Mittho

I first ran into the problem as a customer.

I had ordered from a food store in India and was stuck waiting for my order. Calling the store wasn’t much help: the business had one phone number and so many calls that it was often busy.

Talking to businesses revealed the other side of the problem. Orders were being tracked through notebooks, phone calls, and memory. It was difficult to prioritize what needed to be made, easy to miss orders, and frustrating for customers who had to stay near the stall just to find out whether their food was ready.

We initially thought we were building something like Snackpass for in-person food stalls. Then we started talking to vendors.

The problem wasn’t just ordering. Small businesses were also struggling to manage incoming orders, communicate wait times, pause orders, handle unavailable items, and keep the kitchen moving.

So we changed the product.

I owned Mittho’s product end-to-end, from the initial workflow through customer and vendor experience, while my cofounder handles sales and business development.

The first principle was simple: as few clicks as possible.

Customers should be able to order quickly and leave. Vendors should be able to see what needs to be made without learning complicated software.

We kept parts of the system manual. Vendors cared more about receiving and fulfilling orders than having sophisticated analytics. So instead of building infrastructure nobody had asked for, we kept the backend simple and focused on the workflow that mattered.

We kept watching what happened after an order was placed.

Vendors needed to pause orders. They needed to remove unavailable items. They needed to prioritize what should be made first. Customers needed to know when they could actually come back.

So the product grew around those problems rather than around a predetermined feature list.

Our first users didn’t come from ads or a launch campaign. We walked into businesses, talked to owners, showed them what we’d built, and asked them to try it.

Those conversations changed the product as much as the code did.

We’re exploring how to reduce the work behind the counter: grouping similar orders, prioritizing what should be made next, and eventually helping vendors manage orders through WhatsApp.