Before the Booking: How Guests and Buyers Find You

Long before a guest books a table or a buyer asks for a demo, they have usually looked you up and formed a view. A guest scrolls past, a buyer closes the tab, and your team often never knows. This is the first of six stages in the guest journey and the customer lifecycle: restaurant discovery for a diner, awareness and evaluation for a software buyer. It stays on one practical question: what does a stranger see on a phone in the first minute?

I'm Richard Yu. I spent more than a decade in customer success and solutions engineering at software companies, then co-founded Equal Parts in North Beach, San Francisco. I use both worlds here because the problem looks the same from either side.

How Guests and Buyers Usually Find You

People rarely start by searching for your restaurant or your product by name. They usually arrive at a shortlist through a handful of small moments, and your team is absent for most of them. The details differ on each side, but the shape is often the same:

1. Trigger. A guest sees a friend's video of a dish. A buyer hits a problem or hears a vendor mentioned by a peer.
2. Search. The guest opens Google Maps or Instagram. The buyer searches a category and opens a few tabs.
3. Shortlist. A few restaurants in the same neighborhood. A few vendors that appear to do the same thing.
4. Check. The guest looks at the menu, photos and recent reviews. The buyer looks at the pricing page, case studies and documentation.
5. Act. The guest books or walks in. The buyer requests a demo or starts a trial.

Much of what happens before the last step happens without a conversation with you. The useful question is not how good you are once someone sits down. It is how you look at step four.

Where Restaurant Discovery Happens Now

Restaurant discovery is usually a mix of four things: a video or post, a map, a review and a friend. The order changes, but a decision rarely rests on only one of them.

Social is where the trigger usually happens. A post tends to work when a guest can tell at a glance what a place feels like and what to order. Your Google Maps listing is where that interest gets checked: hours, photos, the menu link, the rating and the recent reviews. For many guests it is the storefront they see before they see your door. Friends often close the loop, because a recommendation can turn a maybe into a booking.

The weak point is what happens between the trigger and the booking. People often save a Reel of a great dish and then lose it among everything else they have saved. Spotguide, the app I co-founded, turns the food Reels and TikToks people save into a personal map of restaurants and nudges them when they are nearby. For an operator, the useful idea is that a save can be a signal of intent that arrives well before a booking. Many restaurants only see the booking, and it can be hard for them to say which video put them on someone's list.

What Each Side Can Borrow From the Other

In software, a public page often does a lot of work when no salesperson is in the room. A restaurant's map listing and menu do the same job and often get less attention.

Picture a buyer comparing three tools using only public pages. The vendor that says plainly who it is for, what the first week looks like and how to start usually gets the call. The other two may have better products and never get a conversation.

A guest asks the same thing in different words: is this my kind of place, and will tonight be easy? A restaurant that answers with clear photos, a readable menu and honest hours tends to get the booking for the same reason the clear vendor gets the demo. In my experience, clarity beats polish when someone is deciding quickly.

The lesson runs the other way too. A good restaurant listing tells a stranger what to order: a photo of the dish and a menu that opens on the first tap. Some software pages leave the visitor to work out what to try first, so borrow the restaurant move and show the one thing a new visitor should do. A guest who saves your restaurant has already told you something before booking, and so has a buyer who comes back to the pricing page twice. Notice it before they ask for a demo.

First Impressions Are Made Before the First Conversation

The first impression is whatever a stranger sees on a phone in under a minute, not the greeting at the door or the first email from sales.

Picture a guest who finds a restaurant through a video of a standout dish. They tap through to the map listing and find old hours, one dark photo and a menu that only exists as a PDF that will not load properly on a phone. The video made a promise and the listing broke it. Many guests will not complain. They will simply pick the next place on the list.

Software can break the promise in the same way, with vague pricing, a signup form that asks for too much, or a product page full of category language that never says what the product does on a Tuesday afternoon. A page that sounds quick to set up can lead to an onboarding plan that takes weeks. The buyer rarely files a ticket. They leave.

The principle I apply to both is consistency. What you promise before the booking has to match what the guest finds at arrival, and what the buyer saw on the website has to match what they get in onboarding. I go further into the tactics in my piece on restaurant marketing strategy in San Francisco. Underneath them, it comes down to saying true things clearly in the places people look first.

A Discovery Checklist You Can Run This Week

Improving this stage takes an afternoon, not a new tool, and a willingness to look at yourself as a stranger would.

1. Search yourself on a phone. Use your name, then a category plus your neighborhood. Software teams should search the problem they solve. Note where you appear and what comes first.
2. Fix the map listing. Check hours, categories, photos, menu link and booking link. For software, this is your directory and review site profiles.
3. Open your last three posts as a stranger. Can someone tell what to order, or what the product does, without context?
4. Read your recent reviews for expectations. Reviews show what people thought they were getting. Gaps between expectation and reality are often discovery problems rather than service problems.
5. Ask the next ten new customers how they found you. Ask guests at the host stand and buyers on the first call. Write the answers down in one place.

If you want a weekly second opinion on the fixes, the GTM & Operations Plan is a 30-minute strategy and operations session every week.

Where Technology Helps and Where It Gets in the Way

Technology earns its place at this stage when it helps someone feel known before they have said a word. It can remember the dish a guest saved, show them the right restaurant when they are nearby, and help you see which video or page led to a booking so you can do more of what works. On the software side, that is a site that remembers which plan a returning visitor compared, or a demo form that does not ask again for what the visitor already told you.

It gets in the way when it adds friction. A pop-up that covers the menu, a forced app download before a guest can see hours, an account wall before a buyer can read pricing, a chatbot that hides the phone number. Each one is usually there to capture something for the business, and each one costs the visitor a little patience. At this stage, patience is in short supply.

My rule is simple: if a tool does not make the next step easier for the guest or buyer, remove it. Then measure discovery honestly, by asking people how they found you and checking whether what they saw was true. You can find me on Instagram at @richhh90.