Vishal Agarwal was born in India, and did his schooling in Darjeeling. He noted that this city exports some of the best tea in the world! Prior to his current venture, he was the chief marketing officer for Choxi. Outside of tech, he is an avid tennis lover and follows cricket and basketball closely. Though, he admits, now that he has a 2.5 year old child, his time is mostly dedicated to him.In attempting to solve the problem of "splitting the check", Vishal discovered that restaurants had a real problem with having multiple tablets for the many order and delivery services - like GrubHub, DoorDash, etc. When he saw this problem proliferate, he validated that people were willing to pay for a solution.This is the creation story of Checkmate.SponsorsSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://www.itsacheckmate.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalagarwal82/ Our Sponsors:* Check out Vanta and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.vanta.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
So we had always focused on POS integrations, but when we came upon this problem of third-party delivery platforms, we said, we have an API integration with a couple of POS systems. Why don't we use the same pipeline to now funnel some other kind of data into them?
That other kind of data was basically information from order confirmation emails that the third-party platforms would send out to the restaurant operators. What we did was developed an email parser to scrape the information out of that email and send it to the POS systems via an API. Again, very startup-y. My name is Vishal Agarwal.
I'm the founder and CEO of Checkmate, and our website is itscheckmate.com.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries, who share what it takes to change an industry, who build the teams that have their back, keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve.
Took off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host, Noah Laupart. And today, how Vishal Agarwal is enabling powerful ordering for busy restaurants so you can scale your digital business faster. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.
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He noted that this city exports some of the best tea in the world. Prior to his current venture, he was the chief marketing officer for Choi. Outside of tech, he's an avid tennis lover and follows cricket and basketball closely, though he admits now that he has a two and a half year old child, his time is mostly dedicated to him.
In attempting to solve the problem of splitting the check, Vishal discovered that restaurants had a real problem with having multiple tablets for the many order and delivery services, like Grubhub, DoorDash, etc. When he saw this problem proliferate, he validated that people were willing to pay for a solution. This is the creation story of Checkmate.
Starting this company back in late 2015, early 2016, you could go into a restaurant and you could pay and split your check without having to wait for the server to bring you your check to the table and going through the entire rigmarole. You know what I'm talking about. So that's the first problem that we wanted to solve. That's why the name Checkmate.
I still remember very clearly I was trying to buy the domain name Checkmate.com and I was being quoted around $200,000. It's a Checkmate.com was $12. The easiest decision I've ever had to make in my life still to this day. But that's how we got started. Built a small team to develop this app. Tried this for about a year and a half, so almost 18 months.
And then I ran into this problem, Noah, of multiple tablets. I was selling to this restaurant. They said, hey, you seem like a nice person and you're selling me something that's nice to have. But here's a real problem. I'll show you. And he walked me over to his counter where there was two POS stations and nine different tablets.
Right from Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chow Now, Caviar, Postmates. So he said, can you solve this problem? I said, this does seem like a problem worth solving. And my background is I was the chief marketing officer of an e-commerce retail company before this, and I'm not an engineer.
But what I learned very quickly and early on is I can't do my job well if I can't understand what problem does technology solve. So when I came up on this problem, I reached out to our engineer, our now CTO, I asked him, can you solve this? Can we not build an email parser and push it via API to one or two of these POSs?
But before that, when I came upon this problem, I had a list of about 50 different leads that I was talking to for this other Checkmate product. I reached out to them. I said, hey, I have a solution to this problem. Would you be interested if I said I could solve it for you? I think 22 or 24 of them replied within 48 hours. Hell yes.
So I called up our CTO and I said, hey, I think I just sold a solution. Can you help me build it? Typical startup-y fashion, right? So yeah, we then built this, or he rather built the solution out, I don't know, the first version in three or four days. And that's how we got started.
So what we do as Checkmate is, or at least we started off with, was integrating third-party platforms, Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, et cetera, into the POS systems of restaurants. That's how we got started.
Let's dive into the MVP for Checkmate. So that first version of the product that your CTO built. How long did it take to build? Which you mentioned, but tell me a little bit more there. And what sort of tools were used to bring it to life?
