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🍽️ From WeChat frustrations to restaurant revolution. 🔍 Discover how one founder's personal pain point led to Bistrochat, now transforming how restaurants across Asia handle bookings through chat and AI

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In this inspiring conversation for founders and investors alike, Jonathan Nguyen sits down with Hacene Taibi, co-founder of Bistrochat, exploring how a simple frustration with restaurant bookings via WeChat sparked a business that's revolutionising the F&B industry. Learn how Bistrochat consolidates reservations from multiple channels whilst building a powerful CRM that helps restaurants deliver personalised service. Hacene shares valuable insights about the true nature of entrepreneurial competition: 'It's not just a product to product competition. It's what are you ready to sacrifice for this to happen?' From coding in Phuket seven days a week for a year to strategically positioning against well-funded competitors, this conversation reveals the mindset required to build a successful startup in a competitive space.

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Discover Bistrochat's expansion across Asia and why Hacene believes that in the AI age, a founder's greatest strength might be knowing what they don't know.

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Transcript

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Jonathan Nguyen (00:10)
Welcome back to another episode of the Unsensible Podcast where we talk to the unhinged founders on their quest to change the world. And today we have the unruly Hacene Taibi from Bistro Chat. Welcome to the pod Hacene. On the first time on the podcast, you have to pitch. So when was the last time you pitched?

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Hacene Taibi (00:26)
Thank you for having me.

⁓ Probably this morning.

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Jonathan Nguyen (00:35)
Wow. Okay. Sounds like someone's fundraising. We might get into that in a second. Okay. What we're going to do is I'm going to put 30 seconds on the board. You just go when you're ready. ⁓

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Hacene Taibi (00:45)
We built BistroChat, which is a reservation system for restaurants. So it consolidates the data and the reservations from all channels, including chat channels, right? That's why the name is BistroChat. So from WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Line, WeChat, Messenger, Instagram. So you don't have to think about it. And then we become the de facto CRM of the restaurant. So we help operations improve the service by knowing...

Who is who and what do they like and what they have last time and how much they spend, ⁓ et cetera. That's what we do.

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Jonathan Nguyen (01:18)
Really good snapshot. And I really want to get into this because it's a space that I think most people don't fully grasp how big it is and how competitive it is. So we'll get into the business, but I actually want to dig a little bit deeper into you as a founder. So your background, you're Algerian who grew up in France. Is that right?

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Hacene Taibi (01:39)
So I'm French Algerian. ⁓ So I lived in both countries. And then I studied IT and international business with the goal of becoming an entrepreneur one day. And that's what I did.

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Jonathan Nguyen (01:53)
What made you decide to be an entrepreneur?

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Hacene Taibi (01:55)
I don't know exactly what's the source, but I was sure after I got my first job that I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I realised when you're at university, well, your whole life, you change subject like every, every day, every hour, every two hours. And then suddenly you go to a job and your job is like marketing or developer or, you can't, you know, work on legal stuff or marketing or distribution or sales or, and I hated that. I didn't want to wait until like you, you know, climb the ladder and.

find yourself 30 or 40 years later at the head of some company and then, ⁓ wow, now I can take care of different topics. I just thought it's better if I build it and then I can decide.

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Jonathan Nguyen (02:37)
How did you end up in China? From what I can tell, you got a job at the French consulate as the IT manager.

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Hacene Taibi (02:47)
I really wanted to go to China from a young age. Since I was a teen, I was like focused on ending up in China. I was passionate about the culture, the language, the history of the country. And so I did everything I could to find a job there. And I ended up managing to get it, but it took a lot of efforts. It didn't just happen. I think it started with reading novels, ⁓ historical novels about China.

And then from there, like it became like the economy and became the language. became like, yeah, everything related to China became interesting to me and still is. And so that's how I ended up in Beijing.

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Jonathan Nguyen (03:29)
And then you ended up running or co-owning a restaurant. Is that right?

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Hacene Taibi (03:35)
randomly because my roommate was opening a restaurant. And so was like, Hey, let's do it together with a few other friends. then, we co-own the restaurant that we still co-own actually today.

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Jonathan Nguyen (03:46)
Give us a plug. Where is this restaurant and what is it called?

