Latest / Small Business Success with Fexingo: Local Companies, Main Street Stories, and Community Commerce / How a Small Pizza Shop Built a Lunch Rush That Chains Envy
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a pizza shop in Cleveland — it's called Crustworthy, though the name matters less than what they did — that had a problem a lot of small restaurants recognise. Their dinner service was fine. Weekend nights were packed. But weekday lunch? Dead. Like, three tables between eleven and one. The owner, a guy named Marcus, told me he was losing money every day before two p.m. Luna: That's brutal because the rent doesn't care what time of day it is. Lucas: Exactly. So Marcus didn't try the obvious things — no Groupon, no early-bird special, no slashing prices. Instead, he did something that sounds almost too simple. He started changing the lunch menu every single day. Luna: Every day? Not just a daily special? Lucas: Right — a daily special is usually one item the kitchen runs alongside the regular menu. Marcus killed the regular lunch menu entirely. From eleven to one, Crustworthy only sold what he called 'today's pie.' One pizza. That's it. And he didn't announce it on his website or Instagram. He built a text-message list. Luna: So the only way to know what was for lunch was to be on the list. Lucas: That was the whole bet. He put a sign on the counter — 'Want to know what's for lunch tomorrow? Text PIZZA to this number.' No discount attached. No reward. Just information. Within three months, he had six hundred subscribers. Luna: Six hundred people voluntarily giving their phone number for a text about pizza. That's pretty good for a shop that probably seats forty. Lucas: Thirty-eight seats, actually. And the text wasn't a coupon — it was a description. 'Tomorrow's lunch pie: roasted mushroom, caramelized onion, gruyère, finished with truffle honey.' That's it. People started forwarding the texts to coworkers. Suddenly, eleven-thirty rolls around and there's a line out the door. Luna: So the scarcity wasn't the amount of pizza — it was the knowledge gap. Lucas: Exactly. And Marcus told me the revenue from that eleven-to-one window grew four hundred percent over eighteen months. Not because he spent a dime on advertising. He just made lunch a limited-time experience that you had to opt in to know about. Luna: Four hundred percent — let me put that in numbers. If he was doing, say, three hundred dollars a day in lunch sales before, that's twelve hundred dollars a day after. Lucas: And he's at fourteen hundred now, actually. Plus the dinner crowd started coming earlier because people who'd discovered the place at lunch started bringing friends at night. His total revenue rose about sixty percent overall. All because he treated lunch as a different product, not a discount version of dinner. Luna: There's a lesson there for any business with a dead time slot. Don't offer a sale — offer something exclusive that only exists in that slot. Lucas: Right. And the beauty of the text list is that it's cheap and it builds an asset. Marcus owns that list. He's not renting attention from Yelp or Google or Uber Eats. He texts the list once a day, and the open rate is north of ninety percent. That's a direct line. Luna: Compared to a social media post where maybe five percent of your followers see it. Lucas: Exactly. And he can also use it to test ideas. One week he did a breakfast pizza — egg, bacon, cheddar — and it sold out by ten a.m. He now does that every Saturday. He never would have discovered that if he hadn't had a way to put an idea in front of people who already trust him. Luna: I want to talk about retention. You said subscribers are still at six hundred after eighteen months. What's the churn? Lucas: It's remarkably low — eight percent annually. People don't unsubscribe because the texts aren't spammy. It's one message per day, always about the next lunch pizza. If you don't care, you ignore it. But if you're on the fence, the description pulls you in. Marcus says the key is that he never sends the same pizza twice. Luna: That's a huge operational commitment. Most small kitchens struggle to execute one menu consistently. He's creating a new product every day. Lucas: He simplified his prep. The daily pizza always uses the same dough and same base sauce. The variation is in the toppings, which he sources from whatever's fresh that morning. So the kitchen doesn't have to learn a new recipe — they just swap ingredients. And he posts the next day's pizza by four p.m., so if someone wants to plan their lunch, they can. Luna: That's smart — it builds anticipation. You get the text at four, you think about it all evening, and by the next morning you've already decided you're going. Lucas: And he sees it in the data. Texts sent between four and six p.m. have the highest click to visit rate. People literally plan their next day around pizza. That's not something you get with a coupon. Luna: Let me ask the obvious question: does this work for any type of restaurant, or is it pizza-specific? Lucas: Marcus thinks any food business with a rotating supply can do it. He mentioned a barbecue place in Kansas City that does a similar thing with a different meat each day — brisket Monday, ribs Tuesday, pulled pork Wednesday. They text the menu at ten a.m. and sell out by one. The key is that the item has to feel like a discovery, not a default. Luna: So the principle is: create a product that changes frequently enough that people feel compelled to check in, and deliver that information through a channel you control. Lucas: That's exactly it. And the cost is almost zero. A text-marketing service costs maybe thirty dollars a