Knihter
Cedarburg
Innovation: Hankr
www.knihter.com
Like many good innovations, the new food-finding app Hankr started out as an idea for solving a problem. John Kuehl felt there was something missing from the various review or map services that help consumers find food.
“It always left me, or me and my wife, struggling to make the call,” said Kuehl, who works in digital marketing in Madison. “What I really want to do is look at pictures of food.”
Allowing the user to look at pictures of food is exactly what Hankr does. The app sorts pictures of real menu items at local restaurants into categories like small plates, Italian or pub food. The user can scroll through the pictures, find a dish in which he or she is interested, and then click on it to find out where it is served.
The problem was, Kuehl didn’t have the time or technical skillset needed to build the app into what it could be.
“Like any newbie entrepreneur, at first you try to bootstrap it,” Kuehl said. Then he began to consider the skills people in his professional network might have and who might be able to help make Hankr a reality.
The team that did have the time was at Knihter, a company with offices in Cedarburg and Milwaukee that started in early 2015 with the goal of helping people build sustainable companies through digital ideas. Knihter is kind of like a venture firm, but instead of providing financial support, it takes a stake in the new company in exchange for bringing technical and strategic expertise to an idea.
“We see that as a really good opportunity for people who have interesting ideas but may not be in the position to make that full and mythical entrepreneurial leap,” said Al Krueger, one of four partners at Knihter.
The rest of the group includes Dan Early, Mark Roller and Dustin Halyburton. Krueger said all four partners have a strong background in the digital space and many times would build something to test ideas, but not take it any further.
“The idea was to be able to take those ideas that we have and build real, sustainable growth companies,” he said.
Kuehl knew Early and Roller, owners of Milwaukee-based web design and marketing firm Ascedia, professionally and said it was important that he trusted the team at Knihter and that they had passion for his idea.
“They felt ownership, I believe, right from the start,” Kuehl said, adding the feel was different from if he had supplied the money and Knihter was performing a job or if the group supplied the funding and controlled the direction of the idea.
Krueger noted the group has built other apps and products before, but Hankr is the first with which it is putting an all-encompassing effort into building a standalone company.
“We each have our individual skillset that we bring to it,” Krueger said.
Early, the chief executive officer at Ascedia, brings an understanding of a business’ financials. Roller, the creative lead at Ascedia, heads the development of Knihter businesses from a creative perspective. Krueger comes at the strategy equation with an eye toward the business model. Halyburton is the lead developer at Knihter.
“With Hankr, (Halyburton is) the one who was writing all the code and was making everything,” Krueger said.
The concept behind Hankr is straightforward, but the challenge is making a sustainable business model of it. Unlike Yelp, which puts much of the control in the hands of users, Hankr gives control to restaurants by partnering with them. The company shoots professional photos of the restaurant’s dishes and then shares the rights with the restaurant.
Krueger said part of the idea beyond the app is to manage the consumer’s expectations of what the food will be like at a restaurant. While words in a review or on a menu can set expectations too high or too low, a picture gives an actual representation of the dish. For that reason, Krueger said the restaurants partnering with Hankr are told to prepare dishes just as they would for any customer.
Krueger said Hankr has been able to secure contracts with a number of restaurants and is bringing more onboard all the time. The idea is to eventually expand to other markets, including Madison.
Kuehl said he wouldn’t have been able to launch Hankr without a partner like Knihter.