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Hacene Taibi (03:49)
It's in Beijing, it's a steakhouse and it's called O'Steak.

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Jonathan Nguyen (03:52)
That's on my list for next time I visit Beijing. And I won't be sending you a WeChat message about it because that was really annoying. Is that correct?

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Hacene Taibi (04:04)
Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So that the idea of Beeser Chat, ⁓ the premise came from that restaurant where everyone I knew in the city was like writing us to let us know. Like on my private WeChat, like, we're going to be three tonight. No, actually we're four. Sorry, I cannot make it. We're not going to come at eight. We're going to come at nine. And, and I was like, Hey, call the restaurants. And they never did. kept writing me and I was like, okay, this is a problem that will

like every restaurant in the world will face at some point. It's just that China at the time was a bit ahead of mobile usage and chat usage. ⁓ thanks to WeChat, right? And so I just thought, okay, this is like something that's going to happen everywhere, not just in China. Like communication will move from email and phone calling to more chats and more occurrences of chat. And you had like companies at the time, like Slack and Yammer. thought this is a deep trend.

that will transform every business, every vertical. And I really liked working in F&B And I was like, okay, let me connect my two passions, IT and F&B and do something with it. And then I met ⁓ my two co-founders later and they had started the project on the site for themselves. And then we decided to basically unite and do the same thing. We went programming, we went coding in Phuket for like a total of about a year.

⁓ So we were just sitting there programming, building the iterating on the product. We lived in the same apartment. We had like one meal a day. We worked seven days a week. So no day off. And we would just go out for dinner between 6 PM and 8 PM, enjoy the sunset and then go back to work and start the same program the next day.

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Jonathan Nguyen (05:52)
It's crazy. I mean, just think about what you can do now. Imagine if you had the LLMs that you have now. Imagine how productive you could have

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Hacene Taibi (06:00)
Absolutely, absolutely. We didn't have them then.

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Jonathan Nguyen (06:02)
unpack a little bit about the tool. you've got obviously the chat function. What are all of the kind of features? How does it solve the of the pain points that restaurateurs might have?

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Hacene Taibi (06:15)
Yeah, so it's the whole journey of the customer, right? So they find the availability, they book, they might have to pay a deposit or just leave the credit card as a guarantee. They might receive a reminder to remind them about their booking. After dining, they receive the review request, you know, and maybe a question to share that review, especially if it's positive. ⁓ And so it's better for the user.

And it's also better for the restaurant owner, had everything consolidating. doesn't matter which app ⁓ is selling the table or the covers. It's all going to be consolidated. So they have a lot of channels. have like six, seven, eight, 10 channels. And I think that this number of channels is going to explode, not reduce. And so we solve that issue where they can distribute on many channels at the same time and everything is consolidated.

It's not anything new, right? Because hotels have been doing that for a long time and airlines have been doing that for a long time. it's the same logic, right? You have a fixed asset business and you distribute on different channels and you consolidate everything.

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Jonathan Nguyen (07:25)
I think most outsiders, like if you book a restaurant, you don't really think about the machinery in that process. So like when I book a restaurant, I go to the restaurant, you know, Google page or if I, if I've been there a few times, I WhatsApp them and say, Hey, I want to book a table. But those tables are kind of inventory in a way that needs to be booked and reserved. And then

There's another system you've kind of mentioned this whole life cycle, but there's this whole system of booking, reserving. There's the point of sale, there's inventory, there's marketing. All of these systems kind of go back to back. And you did a demonstration for me of the product one time and there's a whole CRM in there. So you can see who your big spenders are, what they like, all of that kind of stuff. It's historically.

like maybe seven different systems for a restaurateur to actually understand their business. So I feel like there's been a massive consolidation.

