Reverse-Engineering Owner.com: Finding thousands of their $500+ a month restaurant clients in a week
The $1 billion company recently raised $160m from prominent investors
The day after Owner.com announced they had raised $160 million at a $1 billion valuation, Tech X/Twitter was buzzing with prominent investors celebrating previous seed investments that had 50X'd in a matter of years and 10X'd in a matter of months, along with celebrating new investments in their latest round.
However, I quickly noticed that their investors seemingly had very little context to who their actual clients were. According to their Series C memo, their top investors just “interviewed more than 17 of our customers before deciding to invest.”
I personally asked investors on X/Twitter whether they were shared comprehensive information on their clients and was met with silence.
So, as someone who consults on e-commerce for emerging food brands myself, and is armed with a knowledge of google search API’s I did my best to solve their client riddle and build the largest known external database of Owner.com clients anywhere in just a few days.
What I eventually found from my current sample of over 1,500 current locations is a client base often in secondary or rural markets and a plethora of fast food adjacent takeout concepts (Tacos, Fried Chicken, BBQ, Burgers, Soul Food, Thai, & Indian) who often have less sophisticated operators, smaller spaces, and higher margins on cheap food costs that allow them to absorb Owner's $500 monthly fee and pass the 5+ percent order fees to customers in exchange for a standardized but high-SEO website.
More than 90 percent of the sample appeared to be takeout rather than sit-down focused. Chances are that a fried catfish or fried alligator place in the middle of nowhere Mississippi has heard from Owner.com due to their “boondocks” geo-targeting strategy for new clients.
In summary, for a restaurant processing $60,000 in monthly pickup orders, Owner’s fees amount to approximately $5,000 per month ($60,000 annually), representing an effective rate of 8-10% of order volume compared to a fraction of that for competitors.
I suddenly wondered,
Is Owner more of a tech company or a fast food franchising company?
How can Owner be the Shopify of restaurants if they completely ban any customizations or edits by their clients to the standard templated websites?
What’s keeping their competitors who have cheaper and easier to manage solutions from marketing to a client list like mine? ( I have already been offered $1,000 cash per successful referral from my list)
How come I have basically seen them nowhere I go in my frequent favorite restaurants of Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, or D.C?
Select sample of burger places with Owner template websites:
An A-Z filtered sample of some of their client locations:
Los Angeles Summary & Sample:
Owner’s main focus is seemingly not on major markets like Los Angeles in which I was able to find 75+ businesses using their templated ordering sites including those in the screenshot below. Finding these businesses took a lot more time and effort than in other smaller markets, leading me to believe that is near the full extent of their current market penetration as of May 2025.
I will give them credit that their SEO tied to specific menu items is quite impressive with a single website having dozens of different homepages indexed onto google depending on the dietary, location or food terms someone is searching. But I found it odd that searching dietary or food terms by sub neighborhoods in L.A. often turned up very little tied to the Google search API. People often search by neighborhood (Silverlake) or sub neighborhoods (Virgil Village, Frogtown, etc.) in L.A.
Perhaps, it does actually take real local knowledge to market a restaurant not just an AI templated website?
Additionally, there were a few related things I found even more odd and honestly angering related to a market like L.A.:
On Owner's social media and website they frequently (including just last week) fully dismiss the concept of a sit down restaurant (kind of dystopian in my opinion)
Numerous times, they also fully dismiss the importance of social media. (which in major competitive markets like L.A. can change everything for a business, especially online sales driven ones)
Including in their Series C memo, they are extremely dismissive of a restaurant business owner ever needing to customize or edit their website to their specific needs which to me is also unfortunate for markets like Los Angeles and more premium concepts. There is also a bare minimum of excellence for human written copywriting and messaging that seems often not met when Owner websites are fully auto generated by the AI tools they use.
They claim in their Series C memo “to be the leading authority in restaurant growth and that Owner produces the world’s best business education content designed for restaurant owners” and “Our CEO has become the most popular creator in restaurant content.” In my opinion, the majority of their content lacks depth and any type of fair analysis of their better priced competitors. Sophisticated restaurant owners would be much better off joining Matt Newberg’s Hngry.tv community if they wanted to impartially assess their tech and marketing stack.
Doordash Comparatively, “We’ll build you the same site for free”
As a comparative example, Doordash is taking a near opposite approach, offering to build very comparable SEO & visual optimized websites (and dedicated mobile apps) for practically free while making money on volume on payments & delivery orders that come through the site (with a max 15 percent fee) and free pickup for now. As an example of a “completely free” Doordash storefront site, here is the website for the Capriotti’s chicken shop chain with nearly 200 locations in the U.S. Notice, how not only is the user experience very slick, but it is practically invisible that it is connected to Doordash.
