Six business lessons HungryHungry learnt from a tumultuous 2022

When you lead a successful tech startup, it’s easy to think of “growth at all costs” as a defacto business plan. You’re chasing break-even, competitors are trying to undercut you at every turn, and you know that standing still is actually going backwards.

You want to leverage your momentum and continue to evolve, innovate, and build out new products. Growth is good, but a key learning of the past 18 months for HungryHungry has been that “growth at all costs” is not. 

After restaurants, bars, pubs, festivals, events and corporate venues all over Australia and New Zealand flocked to adopt our core QR code product — especially as venues began to open up following the 2021-22 lockdowns — we decided to seize the moment and dip our toe into international markets, and I uplifted my young family to London to head up our expansion.

We had done our research and exploration, of course, but there was a crucial differentiator between Australian hospitality consumers and those in the US and UK markets that the due diligence didn’t pick up.

Here, more than 1500 hospitality venues signed up for our full contactless QR code product, which allows users to browse a menu, order and pay, all from their mobile device.

From our perspective, lockdowns in Australia accelerated the rate at which our society embraced the use of QR codes and technology in our industry more broadly.

In the US, however, what we found was that customers were used to viewing a virtual menu but not being offered that extra step to order and pay. They also have quite a different mindset when it comes to service and tipping. 

After about six months and half a million dollars of investment, we realised the best outcome was to hit the pause button, for now, and redirect our full attention back to Australia and NZ where the market was ready for what we had to offer, and more. 

We were also observing a changing landscape more broadly in the tech sector and adopted a new mantra: ‘Growth At a Reasonable Price (GARP)’. GARP leads you to run the business in a smart, sustainable way and not jump at every opportunity. It’s a belief that I think just about every tech company in the world needs to switch to. We’ve seen too many tech businesses this year lay off staff, or go out of business entirely. Deliveroo’s withdrawal from Australia is one key example of a failure that has affected the entire hospitality industry, putting many more jobs at risk than their own. 

GARP is one of HungryHungry’s key lessons from a tumultuous but ultimately successful year. Here are five more things we learned in 2022:

1. Go for the win-win-win

Everything we do has to come back to our core value of ‘win-win-win’. That means it has to be a win for our customers (hospitality venues), a win for consumers, and a win for us as a business.

It’s very much of a back-to-basics philosophy — provide value to the customer and do the fundamental things very well. If something isn’t working, fix it. Make sure you’re solving the right problem, and grow the business in a smart and sustainable way.

2. Weathering the tech correction

From our time spent in the UK we could see the warning signs that a tech ‘correction’ and challenging economic conditions were coming to Australia.

As a founder and CEO, it’s easy to get caught up in the micro issues of steering a growing business in a continuously evolving sector and miss the headwinds that signal a shift in business confidence. By making sure you keep a wider view, you can right-size the business and reassess any ambitious plans, such as international expansion, well before the storm arrives.

3. Structure for success

In early 2022, we switched from a silo structure to cross-functional teams. We realised, for example, that there can’t be just one department focusing on customer experience — if we’re not here for the customer then we aren’t really a business, so every team member needs to take that responsibility.

In silos, you can face challenges with different teams not understanding how others work. When we moved to cross-functional teams, each team was focused on the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer. That also helps us better recognise challenges, and turn feedback from customers into improvements.

Having cross-functional teams for different types of customers means each customer deals with the same team every time and fully understands their business model, their pain points and what HungryHungry product best suits them. We were able to implement this change without a restructure, and our business flow has significantly improved.

4. Stay in the day-to-day

People say founders need to get out of the day-to-day and while I would agree there’s some truth in that, it comes with risks. If you’re not there to deliver your messaging and guide it down the chain, what gets relayed from person to person might end up very differently from what you intended. In the good times, you might let things roll a bit more. But when your customers start to batten down the hatches, that’s when you need to be more involved.

Ask: okay, what is our messaging? How do we talk about this? How does it get to the end consumer or the customer? Are we saying the right things? Are we getting the right results? If not, what do we need to change? How can we drive better real-time decision-making? It’s a bit like being back in startup 101 again, but it’s necessary to keep everyone on the same page.

5. Forget about everyone else

It’s hard to ignore your competition, but sometimes you have to just forget about what they’re doing.

In years gone by we have definitely been guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses, or thinking “this seems like the right thing to do, because everyone’s doing it”. We’ve realised that just because someone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for us. When we applied our win-win-win value to what we saw other people doing, we realised that idea or action wasn’t for us.

Mark Calabro is the co-founder and co-CEO of HungryHungry.