5Q: Angus Davis

TEAMWORK: Angus Davis speaks with Christina Taranenko, account manager, and Kaylen Little, marketing coordinator, in foreground. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
TEAMWORK: Angus Davis speaks with Christina Taranenko, account manager, and Kaylen Little, marketing coordinator, in foreground. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

1 Last month Swipely Inc. became Upserve. Why the name change?

The name Upserve is inspired by the energy and passion restaurateurs have for their guests, food and staff. We’re catching our brand name up to where our customers – and our product – have been for a while. Whether it’s optimizing the menu, checking staff performance or building guest profiles, restaurants use our smart-management assistant to help their business thrive. Our new brand better demonstrates our focus.

2 Can you discuss your new spring product release?

We typically do a major product release every quarter or two. For spring ’16, we launched Upserve Mobile for iOS. A busy restaurateur can now manage the restaurant in real time from anywhere – keeping an eye on service while attending a daughter’s school play, for example. Also new is Upserve Shift Prep, connecting reservations with point-of-sale to predict how many guests will come in tonight, and showing meal preferences for repeat guests.

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3 Upserve has grown rapidly. Do you expect that growth to continue? Why?

We expect growth to continue because we target a huge, growing market with a compelling product our customers love. In 2015, Americans spent more on dining out than food at home for the first time. Restaurants now enjoy hundreds of billions in annual sales and employ one in 10 Americans, but they face significant challenges: rapidly changing consumer tastes, fierce competition, 63 percent annual employee turnover and costly technology that won’t interoperate. Upserve helps restaurants solve these problems and more.

4 Are you finding the employee talent you need locally?

It’s challenging to find great talent with experience building, marketing and selling Internet software in any market, but especially in Rhode Island because our local tech ecosystem is still small. We’re trying to do our part to improve that by growing our team. We doubled our marketing team in recent months, and we regularly post new opportunities [on our website].

5 What should businesses expect next from Upserve?

We have an ambitious, challenging growth plan ahead. Look for more product innovation, a strengthening team and, most importantly, more value for our growing base of customers. •

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