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Hacene Taibi (08:33)
⁓ I absolutely think people want one system. ⁓ I don't think it's easy to deliver on that promise because it's very hard to be good at everything. And so I think you will have always like two markets, a market and companies who try to be like the system centralized with every feature. I would say in the U S for example, toast, ⁓ apparently is trying to do that. And then you have, ⁓ systems that are focused on one part of the business, but they also have API's and communicate with the other.

pieces of software you have around. And so they work normally beautifully or hopefully beautifully together. And so you will always have competition between these two. And it's always great to have one centralized system, ⁓ one vendor to speak to. But generally they're not as good in every feature they have ⁓ than the specialized one, right? Because they focus on one thing and they're becomes so good and added and you know, the software.

becomes like to have some depth in that specific problem, in solving that specific problem. So I think you will always have these two dynamics, just like Apple and Android, iPhone and Android. One is consolidated hardware, software, everything together, and the Android is distributed. It's probably not the same ⁓ experience, depending on the brand you take, et cetera, but they're also market leader by market share. And you will have these kinds of competitions, and sometimes one wins.

moves back to the other and yeah, it's like a chaos, permanent chaos.

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Jonathan Nguyen (10:06)
I think it's almost like it's a scaling kind of problem, right? So like, if you are a Coca-Cola, you kind of have to buy SAP, you know, one big monolithic kind of system. It's very hard to have thousands and some of these companies have thousands of applications. But then if you're a small operation, even if you're like one or 200 people, actually SAP is...

like using a sledgehammer to like crack a walnut, right?

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Hacene Taibi (10:39)
Yeah, so. ⁓

It is crazy to use SAP if you are a small company, you're right. And so we have a clear idea about who our customer is or ideal customer. it's like groups, I would say between 10 and 50 restaurants, which would be like on the smaller size of groups. have groups with hundreds or thousands of restaurants and we don't target them today. And so we build the product for them, right? We make sure that we can solve all their problems because they tend to have the exact

the same problems, right? No one is asking me to let the staff connect to SSO, for example, which would be like a big company problem. Small groups usually don't use that. But we still have problems of having maybe 30 or 40 restaurants scattered around three different countries and you having to consolidate the data and the customer profiles and so on. Right. So we address exactly that market and we develop all the features to be the best on that specific market.

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Jonathan Nguyen (11:40)
you've been in there since 2018, still growing, you're raising around by the sounds of things. ⁓ What do you attribute that to?

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Hacene Taibi (11:49)
sacrifice to start with. We sacrificed a lot and we are ready to sacrifice even more, right? So there is a human competition. It's not just a product to product competition. It's not just skills. It's ⁓

What are you ready to sacrifice for this to happen? And we were very clear from the beginning that we really wanted this to happen. And so we were ready to sacrifice. Like I told you earlier, we spent actually years working seven days a week without even questioning it. And so I don't think everyone is ready to do that.

And of course, the more you love it, the easier it is. But it's never easy, but the more you're passionate about it, the easier it is. ⁓ yeah. And then of course, some strategies. We took a challenger strategy, classic challenger strategy, because we had some big players enter the market with a lot of money and lot of backup. So we hyper specialized on our markets. And we divided the market in different segments. we did basically, I used to do like, designed three

circles, right? What are the needs of the customers, what the competition is doing and what we do. And hopefully we focus on what the customers really need and the competition is not doing to have a differentiation. So yeah, that's what we did. Super classic.

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Jonathan Nguyen (13:19)
Classic Venn diagram. What's really interesting about what you said is that if you ask marketing professors, they have all this kind of language and research about, know, product placement and positioning, all this kind of stuff, which is, yeah, fine, academically, great. But actually, at the end of the day, it comes down to it's a ground war, right? How much more resolute and determined is the founding team against that team, right? It's a people and stubbornness.

problem more than it is a this kind of weird marketing equation that they want to make really simple and neat.

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Hacene Taibi (13:55)
Yeah, exactly. You know, in sports, it's the same, right? Who trains so much. met Michael Phelps many years ago when he was ⁓ at the world ⁓ event, like championship in Shanghai. And I spoke with his trainer and it was amazing, right? Like ⁓ this guy trains so much and I would never have wanted to compete against him for sure because he sacrificed so much for this, right? And I don't love it enough for me to

spend so many hours and so many days and so many years in the swimming pool doing labs, right? And so there is a human ⁓ aspect to it. But coding and being in front of the computer is not work for me or any of my co-founders.

We enjoy it. love it. I don't stop coding, you know, because I'm on holidays or because I'm off. I do the same thing. I just work maybe on different things, but it's the same activity because we love it. don't. I read pretty much every entrepreneurship book I can find. And I do that on my free time because I really love it.

