An Interview with Ware Sykes, CEO of Hot Startup NoWait

Last week, we sat down with Ware Sykes, CEO of NoWait, a waitlist management solution for restaurants and their guests.

On the restaurant side, NoWait is rich with features. It allows businesses to manage their waitlist, including walk-ins, call-aheads and reservations. NoWait also supports table management and allows the user to customize server sections and calculate server statistics.

On the customer side, the user experience is simple. The customer simply has to download the app, select a restaurant they want to go to, add themselves to the waitlist and then arrive on time. NoWait displays the time in which it will take for the customer’s table to be ready so if the wait is long, the customer can do something useful instead of wait around indefinitely.

The app also displays the general wait time of restaurants nearby so customers can make dining decisions based on that. This increases the speed of decision-making and helps restaurants retain customers better.

We asked Ware Sykes questions regarding NoWait and where he sees the company going in the future. Below is a recount of the interview in Q&A format. All questions are asked by btrax and all answers are from NoWait CEO Ware Sykes.

How do you describe NoWait in one sentence?

NoWait is a mobile app for queue management serving the casual dining market in the US. The service aims to make restaurant workers and customers’ lives easier. We chose to target the restaurant industry because eating is something people do all the time, whether it’s to spend time with their family or conduct business transactions. It’s an important aspect of people’s lives, and we do it often. We aim to eliminate waiting in this area of people’s lives. This way, we can make restaurants more successful, generate more sales, and let consumers eat out more often.

Who is your main target?

Our main target is casual dining restaurants, but not restaurants in New York in particular because New York has a strong reservation culture. We instead focus on more than 250,000 restaurants across the US.

Photo by: Memphis CVB

Casual dining is anything from the Spotted Pig in New York, which is an upscale restaurant, to chains like Buffalo Wild Wings.

What are some of the things you’ve done to reach this target market in terms of sales and marketing?

Our product is really our sales strategy. We focus on building a solution that restaurants love and that makes the lives of their staff easier. Our company is a hospitality business at its core. We work with restaurants individually when we build the product to understand what our customers’ needs are.

We partner closely with restaurants to deliver a great product experience. Every employee, including our board members, worked at one of our restaurant clients for a couple of days before they were considered a full-time employee.

Photo by: Alex Akopyan

By letting our team host at client restaurants for a couple of nights, they can understand better what it’s like for customers to use our product. It works both ways. Sending employees to restaurants also helps restaurant owners understand and use the product better. Since restaurants are naturally skeptical of new technology and processes, this really helps us cut corners.

How do you differentiate yourself from other competitors in the restaurant reservation businesses?

We’re focused on the casual dining market, and today, NoWait is the definitive leader in the category. Our biggest competitor is pen and paper. NoWait is the first mover in building a mobile network for this particular market, serving both consumers and restaurants.

One aspect of our differentiation is the user experience. We’ve designed our product to be easy to use and worked with our restaurant partners to develop features that made sense for them.

The difference between us and OpenTable or Yelp is that we actually connect and communicate with our users. Our technology can recognize the customer when they walk through the door of the restaurant.

What is the feature roadmap for NoWait?

We have a very robust roadmap which we can’t share at this time, but we have a lot of major features coming out. What we really want to do is develop features that customers are asking us for, make sure we’re helping restaurants drive more sales and consumers save time. We want to give everyone a better experience.

NoWait uses an in-house algorithm to help predict wait time at restaurants, and customers can take advantage of this feature if they upgrade to a different version of the app. Humans are busy and waiters or waitresses often can’t give accurate predictions of wait time in the midst of everything.

Photo by: Natasja

Also, there’s evidence that restaurant hosts tend to sugarcoat wait time. Our algorithm to predict wait time allows restaurant goers to know when their table will really be ready so they can complete other tasks while waiting. This helps improve customer retention rates for restaurants.

NoWait has various notification features and allows restaurants to notify customers by text when their table is ready. The app also allows users to view real-time wait times of restaurants around their location, which aids instant decision-making for which restaurant to go to. Users may end up going to restaurants they normally don’t go to, or they can be more efficient by doing other things while they wait.

Do you foresee international business expansion? If so, in what region and timeframe?

NoWait’s vision is much bigger than just restaurants. We wait in line for many aspects of our lives. Waiting is also not just a US issue, but a global issue. Our goal is to eliminate waiting in every aspect of our lives. The question is not if but when. However, currently we have not spent much time focusing on international expansion.

What other industries do you see as your potential market?

We’ve had requests from every continent in terms of people wanting to bring NoWait to their country. We’ve also had requests across various types of potential customers like doctor’s offices, hospitals… there’s no shortage of demand for our solution. We just need to determine the sequence in which we should enter these different markets. I don’t know what the timeline is–it could be 2 years, it could be less. But we know there is no shortage of demand and we want to move quickly.

Ware Sykes – CEO of NoWait Ware Sykes joined NoWait in 2013. In early 2014, A highly sought-after industry pundit, Ware has been featured by Entrepreneur, The Wall Street Journal,TechCrunch, USA Today, FOX Business Live, and Reuters. Previously, Ware was the Vice President of Sales & Services for TheLadders, the online and mobile job-matching service, where he led all sales and enterprise marketing. During his six-year tenure, he pioneered “Signature,” an unprecedented, systematic program designed to guarantee job offers for job-seeking professionals.