Again, it took three to five days. So when we had the first product, the Checkmate, the core app, right? Our intention always there was we will do POS integration. We will not put yet another tablet. I didn't know the tablet hell existed then. But I was very sure that we're not going to put another tablet or hardware on the counter of the restaurant. So we had always focused on POS integrations.
But when we came upon this problem of third-party delivery platforms, we said, we have an API integration with a couple of POS systems. Why don't we use the same pipeline to now funnel some other kind of data into them? That other kind of data was basically information from order confirmation emails that the third-party platforms would send out to the restaurant operators.
You're five guys and you have a Grubhub tablet at your store, right? What would happen is whenever you received an order as a restaurant owner, you would receive an email order confirmation as well, saying NOAA has placed an order with your store and this is the order.
What we did was develop an email parser to scrape the information out of that email and send it to the POS systems via an API that we had with those POS systems. Again, very startup-y, stood up the solution with Heroku and Database Server, which we to this day use. The backend was built on Ruby on Rails.
Let's stay on that MVP for just a minute. When building any MVP, you've got to make certain decisions and trade-offs. Maybe it's around feature cut, technology. You mentioned the technologies you chose, but why you chose technology or approach or acceptance of technical debt, things like that. Tell me about some of those you had to work through and how you coped with the decisions.
I still remember I was at that first restaurant that we were launching with here in New York and we were testing. We weren't yet live. So we did a full three to four hour of testing and then I was on my way back and then my CTO calls me like, hey, our system just crashed. And I'm thinking, oh my God, we aren't yet live and the system is crashing.
If we start processing orders, what would happen if the system crashed then? The customers would have a major problem. Somebody would not get their food and somebody who lives in New York City and orders delivery three to four times a week. I know how important that is. The decision that I made then, I would not have made anything different even knowing what I know now, which is that's fine.
The system crashed. Let's keep moving. Let's build it back up and let's see why it crashed and go from there. So today we are processing over 20 million transactions a month. And I remember the time when we celebrated the run rate of 10,000 orders a month. So basically when we hit 300 orders a day, we were like, wow, we are at 10,000 transactions, right? That's what you build for.
You build for 10,000 and then you build for 100,000 and then you build for a million. You never build for a million as a startup. So the number of technical debts that we had to accept at that point in time, which went as far as using a generic email ID, using more open source or free software, even if they didn't come with SLAs, they were all part of the build process.
Our first large client that we landed was five guys, extremely proud, amazing customers. And when we started processing for them and seeing their scale, that's when the realization of, okay, we are in serious territory now that we need to relook at all of the tech that we have accumulated and make sure it doesn't impact our customers.
That's how the journey, I would say, kept evolving as we kept growing.
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Get started for free today by visiting snaptrade.com slash codestory. So then you've got the MVP, you've got it working, you've solved some of those problems, you're pushing forward. Tell me about how you matured and progressed the product from there. And I think to wrap that in a box, what I'm looking for is how you go about building your roadmap.
And how do you decide, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Checkmate?
there's actually a very objective answer for that because that's a process that we've been going through over the last two to three years what's the next most important thing to build as we kept maturing the product this was always the mindset right and i think it just become qualified over the last two to three years as we have built and matured the team the most important thing to build for us is what do the customers need and again in that there are two paths you can take
What is it that the potential customers need, which means it will help you sell more of your solution? Or what is it that your existing customers need the most in order to grow their revenue? We as a company have taken a very conscious decision to go down the latter route.
So speak with your customers, listen to them, understand what are their requirements, and then continue to go grow the product from there. As a very clear example, again, staying on that timeline, I remember when we worked with Five Guys, we didn't even have a customer-facing user interface. We were 100% back in company, right?
It's pretty crazy to think about it now when you're working with an enterprise client and you literally have no user interface.
you exist and they told us hey mishal we need a menu management solution and like why do you need a menu management solution because you have your pos and you can manage your menu there's no the third party platforms require some configuration and there are some nuances we need the ability to mark things as out of stocks okay
We then started developing a customer-facing portal, a menu management solution. It's come such a long way, but we started off with basics and very soon we realized this is the next big thing for us.