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Jonathan Nguyen (15:02)
I totally understand. People think I'm like nuts because when I'm on break, I'm always like reading books about human behavior, startups, all this kind of stuff. And they're like, aren't you on holidays? I'm like, yeah, but I enjoy this.

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Hacene Taibi (15:16)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so yeah, I wake up with it. I go to bed with it. ⁓ I'm lucky I have found my passion, right? What moves me and yeah, it's like a musician when you love your instrument, you want to play it.

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Jonathan Nguyen (15:32)
totally get it. Aside from consolidation kind of horizontally, I'm seeing, especially with the big players like Grab and DoorDash, there's very much a verticalization where these companies are essentially, they started out as delivery companies and now they're buying up. So DoorDash just bought seven rooms. Grab bought up Chope.

there seems to be a consolidation now where they want to own the entire customer experience, whether you're getting delivery or whether you're booking a table at a restaurant. So what's your view on this? you know, does this kind of look like to you a potential trade sale in the future? ⁓ Or where do you think the industry is going?

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Hacene Taibi (16:24)
Yeah. So consolidation of data, having like the customer complete customer journey, right? This is what they are after. And at the same time, it gives them like an entry entries in other markets where they're not present with ⁓ immediate relationship with so many venues. So I think it's a very smart move on their part. ⁓ And I think many people would be interested with the kind of business we do and the data we have. We thought about this before starting, right? Because we were thinking we want to

build something, but we want to be able to have investment if we need, we want to be able to sell if we need, et cetera. And so we were thinking ⁓ the reservation hotels, know, Priceline owns Open Table. ⁓ What I didn't see coming actually at the time was Amex.

⁓ buying Tuck and then Rezzy. So there is also like a vertical there. So anything related to hospitality, anything related to payment, anything related to loyalty. ⁓

AMEX probably does it more for the loyalty part of it. ⁓ And I think there are other sectors that are not buying this kind of software businesses today, but they will, including ⁓ people who sell their products in restaurants. For example, alcohol sellers, ⁓ wine sellers, champagne sellers, et cetera. ⁓ LVMH could be interested because they distribute champagne and they could be interested by the data and to improve their marketing, to improve their

margins to improve their distribution. So I think there are many type of industries that could be interested by acquiring this type of business, not just obviously in reservation businesses.

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Jonathan Nguyen (18:09)
Interesting you say that because this dream of ⁓ owning the whole customer experience has been a dream for a long time. And Omnichannel is such a challenge for most companies. So you guys have got chat kind of stitched up. You can like talk to the application on any kind of chat platform almost. And you say on your website, I noticed you talk a lot about NLP and AI.

So how do you guys deploy that? And how long have you been thinking about this actually on the platform?

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Hacene Taibi (18:47)
⁓ So it's in the name, right? It's for chat. So from the beginning, we knew that would be a key differentiation and it was like a long-term vision of chat becoming... ⁓

de facto main communication channel between businesses and their customers. So we spoke about NLP and all of that because we started, you have to remember we started before OpenAI. And so when we started, we were using TensorFlow, we were using like natural language processing. We had the chat and everything working before OpenAI with these chat to PT 3.5. So what it changed though, is that people were not ready. I would go and pitch and they were like, ah,

answering? No, don't trust that. know, it's worth it. could show them that it works. Still, no trust. And then suddenly...

OpenAI evangelized the world in six months. And then we go down and they say, sure. Yeah. need me. Yeah. Sure. Sure. No problem. Yeah. Let the AI answer it. I'm fed up answering. And so it's amazing, right? It had a massive impact on our business, but not in the technical part of it because we could already achieve what we wanted to achieve before they released anything. But on the ⁓ marketing side of it.

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Jonathan Nguyen (20:00)
user acceptance, right? Some the biggest challenges for software. when you talk about the CRM and using AI on that and then building a profile of customers, what are the capabilities?

