It's DONE! Restaurateurs' hunt for an integrated digital platform comes to an end

With over 14 years of experience in technology, latest technological developments and infrastructure set up, Himanshu Khona went on to establish DONE, a complete platform for restaurants to manage and enhance their customer ordering experience. Khona is highly passionate to make DONE the next big thing emerging from India.

Incubated by Vikram Raichura's mobile media marketing venture VivaConnect, DONE is a one-stop solution crafted exclusively for food and beverage industry to manage orders over call, web and mobile and offer a different experience for both owners and customers alike. It caters to chained food service market, which include formats like QSR (Quick Service Restaurants), Frozen dessert (Ice cream & Yogurt), CDR (Casual Dine Restaurants), FDR (Fine Dine Restaurants), Cafe (including Bakery) & PBCL (Pub, Bar, Club, and Lounge).

The seed of the idea was sown way back in 2010 by both Himanshu Khona and Vikram Raichura. Khona, who was earlier the cloud architect of data centre Netmagic Solutions, became acquainted with VivaConnect when Raichura acquired his company Movivation Labs three years ago.

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Interestingly in 2013, Khona's fate took a turn when Mumbai-based QSR Poncho, now Box8, came to him seeking an effective solution for marking their digital presence and enhancing their order management. “I had this idea in mind when our team created few apps for restaurants to order food from mobile in 2010. However, we were too early to the market. In 2013, Box8 (Poncho then) came to us that they needed digital presence for ordering but did not have money to pay up front. When we analysed, we thought there will be many brands looking for same solution. Hence, we envisioned a platform for the F&B industry, which ultimately led to the foundation of a complete call, web and app ordering platform for brands – DONE," reminisces Khona. At present, he looks after three pivotal roles - Product development, Sales and Operations.

How ‘It’s DONE’?

Post VivaConnect's success, Raichura wanted to morph his venture into an incubator for innovative business ideas emerging out of his line of work. As a result, after building enough initial traction, he decided to spin off DONE to form a separate entity. DONE currently operates through in-house infrastructure utilising VivaConnect's cloud telephony system.

The platform allows brands to have their own digital medium, which has become mandatory for food businesses today.  Upgrading to mobile technology enables brands to win more customers. DONE also enables restaurant owners to update things like Menu, Prices, Outlets, etc, whenever required via its content management system.

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For each brand, DONE creates three customised mediums for ordering a meal –  1) a website for online orders, 2) a mobile phone app (Android & iOS), and 3) a call centre setup powered by VivaConnect's telephony platform which takes care of offline, home delivery and take away orders.

“The beauty about DONE is its simplicity, customised mediums, regional call centre, dashboard, customised numbers for brands, multiple phone lines to eliminate call waiting and an interactive UX are some of the key features of DONE,” tells a proud Khona.

Engaging with existing customers is still considered as a serious issue. DONE solutions emerged as a boon for these brands, who are seeking a platform like this where there is no avenue for brands to their order management online and on-call with a scalable back-end infrastructure.

Gearing Up!

Over a span of one year, DONE has brought on-board 20 brands covering 150 outlets across 3 major cities – Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. The client list includes – Box8, Pizza Corner, Juno’s Pizza, Hangla’s, Naturals Ice-cream, RushHrs, Wok in the Box, Baskin Robbins, 6th Street Yogurt, Torrp it up, Eatsome, Khans, Zaffran, Dumadum Biryani, Kaati Zone, Eatlo etc.

The company is doing a monthly business of Rs 65 lakh and has recently achieved the milestone of processing 1 lakh orders. “The last one year has been amazing for us. It has demonstrated our customer’s faith in us and the efficiency of our unique platform,” shares Khona.

Creating Differentiation

The USP of DONE is its integration based business model, whereas, players like Zomato and Foodpanda have aggregation based business model. Khona emphasises that his product is highly interactive and quite different from other similar platforms, mainly due to its customised and interactive UX, multi lingual call centre and templatised websites.

Going Forward

Started with a seed capital of Rs 1 crore, the firm’s current revenue model includes – monthly rentals, per call cost, per web and app order cost. With a monthly traction of around 4.8 lakh orders, the company intends to expand its footprint across India by partnering with 200 brands covering 800 outlets by the end of fiscal year 2015.