Area 31 interviewed Prior’s CEO, Bernardo Reynolds, who told us how they came up with the idea for their startup and where is Prior heading at the moment. Prior is an app that allows users to order and pay before getting to the restaurant, cafeteria or any venue.  You can make your order from your phone, and skip the queue in your favourite venues. You do not have to go to the bar and order or pay, and that’s their competitive advantage. At the moment they are two founders (Bernardo and Andu) that worked previously at Tuenti, and they just hired a salesperson that works on attracting new food chains. Moroever, they had an intern last summer who was in charge of marketing, social media and worked part of his time on client acquisition. They are looking for a new intern to join their team.

«We came up with the idea of Prior, because we were tired of waiting in queues  because no one enjoys waiting in a line to order a coffee. We started speaking with potential clients and we realized that our idea was not only valuable to the people waiting to order for a cooffee, but also to those businesses that constantly see large queues in their venues. The reason for this is that businesses can lose money when people get tired of waiting in long and slow queus. After getting funding and four months later, we started with DO EAT! at IE Campus. That was a year ago and we were having 200 order a month, today we have around 700 a month and not just with DO EAT!. We have incorporated other businesses: Cultura Café, Si-Cool, and Cafeteando. Our main goal at the moment is to acquire food chains to use our app for orders and payments online. In the end we compete with developing agencies. Say for instance the agency that developed the order and payment app for Vips for Starbucks in Spain.»

The way Prior works for businesses: depending on the chain with whom they work, they can choose to be charged a small commission per order or in case they want the app to be incorporated into the chain’s own app so that they can show their brand, it works thorugh a suscription.

«As an entrepreneur, I believe that the most challenging thing is the uncertainty that you constantly face, because you do not really know if things will eventually come out. What you really need to have in mind is that what you are doing is solving a problem and a problem that directly affects you and that you are interested to solve. Because this is what will make you keep going forward when thinks do not work out.»

Madrid, 24 Noviembre, 2016.

Tess de Gregorio