[dismantlethesun]

I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.

I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:

- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall

- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used

- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded

And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.

[raw_anon_1111]

How are you going to do table reservations and accept payments without being online? Yes I know it’s technically possible to accept credit cards offline. But no one does that anymore.

[dismantlethesun]

We're not in the US (hence all the power outages), so our recepits are 60% cash, 30% Mobile Money (our country specific accounts attached to your cell phone number), ~5% neighborhood credit for regulars and 10% for tourists using credit cards.

Even though we can accept cards for everyone, transaction fees means no one wants to use it.

Credit cards payments do work during blackouts, but process slowly. It goes from <30 seconds to receipt to 10 minutes+. The bank software just continually retries until it gets all the data it needs.

We take table reservations over the phone, or via WhatsApp. There's no real complexity to it. The data just needs to be with us at one location, the resturaunt, since that's the same place the customer will be coming to. Being online grants us nothing.