If you had asked me two years ago whether I would be building a QR code menu app for restaurants, I would have laughed. I am not a chef. I do not run a café. I do not wake up thinking about food costs or table turnover.

I am a software engineer who has spent over a decade building consumer web apps at companies like Fab.com, Freshworks, SkyMD and BusinessCards.io. Over the years I have tried to understand how people actually use products, how they ignore them, how they get frustrated by them, how they quietly delete them and how sometimes a simple tool becomes part of their daily workflow.

Somewhere in that journey, I became curious about a very simple question. Why do so many restaurants still struggle with something as basic as managing their menu online?

That curiosity eventually became The Lazy Potato.

Here is why I felt it needed to exist.

Walk into any restaurant in 2025 and you will still see QR codes stuck to tables. Love them or hate them, they are not going away. Some customers prefer physical menus and that is completely fine. But restaurants prefer QR codes because they allow instant updates, reduce printing costs, remove the headache of reprinting menus for every small price or item change, and let customers see richer information like photos, ingredients, allergens and real-time availability. They also help avoid the awkward moment when a server has to say “that item is not available today” even though it is still printed on the physical menu.

And if the sheer number of menu apps on the App Store, Play Store and websites is any indication, the demand is real. But I kept asking myself: If this space is so crowded, why do so many menus still feel bad?

A surprising number of restaurants still use a Linktree page pointing to a PDF in Google Drive or Dropbox. It technically works, but the experience is rough:

For something as critical as your menu, the thing your entire business runs on, this feels unnecessarily broken.

This is something we tech people forget. Restaurant owners are not sitting behind laptops. They are juggling inventory, staff schedules, suppliers, delivery partners and customers. Asking them to log in to a web dashboard, remember passwords and navigate a complex interface just to update the price of “Coffee” is unreasonable. They want:

Most solutions assume the user is tech savvy. Most restaurant owners are too busy to be tech savvy.

This has become a pattern in SaaS. Tools try to become POS, CRM, loyalty, marketing, payments, inventory and analytics all at once. And then the core feature, the menu, receives the least attention.

I wanted to build one product that does one thing well. Make restaurant menus easy to create, update, publish and share. That is it.

I may not know the restaurant business as deeply as someone who has run a kitchen for a decade. But I do know how to build software that respects people’s time.

I know how to ask a simple question. What is the shortest path between the owner's intention and the result?

That is what I am trying to do with The Lazy Potato. Build everything intentionally, without clutter, and with empathy for the person who needs to update a menu at 11.45 pm.

I have been working on this for about six months now and I am genuinely proud of where it is today.
You can explore the current features here: https://www.thelazypotato.com/#features

My favorite feature right now is Import Using AI. You can upload photos or a PDF of your physical menu and the app will turn it into a clean digital one. It is free at the moment and I will write a deeper post about it soon.

I hope this blog becomes a place where I write with intention. No fluff and no soulless SEO content. Just my journey of building this product with sincerity. If you are a restaurant owner, a café founder, or someone curious about product building, I hope this resonates with you.

Cheers,
Nirav