AppIt Ventures develops free Curbside tool for restaurants

Photo courtesy of Logan Swenson / Shutterstock.com

Of the many impacts Colorado is experiencing due to coronavirus, the closure of dine-in restaurants (except for their pickup and delivery services) left a lot of local eateries wondering what to do next. While some restaurants already had delivery or pickup services in place, many did not have the infrastructure, money or manpower to implement such offerings. Which is where local software development company, AppIt Ventures, comes in.

Responding quickly, AppIt created an app called Curbside, which facilitates a direct connection between customers and restaurants for curbside pickup orders. Curbside launched at the beginning of April.

“AppIt made a decision within hours to develop this tool after learning [that] one of our clients, a local restaurant owner, was struggling with how to allow for curbside pickup, and the requirement to offer curbside became critical almost overnight,” says Amanda Moriuchi, CEO of AppIt Ventures. “Our team came together and swarmed the problem to solve it as quickly as humanly possible. This app should have taken 4-6 weeks to develop and we did it in 7 business days.”

The Curbside tool, which is available for restaurants to sign up for here, is free for restaurants to use, which is a big plus for small businesses. Other delivery apps, such as Grubhub and Doordash, make a commission off of each food order, which can range from 15 to 30% of the order, meaning that the restaurants don’t walk away with all the profit.

“We just want restaurant owners to have access to every possible option to stay afloat, and we recognize that restaurants have a razor-thin margin anyway, so we didn’t want cost to be a limiting factor in the decision to sign up,” Moriuchi says. When restaurants deploy the Curbside tool, they receive 100% of the money spent on orders.

Restaurants that are interested in using the service can find a signup on AppIt Venture’s website, and then a dedicated team will help owners through the process. This process includes setting up a Stripe merchant account, creating a menu, identifying contacts and setting up the ordering tool on your website.

“I’m a small business owner myself, and I understand the requirement for the balance of passion and resilience in order to run a business,” Moriuchi says. “In times like these, it only heightens the need for passion and resilience, and it can test you to the core. Crises like this tend to bring to light the best and the worst in people, and I am absolutely blown away to see the immense good that has come from this.”