When restaurant owners juggle multiple delivery service tablets while trying to manage their daily operations, efficiency suffers and money gets tied up in lengthy payment processing. Thibault Le Conte, founder of OrderOut, noticed this widespread problem five years ago and developed a solution that’s now helping restaurants across North America streamline their delivery operations while accessing their earnings faster.
Spotting a Common Restaurant Problem
Five years ago, Thibault observed a common sight in restaurants: multiple tablets from various delivery services cluttering counter space. “All the restaurants with Uber Eats, DoorDash, GrubHub had a lot of tablets. If you had three delivery services, you had three tablets, usually three printers, and all of these were usually not printing correctly and not talking to the restaurant system,” he explains. This observation led him to explore ways to eliminate these tablets by directly connecting delivery platforms to restaurant point-of-sale systems.
The path to building OrderOut wasn’t straightforward. Initially, delivery platforms didn’t have systems in place to work with third-party integrators. “They didn’t have any open API, so we had to literally scrape emails,” Thibault shares. “When a restaurant was receiving an order, they would receive it on the tablet but also in an email. So, we started parsing all the content of these emails.” This manual process came with its challenges. “When you get an email, it’s printed in a PDF. When the order is big, the PDF file is in two pages, so going from one page to a second page and analyzing the content was always creating issues,” Thibault recalls. Eventually, as delivery platforms developed their APIs, OrderOut was able to establish more reliable connections.
Leveraging Past Experience
Thibault’s experience founding multiple technology companies proved invaluable. “I created maybe eight or nine companies before this one, and I always reused the same core technology,” he notes. This foundation helped accelerate OrderOut’s development, particularly in crucial areas like authentication and system communication.
While the delivery integration space isn’t overcrowded, expansion brings unique challenges. “Maybe when we started there were four or five competitors in America. We are around 10 now with some very small ones,” Thibault explains. “The complexity is that in every country you want to get in, you need to partner with new delivery services or point of sale systems.” Thibault points out the varying landscape across regions: “In America you have Uber Eats and DoorDash. If you go to Canada, you only have Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes. In France, you will have Uber Eats and Deliveroo, but you won’t have DoorDash.”
Growing Without Venture Capital
Unlike many tech companies, OrderOut chose to bootstrap rather than seek venture capital. “We are completely bootstrapped,” Thibault shares. “I have a business partner who invested $250,000 four years ago during COVID. Since then, it’s been purely organic growth – we don’t have a board, we don’t have investor meetings.”
OrderOut is now expanding into financial services. “We are trying to help restaurants with their cash flow,” Thibault explains. “If you order today on a Monday, restaurants will get their money next week on Tuesday – in nine days. We’re launching a product that would allow restaurants to access their Uber Eats payouts every day at 7:00 PM.” The company is also tackling another payment pain point: employee tips. “Today if you work in a restaurant and get tips that aren’t cash, you potentially get them on your next paycheck. If you’re paid every two weeks, you need to wait for your next paycheck. We want to allow employees to get their cash same-day, based on how quickly the manager can approve it.”
With seven team members in Miami and 18 spread across Brazil, India, China, Ecuador, and Mexico, Thibault maintains efficiency through clear communication channels. “We use Slack a lot, we don’t send emails internally. We keep it flat completely – everything on Slack, no problem of communication when everything is written.”
To learn more about streamlining your restaurant’s delivery operations, connect with Thibault Le Conte on LinkedIn.
