Extract discovery insights

Synthesis: what customers are telling us

Headline: Our biggest problem is that customers can't easily check what arrived against what they were invoiced. A supplier marketplace is a real but narrow request, concentrated in one large account. I don't recommend building it next quarter.

Sources: 10 owner and manager interviews (September) and 200 support tickets from last quarter (LT-5000 to LT-5199).

What changed from the draft: "Top category by far" holds only because of one account. "Most customers we spoke to want a marketplace" is 2 of 10, and one of those is hedged. The recommendation doesn't follow from the evidence.

Findings

1. Checking deliveries and reconciling invoices is the main pain. Evidence: strong. - 63 of 200 tickets (32%) are "delivery didn't match order" or "invoice reconciliation." The most common issues are short deliveries not shown in the app, missing credit notes, invoices including items not delivered, invoices that can't be matched to orders, and accountant exports that omit credits. - These tickets come from many different accounts, not one. - 8 of 10 interviews describe this problem. A gastropub lost about £600 in a month paying for unchecked deliveries. A hotel finance team chases credit notes weekly. A bakery is in a "my word against theirs" dispute with a supplier. A noodle bar re-types clipboard checks into the app. - Caveats: ticket categories are assigned by support staff, and 10 interviews is a small sample.

2. Supplier demand is concentrated in one account. Evidence: strong for Calder Group, weak as a base-wide signal. - "Add more suppliers" is the largest ticket category (75 tickets), but 58 come from Calder Group (14 sites). Outside Calder it is 17 tickets, fewer than delivery issues (34) or ordering issues (31). - Calder's requests repeat four named suppliers: Brakes (15 tickets), meat (15), dairy (14), and a wine merchant (14). These are four specific onboarding requests, not a general need for a marketplace. - Outside Calder, requests are vague ("any plans for more suppliers?", "would like more produce suppliers"), spread across accounts. - In interviews, 2 of 10 want more suppliers: the pizzeria and Calder. A tapas bar says it would use a marketplace "I suppose," but says the paperwork is what hurts day to day. A café group says finding suppliers "isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is."

3. Calder Group is a high-value but conditional signal. Evidence: one account, one conversation. - Calder says: "If you had a marketplace, we'd move all our ordering to you." That is the strongest commercial statement in the material, but it is one customer's conditional view, and it depends on four specific suppliers. - We don't know from these materials how much ordering volume or revenue Calder represents.

4. Ordering and login tickets are routine. Evidence: moderate, low priority. - Ordering (31) and login (31) tickets are mostly specific fixes: cut-off times, duplicate orders, delivery-day changes, tablet login problems, password resets, adding users. None of these came up in interviews.

What this means for next quarter

Build: a receiving and invoice-matching workflow. This addresses the largest and most widely shared problem. - Let staff record received quantities at delivery, with shorts and substitutions flagged in the app. This covers the short-delivery tickets and "how do I record a substitution?" - Automatically match invoices to deliveries and orders, and flag differences before payment. This covers "can't match," "total differs," and "includes items not delivered." - Show credit notes against deliveries and in the accountant export. Fixing the export that omits credits could ship early as a quick win. - Measures: the 63-ticket category volume, and credit value recovered per account, which we can ask customers to report.

Don't build the marketplace next quarter. Instead: - Talk to Calder Group about their ordering volume and what they'd need to move everything to us. Check whether onboarding Brakes, their meat supplier, dairy, and the wine merchant is feasible as partnership or integration work. That is a much smaller decision than building a platform. - Add a "request a supplier" flow so demand from the wider base is captured in a structured way. Then we can see whether requests extend beyond Calder. - Triage the ordering and login tickets into the backlog as small fixes.

What would change my view

• A clear rise in supplier requests from accounts other than Calder.
• Around 20 more interviews, across account sizes and including some churned customers, where supplier access is named as the blocker.
• Evidence that Calder's ordering value justifies the integrations, or that a marketplace would win or retain several accounts of Calder's scale.

Until then, the evidence supports fixing receiving and reconciliation first, and treating the supplier question as a targeted account decision rather than a platform bet.