This is one of the first custom examples for a larger chain, but for over 4 years Doordash has had a user friendly storefront product available to any restaurant with ZERO fees outside of delivery commissions for drivers which caps out at 15 percent. Even in the Doordash marketplace app itself, pickup commissions have been capped at 6 percent INCLUDING payment processing for years as long as select criteria is met by the merchant. DashPass customers also get 5 percent back on such pickup orders. Comparatively, Owner.com merchants charge customers an additional 5 percent fee on top of payment processing merchants have to absorb.
I would argue that Doordash knows what they are doing, although even despite my skepticism the impressiveness of the growth Owner.com has found can not be diminished. It might confuse their investors, but Owner could easily pivot as needed and find success in a slightly adjusted model based on volume instead of subscription fees, at least for more sophisticated partners. Perhaps, this is already even planned on their end once they have fully integrated their AI features such as the “AI marketing” assistant they promise in their Series C memo.
Toast’s Valuable Volume Game
Separately, perhaps Toast eventually plans to scale their “Local by Toast” mobile app which offers the same free pickup, integrated rewards and low delivery fees as all restaurant specific Toast ordering sites do. Though, as far as I can tell they have spent almost zero dollars actually marketing the app to get people to use it and there are quite a few user experience issues. That said, the organization of all my favorite restaurants in one easy to order place without fees makes any shortcomings a small concern for me. I use the app almost every day. Some of my favorite vegan friendly places to order from in L.A. are Pine & Crane/Joy, Just What I Kneaded, Maciel’s, and Layla’s Bagels'. (all incredible places)
Overall, in comparison to Owner.com’s 3000 or so estimated total U.S. clients, Toast currently has over 80,000 restaurants signed up not including their multiple locations and in just Q4 of 2024 added 7,000 new total locations, while for the full year of 2024 processing .5 percent of the US GDP in payments. All this transaction data is also very valuable if they want to pursue efforts around AI linked personalized recommendations & insights (and eventually ads). Unlike credit card companies, Toast has all the valuable data on what someone is actually buying.
And Toast making sizable cash flow on volume isn’t just a theory by a few VC’s, but a proven and growing reality. Even quite a few Owner clients in L.A still use Toast as their primary operating and marketing system. Square also has a similar low fee delivery integration plus marketing suite. The dynamic of these large players having low fee delivery and marketing tools integrated into their nearly free partner websites completely negates Owner.com’s argument that they want to help small business owners reduce predatory fees. If anything they are the ones being predatory.
Additional Marketing Opportunities for Restaurants (And for Shopify?)
Overall to me, it appears that one of the largest opportunities in the food business vertical if you are not just wanting to game order volume is figuring out a more dynamic way to market and advertise higher margin offerings such as catering and ancillary retail products (I.E. house made sauces or proteins, frozen meals, meal kits). Current catering platforms like EZ Cater are hampered by “pay to play” dynamics, high fees and a user experience that diminishes high-quality more premium options.
I even said as such in a response tweet to the founder of Owner.
And armed with the data set of owner.com clients paying $500+ a month, I also thought about reaching out directly to contacts at Shopify to show them there is valid proof that they should focus more significantly on food businesses, including on this potential for online marketing for ancillary retail products and catering.
Right now, a Shopify site is not off the shelf for a physical food business and requires real API knowledge to optimize deliveries/pickups. It also requires a specialized template such as this $360 local template.
With a few tweaks Shopify could easily provide a practically off the shelf solution to physical food businesses and arm them with a lot more marketing capabilities than Toast, Square, Doordash, Uber, and Owner currently offer especially for these ancillary offerings that have a lot of room to grow for premium restaurants.
After all, Shopify’s $39 a month base price and seamless integrations seems a lot easier to stomach than $500 a month plus 5 percent plus payment processing of Owner. What if the best Shopify for food businesses was just Shopify?
Final Thoughts:
When I as a single person, while awfully sick in bed, can reverse-engineer the majority of your entire business model using basic search API tools, it raises questions about what exactly investors valued at $1 billion and whether they have a real understanding of the competitive landscape.
For premium food businesses in competitive markets, Owner quite frankly should not be considered as a long-term solution, though it can work as a temporary turnkey website. For what it offers as a SAAS tool, Owner’s monthly price is significantly higher than competitors, and its fees for pickup are also somewhat higher.
I will give Owner credit that their SEO systems and fully turnkey website stack is impressive and the rate of their growth has few precedents. But, I would guess that if their client base of largely unsophisticated, naive operators was properly marketed to by competitors, quite a few would find it hard to justify the expensive, predatory pricing to stick with Owner for the long haul. For what it is worth, select industry experts I have reached out to in the last week, have almost the same sentiments about Owner’s predatory tactics.
Disclaimer: Everything in this analysis is based on publicly available information and represents my professional opinion based on documented research. I'm happy to correct any factual errors that can be identified. I stand by my methodology and conclusions. Feel free to reach me at connor@333.kitchen