Restaurant home
The restaurant landing — Order & Pay entry point.
iOS · PHP / Symfony2 · AWS · 2011–2013
Order, pay, and reach your waiter — from the table.
MoWaiter was a smartphone dine-in product I co-founded: guests browsed the menu with photos, ordered, split the check, and paid from their phone — and messaged the waiter without flagging anyone down. I was CTO / architect / developer and built the entire stack: the iOS app, the back end, and the infrastructure — no AI to help back then.
Archival project — the company wound down in 2013. Kept here as founder track record: product built from zero, deployed in real restaurants, operated in production.
What it did
Order & pay at the table.
Guests opened the restaurant on their phone, browsed a photo menu,
ordered, and paid — no waiting for the check.
Split the check.
Per-item and percentage splits across the table, settled
individually from each guest's phone.
Waiter messaging.
A direct line to the waiter — refill, question, help —
without flagging anyone down.
Restaurant side.
Menu management with photos and categories, order flow into the
kitchen, and item-sales reporting for the owner.
The story
Co-founded in 2011 in Sunnyvale, years before table QR-ordering became normal. We ran the full product process — Balsamiq wireframes, InVision flows, test plans, a real sales pipeline — and deployed to paying restaurants in the San Jose area, where it processed real dine-in orders. The company wound down in 2013; the lesson inventory (distribution beats product polish in restaurant tech) came with it. I went on to TrialPay, and the end-to-end ownership habit — product, code, infra, operations — never left.
Screenshots
From the live app in 2013, running at a San Jose restaurant — recovered from the original launch-era archives.
Menu with photos
Menu item with dish photo and ordering controls.
Order review
Order review with the category carousel.
Share the check
Receipt with "Share the Check / Pay Now".
Split the bill — choose amounts
Per-item split editor — picker wheels choose how much of each item you pay (none, ½, ⅓…).
Split & merge
Receipt with editable per-item percentage splits, then settle your share.
Under the hood
- iOS app
- Native Objective-C, built from scratch — menu browsing, ordering, payment, split-the-check, waiter messaging.
- Back end
- PHP / Symfony2 + MySQL, designed and built from scratch; JavaScript / jQuery web front end for the restaurant side.
- Infrastructure
- AWS EC2, provisioned and operated by me — deploys, monitoring, and on-call.
- Product process
- Balsamiq wireframes, InVision flows, written test plans, and a tracked product roadmap.
- Role
- Co-founder · CTO / architect / developer — everything technical, end to end.