Eureka: Building consumer apps for brands in under a week with no coding required 

0:14You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. David Brunier is the founder and CEO of Kata, a next-generation SaaS platform based in Singapore that enables restaurants and retailers to launch fully branded consumer apps in just days, with no coding required and minimal upfront costs. Previously, David co-founded Flash Coffee, one of Asia's fastest-growing coffee chains, which he scaled to over 200 outlets across multiple markets. He now supports that company as a shareholder and advisor, as well as leading Kata on its journey to help businesses of all sizes unlock new opportunities and accelerate growth.

1:00So, how do you turn offline industries into technology-driven growth engines? Well, here is David with more on how the journey began.

1:13I started my entrepreneurial journey quite early. I was one of these people who didn't really love university or, I mean, while the time was great there, I felt that I really wanted to get into business and started my first company already out of university, back then a small e-commerce business selling premium wines. And then just after my graduation, I was part of building Fedora, which is a food delivery company that we grew quite quickly together with Rocket Infinite. I think we probably scaled to 10, 12 markets first year and sold the company to Delivery Hero, which is a big food delivery player globally nowadays.

1:49I was working from Berlin with Delivery Hero back then, and then moved to Singapore. It's also where I'm based at now to take over growth and marketing related things as a CMO for Delivery Hero. APAC for a brand called Spie Panda, which is also a big food delivery player here, one of the leading players in Asia, and then started a business completely from scratch together with Rocket Internet back then called Flash Coffee, a fully digitalized coffee chain which operated in many markets here across the Asia-Pacific before starting Kata. And yeah, that's basically how it all started.

2:25when we built flash coffee a few years back we essentially built two different companies in one which we realized only a little bit later but the whole thing evolved from building a brick and mortar business to understanding that customers nowadays really love and even expect digital experiences in their day-to-day purchasing of anything right and and you can probably relate everything nowadays is fully digital. We're using our phone to essentially do everything in our lives. But somehow retail is lagging behind. And we understood that very early and said, let's go out there, build a fantastic consumer app for our customers to order through and have better POS systems and have just a full-on tech enablement to grow the business more quickly.

3:09But the sobering realization was that when we looked out for software as a service provider, basically a company that could help us build our own app or just give us one. We didn't even find a bad provider. We found none. And so long story short, we ended up building product in-house. We hired more than 120 engineers plus product teams, business intelligence teams. So I think around 150 people full-time just to build the best consumer product when it comes to technology that F &B had seen. But back then, that was for our own sake. It was very selfish and we wanted to simply increase our revenues, improve our bottom line and essentially give our customers a much better experience.

3:50But over time, there were lots of big group CEOs from, I think, very, very well-known F &B players knocking on our doors. And I remember this one day, there was a group CEO flying into Singapore and we're talking a chain with a few thousand outlets, a really kind of a a larger scale FMB chain. And it was like in the movies. He told me, hey, David, write down a number on a piece of paper, hand it over to me, and that's what we're going to pay for your technology. We're really good in providing our products. We're probably market leaders in that, but we just can't figure out technology. And I heard that over and over again, that people are really good in their respective space.

4:30So I don't know, they're great in baking pizzas or great in doing their sushi or their coffee or whatever. it is but naturally they are not leading when it comes to building triple a grade tech products and so that day i realized oh wow there's really something in for it if we're able to provide other players with this tech so they can grow that happens so many times people asking for licenses people asking to even buy the whole tech stack and so on so roughly a year ago my co-founder's we decided to build Qatar to really support other players in their growth. We acquired FlashCoffee's technology, the IP, the tech team, everything, added a few additional people, and I would say built one of the most fantastic tech stacks out there when it comes to consumer apps.

5:20So I think the typical journey for a restaurant chain owner, a QSR operator would be the realization, number one, customers require us and are asking us to have an app, a loyalty program and whatever it entails. And then you're thinking about your option. Option one would be, hey, I'm building an in-house team. I'm recruiting all of these people. I'm suddenly managing a roadmap. I have to deal with servers and maintenance and feature sets that are ever evolving, prioritization of that, etc. And that's going to cost you millions because the problem is this. It's very black and white when it comes to consumer perception.

5:58Either you have a really good app or you have a not so good app. And there's really not so much in between. So what happens to a lot of players out there is that they're trying to build it themselves. So even they're going to an agency, which is the second option, and they put down, let's say, a million dollars. And then you wait for a year until it's built and you launch a minimum viable product. But customers end up hating it because it's not at the kind of feature set that a grab food would have, a food vendor would have, a Cooper Eats would have. But that's the customer expectation. But now the problem is you've just put down a million dollars.

6:32You just waited for a year to launch this. You put in marketing money and now it's really hard to roll it back. And what we're solving here is that we're saying we're not charging any upfront money. We are really kind of entrepreneurial about it. We absorb the risk. We launch it with our partners. We see this as a partnership, not as a please sign a contract here. you never hear from us again kind of thing. And we only grow if our partners grow. So basically through transaction fees, etc., where we just make sure that our team is fully aligned on incentives and wants our partners to grow. We have just launched our first partner officially.

7:08They're called Guzmany Gomez. It's a publicly listed company, amazing company, growing very, very quickly. They've just rolled it out in Singapore and already in the first few weeks have hit number one spot on the App Store. frequently and we're very very proud of it so while i can't disclose the exact numbers of people using it it's really mind-blowing how successful the app is right now and how many customers have chosen to transact through the app and the overall kata platform which is more than just an app you have also a few other channels but it's really it's really really nice to see that

7:45now it's really about launching all these other brands that we're very lucky that they're teaming up with us and we have some really cool ones coming up a lot of local heroes here in singapore we've actually also started doing business outside of of singapore even outside of this region but there are really lots of leading brands out there that we're very proud of that have chosen to work with kata so now it's all about launching those properly and we're advising them right now on launch strategies etc and i think that's that has to be focused for us so finding as many amazing players out there that we can work with.

8:19We're obviously focusing a lot on F &B right now, but customers have been transacting with F &B businesses just like they have with other offline businesses in the past. So what we're looking at is booking services. What we're looking at is grocery stores, specialty retail stores, anything that's currently being ordered offline. Our idea is to fully transform that into digital players and enabling these players to grow like e-commerce businesses would. And so there's really lots of work on our stakes for now. We're working a lot on AI features right now, which I think are going to be very exciting.

8:56So lots of automation happening. And I think lots of things on payment. It's all about empowering our partners. And that goes way beyond just providing them with an app or an app infrastructure. It's really about helping them grow. So I think us being partners for growth for these amazing merchants is going to unlock a lot of value in the future for them.

9:22That was David Brunier, the founder and CEO of Cata. And you can learn more about the vision by heading to cata.sg. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us wherever you get your audio if you'd like to get in touch with the team email laura on lrk at monocle.com i'm tom edwards goodbye and thanks for listening to eureka