Interview With Chatmeal Founder, Victor Metelskiy

Chatmeal is a food ordering tool built with no-code. Since launching last year, ChatMeal has been used by restaurants in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, Turkey, Russia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Indonesia.

My name is Victor Metelskiy. I’m a senior no-code full stack developer. I am the founder of Chatmeal, a WhatsApp-powered food ordering tool for restaurants.

Chatmeal allows restaurant owners to create a digital menu, share it on social media, and start accepting orders via WhatsApp. It does not only help restaurants to save 20-25% of commissions paid to food marketplaces, but it also allows them to have direct communication and get personal with customers.

Around July 2020, I spoke with a restaurant owner in Bali. He told me that the commission fee for the marketplace is killing his business, especially during the pandemic. Our conversation inspired me to find a solution. I wrote my “first line” of no-code, and two weeks later I showed him my MVP. The same day we uploaded his menu on Chatmeal and he started using the app.

Using my app will help both restaurants and customers to save money. Keep in mind that most restaurants (in Bali) increase the price of their menu by 20% to pay the commission fee.

I have found more than 10 startups. A couple of them were successful, most of them were not. In the past, I had to hire developers and pay a ridiculous amount of money to test an idea and have the product 3 months later when the market had already shifted.

So I started learning Bubble. Within the first week, I saw that I could build something worthy in no time. I don’t need to learn front-end, back-end, databases. It was quick.

It took me 6 months, but I learned full-time for one month. You need a couple of months to experiment with Bubble. For ChatMeal, it took me two weeks from ideation to having the product.

Whenever I stumbled upon problems on Bubble, I went to Youtube to find solutions, and that’s where I found the tutorials by Zeroqode.

Every day there’s a new obstacle. But part of the experience in learning no-code is understanding that there is a solution to any obstacle. Learn to Google, learn to ask for help from the community. There is always an answer to any challenge with no-code.