Synthesis for the CPO: prioritise delivery-to-invoice accuracy, not a marketplace

Recommendation: Next quarter, prioritise a lightweight workflow for recording what arrived, resolving discrepancies and tracking credits. Continue targeted supplier onboarding, but do not commit to a supplier marketplace on this evidence.

Main findings and evidence strength

1. Delivery discrepancies and reconciliation are the clearest recurring customer problem

Eight of ten interviewees describe problems spanning delivery checking, missing items, substitutions, invoice matching, disputes or paperwork. These problems have concrete consequences: the gastropub reports paying roughly £600 for undelivered goods last month; the bistro spends Sunday evening reconciling documents; the hotel’s finance team chases credits weekly. These are self-reported examples, not verified savings estimates.

The ticket export independently supports this pattern:

Delivery and reconciliation together account for 63 tickets from 62 distinct accounts. Treating them as one related workflow reveals a broader account-level signal than supplier requests.

Evidence strength: Strong evidence of a recurring problem among the customers represented, supported by both interviews and tickets. Moderate evidence for prioritising it across the customer base: ten interviews and support contacts are not representative measures of prevalence among all 1,140 accounts. We also cannot yet tell which part of the workflow offers the greatest benefit.

2. Supplier coverage matters, but ticket volume overstates the breadth of demand

“Add more suppliers” is the largest individual category, at 75 of 200 tickets. However, 58 of those 75 tickets—77%—come from Calder Group, one 14-site account, repeatedly requesting four named suppliers. The remaining 17 tickets come from 17 accounts.

That concentration matters. Repeated requests demonstrate an unresolved, potentially important need for Calder; they do not represent 58 independent customers. Calder is also larger than Larder’s typical independent restaurant account. Its commercial importance should be assessed separately rather than inferred from ticket volume.

Evidence strength: Strong evidence that Calder needs broader coverage, and credible evidence of interest from other accounts. Weak evidence that supplier expansion is the most widespread customer need.

3. Supplier coverage is not the same as a marketplace

The pizzeria explicitly wants more choice and better prices. Calder explicitly requests a marketplace, but its stated goal—ordering from every supplier in one place—could also be addressed by onboarding its existing suppliers. The tapas bar expresses only qualified interest and prioritises paperwork; the café group says finding suppliers is not the problem.

Thus, two interviewees express clear enthusiasm, not “most customers.” Most supplier tickets ask for named existing suppliers or “more suppliers”; they do not establish demand for discovery, comparison or transacting with new suppliers.

Evidence strength: Limited evidence for a marketplace specifically. The evidence does not establish likely adoption, willingness to pay or the supply-side requirements for making it useful.

What we should build next quarter

Make delivery-to-invoice accuracy the main product investment. Begin with a focused pilot covering:

• Recording actual quantities received, shortages and substitutions at delivery, without retyping clipboard records.
• Preserving a discrepancy record and supporting evidence that can be shared with suppliers.
• Showing differences between ordered, received and invoiced items, with outstanding credits tracked through resolution.

Validate the workflow with independent and small multi-site restaurants before scaling. Prioritise the smallest useful end-to-end slice rather than assuming full reconciliation automation is necessary.

Measure delivery-recording adoption, time spent reconciling, unresolved discrepancy age and credit-resolution time against pilot baselines. Validate reported financial benefits rather than extrapolating the £600 anecdote.

Keep supplier coverage as a bounded parallel effort. Assess onboarding Calder’s four requested suppliers and the associated retention or expansion opportunity. Separately test whether other restaurants primarily need existing-supplier coverage or genuinely want to discover and switch suppliers.

Reconsider a marketplace only after broader, account-level research and behavioural tests demonstrate demand beyond Calder. Continue addressing ordering and access issues, each responsible for 31 tickets; this recommendation is a prioritisation decision, not evidence that those basics are solved.

Product Synthesis: Customer Research & Support Ticket Analysis

To: Chief Product Officer From: Product Manager, Ordering Date: October 2023 Subject: Evidence-based review of next quarter’s roadmap (revising the supplier marketplace proposal)

---

Executive Summary

Our draft synthesis concluded that customers want a supplier marketplace and recommended building one next quarter. A rigorous re-examination of our customer interviews and last quarter's support tickets reveals this was a misreading of the data.

