SinglePlatform
Making It Easier for Restaurants to Manage Promotions
SinglePlatform
Wiley Cerilli
Wiley Cerilli wants to be the bridge between restaurants and the growing gaggle of mobile apps and websites that promise to connect them with diners. His year-old company, SinglePlatform, lets restaurant owners plug information about menus, hours, and promotions into one system that pushes the data out to thousands of apps, review sites, hotel directories, and networks like Facebook and Twitter. Restaurants pay a one-time sign-up fee of $100 to $200. SinglePlatform generates a unique phone number for each restaurant's listing and tracks how many diners call through the system. It charges $1 for each call that lasts more than 30 seconds, presumed to be a reservation. The 31-year-old Cerilli, a veteran of online food delivery company SeamlessWeb, says the technology behind SinglePlatform isn't complicated. "The difficulty is signing up that network of restaurants who are not tech-savvy," he says. Most of his 23 employees are salespeople who have enlisted 3,000 restaurants in New York (where SinglePlatform is based), Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The company raised $1.2 million in venture capital in September. Cerilli says SinglePlatform had sales of about $500,000 in its first year, and he's projecting more than $1 million this year.
—John Tozzi (posted on April 15, 2011)
Wiley Cerilli
Wiley Cerilli wants to be the bridge between restaurants and the growing gaggle of mobile apps and websites that promise to connect them with diners. His year-old company, SinglePlatform, lets restaurant owners plug information about menus, hours, and promotions into one system that pushes the data out to thousands of apps, review sites, hotel directories, and networks like Facebook and Twitter. Restaurants pay a one-time sign-up fee of $100 to $200. SinglePlatform generates a unique phone number for each restaurant's listing and tracks how many diners call through the system. It charges $1 for each call that lasts more than 30 seconds, presumed to be a reservation. The 31-year-old Cerilli, a veteran of online food delivery company SeamlessWeb, says the technology behind SinglePlatform isn't complicated. "The difficulty is signing up that network of restaurants who are not tech-savvy," he says. Most of his 23 employees are salespeople who have enlisted 3,000 restaurants in New York (where SinglePlatform is based), Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The company raised $1.2 million in venture capital in September. Cerilli says SinglePlatform had sales of about $500,000 in its first year, and he's projecting more than $1 million this year.
—John Tozzi (posted on April 15, 2011)
