Cemal · Margino

Solo founder building Margino — snap a supplier receipt, get a profit-safe price for in-store, UberEats & DoorDash. iOS, free to start 👇

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

I'm a solo founder. I just shipped my first iOS app — after Apple rejected it 4 times in 8 days.

It does one thing: you snap a photo of a supplier receipt, and it tells a restaurant the price they need to charge on DoorDash & UberEats to actually make money.

Here's the story 🧵

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Pricing detail I care about: suggested prices end in .49 or .99, and the rounding only ever goes UP.

$6.96 → $6.99. $9.28 → $9.49.

A price that looks right but undercuts your margin by 3 cents × 1,000 orders is still a loss.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Shipping soon in Margino: prices right in the app.

Snap a supplier receipt → see what to charge in-store, on Uber Eats and on DoorDash, with your target margin still intact after the commission. No spreadsheet required.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Something I learned running a produce shop that sells on delivery apps: the costs that hurt aren't the big jumps you notice. It's 3–4% creep on 20 items you stop checking.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Question for restaurant owners: when did you last re-read your delivery app contract?

Plans, promo fees, ad fees and "marketing" charges change more often than menus do.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

San Francisco made its 15% cap on delivery commissions permanent.

Same app, same dish, very different economics depending on the city you cook in. Worth knowing your city's rules before you price.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

NYC's total cap on delivery app fees went from 23% to 43%: 15% delivery + 3% payment + 5% other + an optional 20% for "enhanced services."

If you're in NYC, check which of those you actually signed up for.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

"Missing item" refunds on delivery apps are usually charged back to the restaurant, often without proof.

If you're not photographing orders before the driver takes them, you have nothing to dispute with.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Delivery math most owners never write down:

$14 dish, 30% commission → you get $9.80.
If your food + packaging cost is $5, in-store you keep $9. On delivery you keep $4.80.

Same dish. Half the profit.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

3/ The bigger leak: of 13 people who signed up, 9 stopped at one mandatory screen ("Connect Google Sheets").

I built what I loved, not what a busy owner needs first. Fixing the order now.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

I shipped my app in May, then went back to my other businesses and stopped looking at it.

Last night I opened it: "Sign-in failed."

It had been down for weeks. Nobody told me. A short thread on what I found 🧵

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

2/ I only tracked successful sign-ins. Analytics showed 3 US devices opening the app during the outage, zero logins, and no way to know if they tried.

Now failures are events too.

[Oley Kasapçı Yılmaz @Oleyky]

İnadın, direncin bizimle. Mücadelen bu kentin sokaklarında dolaşıyor.
Tutsaklıkta son doğum günün olsun. İyi ki doğdun başkanım🎈🎈🎈Seni çok seviyoruz ve sana söz seni cumhurbaşkanı yapacağız✌️@CAOIletisim1 #İyikidoğdunEkremİmamoğlu

[Oley Kasapçı Yılmaz @Oleyky]

#DenizGöktaşSerbestBırakılsın
#DenizGöktaşYalnızDeğildir

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Menu engineering 101: your highest-margin items should be the easiest to find and order. Sounds obvious. Walk through your own menu — and your delivery listing — and check. Most don't pass their own test.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

If you run a restaurant, café, ghost kitchen, or food truck and you've ever wondered whether you're actually making money on delivery — Margino is free to start. Scan a receipt, see the truth.

https://t.co/rHwvW0K0Y6

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Honest update: the app's been live ~2 weeks and almost all downloads came from my own network, not the US food merchants I built it for. Distribution is the real problem now. So I'm here, learning to reach them. #buildinpublic

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

Pricing for profit isn't 'charge more.' It's knowing your true cost per item and what each channel takes, then setting a number that survives the fees. Most people skip step one and guess the rest.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

After a supplier price hike, re-pricing one menu item takes two minutes. Not noticing for three months costs you real money on every single order. The cheap fix is just... checking regularly.

[Cemal · Margino @cemaloley]

For anyone selling food on UberEats / DoorDash / Grubhub: what markup do you add vs your in-store price? Trying to learn how people actually handle this in practice. No wrong answers.