Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business solutions but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Vincent Chaglasyan, Co-Founder of Orderbyte, located in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Orderbyte is a restaurant delivery operating system with a direct-to-consumer storefront to place online orders, process payments, and provide on-demand drivers for delivery. In short, we help local restaurants and "mom-and-pop" eateries deliver orders sustainably and profitably.

Tell us about yourself

Growing up in a family of restaurant owners, I've been immersed in the restaurant industry (from operations to marketing) almost on a daily basis since childhood. On average, the restaurant industry is a very low-margin business, making it so much more important to always understand your bottom line profit - one wrong move brings you that much closer to closure. With the growth of online ordering in a post-COVID world, many independent restaurants without the budget for market research and in-house tech teams were not prepared for 40% of total industry sales to fully shift online. Maximizing online sales now plays a key role between closure and profitability. That's what drives me each day - making sure local restaurants - just like the ones my family ran, do not lose their standing simply because there wasn't a delivery stack designed for SMBs. At Orderbyte, our goal is to get every restaurant to fulfill 20,000 online orders a year.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

At my previous start-up, Expy (micro acquired), a monetizable link-in-bio tool with an integrated community for creators, we crossed 6,000 active creators (25K+ followers min.) in under 4 months. What was truly fulfilling, however, was that for over 40% of these creators, Expy was the place where they earned their first online earnings - for many, this meant buying their first professional equipment and for others, moving more full-time into their creator business. Now, it is about having this same impact, yet for local restaurants trying to navigate this "online sales storm", by providing them with the same delivery tech a nationwide brand with an in-house tech team would have, for free.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Accountability. When you start your own business - you need to take full ownership and responsibility for the impact each decision you make has on your team, your partners, your clients, and of course, the industry as a whole. Your actions have a waterfall impact on your entire surrounding system and structure. This is one of the hardest yet fulfilling parts of running your own business.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Everything's already out there, but these are the 3 go-tos for my day-to-day :)

  1. Be customer-centric - at first, it feels somewhat embarrassing going out to your customers and seeking critical feedback, yet as many say, if your product doesn't embarrass you at first, you're already too late :)
  2. Fast execution, fast fixing - Release updates, gain insights and make the necessary adjustments. It's very easy to get stuck in a vicious cycle of perfecting your product/business internally, yet it's a whole different game once it's out to the public - and that's where you figure out what's most important.
  3. Don't fall in love with the product but with the vision and mission. The way you resolve the problem you set your sights on might require a completely different solution than you first anticipated, and you should be okay with that. You're not building a product for the sake of building it but to solve a specific problem!

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://getorderbyte.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getorderbyte/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vince.chag/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VinceChag
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vchaglasyan/


If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

Turn your craft into recurring revenue with Subkit. Start your subscription offering in minutes and supercharge it with growth levers. Get early access here.