If you are a busy New Yorker or live in another fast-paced city, you may have been in this situation: frazzled and running late for work, you rush out of your apartment without having time for breakfast, or even that cup of coffee you need to kick-start your morning.
If you’re like me, you stop on the way to work for at least some coffee, even if it takes an extra 10 minutes because of a long line at a favorite local cafe. But with GoMobo, a service available in more than 300 quick-service restaurants such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway in Manhattan, it’s possible to save that 10 minutes and arrive at work on time and happily fortified with your morning dose of caffeine.
GoMobo allows users to text message or use the Web to place orders ahead of time and also to pay for them. So you can text message an order to a local cafe as you’re leaving your apartment and have it be ready and paid-for when you arrive, allowing you to skip the payment line — often the most time-consuming part of takeaway orders.
Noah Glass, CEO of GoMobo, came up with the idea for the company while working in Johannesburg, South Africa, for an investment firm in 2004. He noticed that while 90 percent of the people there didn’t have a bank account, nearly 100 percent had mobile phones, and because of this, prepaid mobile minutes became a type of currency.
“People would go to get their hair cut and say, ‘I’ll give you two minutes of my mobile airtime if you cut my hair,’ ” he said. “The mobile phone leapfrogged banking.”
Working with local developers, he came up with the idea of giving consumers the ability to use mobile phones as a payment system for takeaway orders. Glass moved back to the U.S. and set up GoMobo in New York in September 2005, opting out of his previous plan to attend business graduate school at Harvard University.
He didn’t forget his love for academia altogether, however — in November 2005, Glass piloted the first GoMobo services at a coffee shop called Koffee 2 (since renamed the Public Cup) near Yale University, his undergraduate alma mater in New Haven, Connecticut.
Initially, Glass thought people would just want to use the service to order morning lattes on the way to class. But he found that “people really wanted to order lunch, not just coffee,” he said. That is how GoMobo shifted its focus from morning coffee to providing lunch orders for “quick-service” eateries in New York, and eventually across the U.S.
The New Haven pilot was successful, and in May 2006 GoMobo launched its service in two Manhattan areas chosen for their concentrations of daytime office workers who need lunch in a hurry: Madison Square Park and Rockefeller Center.
New York Burger Company, tossed, Benvenuto Cafe and Mangia were the first quick-service restaurants to go online with GoMobo in Madison Square Park, while tossed, Yummy Sushi, Two Boots, Cafe Metro, Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts began using the service in Rockefeller Center.
The latter neighborhood was especially a good fit for the service because “the dynamic is there are a ton of people trying to get lunch at the same time, [including] a lot of tourists that frustrate people that work in the building,” Glass said. Because tourists are less concerned about a time schedule than local professionals, using GoMobo “became the insiders’ way of getting lunch,” he said.
Signing up for the GoMobo service is free; the company is paid a 10 percent transaction fee by participating restaurants for each transaction that goes through GoMobo. Glass said GoMobo also is offering up-sell opportunities through e-mail or text message, depending on whether users have opted in to receive such messages, with participating companies charged if the messages bring them additional business.
The point of GoMobo is not only to make lunch easier for busy city dwellers, but also to drive business to participating restaurants so that GoMobo earns more transaction payments.
So far, that strategy is working for Perry Mallas’ restaurant, Benvenuto, in Madison Square Park. Mallas has seen more repeat business since his cafe started using the GoMobo service nearly two years ago. “I have a lot of regular customers that use the system,” he said.
Once people sign up for GoMobo, they can automatically begin using their accounts to order and pay participating restaurants through the online system. They can choose online what time they want to pick up their orders or have them delivered, and GoMobo uses an algorithm based on that time and information that is constantly being gathered from restaurants about how long certain orders take to prepare at certain times.
The algorithm comes in handy, especially when a person orders lunch for a 12:30 p.m. pick-up time at, say, 8 a.m., Glass said. GoMobo will hold that order and send it to a restaurant leaving only enough time for it to be prepared. The system bases its hold time on algorithm information about how much time it typically takes staff to prepare that particular order during lunchtime.
To use text-message ordering, users must set up “GoCodes” for regular orders at certain restaurants. For example, said Glass, a person might save a “small coffee, bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts at Rockefeller Center” as GoCode number 1. GoMobo sends that order number to its text short-code, 46626, and the order is sent to Dunkin’ Donuts from there. Customers also can choose different pick-up times or delivery options by adding those specifics to their text messages.
Eateries have three ways to install GoMobo at their sites. A plug-in that can work with an existing point-of-sale system is one option, while installing an application locally on a Windows PC is another. Glass said GoMobo also can set up its system to send a restaurant a fax when orders come through, with a follow-up phone call to ensure that the faxed order has been received.
GoMobo has expanded to many major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seattle and Chicago. More information about where the service is available and how to sign up can be found on GoMobo’s Web site.
