Oliver Auerbach is the founder and CEO of GloriaFood. They are developing the world’s first free online ordering system for restaurants.
Q: What would you like to see your team accomplish in 2019?
Help restaurants realize that paying 20-50% commission to marketplaces for every order will slowly kill them. We want them to claim back ownership over their online presence/sales.
Q: What were the most challenging areas in the early stages of the company’s growth?
We’re building an online ordering system for restaurants. It turns out that the best ordering system won’t help if these restaurants have no website visitors or no website in the first place. We ended up creating a website builder to solve that problem. However, it was painful to see many people signing up for our service and then not being as successful as we had hoped them to be due to a bad website.
Q: What is your favorite book?
Jim Collins – Good to great.
Q: Do you use any specific method or system to run daily operations?
I like to be on live chat with our restaurant clients at least 1 hour per day. I’m doing this for 6 years, and there is just so much to learn from our clients, which helps to decide which areas of the product we need to improve.
Q: Why did you choose your present industry at this time?
When I started the company, I evaluated several ideas. There were 3 criteria which the ideas had to meet to be on the shortlist.
1. I need to be personally passionate about solving this problem.
2. It must be a SaaS business with the ability to launch globally from day one.
3. It should be possible to become a financially healthy company without external investment.
Q: What is the best/worst moment you can remember in your career?
Best: We’re building an ordering system for restaurants. So when the very first order was processed for one of our restaurants, it was an incredible feeling to have created something that solves a real-world problem.
Worst: When I did (sometimes still do) people management related mistakes, and then I see other people suffer because I didn’t handle it better.
Q: Looking back – if you could advise a younger version of yourself to do something different – what would it be?
I wish I had exposed myself to sales, marketing, and business models much earlier in my career.
