Interview with Rick Orr, founder and CEO of TabbedOut
Rick Orr is the founder and CEO of TabbedOut and wants to change the way you pay for your bar or restaurant tab. TabbedOut provides a mobile application that allows you to track and pay for your bar tab at participating locations without having to track down your waiter or waitress first. Rick spent time discussing how they are currently marketing a mobile application using more traditional on-premise advertising techniques.
Although they are a mobile application and on the cutting edge of technology, their online advertising has been less effective to date compared to other more successful marketing strategies. Instead, they are spending their time and marketing dollars marketing on the premise of participating bars and restaurants to much greater effect and are refining their outreach to try to reach a large number of venues in a given city to get significant word of mouth marketing and selection for their customers.
Just because you have a mobile application, don’t overlook traditional marketing methods that may better suit your specific application.
The Interview
Stats
HQ:
Austin, TX
Capital raised:
$2.5 million
Customer:
Over 145 active venues 13 states and 49 cities with focus on Austin, New York City, Portland, Atlanta, Bay Area, Las Vegas and LA
Interesting interviewee fact:
The idea for TabbedOut was born out of a 55 minute closeout process during a lunch while I was at my first startup, WholeSecurity, in 2002.
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Scott: Hi, this is Scott Olson with FounderBuzz, and today I'm actually interviewing Rick Orr, an old colleague of mine that I worked with a few years back who started a company called TabbedOut. They're a mobile application geared at helping you pay your tabs and bills at restaurants and bars. He talks about how they're marketing their mobile application. It's pretty interesting. They're using kind of old school, on location advertising for a new world mobile app. If you have a mobile application that it has a physical presence associated with its use, you may want to consider some on site advertising and how that can impact your mobile application download. Hope you enjoy this interview and would love your feedback. Thanks.
Rick: Hi, this is Rick Orr, CEO and co-founder of TabbedOut. We're an Austin based company that's focused on extending the traditional point of sale at bars and restaurants to allow patrons to open, monitor, split, and ultimately pay checks from their own iPhone or Android device. TabbedOut has made mobile payments reality putting convenience, security, and control directly in the hands of our end user. Of course, for merchants this means increased sales and no more walked checks.
With regards to how we're marketing the application, we're primarily leveraging sort of what I would call guerilla style marketing or in-venue promotions. We certainly have the physical presence requirement for our advertising to be or awareness generation to be most effective. This renders itself as everything from very directed training to the staff to make them aware and understand the benefits. From a sort of signage perspective or POP perspective, this is banners and bumper stickers on the back of registers. Of course, the static cling sticker on the door and any other types of sort of bars and restaurants centric advertising that we can get in front of our customers right at the time of purchase.
What hasn't worked so great for us is online advertising. This really gets back to the physical nature of our product. You can learn about TabbedOut on Monday from great online traditional methods, but it might not be until Friday that you actually go in and would be able to use the application. So really the most effective with regards to using the application, where we've seen about 65% repeat usage in our existing customer base, has been through the guerilla, in-venue style promotion.
FounderBuzz is the work of Scott Olson, President of MindLink Marketing. MindLink Marketing specializes in working with startups to provide strategic and web marketing services. Stop by the MindLink site for some great tips on marketing strategy, great marketing content, leads management and more – www.mindlinkmarketing.com
FounderBuzz is the work of Scott Olson, President of MindLink Marketing. MindLink Marketing specializes in working with startups to provide strategic and web marketing services. Stop by the MindLink site for some great tips on marketing strategy, great marketing content, leads management and more – 
