How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

People often ask me how we’ve done it. We barged into a crowded market with a generic product. We didn't have any brand. We didn't spend oodles of money on advertising, coupons, and promotions, like our competitors were doing. And while usually in our industry others go out of business in six months or a year, we saw profit in the second month. A year and a half later, we are still in business—and expanding. In this post, I'll tell you how to market a restaurant without marketing it or at least how we did it—and how you can...

We started in 2016 with a radical idea of selling only seven pizzas. It worked much better than even our friends predicted. And we’ve been quite reserved in our menu development, having introduced only two new pizzas since our grand opening. But now the Dodo team’s going rogue, adding salads and milkshakes to the table in our second shop in Southaven. In this post, I want to explain the logic behind our revamped menu strategy and also open a conversation about how new dishes should be invented, tested, and launched by a restaurant team.

This April, we promised to return money paid for any order that left our customers unsatisfied. Late delivery? Missing drink? Cold pizza? Just a pizza you didn’t like? Doesn’t matter. We encouraged our unhappy customers to call or leave a message on Facebook, tell us what the issue was, and get all their money back.