tapviva is cloud dining.  We are building a platform agnostic, fully customizable mobile ordering app for local counter restaurants, cafes and food trucks. Our goal is to bring the mobile app technology to all cafes, not only the ones that can afford to build the app themselves.

Our app will allow the cafes’ customers to order and pay on their phone, the order will be received by the cafe, and the cafe will begin preparing the order before the customer arrives. Both cafe and customer will have a clean and pleasing experience.

We are a lean business because our goal is to help thousands of cafes, restaurants and food trucks be lean by bringing them an affordable app service.

In the meantime, we stay lean by doing it all ourselves, with a little help from the AppSumo lean start-up package.  Vote for us in the unbelievably awesome AppSumo Lean Startup Challenge. Here are a few ways we are using, and plan to use the AppSumo package to help our lean little start-up grow (plus a few other tools we use to stay lean that we couldn’t help but mention):

• Like any good start-up, we need clients to agree to our terms and conditions and share some information about their business and interests. We found Pandaform to be the perfect (affordable) solution.  Not only did it save us money, due to the AppSumo deal, but it also saved us time. Pandaform is incredibly easy to use (it is drag and drop), we get a notification whenever a form is filled out, and it has an admin panel that actually makes sense. Easy to set-up forms? That’s lean!
• We need to deliver orders to food trucks that are on the move. We plan to be using Twilio’s text message service to send orders to phones.  We have been excited about Twilio since we first heard about it – we are looking forward to using the service to send texts to clients for pennies. Pennies for texts? That’s lean!
• Twitter is a free way for us to market tapviva to potential clients, we have been amazed by our ability to connect with ideal potential clients in cities other than our own around the country. Free marketing? That’s lean!
• Right now we are relying on outbound efforts (thank you BatchBook CRM!) to find and organize clients. In the future we hope to have customers find our site and sign up for our services. When they land at our site we still want to be available for any questions they may have – we plan to utilize SnapEngage to live chat with any customers with questions. Letting customers find you, but still having a live conversation? That’s lean!

tapviva? That’s lean!

Tags: Android, AppSumo, BatchBook, cafes, food trucks, Google Docs, iPhone, Pandaform, restaurants, SnapEngage, Twilio, Twitter