Silicon Valley often paints a picture of tech startups as the brainchild of young, brilliant minds tinkering in garages, hoping to strike it rich. But the reality is, many of those ventures fail because they don’t solve a genuine problem. Increasingly, the most successful tech isn’t born from a cool idea, but from a painful need.
The retail and hospitality sectors, especially since the pandemic’s surge in digital adoption, have become fertile ground for this kind of innovation. Businesses facing unique challenges are building their own solutions, then spinning those off into standalone companies to serve a wider market.
From Pain Point to Platform: How Businesses Are Building Their Own Tech
Table of Contents
The most innovative companies aren’t always looking for ideas—they’re solving problems they experience firsthand.
- Companies like Openr, Fabacus, and Slerp all originated as internal solutions to specific operational challenges.
- The hospitality and retail industries are driving this trend, fueled by the rapid shift to digital channels.
- Prototyping a solution within an existing business provides credibility and a deep understanding of customer needs.
- Operator knowledge is pivotal to building an operator-first view.
Joel Robinson, founder of Openr, exemplifies this approach. Before launching his tech company, he was grappling with a data nightmare at the Azzurri Group, which operates Zizzi, Ask Italian, and Coco di Mama. Having joined Azzurri in 2019 after working at Sainsbury’s, Robinson quickly realized the hospitality industry’s digital landscape was a fragmented mess of scattered data, manual processes, and inflexible systems.
“We were experiencing the pain,” Robinson says. “In 2017/18, hospitality was relatively simple. But post-pandemic, it became about order at the table, click and collect, website ordering, and catering platforms. Managing identical data across these platforms was proving inefficient.”
Unable to find a suitable off-the-shelf solution, Robinson’s team built one themselves. “If we needed something, we’d build it,” he explains. After confirming the problem was widespread among pubs, quick-service restaurants, and cafés, they knew there was a market for their solution. Openr was designed to be spun out, and its initial development within Azzurri gave it instant credibility.
Scaling Up: Building a Development Team
While Robinson and his team had built some initial services, like click and collect and pay-at-table, the Openr data platform required a dedicated development team to scale and bring to market. Today, Openr serves clients like Stonegate, Caffé Nero, and Burger King.
A similar story unfolded for Andrew Xeni, co-founder of Nobody’s Child and Fabacus. His experience in the retail and manufacturing sectors, gained while working at his family’s business, Europride Ltd, revealed opportunities for both a fashion brand and a tech company. Fabacus, he describes, is a trusted system of record for product data, essential for ESG reporting and digital product passports.
Xeni initially built a product lifecycle management platform for Europride, but quickly realized the underlying data aggregation platform – Fabacus – had broader potential. “I realized it was solving a common problem,” he says. He discovered a gap in the market: no one was addressing the challenge of siloed and fragmented product data.
“The main ingredient I brought to the table was the business logic and understanding of the problem and the solution needed,” Xeni explains. “Anyone can build technology, but it’s like letting an architect build and decorate your home, expecting it to meet your needs.” Fabacus, initially self-funded, now works with brands and retailers including Nobody’s Child, Paramount, NBC Universal, Hasbro, Fanatics, and Tesco.
Solving for Operators, First
JP Then, founder of Crosstown Doughnuts and Slerp, faced a similar realization. As an early adopter of Deliveroo and UberEats, he needed an e-commerce platform to manage the growing volume of online doughnut orders. “I had 10 locations with click and collect and on-demand delivery, but they all had different attributes,” he says. “I didn’t want to build a platform – I wanted to find something, but there was nothing out there. Slerp was born out of my need to solve a problem.”
Conversations with other operators confirmed the widespread need, leading Then to incorporate Slerp in 2016. “A bakery running a tech company didn’t make sense!” he jokes. By 2020, Crosstown’s success provided enough proof of concept to attract other customers, aided by advancements in last-mile logistics.
Slerp gives hospitality companies greater control over delivery margins and fosters direct customer relationships, reducing reliance on marketplaces like Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats. The platform integrates with delivery riders while preserving customer data. Then, who left Crosstown in 2020 amid the challenges of Covid-19, continues to run Slerp, serving clients like Nell’s, Zia Lucia, Dom’s Subs, Sourdough Sophia, Chicken Cottage, and Chopstix.
The Power of Internal Expertise
Ed Brown, co-founder of Double Puc and Percy Labs, also understands the challenges of the hospitality industry. His experience with Friska, a healthy food chain that faced difficulties in 2021, led him to recognize the value of the dedicated enterprise resource planning system he’d created for purchasing, supply chain, and ingredients. This became RocketOS, a software-as-a-service offering. Brown now believes he should have spun it out earlier.
Now operating Double Puc Café & Catering in Bristol, Brown is developing Percy Labs, an artificial intelligence-powered purchasing platform designed to consolidate orders and reduce ingredient costs. He believes the platform, leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, could save businesses 10% on ingredients. “We know it is a challenge to build a product, but we’ve done similar with RocketOS and Friska,” he says. “We know that these solutions will be easy for operators to use. Every feature we build, we can see it’s useful.”
Building within Double Puc allows for rapid prototyping and testing. “We know how it needs to work. It’s all customer-centric. Everything has been tested in a real environment,” Brown says, adding that this approach builds trust with wholesalers and operators. As technology becomes increasingly integral to retail and hospitality, the demand for practical, problem-solving products is likely to grow, creating further opportunities for in-house development and spin-offs.
