PLATFORM & BUSINESS MODEL STRATEGY
SEAT@THETABLE
SEAT@THETABLE a trend-native discovery platform that gives diners the trend without the queue, and independent restaurants visibility without going viral.
Product/UX Prototype, Pitch Deck Design
Claud, Coded HTML/CSS Prototype, Canva
Projected Year 1 ARR at 2% New York penetration, breaking even at just 127 subscribers.
01 OVERVIEW
Food discovery shifted from long-form, trusted journalism to short-form content built for engagement, not judgement, and TikTok is now where 70% of Gen Z go first for food recommendations. That shift broke the experience on both sides: diners wait 30+ minutes for a trending spot only to be let down, and great independent restaurants that never went viral stay invisible no matter how good they are. Every existing tool organises around a place, Google Maps for what you already know, TikTok for what's going viral, but nothing sits in between to turn a trend into an actual decision. We built Seat@TheTable to close that gap: a two-sided app organised around trends instead of places, giving diners real-time alternatives and wait times, and giving independent restaurants visibility they can't win through an algorithm alone, with free onboarding so there's no barrier to join.
02 THE PRODUCT
We built and tested a working prototype for both sides of the marketplace, a customer-facing app and a business-facing dashboard, with freemium pricing from $0 to $149/month. Real-time data is phased on purpose: restaurants self-report at launch, public data layers on top, and crowd-sourced diner reports take over at scale, basically Waze but for food, so accuracy compounds as the user base grows.
03 VALUE
With no inventory, no delivery fleet, and no per-cover costs, we break even at just 127 subscribers, and projected about $399,000 in Year 1 ARR at 2% penetration of New York's restaurant market. The expansion plan follows the same logic into LA, Chicago, San Francisco, then London, Toronto, and Sydney, cities that share the same conditions that made New York work.
04 WHAT THIS TAUGHT ME
This project pushed me past just writing strategy slides into actually designing the prototype, two-sided product, not just the business model but the real customer and business experiences that had to hold it up. The hardest part was staying honest about the cold-start problem: a platform's only as good as its ability to get the first restaurant and the first diner to show up before the other side even exists yet. That's what shaped almost every decision we made, more than any single number in the model did.