Avocaty

Avocaty began as a freelance project I built in 2020 under the name alacartadigital. A few years later, Álvaro and Jose approached me with the idea of taking the platform to the next level, and I came on board as co-founder and CTO.

We rebranded as Avocaty, launched a company, and overhauled the product. We redesigned the entire editing experience, improved the visual design of digital menus, and added several features people had been asking for. These included automatic translations and the ability to digitize menus from photos using OpenAI's OCR capabilities.

We also spent time experimenting with different strategies to grow and improve the business:

• Improved onboarding flows to increase conversion from sign-up to published menu

• Tested multiple approaches to ad campaign performance and SEO

• Iterated on plan selection design and pricing page copy to drive upgrades

Later in 2023, we decided to expand into Pay & Order to increase revenue per customer. I started building an integration with Ágora POS through Deliverect, which turned out to be quite complex. It needed real-time, two-way sync, support for modifiers, and flexibility for different kinds of menu setups. We also added support for LastApp.

We were really excited about this new direction and started preparing marketing materials and videos. But during early user testing, we ran into limitations with the integrations. Solving those issues would have required a lot more development time than we could handle with just me on the technical side.

So we decided to pause that direction and let the platform run in a more hands-off way. Since then, we’ve been keeping an eye on it, making small improvements and adjusting things month by month.

It’s a product I’m still proud of. Avocaty is a tool that helps hundreds of restaurants manage and update their digital menus with ease, and it taught me a lot about product development, experimentation, and scaling.