Member Info for spero

There won't be an RNS when London goes live, it'll just go live.
Previous new locations have appeared during the day, not at 8am.

I'd be happy with London 15, Manchester 5
as long as we see lots of new venues coming on line in the weeks after.

tech deal might be the point of sale (POS) integration mentioned on twitter last week

> poor old spero
Took it on the chin and bought back in the morning. Mention of the trial expanding to London was trhe clincher.

You have to speculate to deccumulate it seems :)

The share price spiked to 9p in anticipation of Brighton + Reading + a tech partnership. Reading and the partnership never appeared and Brighton launched with just 5. The share price dropped 70% quite rapidly (blame Justin Waite all you want).

Throughout August, the share price held in the 2.6p -> 3p range (despite the regular loss of restaurants). This was in anticipation of September hypergrowth (anticipation again). This hypergrowth is supposed to involve 200 new restaurants, London, Manchester, Edinburgh etc this month. That's so unlikely to happen by the end of September, as promised, that it feels impossible.

Here's the key for me: just because a share has dropped 70%, it doesn't mean it's on a solid floor. It can drop 70% again if targets are missed. And it looks like they are going to be.

They may pull 18 large rabbits out of a hat before October and I'll miss the party. Otherwise I'll reassess if/when this gets a lot cheaper.

13 working days remining

we need a further 9 new locations with 20 restaurants in each just to hit the target :(

Sanj describing September in early August: hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBRbE7Jknz0 (see 3:43)

"Whats it's going to look like in September is that we're going to have more than 200 new restaurants on board in some great key new locations, spread across the UK. The likes of Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Birmingham and the big one for me - London...."

This was at a time when they had made the shift to fewer promises, quieter social media & fewer excitable RNSs.

Either we hit that 200 target (with the majority of those named cities activated) or we don't. It's not going particularly well so far, but there's still a chunk of month left. One thing seems clear, the share price won't stay at 3p. It's going to move strongly in one direction or the other. Miss these targets and we'll see new lows IMHO

Art's comment is a demand, not an observation.
+1 to it from me

Today's sell was a buy. The buyer reported this news earlier.

Existing locations are now stable. B'ham online and +12. Looking good from here.

I've been counting restaurants every few days (random intervals) since early July. Almost every count showed a very slight decline. The only exceptions were:
* Aug 13th when so'ton and b'mouth each increased by one
* Aug 6th -> 8th had no decline.
Restaurant numbers (excluding Birmingham) have remained stable now for 8 days. Looks like the decline in the existing locations has been halted.

As a parallel, some drivers work simultaneously for Lyft and Uber.

A special offer on a table in a restaurant isn't a limited supply of physical stock. If a restaurant decides to issue four 50%-off deals, it can advertise them via both apps. If they are exhausted by one app, the they can be made unavailable on the other. Perhaps five will be booked before they can update, but there isn't a supply issue, they just serve one more discount than planned. This is unlikely to be at the expense of a full-price table, otherwise they wouldn't be offering 50%-off deals at that time of day. It requires admin overhead, but increases exposure of the deals to the public and will therefore be beneficial to the restaurants. Competition will also help get the public used to looking for & using yield management dining offers and drive innovation.

This is not like the 'first mover advantage' that ebay lost out on in Asia (to Yahoo I think). Everyone can use multiple apps.

Do Discoeat or Bigdish demand exclusivity? What's to stop restaurants from participating in both?

one small thing. I'm invested in VRS (Graphene). Investors got wind of a deal with Aecom to build an innovative arch to reduce engineering cost for transport projects. Investors found project pdfs that were quickly deleted, miicro-sites for the project that also had to be removed. Eventually, the investors speculation about a still private deal stopped the project. We should be careful what we post.

Panic selling going on. Bebop had 5mill+ shares and is selling. That's a lot of shares to sell under stress. I think one of two things will happen.
* The general panic selling will end and people will buy the bargain. The price will climb again. The panic sellers will have been dumped out of the share at the bottom.
* The company will RNS positive enough news to steady the ship for the low-liquidity summer months, and the share price will advance on Q4 news.

My avg is still a way off, so I'm going to avoid giving in to the fear generated by the panic and hold. I will either regret it or not. For me the biggest regret would be to jump out now, then watch the party bus drive off into the sunset without me.

Trying to sell the idea to restaurants without also generating customers to use the app was a mistake. I think this has been identified and the focus has shifted to chains/marketing/social media/brand ambassadors. Remember, they floated early, so we get to see these embryonic-stage strategy changes. It doesn't mean they were lying, it means they're experimenting and failing forwards.

Reassuring, thanks Monty

109, not 98. And Brighton still 5 for me. Perhaps Scottman you've been barred from one of the Brighton ones, so it no longer appears in your app :)

sorry, stable very low boring %

RE poor sign-up figures.

tldr: strong hold, invest in the story

The problem here IMO is, the general public don't know about or use Bigdish. Restaurants have never heard of them. Some think it's worth a try, so they sign up and offer 50% off, then no one turns up. Some then drop out (despite there being no cost of remaining in). Most businesses who exit probably decide it's not worth their time making sure all staff know what to do if the one customer that week comes in.

Investors and potential investors see the numbers declining over time (fewer sign-ups than drop-outs) and call out the model as the problem, even branding it a failure. Less than two weeks ago, I was part of that noise, bemoaning the loss of 24% of pre-Brighton restaurants to this forum.

Someone posted a reminder on this forum that we've been allowed in *early*. Other start-ups would get much bigger, perhaps even have a nationwide skeleton, before floating at £1. If dish had decided to do that, as I suspect they often wish they had, we'd have missed out on that astronomical increase in share value.

A trade off to being allowed in now is that we see the things that aren't working, then bite or nails hoping they can work it out. I think with this issue, they have a clear understanding of the problem and are innovating around it. They need customers to use the app and go to restaurants. Without a big increase in public awareness then the sign-up/retention problem will never go away. The Brand Ambassadors are part of the solution. Hopefully just a small part of a much wider public awareness campaign. As people learn about us and the customer base grows, more business will stay on the platform. Happy customers organically lead to other new customers, which provides a growing customer base for more restaurants on the platform. Restaurants will see the platform growing without them and want to joing (self sign-up portal)

It's like trying to start rolling a large boulder. Eventually, it will hit a Malcolm Gladwell style tipping point in public/restaurant awareness, and the territory managers will have the easiest jobs in the UK.

You can't ask people to prove it's a sound investment when the shares are just 5p. If you need that kind of security before you commit then invest in an FTSE-100 fund and make a stable 10%. Or invest in a story that should be amazing and make 1000%

other shares I've invested in (VRS, BIDS) - their CEOs have admitted to following the forums. Aidan / Sanj, if you're reading, this wasn't a little hiccup. You need to spend on operations / platform people.