Problem
Small restaurant owners on delivery apps lose 25%+ of every order to commission and only find out at month end, if at all. They run the business on WhatsApp, a notebook and instinct, with no POS analytics and no live P&L, so the leak stays invisible until the cash is gone.
Decisions
- [01]
Painkiller, not vitamin
I started with a generic cash forecaster, the kind an owner signs up for and forgets, then narrowed it to the one leak I know from the other side of the table: I built the tiered commission structures at Yalla Fast, so I know exactly where the money goes.
- [02]
The number is the product
Every screen gives the owner one figure he didn't have, with commission, fixed fees and food cost broken out as their own lines. Nothing decorative sits between him and that number.
- [03]
Arabic first, English fitted to it
Layout, type scale and numerals are decided in Arabic, then English is fitted to them. The money math sits in a framework-free, unit-tested core, so any figure on screen can be explained line by line.
Outcome
- Full-stack SaaS shipped solo: money-math engine, bilingual RTL dashboard, auth and persistence, live on Cloudflare
- Tested profit engine with golden money-math cases; a nightly cron flags a cash shortfall before it lands
- Go-to-market starts warm: 100+ Jeddah restaurant contacts from the HubSpot CRM I built
- Honest status: zero customers and unvalidated, with a free launch month while owner interviews run
Screens