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Hacene Taibi (20:14)
just what you ordered and how much you pay, how many times you come, what's the channel you use to book. And so from there we can know, like the restaurant will be able to know if you like red wine, white wine, oysters, champagne, if you usually come for brunch or if you usually come for lunch. And ⁓ that is very valuable information to target marketing on one side and also improve your satisfaction of the customer on the other side.

a whiskey or a musk mule when you show up. Maybe the third time or fourth time you show up to the same restaurant, you want them to know, right? You want them to say, do you want your musk mule instead of, you know, let me go bring you the menu, etc. And so it improves the VIP feeling and so we help restaurants scale the VIP feeling basically.

by improving their operations. We give them the right information at the right time to know what to say. You don't replace the staff, but you empower them.

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Jonathan Nguyen (21:17)
Have you had any unexpected insights from the data? mean, aside from the fact that you've now slipped down to second most valuable customer at Manmo, were there any other valuable insights you've discovered from the data? ⁓

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Hacene Taibi (21:28)
Yeah. Yeah, about.

Yeah, many, many things actually. the, the number of no show was really big, much higher than I thought it would be. So we have to build like payments to, to fix that. ⁓ it's interesting to see the number of last minute bookings, ⁓ by last minute, mean, in the last 30 minutes, right? So we built a solution to actually be able to accept last minute bookings because it, we realised it's like five to 10 % of the business, which is huge. so we were surprised all this

time by the customer's behavior, but also the restaurant staff behavior. And we adapt. We release features thinking it's going to be great for 30 % of our restaurants, and it ends up being used by 90 % of the restaurants. So yeah, we released automation for phone calling, and we thought it's a niche, and it's actually not a niche at all.

Yeah, we have also like bad surprises sometimes when we're not so good at picking what we develop, right? You develop something thinking 90 % of the restaurants will use it and they ask you for it and they keep asking you and then once they have it, they're like, okay, we have it now and we'll probably use it at some point. And they don't. So yeah.

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Jonathan Nguyen (22:53)
There's a really interesting thing I learned when I was ⁓ observing focus groups and looking at focus group data. And consumers always ask for things, but it's not really what they want. And sometimes they tell you it's what they want and it's not really what they want. But observing their behavior is often the most truthful way of uncovering that. And in software, it's really interesting because

I always monitor the ⁓ roadmaps and the feature requests pages of various software. And you'll see like there's some people that are super vocal about a particular feature. say, I'll subscribe if you implement this feature. And previously I was like, yeah, maybe you should implement that feature. But actually if you look at it over time, you'll see that the most vocal

feature requests aren't necessarily the ones that get used.

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Hacene Taibi (23:55)
I spend 50 % of my time with restaurant owners who are our clients. So either I'm pitching them or I'm doing support or I'm ⁓ helping them with something. I have to think like a restaurant owner. So I spend most of my time with them. So I can get both the requests, also there is a part of the features they can never ask for because they can't imagine it's possible.

No one asked us to develop a chat with an AI that takes the bookings in 2018. No one. Because they didn't really think the AI could do it, right? But they still had the needs, right? So it's exactly what you're describing, spending time with them. And ⁓ the most valuable features are the features we think of that solve big issues that were not asked for by restaurant owners. These are the best because the chances that ⁓ it's a differentiation ⁓

higher rate because the chance is higher because

We are competing with other companies and they also ask, you know, they're smart and hardworking and they also ask questions and ask them what features they want. Right. So if you want to differentiate, you have to uncover something, discover something that ⁓ is not in plain sight. It's not like, okay, just talk to any restaurant owners and they will ask for it. And so we have a part of the features that we develop that are in this bucket where we take, it's a higher risk by the way, right? Because we think they will need this. They didn't.

say they will need this, right? ⁓ But it's also the most rewarding one because once it works, then it's amazing. They want it, you are right, no one else has it. So you have a clear differentiation now and ⁓ your company can keep growing and so on. yeah, that's basically, I'd say 25 % of my job is come up with that direction that we need to take that will give us both. ⁓

differentiation and hopefully love from our customers.

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Jonathan Nguyen (25:58)
⁓ on that issue of growth. So are you guys looking to fundraise at the moment?

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Hacene Taibi (26:05)
We're closing our fundraise. We're finishing the fundraiser.

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Jonathan Nguyen (26:09)
Okay, anything you can talk about?

