The Burrito Joint eatery at the corner of Packard and Dewey in Ann Arbor might seem an unlikely birthplace for a tech startup. But that was where Verdi Erel Ergun, 27, the Joint’s owner and an MBA student at the University of Michigan, decided he was fed up with his cash register. And frustration, when felt by a creative entrepreneur, is often the spark of a new business idea.

Ergun’s year-old startup, which goes by the name of Own, is developing a Web-based cash register system that makes it easy for restaurateurs to customize the interface that their employees see when they’re entering customers’ orders or ringing up the bill. The system not only lets managers create buttons on the fly to fit a changing menu, but also gives them real-time remote access to all their stores’ sales data, and integrates customer loyalty programs with social media.

There were three components to the problem as he saw it from the Burrito Joint. Let’s say he wanted to create a new burrito item on his menu. First, he had to draw a box on the screen of his register. That’s the burrito. Then, he had to create a code for the burrito, like XY3426, and then he had to create a box and a code for every single ingredient in that burrito. “So, before you know it, you’re not dealing with real items anymore. You’re dealing with codes,” Ergun says.

Then, as the owner, if Ergun wanted to get a real-time update on sales, he would have to call up his manager, interrupting his work, to get the figures.

And at the end of a 10-hour day, Ergun would go home and update the Burrito Joint’s Facebook page and find time to send e-mails out to customers, in a separate process that was completely disjointed from sales.

“It’s just a huge pain, you know?” Ergun says the process not only wastes restaurant owners’ time, but prevents innovation by discouraging change and creativity with menu items. Today’s point-of-sale systems also make it difficult for owners to track sales, and make social-media marketing an extra burden and afterthought when it should be front-and-center in attracting and retaining customers, Ergun argues.

Own’s solution is to replace a restaurant’s cash register with a Web-based system—with Ajax to make it “feel” like software—that is easy to use and accessible. He’s aiming his product at Michigan-based coffee shops and microchains. So, let’s replace his burrito with, say, the gingerbread latte that a coffee shop might want to add for the holidays. Just click “add new item” and search. As you start typing, icons will pop up with suggestions, kind of like Google. It’s “smart,” too, and knows ingredients and suggested prices. So, using Own is not a burdensome coding project, but rather more of an affirmation process, checking things off as the system presents it to you.

Ergun says he chose coffee shops as his first customers because most of them already have well-established loyalty programs, and Own offers a way to get loyal customers into a database and reach out to them on social media. When a customer gets a loyalty card, clerks can enter their birthdays and coffee preferences into the database. Then the store … Next Page »

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