I did not start GoOrderly because the world needed another ordering app. I started it because I had already watched a restaurant put real care into the food, then lose time, money, and the customer in the gap between the kitchen and the person who wanted to eat.
The work that changed how I see that gap was SVSFood. I was helping improve operations across outlets in Madhya Pradesh: a custom kiosk, an admin console, an ordering website, and a rider app on one shared backend. The better the operations got, the more obvious the leftover friction became. Every improvement showed another place where the system was still slowing the team down, and the customer along with it.
That bothered me. A restaurant spends years getting the food right. Then the ordering, the handoffs, and the follow-up often feel like an afterthought. Restaurants and cloud kitchens pay commission on orders and can lose the customer after the first one. The customer, for their part, gets an experience that is more annoying than the food deserves.
This is an enormous industry, and I think it deserves workflows that are as good as the food.
That frustration is why I started GoOrderly. The product is live at goorderly.in. This essay is the longer version of a piece I first published on Medium.
What working on operations taught me
Operations work teaches you to look at the whole path of an order, not one screen. An order starts when a customer decides what to eat. It passes through a menu, a payment, a kitchen ticket, maybe a rider, and ends with a customer who is either happy or not. Every handoff on that path is a place where something can be retyped, delayed, or misunderstood.
When those handoffs live in different tools, the restaurant ends up doing the integration by hand. Someone updates the menu in one place and then again in another. Someone reads an order off one screen and keys it into a second one. Staff absorb that work quietly, usually at the busiest hour of the day.
On SVSFood, the rented kiosk and the templated ordering site did not share inventory. When the vendor had a bad day, the counter had a bad day. Replacing that meant four products that had to agree on one truth: what is on the menu, what is in stock, which coupon is valid, and where an order is right now. I wrote that rebuild up in Firing a kiosk vendor. The outlets reported ₹40L+ revenue in the first month on the new stack. The number mattered less to me, as a founder, than the rule underneath it.
The customer feels it too
Restaurants are not the only ones paying for friction. A customer who wants to order again has to remember where to go, find the restaurant among many others, and start over. Wait times can be unclear. A sold-out item can turn up after payment. A coupon can work in one place and not another.
None of these are dramatic failures. They are small frictions, and they add up to a customer who orders somewhere easier next time. Restaurants often never see that happen, which makes it harder to fix.
I think delight in a restaurant order is mostly the absence of annoyance:
- A menu that is accurate.
- An order that goes through the first time.
- A status that is clear.
- A way to come back that takes a few taps.
That is the customer bar GoOrderly is built against. Fast checkout, a menu the kitchen actually has, and a return path that does not send a regular hunting through a marketplace search.
Whose customer is it?
This is the question that sits underneath the product. Think about a regular at a small restaurant. They liked the food, so they ordered again. On a delivery marketplace, that second order passes through someone else's app. The restaurant cooked the meal, packed it, and earned the customer's trust. The marketplace controls what the customer sees next: the screen, the search results, and which restaurants appear alongside yours.
Marketplaces do something valuable. They put a restaurant in front of people who have never heard of it, and I do not think restaurants should give that up. My problem is with what happens next. The customer a restaurant earned can end up being a customer the platform shows to competitors.
A restaurant cannot fix that with better food. It is a structural problem, and structural problems need software that is built differently.
| Channel | What it is best at | Who decides what the customer sees next |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace (Swiggy, Zomato) | Being found by new customers | The platform |
| Direct channel (GoOrderly) | Bringing back customers who already like the food | The restaurant |
I wrote the practical version of this for owners at Swiggy and Zomato as a discovery channel, not the only channel. Commission on those apps is commonly reported at roughly 16% to 30%, depending on the contract. On ₹1,00,000 of monthly orders at 25%, that is ₹25,000 handed over. That illustration is a way to see the leak. It is not a promise of what any one restaurant will save. Your contract and your repeat rate are yours.
What "own it" means in practice
When I say a restaurant should own its ordering, I mean four plain things.
- The channel. A website, an app, and a kiosk that carry the restaurant's name.
- The customer relationship. A restaurant should be able to recognise a returning customer, with their consent, and say thank you.
- The data. Restaurants should be able to access and export their order and menu data, while respecting customer privacy.
- The workflow. New orders should land in the POS the team already uses, not in a second screen that someone has to retype.
That last one matters more than it sounds. A direct channel that adds work for a busy kitchen risks becoming another burden. This is why GoOrderly is built as one connected system: a self-ordering kiosk, an ordering website, a customer app, and an admin console, with orders flowing into Petpooja. Restaurants that run their own delivery can add a rider app.
