Has COVID accelerated the need for restaurant owners to level up their business acumen to effectively utilize vertical SaaS tools such as ChowNow?

Yeah, we only think this model is feasible because of Covid, largely because of how it brought the business model of the delivery apps into the spotlight for the public. 

Prior to Covid, it was mostly restaurants around the country and industry folk that knew the way that these delivery app companies operated—the massive cuts they take from revenue, their business practices that are not built to benefit the restaurants themselves, etc. 

When Covid first hit, there were a lot of articles around how people could help restaurants stay in business, and originally, people were talking about using delivery apps. 

Very quickly, restaurants said "No, we need every dollar we can right now, and those companies are taking 30% plus off every order," and I don't know if a week went by without some publication writing an article really breaking down the delivery app business model.

As a result, the general public started to get educated, and that created a story over most of 2020 where you saw local politicians and city council members and mayors and others around the country paying attention and starting to layer in these delivery cost caps that we talked about earlier. That's why the cities are putting these kinds of regulations in place: so they can keep their local restaurants in business. All this to say, yes, the general public is much more aware of the way these delivery app companies operate.