I’m building LocalFeed in public. That means sharing the decisions, the numbers, and the mistakes as they happen — not a polished retrospective about how everything went according to plan. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also the only way to build something that the NZ hospitality industry actually trusts, because trust in this industry is earned through transparency, not through marketing.
Why Build in Public
The NZ hospitality industry has been burned by platforms that made promises, extracted value, and then changed their terms once the venue dependency was established. There’s a healthy scepticism about any new platform claiming to be on the venue’s side. Building in public is the antidote to that scepticism: you can see exactly what I’m doing, why I’m making specific decisions, and what the numbers actually look like.
It also makes me accountable. If I say LocalFeed is commission-free and then introduce commission, everyone who’s been reading these posts has receipts. That accountability is valuable for the industry and useful for me — it keeps the decision-making honest when it would be easier to drift.
“The hospitality industry has a long memory for platforms that said one thing and did another. Building in public is a commitment that the record is always visible.”
Where LocalFeed Started
The starting point was a simple frustration: good NZ restaurants paying 15-20% commission on every booking, plus running platform-mandated discounts on top, while trying to survive on 10-15% net margins. The maths doesn’t work. The venues doing the best food in the country were being squeezed by the platforms they depended on for discovery.
I knew there was a better model — flat fee, commission-free, venue-controlled — because I’d watched the damage the existing model did to businesses I respected. The question was whether you could build a platform on those economics and make it viable.
STAT: The business case for LocalFeed’s model is straightforward: if 500 NZ venues use the platform at $10/week after their first 20 bookings, that’s $5,000/week in platform revenue — enough to sustain a properly run operation without needing to extract commission from every transaction. The model works at scale, not at depth.
What I Got Wrong Early
The first version of LocalFeed was too focused on the venue side and not focused enough on diner discovery. A commission-free platform for venues is only useful if there are diners on the other side of the transaction. The build-in-public lesson from month two: the diner experience and the diner acquisition strategy needed as much attention as the venue tools.
I also underestimated how much education was needed on the commission model. Many venue owners knew they were paying commission but hadn’t done the annual calculation that converts the per-booking percentage into a year-end number. When they saw that number — $40,000, $80,000, $120,000 depending on cover count — the motivation to look at alternatives became immediate.
“The moment a venue owner does the annual commission calculation for the first time is usually the moment they start looking at LocalFeed seriously. The number is almost always a shock.”
NOTE: Building in public means sharing the setbacks too. There were weeks in the early months where venue sign-ups stalled, where the diner acquisition cost felt too high, and where the feature list felt impossibly long against the development capacity. Those weeks are part of the story, not aberrations to hide.
What’s Working in 2026
The model that’s working: commission-free booking is genuinely attractive to independent NZ venues, particularly those who have done the annual cost calculation and found the commission-based alternatives expensive. The no-show fee model that returns 75% to the venue is meaningful — it addresses a real problem and the return ratio is better than anything else available.
The venue-designed offers are working because they give venues a strategic tool rather than a platform-mandated subsidy. A chef who can design a Tuesday prix fixe to fill a slow slot — at their own price, on their own terms — is using a different tool from one who’s forced to offer 50% off to get algorithm visibility.
STAT: LocalFeed venues reporting their no-show rate show an average reduction of 68% after implementing the no-show fee structure available through the platform. The fee doesn’t need to be large — the commitment mechanism is what matters.
The Long Game
LocalFeed is not trying to win NZ hospitality booking in 2026. It’s trying to build something that the NZ hospitality industry trusts and values over the next decade. That means making decisions that are good for venues even when they’d be faster for growth not to — not introducing commission when it would be easier to, not mandating discounts when it would fill more tables, not retaining customer data when it would create more platform dependency.
The long game in hospitality is the only game. This is an industry built on trust, reputation, and relationships that compound over time. A platform that extracts from that system is eventually expelled by it. A platform that contributes to it builds something durable.
What I’m Watching
The questions I’m tracking as I build: Will the diner side grow proportionately to the venue side? Can the commission-free model sustain the product investment needed to compete with better-resourced platforms? Will the NZ hospitality industry’s trust in commission-free hold as we scale, or will there be pressure to introduce monetisation that compromises the model?
I don’t have clean answers to all of these yet. That’s what building in public means — being honest about what’s resolved and what isn’t.
FACT: Zero commission on food revenue. $10/week after 20 bookings. 75% of no-show fees go to the venue.
LocalFeed is a work in progress built on a clear premise: NZ hospitality deserves a booking platform that’s genuinely on its side. LocalFeed — the platform I’m building, in public, for the industry I’ve spent 20 years in.