Watch word of mouth spread — or stall.
See how many customers you can reach in your area, and how their word-of-mouth can grow that reach over time. Start with your delivery radius, then dial in how often people eat out and how likely they are to choose you.
Define your market
Set the size of the market your restaurant can serve. Start with the number of households inside your delivery area, the average number of people in each home, and how often those people eat out instead of cooking.
This gives you the total number of restaurant meals bought in your area each day — the pool every restaurant nearby is competing for.
We assume each person eats 3 meals a day. The sliders control how many of those meals are bought from a restaurant instead of cooked at home.
Meals eaten out in your service area
540/ day
16,416/ month
1,200 households × 3 people × 3 meals × 5.0% eaten out = 540 restaurant meals a day.
Model your customer purchase behaviour
Active customers
Aware customers
Someone who has only heard of you is colder than a regular. They warm up a little every time they hear about you again.
Active customers pick you 5.0% of the time, so a newly aware person picks you 1.25%.
Each mention adds 15.0 percentage points. An aware customer reaches parity after about 5 mentions.
Retention and daily demand
5 orders/day at 5.00% per active customer per day means about 667 active customers to start.
Customers today
667
Customer base needed to produce about 5 orders a day
Orders per customer / year
2.7
How often one active customer orders from you in a full year
Average customer lifetime
60.0 mo
At 10% annual churn, the average customer stays around 60.0 months
Customer lifetime value
$438
Revenue one customer brings in before they churn — about $58.4K a year across the starting base
Customers per customer / year (K)
0.31
Below 1 — growth fades without new reach
Watch your service area light up
Day 0 / 365
Day 0
2.9K
Day 0
2.9K
Day 0
0
Day 0
0
Day 0
667
Day 0
667
Day 0
5
$160
Day 0
5
$160
What the run means in dollars and reach
Total revenue so far
$160
Revenue from day 0 through day 0
Daily revenue growth
0%
Day 0: $0 → Day 0: $160
Revenue run-rate
$58.4K
If the last day's revenue kept up for a full year
Customer growth
0%
667 → 667 active customers
Awareness growth
0%
667 → 667 people who know you
Service area reached
18.5%
667 of 3.6K people in your area
Customers lost to fatigue
0
Costing about $0 in lost revenue so far
Net new customers
0
Active customers gained beyond the starting base
K factor
0.31
Word of mouth is not self-sustaining
Eat-out orders in area / year
197,100
Every restaurant meal bought in your service area
Your share of those meals
0.9%
A reality check: even strong growth is a small slice of the total market
Awareness has to be earned
Nobody knows about you until a customer tells them. Every aware person in this model got there through a shared meal or a conversation.
Two ways word of mouth travels
A shared meal lets someone taste the food, so it converts well but happens rarely. Talk — texts, calls, group chats — reaches far more people at a much lower conversion.
Menu fatigue leaks customers
Customers get bored and lapse back to merely aware. Growth is the race between new referrals and that leak.
These numbers are estimates based on what you enter and what we see across independent restaurants. They are not a guarantee of performance.
More free tools
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Model how word-of-mouth compounds over time.
Find the customer ceiling your churn rate creates.
What one customer is worth, and what you can spend to get one.
What delivery-app commission costs you every year.
The conversion rate your ads need to pay for themselves.
How much volume can you lose after raising prices and still break even?
How many new orders a promo needs to pay for itself.
Orders per month needed to cover your fixed costs.
Where distance turns a delivery order into a loss.
Whether your rewards program earns back what it gives away.
Food plus labour against the 60% benchmark.
Work backwards from the profit you want to the orders and crew it needs.
Turn awareness into repeat orders
A 15-minute walkthrough of the ordering, referral and loyalty tools that raise your conversion rate — the single biggest lever on your K-factor.
Book a free demoThese numbers are estimates based on what you enter and what we see across independent restaurants. They are not a guarantee of performance.