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Hacene Taibi (26:12)
⁓ nothing I can talk about. ⁓

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Jonathan Nguyen (26:15)
I wanted to get a scoop in there see if you'd let it go.

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Hacene Taibi (26:21)
We don't need it. We're profitable actually. We're growing profitably. We want to grow faster. That's the idea.

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Jonathan Nguyen (26:27)
And so you've got Singapore, you're in Singapore already. ⁓ Where is the, what's the growth markets that you're interested in?

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Hacene Taibi (26:37)
So we're in Singapore, Thailand. So obviously we're from Hong Kong. We're in Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia. And we're interested by anything Asian. yeah. Ideally, within few years, we will be in all of Asian countries.

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Jonathan Nguyen (26:54)
So I'm going to give you one last question, hardest question. Founders often fumble it, but 10 years from now, where do you see the future of this particular industry and perhaps, you know, where you guys will be?

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Hacene Taibi (27:10)
Okay, so we were right about something. We were right about AI becoming a thing and taking over communication. We were probably wrong in 2018 about its capacity and what it could be doing. So 10 years from now is really, really a long time in the AI age.

Highest conviction is that whatever I think is going to happen is going to be wrong. So I have to steer the company knowing that I'm probably wrong. It's like ⁓ how Ray Dalio puts it, it's more important to know what you don't know than what you actually know. So this is number one. Number two, will be like... ⁓

I don't know if it will be coding. I don't know what the software company will be. I don't know if it's going to be a software to software communication. And actually humans are not really in the loop, which is kind of what is happening now. ⁓ It's really hard. I think I have a hard time understanding what's going to be four years from now. 10 years, if I had to bet, I would bet against anything. I would say being right.

There is a non-zero chance that we reach AGI and in that world, I have no idea what that world is like, right? So putting AGI aside, if that doesn't happen.

then probably it's going to be like software to software communication, software. will be the code, writing code will be easy. So the value will come not from writing code. It has to come from something else. ⁓ Partnerships, contracts, exchange of data, protocols. I don't have the answer today, but the code is definitely getting cheaper.

by the day or by the hour or by the minutes. And so the value of the company will come from something.

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Jonathan Nguyen (29:07)
What about for Joe Blow customer though? Like, forget about your customers. What about for me who wants to go to a restaurant and make a booking? What does that, what does all of that mean?

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Hacene Taibi (29:18)
It means you will talk to Siri and say, hey, find me an Italian five miles around here. And that has a table for six Friday at 6 PM. That's it. Then it will look for it. It will communicate with humans or software and it will book it. It will use your credit card if needed to consolidate or to secure that booking and it will let you know that it's done. So it's a super low level of friction.

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Jonathan Nguyen (29:47)
Yeah, I mean, in some respects for the end consumer, it's actually some of that's possible today already. But for the restaurants who are your clients, there's actually huge implications to that. you know, things like SEO and all that kind of stuff is like, it's a whole different world, right?

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Hacene Taibi (30:07)
Yeah, so SEO, you're saying search engine optimization. We should speak about, you know, LLM optimization. I actually wrote an article about that on the company blog to explain how, what you have to do to get LLMs to actually mention you. If you say, I want, ⁓ what are the three best Italian restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong, Chatjibiti and Gemini and DeepSeek will give you answers to these questions. How do you make sure you are one of them?

It's a very interesting topic and yeah, and so ⁓ Ironically or funny enough beef my former company in China. So this was research. I was not my first company

The first company was about SEO, was about doing SEO for Baidu in mainland China. And many people knew Google and how to do SEO for Google, but have no idea how to do it for Baidu. And so we spent our time reverse engineering Baidu and standing the algorithm and working with our clients to improve their websites, improve their rankings and their traffic and targeting. And so I might end up doing the same thing again for restaurants, except

Instead of doing it for search engines, we'll be doing it for ⁓ Chanty PT and Gemini and Claude.

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Jonathan Nguyen (31:29)
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you get up to and I'm going to look you up in a year. For sure I'll see you again soon, but I'll get you back on the podcast in a year and see where you guys are at.

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Hacene Taibi (31:40)
Hopefully we will have accomplished a lot. Thank you for having me.

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Jonathan Nguyen (31:42)
I'm sure you will.

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