Q How did FoodZaps come about?

Ms Chan I used to be a developer for a while, and then founded my own restaurant in 2013.

That's where I started sourcing for the idea of such a system.

I needed 30 tablets with one point-of-sale solution for different preparation stations in the kitchen.

On average, I found the quotations to be at least $90,000 in the market, and I was thinking, "How many miso soups would I need to sell to cover this cost?"

Then, Winson and I met. He has been working in the information technology industry for more than 20 years. We started to enhance a prototype, using my restaurant as a beta testing ground.

Mr Tan I had already thought that the restaurant industry was very outdated in using technology, so why not use smartphones?

I started to develop some software with technology that let devices synchronise without any complicated set-up.

The Association of Small and Medium Enterprises introduced Chelsea to me as a client and, from there, we started to turn this from a project to a product.

Ms Chan Then we have Rina, our digital marketing director, who used to work in Foodpanda. She's the one who's currently bringing FoodZaps to 71 countries.

Q What does FoodZaps offer food and beverage businesses?

Ms Loh If you download FoodZaps on Google Play, there are many different menus, from cafes and bars to restaurants and food trucks. Even for bars, specifically, we have an open tab function.

Ms Chan It was really fun to run my restaurant as a test bed. Of course, there were difficulties, but Winson is a very committed business owner. So when we do test-bedding in the restaurant, when there's any problem, we would just drop him a call and he would say: "Give me some time, then press the update button." And the feature is there.

That's the beauty of this system. We can remotely do any changes from the back end, and immediately push them to the users - real-time problem-fixing.

Other systems are cloud-based or server-based. They usually require a certain level of set-up infrastructure. For example, an Internet connection or a certain level of customisation is required. And server-based systems do not get real-time push updates - you need to wait for someone to come down and probably need to pay for the features as well.

Mr Tan It's a hybrid system, so if there are any updates, they need an Internet connection. When there's no connection, operations will go on as per normal, and the system will automatically sync when it goes online.

Ms Chan Meanwhile, other than being a point-of-sale system, we're also an order application platform.

The common market scenario is that we walk into a restaurant in Singapore and you can easily find six tablets featuring different solutions. UberEats, Foodpanda, they need to receive orders and each application consumes space on a tablet.

What we can do is, we have a very open API (application programming interface) - very open to accepting all the online and offline orders.

Q Your app has been downloaded by users from Asia to Africa to South America. Do you have an internalisation strategy?

Ms Chan Globally, what we are doing is really testing, so we actually throw out the product and monitor which regions or which countries are more likely to be converted. Then, we will focus our efforts there.

Singapore is mainly a starting base, where we establish partnerships and sales strategies. Then, we'll go into other markets differently. Worldwide, we already have 60,000 registered restaurants.

In our global market, Asia would be the largest segment, as it is slowly picking up technology.

We would first like to go into countries nearer Singapore. From our database, we can see that Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia have higher traction rates in Asia. Most of our partners come from these specific countries, so we'll go to market there.

Q Besides issues like supporting local languages on the app interface, what other barriers do you face in scaling up your business outside Singapore?

Ms Loh Maybe our marketing budget. We are a start-up and when we pump money into, say, Google Ads, every click is a few dollars, so we might use that up in terms of creating the brand awareness.

Mr Tan At the end of the day, we are a business-to-business company. Most of the restaurants are very, very busy. To do outreach is a challenge.

Ms Chan Actually, manpower is a challenge in Singapore as well. Singapore is a very expensive country, in terms of manpower overheads.

We are considering moving or setting up an office overseas, just to lower the headcount. We are a very lean team. Eight of us are supporting 60,000 users worldwide.

We are very glad that the Government is coming up with all these strategies to push start-ups and help SMEs like us, but to make Singapore the headquarters, we really need to be very well funded because we could get three people in Malaysia instead of one in Singapore.

Q Finally, what expansion plans are on the table for FoodZaps?

Ms Chan We didn't go into the market until 2016, but before that we did do some sales.

Mr Tan By early this year, we had already broken even. For our projected revenue, we're looking at at least half a million dollars.

We're still pretty much focused on F&B, but across different verticals. Now, we're talking about working with partners like customer relationship management and accounting software.

Ms Chan In every market, there are very different habits in terms of membership management, payment management, delivery management, and even table booking management. That's what we're going to do in the next few countries as well - to have as much integration with local partners.

Ms Loh We're actually hoping that in other countries, the banks will approach us and use us as their preferred point-of-sales system.