month. Compare that to what restaurants spend on Facebook ads or delivery-app commissions. Marcus is paying fifteen percent to his credit card processor and nothing to anyone else for those lunch sales. Luna: He's essentially built a media property around his restaurant. The text list is a daily newsletter that happens to sell pizza. Lucas: That's a great way to frame it. And it's why I think this model matters beyond restaurants. Any small business with a time-sensitive product — a bakery with a daily bread, a flower shop with a morning delivery window, even a service business with a slow hour — could borrow the same idea. Luna: Name one non-food example. Lucas: A dog groomer I know in Austin started a 'same-day spot' text list. She opens three slots every morning at eight and texts her list. They fill in minutes. She used to have no-shows all the time. Now she has a wait-list that clears every day. Luna: So it's about converting an unpredictable demand problem into a predictable one. Lucas: Yeah. And the psychology is different. When someone books a groomer two weeks out, it's easy to forget or cancel. When they get a text at eight a.m. saying 'one slot open at ten,' they feel like they've won something. The commitment is stronger. Luna: For the listener who wants to try this next week, what's the minimum viable version? Lucas: Pick your worst time slot. Commit to one item or one service that you'll only offer during that slot. Put up a sign, handwrite it, don't overthink the design. Collect phone numbers for a week. Then send one text per day announcing what's available. Don't offer a discount. The scarcity is the offer. Luna: And if nobody responds after two weeks? Lucas: Then you change the item. Marcus went through six different pizza styles before the mushroom truffle honey one hit. The first few were too generic. People need a reason to forward the text to a coworker. 'Pepperoni' doesn't get forwarded. 'Smoked brisket with pickled jalapeño and cilantro crema' does. Luna: So the headline has to be shareable. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the part that takes creativity, not money. Marcus spends maybe ten minutes a day thinking about tomorrow's pizza. That ten minutes generates hundreds of dollars in incremental revenue. The ROI on that is absurd. Luna: I want to ask about scaling. He's at six hundred subscribers now. What happens when he hits two thousand? Will the kitchen keep up? Lucas: He's already thinking about that. His plan is to add a second lunch slot at one p.m. with a different pizza, and split the list into two groups. Group A gets the eleven a.m. text, group B gets the one p.m. text. That way he can serve more people without extending the kitchen's peak load. Luna: That's a clever operational hack. He's essentially doing demand shaping through the text channel. Lucas: Right. And he can test it with a small subset first — send the later text to just fifty people and see if they show up. The list gives him a lab. Luna: One thing that strikes me about this whole story is that it's completely independent of the big food-ordering platforms. He didn't need DoorDash or Uber Eats. Lucas: He refuses to use them. Says the commissions would eat his margin and he'd lose the direct relationship. His delivery is limited to in-house drivers for large orders. Lunch is walk-in only. That constraint actually helps — it creates a sense of place. People have to come to the shop. Luna: And walking into a busy, energetic lunch spot is part of the experience. You can't replicate that through a delivery app. Lucas: Exactly. The ambiance, the smell, the line — it's all part of the product. Marcus told me that when people wait in line, they talk to each other. Regulars have started to recognize each other. It's become a little community around the lunch counter. Luna: That's the kind of thing you can't buy with a marketing budget. Lucas: You can't. And it's why this episode matters. There's this narrative that small businesses can't compete with chains because chains have bigger budgets, better technology, more data. But Marcus is outspending nobody and outearning his local competitors because he understands something about human behavior — people love feeling like insiders. Luna: The chain pizza place down the street has a loyalty app with points and push notifications. But it doesn't have a text from a real person saying 'we made something just for today.' Lucas: That's the whole difference. Technology is not the moat. The relationship is. Luna: And on that note — we put out a lot of these episodes, and it's possible because a small group of listeners chips in a few dollars a month through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That support keeps the show ad-free and lets us dig into stories like this one. Lucas: Yeah, it's a simple model. No ads, no sponsors, just people who find the conversations useful throwing in what a coffee costs. If that's you, we appreciate it more than we can say. Luna: Alright, back to the pizza. Lucas, what's the one thing you want listeners to take away from this episode? Lucas: That your worst time slot might be your best opportunity — if you treat it like a separate product rather than a discount version of your main one. Pick a slot, pick an exclusive offer, build a direct channel, and test relentlessly. You don't need a big budget. You need a good story to tell, and a way to tell it to the right people. Luna: And maybe a really good pizza. Lucas: That helps. But the principle works for any small business. The dog groomer in Austin proved it. The BBQ place in Kansas City proved it. The question is: what's your version of the mushroom truffle honey pizza?