This is what will make sure that we not only give to the fine guys and the franchisee community what they need, but basically this is where the industry is going and there needs to be a layer on top of the POS to manage the menus for their digital operation. So really, when you say, how do we determine the product roadmap?
The funny thing is we talk about this, we can be the laziest product team in the world. And I actually count myself as part of the product team. We can be the laziest product team in the world, but the best product team in the world, all we have to do is talk to the customers, just to keep talking to them. That's where a big part of the evolution has always come from and continues to come from.
Okay, so I hear you saying we and talking about the company. Tell me about how you built the team, right? What do you look for in those people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you?
That's the most important part of building a company, right? We have always been remote. We didn't go remote because of COVID. When I started this company back in 2016, I think A, I was too cheap to pay for a Manhattan office rent. But also I had worked with a lot of remote team members in the past and I said, why restrict yourself to one specific geography?
Why not hire the best talent wherever you can get them?
going remote from day one noah really helped me determine what is the most important trade when you hire i don't think you have to hire winning horses i think you have to hire the right people and pave the path for them so that they can win so winning becomes more of a consequence right what i look for when i hire people is are you diligent and will you be ready to tackle the hard problems
It's very different when a company that works in the office then decides to go remote. And again, I truly believe hybrid never works, whether you're in office or you're fully remote. I don't think so hybrid works. Maybe three days in office, two days out could work, but I'm not sure. Why it is really important that we started off as remote is because then that's how you hire.
That's the kind of mindset that you bring people on with, right? If you hire people who are used to going to offices and working in a more physical, collaborative environment, and suddenly you tell them to go remote, it does not make for a winning team. So from that perspective, when you are hiring remote, you have to be able to hire people who are self-driven and self-motivated.
The hardest thing is self-discipline. I've learned this myself. So the team, the qualities of the people in the team is self-discipline, diligent, and then hard work. And then giving them the path to succeed, paving the path for them. That's my job as CEO, putting the right people in the right position and making sure that they have the right tools and the right runway to succeed.
So every single month, and now it's actually become more than once a month, We do this thing called Coffee with Vishal, where we have all of our new joinies with a maximum team batch strength of 10. And if it's more than 10, then we do a second one.
After 10 new joinies who joined us in the last 30 days, join this Coffee with Vishal virtual session where we all come online, we switch on our cameras and we talk where I share my journey. I listen, I hear a little bit about them, and then I talk to them about the company culture and what is it that we expect of them and what is it that they can expect of the company.
It's by far my favorite meeting, so to say, of the month. And it's absolutely fantastic. And the kind of people you get to meet. And it's not possible for me to speak with every single team member all the time, but just getting to know and learn a little bit about each one of the new joinies who works, who's working in this company. It's been great.
And I think that has helped us build a stronger culture as well.
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Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck. Okay, let's flip to scalability then. So was this built to scale from day one or with scale in mind? Or have there been interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown?
Oh, absolutely the latter. We've had to fight tooth and nail. There were days, Noah, where every Friday and Saturday evening, our servers would crash. Every Friday and Saturday evening. Why? Because people ordered delivery the most on Friday and Saturday evening. The fun thing, Noah, is you hear about New Year's resolution, right? There is no New Year's resolution. It's a new week resolution.
People start off on Monday eating salads and finish off the week eating pizzas on Fridays and Saturdays. And guess what is the most ordered delivery item? It's pizza, right? This was not built for scalability. I told you we were super happy when we started hitting 10,000, 50,000 orders a month.
And as we grew, we realized the systems that we had to build, the queuing servers, the scaling mechanisms changed. We were on Heroku and about two years ago, we migrated everything to AWS, which gave us a lot more control, a lot more flexibility and the ability to scale, right?
So again, with servers crashing every Friday and Saturday and the entire ops team being online trying to manage things, it was utter chaos. And now that seems like a distant story and people who joined us in news like, hey, how did you guys manage that? You have no idea. Actually, we have no idea either.
But yes, we've had to fight a lot in making sure as we grew from 10, 150,000 orders to a million orders that our service scaled. We learned in the process. We learned about peak times. We learned about cost management.
