impressive. Um I think we've talked about you know drive Grow expand 3 amazing packages Some of the amazing features you've embedded within them what clearly jumps to my mind almost anyone that's gonna listen to this episode knows of. Someone or someone through someone that it either works in or owns something in the food and beverage industry or the restaurant industry and so I have to imagine they're going to want to listen to this and find out more so if they're listening to this. Um, where should they go to find out more details. And what are sort of the steps you'd advise for somebody who's looking to find out more information or maybe even get started right.

41:30.70
Parsa Riahi
So the simplest thing you can do is just go to Dyn app dot ca dyneappdot ca and book a demo for for any restaurant you can send that link to your friends who work in the restaurant industry. Anyone who's working in this space can really book a demo and our amazing customer support team is available twenty four seven to get to your needs. And so we'd be happy to show you the product walk you through it see if you can if you like it and see how we can help you create a customized solution that works the best for your business. We want to really show you how seamless it is to integrate ah into Dyn, you know we're not here to spend a week trying to you know, plug in your your wires and your pos system into our tech It's really just a few clicks that connect your different pos providers your social media all the different pieces in your in your puzzle and then have this dnd thing going on in the background that does the thinking for you and makes your life a lot simpler a lot less time spent on trying to digest large datasets and trying to understand market trends and give you actionables that you can really focus on. Drive your business around making your marketing decisions sort of drive traffic further around optimizing your pricing to get you further margins and in seeing the optimal amount of inventory and supply. You should have on a given cadence as well as informing how you can expand to new locations and understand competitors through all of this process so you can go from that mom and pop shop. With 1 or 2 locations and scale up to that enterprise we've seen people go from 1 locations to 5 locations in under a year using our platform that's crazy. We've seen restaurants go from 50 to 100 locations their platform that's crazier and so there's a place for each one of these different scales using dime and we want to make that available to everybody and so if you know anyone in this space.

43:05.15
Parsa Riahi
Whether they're restaurants whether their quick service. You know they run a pizza joint they work in in ah in a hotel you name it anywhere that they're serving food or anything else. We're able to apply this tech to that place and create a customized solution for them.

43:18.50
mike_flywheel
I I Love it. I mean you know how much I Truly love everything that's happening with ai um I'm super passionate about connecting it with people to create empowering scenarios and and obviously like there's no surprise ai can make. Things efficient. It can make things go away. But if there's an industry that has been so hurt by Covid and so many efficiency challenges. It's super special that you guys are applying this solution to help them regain the scale that they need to continue to grow and thrive.

43:51.65
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, yeah, exactly Maybe if you're a fluty This is the the place.

43:52.37
mike_flywheel
You also know I love food. So if restaurants continue to grow expand I love it. It's like so like there's no way you can hate going out for food or drinks with friends and so if people can do more of that and are empowered to do more of that and the restaurants are thriving because of solutions like dine. That's super amazing. So again. Dyn app ca but dyn with a y parsa. Thank you for joining us today on the pitch please podcast I know there's a little bit of a different episode. We haven't done a deep tech review a deep feature review of some of our previous startups and I hope we get more of them to come back to do this I think it was super engaging and cool. Any final closing thoughts from your side before you wrap up. So.

44:29.95
Parsa Riahi
I mean if anyone has any questions. Of course you have the Dyn website you can go right to in dynap dotca and fill out our our forms to get feedback on the tech that you're seeing on any demos that you want to do and so we'd love to get your feedback on this format as well. Both Mike and I and seeing how we can improve this format and maybe give you a bit more of a technical perspective if that's what you like. Or go into more so the case studies and you know real success is that Din has seen across. You know its its various set of clients and really show you how it's making that direct impact on a case-by-case basis. But with that. Thank you Mike so much for this opportunity. You know we were very happy to. Continue doing these podcasts and it's always great to see you much as we're across the country from each other It's it's it's ah it's a great pleasure.

45:08.28
mike_flywheel
It's awesome. The time zone always works out pretty good for me because I can do these after work and keep you within your own time zone of the day. So thanks again, everyone who joined in welcome back to the pitch please podcast Hope you enjoyed that episode and catch you on the next one. Thanks.

45:11.77
Parsa Riahi
Yeah, you go.

45:18.48
Parsa Riahi
Thank you everybody.

45:21.92
mike_flywheel
Before I pause the recording any questions or things that you want to dive into to make sure you have some artifacts.

45:29.57
Parsa Riahi
I Went through all the features. So that's good. Um.

45:36.69
Parsa Riahi
Thank you everybody and come dine with us.

45:44.14
mike_flywheel
Good. Good.

45:45.85
Parsa Riahi
Think So let me just check the podcast script real quick.

45:54.15
Parsa Riahi
Okay, that should be fine. Yeah because.

45:58.98
mike_flywheel
So save this one good to go I'll head stop now.