A $100/month waitlist-and-reservations app for restaurants that undercuts OpenTable and Yelp by refusing to charge cover fees
on pace for $500K+ this year · 700 paying customers · 15,000 businesses have trialled it
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Joe studied computer science, worked as a software engineer, and in 2008 joined Shutterfly, the online photo company — the first job where he felt he was building something fun. He moved into management and immediately missed building. He went looking for a side project that would teach him iOS. The idea arrived in 2017 at a busy Saturday brunch: he was put on the waitlist, got a text with a link that said "click here to see your wait time," tapped it, and the link demanded he download Yelp and create an account first. By the time he had signed up, a second text arrived saying his table was ready. His reaction — that link should just show me my wait time, I shouldn't have to make an account — became the product. His wife suggested he build a waitlist app. The build was slow and part-time. Six months in he had a prototype that could add people to a list but could not text anyone. About a year and a half in he pushed to get something shippable and launched on the App Store, where he got 10 downloads in the first week. In-app purchases only went live around year two, which is when it started behaving like a business. The year-by-year revenue he gave on camera: year one $0, year two $14,500, year three ~$116,000, year four $186,000, year five $307,000, year six $354,000, year seven $445,000, and this year on pace to clear half a million. He is still the only developer.
6 more sections — the full story, the playbook, the risks, and the numbers. Free account unlocks everything.
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Create free accountEmail code only. No password.Data credibility: Founder interview on Starter Story. Every number — the year-by-year revenue ladder, 700 paying customers, 15,000 trials, 59M parties, CAC $130 and LTV $750-$1,000, and the full cost breakdown — is stated by the founder on camera and is unaudited; no dashboard was shown. The product name is rendered as "Weightley"/"weightly" throughout the auto-generated transcript, which is a caption artefact; we have written it as Waitly. Note the arithmetic tension we flag in section 03: 700 customers at the stated $100/month flat fee would be $70K/month, but revenue is given as $40K+/month, so cheaper plans must exist that the transcript never describes.