How a Seed-Stage Startup Closed 12 Customers in Their First Month With Orbital

Daohao Li is a partner at Gai Chicken and O'Bell Spot and owns his own restaurant. He got into restaurant tech because he watched sophisticated operators run circles around mom-and-pop owners purely on systems, and knew most owners couldn't access that.

Munch's product is basically an operating system for restaurants - automating 80% of the bookkeeping and producing CFO-quality P&L reports for $50-100, versus the $200-500 traditional services charge.

He'd been building inside a closed network. He needed to get outside those walls. He signed with Orbital.

Here's what happened in 30 days.

When he signed on, he had one goal.

"Our goal was to get 50 customers onboarded, cold and warm. What was special about it was that it was fully concierge. You guys made sure I knew what I was going for. Helped me settle in. And every time I requested a lead, it came back in 24 - 48 hours. If I said I need it by this date, it was never later than the date. Always before."

That speed was the unlock. Lists came back so fast, Daohao could test methods in real time - not sit on a bad strategy for weeks.

"I was testing every day. I very quickly knew the restaurant owners weren't gonna cut it. We were dialing for 3 to 4 hours straight. I was like, alright, this is a waste of time. Then I said get me a list of bookkeepers and accountants in New York. Boom. 48 hours again."

Week by week, here's how it broke down.

"Within the first week of kicking off, you guys gave us around 1,000 contacts to look at, and we were working off 400 usable leads. That got us enough feedback to understand we probably shouldn't be doing door-to-door to restaurants directly. That was the end of week one. Beginning of week two, you gave us 100 leads for accountants. From the 10 we worked off, one of them landed us all of our clients."

"End of week one, we were still figuring out. End of week two, we hit the jackpot. End of week three, we got all the customers onboarded."

"We converted 12 customers. 10, 11, then 12. We haven't even worked the rest of the leads yet."

Is Orbital worth it as a founder?

Daohao didn't hedge.

"If I tell you that you spend $1,000 a month, how much is your time worth? You spend $1,000 a month for them to take that whole part out completely - save you maybe 20 hours a month, no cognitive load. You just go work on it. I will pay $4,000 a month if I had the money. Would you? That's what I tell them."

"I'm sure other tools could do something similar. But I wouldn't do it with anyone else."

He made the bet with Orbital. He doesn't regret a dollar of it.