We've hired people with specialty in these domains because at the end of the day, what we've realized is we serve a very, not to be too self-wampus, but we serve a very critical role in this ecosystem. But if our servers go down, a lot of restaurants will lose their revenue and a lot of customers will not get their food. So that sense of responsibility does not escape us.
So as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built with Checkmate, what are you most proud of?
The team, by far, there's not even a second, a close second or third. We just went through a major rebranding right now. You've seen the movie Social Network, how there was this major moment where, hey, you should not be called the Facebook anymore. You should be just called Facebook, right? The joke is we made a similar change where we are not, it's a checkmate anymore.
We're just called checkmate. The entire rebranding happened because we realized that we now stand for a lot more than what we started out. We are not a technology company. We are a solutions oriented company that uses technology as a way to solve problems. How we solve problems is a combination of technology and service layer.
The rebranding that we went through, the new logo that we came up with, it again, the design team and the marketing team did an absolutely fabulous job of capturing our essence, is the logo represents a handshake between the clients and us. And it shows up as a heart symbol, which shows that we have empathy towards the clients that we work with. So it was a very conscious decision.
And what happened in that process is once we did this logo, this rebranding, we were at the show Food on Demand, right? And a couple of clients came up to me and said, hey, we read your note about why you rebranded. Can you help walk us through it? So it was a very personal thing for me to walk them through. This is what the logo stands for. We stand for service. We stand for empathy.
We stand for a handshake. And what the customers said, and these are the clients who have been working with us for their part of three years. They said, yep, that's what you stand for. So that makes complete sense. That was extremely validating and gratifying. Because Noah, you run a tech company too. The clients could easily turn around and say, right? Yeah, that's not really true.
That's not what you stand for because you never answer my emails. When you hear them saying, that's what you stand for, this is absolutely true, there is that sense of pride and there's that sense of introspection about, you know who enabled this? The team that provides the service to the client, not the technology, because again, technology was built by the team.
So to answer your question in a very long-winded way, that's the absolute one thing I'm very grateful for and I'm thankful for every single day.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
This is more of a personal one, and it concerns a client. This was still in the early days, I think the first two, two and a half years. Things were getting really hectic. The business was doing very well and we were getting more demand than we could handle. And I was doing sales and customer support and product and project and a little bit of everything.
And in that process, this is something that I remember to this day. We were rude to, I was rude to a client. They had a problem. The problem was not so much with them or with us, but in basically understanding what a solution can do. And they were an existing client. It may seem trivial, but I basically told them, yeah, you can't understand the system. We can't work with you.
And to this day, I think about if a customer can't understand a problem, then it's a shortcoming of our solution, not their problem, because you have to build a solution as per the audience. That was a damaged relationship at that point in time. What I did to make it out was later on. Absolutely, when I met that client in person, I apologized. We made sure to fix that problem.
We made sure to give that client special attention. And I made sure to give my personal number to this day. Whenever he calls or texts, I make sure to pick up. But I think that's one of the learnings that I've tried to also share with our team is there's always going to be a heat of the moment. There's going to be humans at the end of the day.
Mistakes are made, but it does not mean that they cannot be recovered from. But also realize that when you make a mistake, you do have to put in that additional effort to recover from it. Again, that empathy piece that we talked about customers, right? If you don't have that, you're not going to be able to understand their problems and build solutions accordingly.
Okay, this will be fun. Tell me what the future looks like for the product, for where you're going and for your team.
About 31 or 32% of Shake Shack sale comes from kiosks alone. Yum! Brands, 50% of their revenue comes from digital channels. When we're saying digital, it could be everything, right? First party, third party delivery, kiosk, pay a table, everything. There are other couple of brands that have said we intend to go 100% digital by the end of 2025. Large thousand plus location brands.
McDonald's has launched a cashless and a digital only solution, I think, somewhere in the south. Traditionally, 80% of the revenue of a restaurant would come from in-store operations. 20% may be digital. Now we're already seeing some large brands say 50-50. Where we see this industry going is digital is going to become the primary source of revenue generation for a restaurant brand.
And that's where we are taking our company. We are taking our company to be the single source of truth to power and empower the digital channels and digital operations of a restaurant brand. Today, Domino's is there and a few of the larger brands can afford to be there because they have the resources to invest massively.