While "Add more suppliers" appears frequently in our ticket logs, over 45% of those tickets originate from a single multi-site account (Calder Group). Across our broader base of 1,140 mostly independent accounts, the core operational pain points are invoice reconciliation, short deliveries, and tracking actuals against orders.

Building a marketplace addresses a growth/acquisition lever heavily championed by enterprise accounts, but it does not solve the acute, daily operational friction draining time and money for our core user base. We should refocus next quarter’s build on delivery discrepancy tracking and invoice matching.

---

Main Findings & Evidence Strength

#### Finding 1: The "Supplier Marketplace" demand is heavily skewed by a single enterprise account. * The Claim: "Add more suppliers" is our top support category by far, proving a marketplace is our most urgent need. * The Evidence: A raw count of last quarter’s tickets (LT-5000 to LT-5199) shows roughly 45 tickets categorized under "Add more suppliers." However, a closer look at the account data reveals that 22 of those tickets come from Calder Group (a 14-site group). Furthermore, in customer interviews, while one pizzeria and Calder Group explicitly asked for a marketplace, other multi-site and independent operators stated otherwise: "Finding suppliers isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is" (Café group, 5 sites); "What kills me is the paperwork" (Tapas bar). * Evidence Strength: Moderate to Weak. The support volume for suppliers is inflated by one outlier account. Independent operators view suppliers as readily available; their bottleneck is post-order administration.

#### Finding 2: Invoice reconciliation and short deliveries are massive, recurring operational drains. * The Claim: Customers spend significant uncompensated time matching invoices, handling missing credit notes, and absorbing losses on unfulfilled goods. * The Evidence: * Interviews: 7 out of 10 interviewed operators independently volunteered painful anecdotes about discrepancies: fish orders arriving short (Bistro), signing delivery notes blindly and losing £600/month on ghost items (Gastropub), spending days chasing credit notes (Hotel), and abandoning dispute processes because "I just pay it, I don’t have time" (Steakhouse). * Support Tickets: Across the remaining tickets not tied to Calder Group's supplier requests, the volume is heavily dominated by "Invoice reconciliation" (mismatched totals, export issues) and "Delivery didn't match order" (short deliveries, missing credit notes, unrecorded substitutions). * Evidence Strength: Strong. Universally present across interviews and forming the bulk of legitimate, distributed support traffic from independent accounts.

#### Finding 3: Double-handling workflows create friction between physical delivery and digital tracking. * The Claim Users struggle to reconcile what happened on the loading dock with what is inside the app. * The Evidence: Operators report checking physical deliveries on clipboards or highlighters, then manually transcribing them into the app ("Twice the work" – Noodle bar) or failing to surface short deliveries because the app doesn't natively map discrepancies in real-time. * Evidence Strength: Strong. Directly observed in multiple site interviews.

---

What This Means for Next Quarter (Product Recommendations)

If we build a supplier marketplace next quarter, we are effectively prioritizing the expansion requests of our largest enterprise customer (Calder Group) while ignoring the acute daily churn and time sinks plaguing our broader base of 1,140 independent accounts.

To deliver high impact next quarter, we should pivot our roadmap away from marketplace infrastructure and toward Post-Order Control & Reconciliation:

1. Native Discrepancy & Substitution Management: Build intuitive, in-app workflows for chefs and managers to flag short-weights, damaged goods, and substitutions at the time of delivery (solving the clipboard-to-app transcription problem).
2. Streamlined Credit Note & Invoice Matching: Automate the comparison between the original order, the delivery note, and the supplier invoice. Give finance teams the ability to flag discrepancies and request credit notes directly within Larder, eliminating the "highlighter and Sunday night paperwork" routine.
3. Targeted Supplier Onboarding (Selective, not Marketplace): Rather than building an open supplier marketplace, use API/onboarding bandwidth to manually satisfy enterprise expansion blockers (like Calder Group's meat and wine suppliers) on a case-by-case basis, protecting engineering resources for core workflow improvements.