The product choices behind GoOrderly
One system, not four tools
A kiosk at the counter, a website for online orders, an app for regulars, and a console for the team could be four separate products. I would rather they behave as one, so the restaurant maintains a single menu and a single view of its orders. Coupons, offers, and analytics live in the same console. A sold-out item disappears everywhere at once.
On the site I describe that as five products working together when delivery is included: kiosk, website, app, console, and rider app. Zero marketplace middlemen on those orders. The customer relationship and the data stay with the restaurant. See the full set on goorderly.in and the features page.
Work with the POS, not around it
Many restaurants already run a POS they trust. A new ordering channel should send orders into it. That is why GoOrderly connects with Petpooja, and why my first question about any other POS is how the orders get there. If the kitchen already lives in Petpooja, GoOrderly should not ask them to live somewhere else during the dinner rush. The integration write-up is at Petpooja POS connection and Petpooja kiosk integration.
Built for the restaurant, not rented
I do not want a restaurant to feel locked into a tool it cannot shape. GoOrderly is built so features can be adapted to how each restaurant works, and the person who built the system is someone you can talk to. Pricing is custom to the outlet count, the channels, and whether you run your own riders. You can start with the kiosk only or take the full ordering system. GoOrderly does not take a percentage of orders placed through your own kiosk, website, or app. Payment gateway fees, if you take online payments, are set by the payment provider.
The public proof of that shape is Kesar Mahal in Bareilly. I built their self-ordering kiosk, admin console, online ordering website, and rider app, and it replaced a rented ordering platform. Guests order in the restaurant. Customers order on the restaurant's own site. Riders run the restaurant's own delivery. The console holds orders, analytics, coupons, and the menu. One developer, one restaurant, one system. That is the offer GoOrderly now takes to other owner-run restaurants and cloud kitchens.
Why I work this way
Every product I build, I try to leave in a state where one person can run it. That means boring technology, written scope, and a clean handover, and it carries straight into GoOrderly. Most restaurant owners do not have a platform team. If something breaks during the dinner rush, they need to talk to the person who built it, not open a ticket and wait.
So GoOrderly is deliberately close to the people using it. The developer behind the system is someone you can actually talk to, and a feature you need can be a conversation instead of a roadmap request. Setup, customisation, and support are part of the same relationship. I still build software for other businesses at vishu.app. GoOrderly is the company I founded so restaurants can buy this specific system without commissioning a one-off from scratch.
The stack habits are the same ones I use on client work: React Native for the kiosk and rider surfaces, a web ordering site and admin the team can run, and one backend that owns menu and order state. I wrote about why that mobile choice is deliberate in Why I choose React Native, and about how I keep APIs and Postgres boring enough to survive a lunch rush in Docker, GCP, and Supabase.
What I will not promise
I will not tell a restaurant owner that a direct channel replaces Swiggy or Zomato. It does not, and for most restaurants it should not. Discovery still matters, and a new customer has to find you somewhere.
What I will say is narrower, and I think more honest. Use marketplaces to be found. Then give the customers who already like your food a simple way to come back to you directly. If that works, it works because the food was good and the channel was easy.
I also will not quote you a number for what you will save. Your commission depends on your own contract, and your repeat rate depends on your own customers. Anyone who gives you a figure before looking at both is guessing. After a short demo we agree scope and a clear price for the software. That price is for the system. The order value on your own channels stays yours.
What I am still working out
I do not have all of this solved. Getting regulars to move from a habit on an app they already have to a link they have never used is hard, and it takes small, practical effort: a QR code that works, a checkout that is fast, a reason to choose the direct route. That is the work still ahead: finding which of these changes make the direct route genuinely easier. I would rather say so than pretend the answer is obvious.
We are starting with owner-run restaurants and cloud kitchens in Delhi NCR, including places that already sell on Swiggy and Zomato and want a channel of their own. Hardware is the restaurant's device and server. iPad and iOS-first kiosks are the direction we are heading as a later step. Cloud kitchens, who often have no counter at all, can read the cloud kitchen ordering system. Restaurants comparing in-store hardware can start with the self-ordering kiosk.
The short version
- Marketplaces are for being found. Keep them.
- A direct channel is for bringing your own customers back.
- It only works if it adds no work for the kitchen.
- Nobody can honestly promise you a saving before looking at your contract and your customers.
If you run a restaurant
Ask yourself one question this week. If your best customer wanted to order again tomorrow, what would they have to do, and who would they be ordering from?
If you want to talk it through, or see how the kiosk, website, and app fit together, the details are at goorderly.in. You can read about the company, compare pricing, or book a demo. I am Vishu, founder of GoOrderly, and I am happy to answer questions.