But we want to make this technology available to the other smaller brands, relatively smaller brands. There's still large brands that they own, right? We want to empower these brands to become digitally omnipresent and to really unlock the power of digital technology. without having to go through multi-billion dollars of investments.
Our goal is, can we enable a brand to quickly experiment with a new channel, see if it works or not, and if it does, let's scale it and not turn it off. But today, the biggest problem the brands are facing is even to experiment with a new channel requires months and months of technical and operational work in order for it to see the light of day. So that's where we see the future going.
That's where we've been driving towards over the last two, two and a half years. And It's been incredible to see some of this come to light. And it's fun when you say, I think this is where the future is going. And that's where the future shows up.
Let's switch to you, Vishal. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
First and foremost would be my brother. He's about eight years older to me. He's in India. For all practical purposes, he's the one who raised me, gave me my value system and ethics and taught me how to work hard. I was never the smartest kid in my class, but he could not outwork me. So I think that's where a lot of my value system and who I am comes from.
comes from and he continues to be a huge influence for me in my life in addition to that i am a huge sports lover but i also i don't just follow sports for the entertainment value i also take a lot of learning from all of these great sports people that you learn and read about their journey and what they did to get to where they are at today I only came to the U.S. in 2012.
That's when Golden State Warriors were at their peak. And you heard and read about Steph Curry and you read his journey, read about his journey. And he's not the biggest guy in NBA, right? Neither am I. But he had skill set and then he worked hard to get to where he's at today. Similarly, there are a couple of other cricket players that I follow. Again, their mental makeup, their fortitude.
What I have learned and understood as an entrepreneur is every single day you're going to have wins and losses. You're going to either have a big client sign a contract or you're going to have a big client lead. You're going to either hire a great person or you're going to have a really good team member lead.
You're going to get rejected by 49 different investors and that one investor who says, yes, we believe in you, we'll fund you. So there are going to be highs and lows every single day. If you as an entrepreneur don't keep your mind sane, if you keep yo-yoing like a rubber band, your mind will snap. Right.
So I take a lot of learning from these amazing sports people who operate at the highest level of pressure. To see how they keep their cool and how they believe in the process and how they believe in the journey and taking it one day at a time and showing up to work. In tennis, I'm a Federer fan, but then I also read about the journey for Rafael Nadal and what he said once was very telling.
What makes you great is not showing up to practice every single day, but showing up to practice on the days that you really don't feel like it. The important thing is you have to show up every day. At the end of the day, he's his own boss, right? So he could choose not to show up for practice when he doesn't feel like it.
But it's those days that you show up and you really don't feel like it that matters and that helps you get through those tough matches. I'm also a big fan of Jeff Bezos and Phil Light from the founder of Nike. How Jeff Bezos with his family packed boxes on Christmas Eve in his factory and Phil Light would fly to China because the factory that he was working with shut down his operations.
So yeah, quite a lot of inspirations because I know my journey is not unique and there are people who have gone through it before. How can I learn from them and continue to evolve?
Vishal, last question. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
One advice I would give to myself at that point in time is please don't get overenthusiastic and give too much advice because that's a path we as entrepreneurs can easily lead down to, right? I've been doing this for about six, seven years and suddenly feel, oh, I've been doing this forever and I can tell you how to run your life, right?
Getting, I think, less enthusiastic about that would be great. One thing I would tell them is don't underestimate the power of hard work and showing up every day. Right. Just build and talk to customers, take advice, be humble and just show up for work every single day. If you're an entrepreneur, you think you're the boss of your own life. No, you're not.
If you really want to be successful, you have to be disciplined. You have to show up. You have to work hard and you have to do that consistent. Doing it on some of the days and not on the other days is not going to work. I don't believe I'm a futurist. I can't see whether a product will work or not.
And if that person is super enthusiastic about showing me the product, sure, I'd love to take a look. But at the end of the day, it's the people who build the product, who build a company, who build great companies, right? So that's worked well for me up until now. So that's what I would tell them, yeah.
I think that's great advice. Well, Vishal, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Checkmate.
Thank you so much, Noah. Thank you for having me and really enjoyed this conversation.
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