Eat there, then sell

The falafel place was closed, so dinner happened at the Italian family restaurant we already like, and at closing time, with only staff left, the company made its first in-person pitch. The waitress didn’t know if they had a website (“I just work here, talk to the owner”), and the owner was in back with fifty utility receipts spread in front of her ▸ 24:32. The pitch, delivered solo while Julia was in the bathroom: we just started a company, we build websites, and, the closer, we’ll make you a mockup, no commitment, and show it to you tomorrow night ▸ 25:12. She liked the idea.

The mockup got built the same day, Stitch plus Canva plus GPT plus Gemini, and produced this diary’s favorite detail: Gemini, fed the menu PDF, titled a section “el secreto es la masa”, a phrase neither of us recognized, until we found it printed in tiny type at the bottom of the physical menu ▸ 26:45. Two visits and we’d never seen it; the model caught it in one pass.

el modelo leyó la letra chiquita del menú →

If tonight goes well, the loop generalizes into the most digestible go-to-market ever proposed: find restaurants without pages, go eat there, and pitch at closing. Comemos y vendemos ▸ 31:53. Julia’s suegra-endorsed insight underneath it: for older owners, face to face is not a nicety, it’s the only channel where a technology pitch doesn’t feel like a scam call ▸ 32:04.

And the strategic reason restaurants specifically: every landing-page client in this niche is a future Picky prospect, and Picky can later grow suppliers, logistics, split bills, services that compound inside one specialization instead of scattering across unrelated industries ▸ 33:02. Price being considered: “because we like the restaurant”, down from the list price to a million. Tonight we find out…