From Breweries to B2B SaaS: How Gotab Turned Industry Pain Points into Product Strategy
Sometimes the best innovations come from living with a problem before trying to solve it. For Gotab co-founder Tim McLaughlin, owning breweries while having an enterprise software background created a unique perspective on restaurant technology’s shortcomings.
In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Tim shared how this dual experience shaped Gotab’s product strategy and approach to industry transformation.
The Operator’s Perspective
Before founding Gotab in 2016, Tim had already built successful software consulting companies. But it was co-owning two breweries that revealed the true state of restaurant technology. As he explains, “I quickly learned just how broken restaurant technology is. It’s all closed, it’s all proprietary. I mean, as an architecture and data, it’s all proprietary. Massive lock in. No portability, hardware lock in. It’s totally crazy.”
Bridging Two Worlds
Tim’s background in enterprise software provided a stark contrast to restaurant technology’s limitations. He notes, “My background is actually enterprise software. And in enterprise, there’s a very clear path for best of breed.” This perspective shaped Gotab’s approach to building an open, API-driven platform rather than a closed system.
Starting with Guest Experience
The initial focus came from observing actual customer behavior. As Tim explains, they wanted to “make it so guests don’t have to do the things they don’t want to do in restaurants, aka pay split the non fun stuff, not ordering and tasting stuff, not talking to great service staff, but taking away the not fun stuff.”
Learning Through Implementation
Testing their solution in their own establishment proved invaluable. When they introduced QR ordering in 2018, they discovered unexpected challenges. Tim recalls, “We would actually take more orders than they’d ever taken before at the same time. So then we ended up becoming an operational tool to fulfill the… keeping the promises that we already made to the guests.”
Expanding the Vision
This operational challenge led to a crucial insight: guest experience and operational efficiency are inseparable. Gotab expanded beyond just ordering into comprehensive operations management. The results were significant – while “restaurants typically try to stay under 30% of their revenue is spent on labor,” Tim notes that “our restaurants, on average, have a 22% labor cost.”
Building for Scale
Their experience with high-volume operations shaped their target customer profile. Tim explains, “Maui Brewing will see 8000 people. 8000 guests come through one restaurant in a week, which is a pretty high volume.” This level of scale demands sophisticated operational tools.
Lessons for Founders
Gotab’s journey offers valuable insights for founders building industry-specific solutions:
- Direct experience with industry problems provides crucial insights
- Cross-industry expertise can reveal solution patterns
- Testing in controlled environments surfaces unexpected challenges
- Operational problems often point to bigger opportunities
Their approach also demonstrates the value of maintaining both operator and technology perspectives. As Tim describes their product development philosophy: “We want to look forward and kind of work our way backward into how restaurants should operate. Like, fast forward ten years, how should they operate? And then say, okay, well, how do we adapt that to how people want to or already do operate?”
For B2B founders, particularly those transforming traditional industries, Gotab’s experience shows how combining insider knowledge with external expertise can create breakthrough solutions. Sometimes the most valuable innovations come not from pure technology advancement, but from deeply understanding and reimagining industry operations.