A cool company that isn’t keeping up - Sales Development Representative ChowNow Employee Review

The Great Managers? All laid off The Great Co-Workers? All laid off I get it, layoffs happen. This is a business, not a charity. However the multiple rounds of layoffs were frequently the results of the executive team not having a clear vision for what the company can and should be. Every time a new idea was implemented it seemed like 2 months later it was scrubbed. After each round of layoffs the CEO would release a video on slack pretty much explicitly stating “they made some missteps and grew too fast” or “didn’t really understand how certain things would play out.” Here’s the problem at the core of all these issues. The product does not address the needs of restaurants in 2022. Selling ChowNow is like trying to convince your friends to sign up for MySpace in 2010. Sorry but Facebook exists and it does all the same things but better. There used to be a real need for online ordering that wasn’t Doordash or UberEats. Then every POS system out there completely undercut ChowNow’s entire business model by adding online ordering which also intergrates directly into their inventory management. Would you rather pay $20/month for an add on to the POS system you’ve already invested in or pay $200/month to ChowNow to do the same thing but with less functionality? Marketplace is a cool idea too, but again, restaurants almost universally solved the “commission free online ordering” dilemma when they were forced to in 2020. The best case scenario is that a larger company like Toast or Square buys out ChowNow and the executive team gets to cash out on their decade of hard work. Investment in the company has begun to dry up because growth has stagnated. Will ChowNow survive in an economy where liquidity isn’t as free flowing as it has been in the last 10 years? Probably not. There’s lots of great people that work there and I’m rooting for them but the future does not look bright for this company. Accept a job here at your own risk.