A good meal out with friends is one of life’s great pleasures. Sunday wants to make it even better. With the aid of a QR code, diners can use a smartphone to access Sunday’s platform and pay their bill in as little as 10 seconds, saving them the time they might have spent arguing about splitting the bill, waiting for a busy server and getting the tip right.
“We provide a checkout experience that matches the frictionless experience of online retail in brick and mortar restaurants,” says Antoine Jacoutot, VP Platform Engineering, Sunday. “We have a product called Pay At Table which allows you to do exactly that, but we also offer other things like ordering, ratings or loyalty programs. We’re really building a complete checkout solution.”
Founded mid-pandemic by restaurateurs for restaurateurs, Sunday has signed up more than 5,000 leading hospitality brands across France, the United Kingdom and the United States in just 18 months.
Clean solutions for complex problems
Sunday’s success, says Jacoutot, lies in the combination of the real-world restaurant experience of its founders and the company’s focus on technology.
“I like to say that Sunday lies somewhere between food tech and FinTech,” he explains. “We are a payment company, but we’re also trying to solve lots of complex problems in the restaurant. We provide the quickest, smoothest checkout experience for restaurateurs and customers, but that requires a lot of hard work under the surface. Fifty-five percent of our employees work on either the product or on the technology.”
Sunday’s platform minimizes friction for restaurants by integrating with their existing point of sales (POS) systems, harmonizing multiple data streams, providing real-time payments updates and automating reports. For customers, Sunday provides a method of paying that can be used by anyone with a smartphone, personalized to their particular table and with the option to tip servers simplified to the press of a button.
With Google Cloud as its technology infrastructure, Sunday built a platform that could handle the scale and speed required for a proof of concept (POC) in its first six months. As the company moved towards production, however, it became clear that while the POC setup worked, it could still be improved upon. Sunday turned to DoiT to help optimize its infrastructure for growth and flexibility.
“We’re a lean startup with limited resources, so we needed to simplify our technology platform as much as possible,” says Jacoutot. “We didn’t just want technical expertise, however. We also wanted a strategic partner that could solve our current problems but also help us plan for the future. For us, that partner was DoiT.”
Simplifying the Google Cloud ecosystem with DoiT
The Sunday platform has been continuously optimized and improved with DoiT’s help over the last twelve months. With Google Kubernetes Engine at its heart for enhanced scalability, the company uses BigQuery, Cloud SQL and Pub/Sub for its data and messaging services. But Sunday’s partnership with DoiT does not involve close technical supervision. Instead, the company meets with DoiT every month or so to discuss its goals at a more strategic level. “We talk about what we want to happen and brainstorm ideas with DoiT,” says Jacoutot. “We listen to DoiT’s suggestions and then implement the technology ourselves.”
As a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner, DoiT not only has a long history with the platform, it also maintains close links with the Google Cloud team. That means it can act as a guide for Sunday, helping the company find the solutions it actually needs more quickly. In its regular meetings with Sunday, DoiT will often present a quick summary of what has changed and what to look forward to in the Google Cloud landscape.
For any issues that require more immediate attention, Sunday’s developers use DoiT’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to inspect their infrastructure and raise tickets. More often, however, they communicate with DoiT over Slack for quick and easy resolutions. “What’s great about DoiT is that they offer us fantastic support on Google Cloud,” says Jacoutot. “But they are so much more than an IT help desk. We don’t have a tickets-based relationship with them. Direct access is very important for us.”
Sustainable growth with transparent costs
Since going live, Sunday has gone from strength to strength not only in terms of expanding its customer base but also in terms of what it has done for those customers. Restaurants that use Sunday report improved table turnover, a 40% increase in tipping rates, triple the number of Google reviews and a 12% increase in the average basket.
DoiT’s partnership with Sunday has focused on strategy and cost optimization, which has helped the company stay lean and nimble in challenging times. DoiT has enabled Sunday to save 15% on its cloud costs while boosting technical implementation speeds by 25%.
“Cost transparency and optimization has been absolutely critical for our success,” says Jacoutot. “All of our technology spend with Google Cloud and others goes through DoiT, and that makes things very simple for us in terms of planning and strategy.”
While cost optimization has been a major focus for Sunday, for Jacoutot, it is the first step in a journey towards greater cloud governance. “One of the most important discussions we’ve been having with DoiT is about cloud governance,” he says. “Our end goal is to get full visibility into our platform and the data flows in and out of it. That means clear technical validation, proven compliance, cost optimizations and improved security.”
Looking ahead to 2023, the company is preparing for even faster growth into new markets, which means consolidating the current infrastructure and making sure it can handle rapid growth as well as the introduction of additional products.
In the longer term, Sunday is also working on new features that will make the checkout experience even smoother. “At the moment, we’re having all these conversations with DoiT about what we’re planning and what kind of technology we’ll need and what problems we’ll run up against,” says Jacoutot. “We’re building the foundations for the next iteration of Sunday. It’s an exciting time.”
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