Arrif Ziaudeen, Founder and CEO, Chope

There were several key milestones that restaurant-booking and food discovery platform Chope has made throughout its journey, which included the opening of its Hong Kong office, the launch of its dining discount vouchers service, and the set up of its data team.

But the most notable one is the profitability status that it has achieved in its home market Singapore.

“[The status] proved that our model works, is sustainable, and becomes profitable relatively quickly. We learned that no matter what fickle markets reward, profit is its own reward,” Chope Founder and CEO Arrif Ziaudeen wrote to e27 in an email interview.

While Chope is widely known as a restaurant-booking platform, the startup actually started out as a B2B service provider for restaurants, before branching to include customer-facing services.

Its B2B services, which range from the queue management system to reservations dashboard, are currently the startup’s highest quality revenue stream.

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“We attribute our success by staying very focussed on what we are good at and keeping our heads on building a profitable business. We started out by understanding restaurants’ operational pain-points and built them tech solutions for marketing and managing reservations. Today, we stay true to our mission of providing restaurant partners with a suite of reliable tech solutions such as table management, CRM, pre-orders, calls and queue management that success a real problem for them,” Ziaudeen explains.

The CEO also puts emphasis on localisation efforts such as the use of local languages, partnership with local food bloggers, and the hiring of a local team. This is especially crucial since Chope is currently available in five markets across Asia: Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia (Jakarta and Bali), Thailand (Bangkok and Phuket), and China (Shanghai and Beijing).

“Finally, there’s a great network effect where we grow faster the bigger we get. As a market leader with millions of users, customers and investors have confidence in our reliability and longevity, so are more willing to work with us. More restaurants attract more diners, and so on in a virtuous cycle,” Ziaudeen continues.

More secret sauce

In addition to the more practical approach, Ziaudeen also shares the company’s value vectors that may have contributed to its success: Stay Hungry, Think Bigger, and One Team.

‘Stay Hungry’ – Grit

“That means sticking to things even when they fail, or it sucks. There’s something better on the other side.”

‘Think Bigger’ – Never lose sight of the big vision

“We are all busy solving daily crises but remember the bigger purpose of all this – to change the lives of our diners and restaurants.”

‘One Team’ – Having empathy for the people we work with

” … Not just amongst Chope staff, but with our partners and users as well. Open honest communication amongst all stakeholders even when times are tough.”

Also Read: Restaurant booking platform Chope names new COO

Towards the future

Chope’s journey began in 2011 when Ziaudeen noticed challenges in Singapore’s F&B industry, such as the inconvenient reservation process where customers were subject to fixed hours to call and a general lack of aggregator platforms for people to find places to eat.

When it was first launched, the startup began with only nine restaurants in its platform, but it claimed to work with 4,000 restaurants at the moment.

Ziaudeen reveals what Chope is aiming for the next part of its journey.

“Our key focus right now is to continue scaling our business in the markets we are in, making our model even more scalable and automated so it can reach into every Statistics Of Income (SOI) or alley,” he says.

“We continue to invest in and build our ‘Discover’ pillar – which is data-backed algorithms to improve search and discovery of dining options. We have already started accurately recommending and personalising content to connect diners to restaurants, and vice versa. As we delve further into developing our tech and harnessing of data, we continue to offer a more seamless experience for our users,” he closes.

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Image Credit: Chope

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