Elias Hage – App8
Elias Hage is the Founder of App8, the name of the company is a clever word play of “appetite”. He told me about his idea of building an app that diners use that would connect to the terminals in restaurants. This would allow customers to review and pay their bill without having to go through the long process of getting the servers attention and waiting 10-15 minutes for the bill. This is a clever idea but when he told me that in future releases they would allow App8 users to split the bill themselves, I thought brilliant!
“What made me start my company was, a while back, I had a bad streak of waiting FOREVER for the bill at restaurants. It had me thinking ‘there must be a better way, people can already order fast food from their phones, why not something for sit-down dining?”
Meet Elias Hage, the founder of App8, a mobile app platform that brings you the convenience of fast and secure payments from your seat at your favourite restaurants, soon serving full-service food and beverage establishments in Ottawa and beyond.
What makes App8 different is that it’s an app built for users – Elias and his team are constantly gathering information and feedback from users, creating iterative solutions as they go along. “After asking a lot of people about their experience, I realized that for servers payment processing consumes 15% of their time separating printing and waiting for the customer to process, and for diners as much as 20% of their experience just waiting for the bill. With this very specific problem in mind we validated and developed our MVP for App8.”
They promise a better experience for both restaurateurs and their patrons. As one of the newest members here at My Byward Office, we think Elias may have one of the coolest ideas related to food we’ve seen awhile (along with Desk Nibbles). If you haven’t checked them out, keep scrolling after this profile.
We asked him how he has fun at work, but he told us to hold off, “wait until I have a bigger team, then I’ll tell you about Power Hour and the joke of the day ritual. For the moment, I keep the jokes of the day to myself. For now, what I will say is the one of the best bits of advice I was ever given: ‘take good care of your team and help them succeed – and you will be successful.’ So then, what makes me successful is really all about being focused, maintaining relationships, helping others and staying positive. It is the same formula that I use for life.”
What makes App8 different is that it’s an app built for users – Elias and his team are constantly gathering information and feedback from users, creating iterative solutions as they go along. “After asking a lot of people about their experience, I realized that for servers payment processing consumes 15% of their time separating printing and waiting for the customer to process, and for diners as much as 20% of their experience just waiting for the bill. With this very specific problem in mind we validated and developed our MVP for App8.”
They promise a better experience for both restaurateurs and their patrons. As one of the newest members here at My Byward Office, we think Elias may have one of the coolest ideas related to food we’ve seen awhile (along with Desk Nibbles). If you haven’t checked them out, keep scrolling after this profile.
We asked him how he has fun at work, but he told us to hold off, “wait until I have a bigger team, then I’ll tell you about Power Hour and the joke of the day ritual. For the moment, I keep the jokes of the day to myself. For now, what I will say is the one of the best bits of advice I was ever given: ‘take good care of your team and help them succeed – and you will be successful.’ So then, what makes me successful is really all about being focused, maintaining relationships, helping others and staying positive. It is the same formula that I use for life.”
We liked that answer, but we still look forward to a good joke sometime soon!