In partnership with

GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), delivering you a startup idea that turns restaurant menus into revenue engines.

6,500 startup ideas later, NTE Pro is where the obvious ones hide before everyone else sees them.

Before the headlines hit, WhoFiled shows you the companies you should keep an eye on.

Check out all the past newsletters here

Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - Menus convert now

• $10 Menu Change

Menus are conversion funnels now

The One Liner

Menus optimized like landing pages.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

Menus aren’t static PDFs. This tool A/B tests digital menus to show which layouts, prices, and words increase orders and revenue. Fast wins.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

Restaurants obsess over ingredients, suppliers, and staff training and then lock the menu and never touch it again.

Menu layouts are set once.
Descriptions are written on gut feel.
Pricing tweaks are scary.
Photos and placement are guesswork.

Meanwhile, a tiny change in wording, order, or price anchoring can swing what people order and how much they spend.

The menu is the highest-leverage conversion surface in a restaurant.
And it’s treated like a static PDF.

Digital menus update instantly.
Learning doesn’t.

The Solution

Treat the menu like a product, not a design artifact.

This software lets restaurants run simple A/B tests on digital menus - quietly, automatically, and without disrupting the kitchen.

Different versions rotate behind the scenes.
Item placement changes.
Descriptions evolve.
Prices anchor differently.

Sales data flows in.
Winners become the default.

Same food.
Same staff.
Better decisions.

Owners don’t need to guess which dishes drive profit vs popularity, the menu tells them.

How We’d Build It

Phase 1: Proof (MVP)

• Start with QR-code menus only

• Use a vibe-coding builder like Lovable or Typedream to spin up menu variants fast

• Manual POS export or lightweight tools like Census or Segment Functions to tie menu views to item sales

• One metric: revenue per menu view
  Goal: prove small changes move real money

Phase 2: Operator Clarity

• Simple test templates: top placement, naming, price anchoring

• Plain-English results: “Version B made 7% more per table”

• Use tools like PostHog or Statsig for experiment logic without heavy infra
  Goal: make insights obvious, not overwhelming

Phase 3: Scale

• Deeper POS integrations where it matters

• Auto-suggested tests based on past wins

• Roll out across multi-location groups
  Goal: turn menu optimization into muscle memory

Why It Needs to Exist
A/B testing is table stakes everywhere, except hospitality.

QR menus are normal.
Item-level sales data already exists.
Margins are tighter than ever.

The tooling is ready.
The mindset just hasn’t caught up.

This isn’t about becoming “data-driven.”
It’s about finding free money hiding in plain sight.

Once you see menus as conversion funnels, you can’t unsee it.

Easy setup, easy money

Making money from your content shouldn’t be complicated. With Google AdSense, it isn’t.

Automatic ad placement and optimization ensure the highest-paying, most relevant ads appear on your site. And it literally takes just seconds to set up.

That’s why WikiHow, the world’s most popular how-to site, keeps it simple with Google AdSense: “All you do is drop a little code on your website and Google AdSense immediately starts working.”

The TL;DR? You focus on creating. Google AdSense handles the rest.

Start earning the easy way with AdSense.

Earn with Google AdSense

The $10 Menu Change

Here’s the thought experiment:

A restaurant spends $2,000 a month on ads.
Instagram. Google. Delivery apps. All the usual stuff.

Or…

They change one word on the menu.

That’s it.

No new dish. No new chef. No new campaign. Just a tiny edit no customer consciously notices.

The question: can that outperform the ads?

Side A: “This is obvious and a little dangerous.”
Menus aren’t neutral. They already guide behavior. Moving an item to the top increases orders. Removing a price anchor makes everything else feel reasonable. Swapping “burger” for “house-grilled burger” nudges people upmarket.

At that point, are we optimizing… or manipulating?

If customers don’t realize they’re part of an experiment, does that cross a line?
Restaurants aren’t SaaS dashboards. They’re places people trust.

Side B: “This is already happening — just badly.”
Every menu influences choices. The only difference is who decides and why.

Right now it’s gut feel.
A chef’s favorite dish.
Last year’s pricing.
A designer’s aesthetic.

Testing doesn’t create persuasion. It exposes it.

If a $10 menu change increases average order value by 6%, is that unethical?
Or is it irresponsible not to know?

Now push it further.

Change one word:
“Classic” vs “Signature.” One sells nostalgia. One sells confidence.

Move one item to the top:
Does the best-margin dish suddenly become the most popular?

Remove one price anchor:
Does the $28 entrée stop feeling expensive when the $42 steak disappears?

None of this feels dramatic.
That’s the scary part.

The real debate isn’t optimization vs vibes.
It’s transparency vs ignorance.

Do you want decisions driven by instinct and tradition?
Or by evidence you can actually see?

Because if a single menu tweak quietly beats a month of marketing spend, the uncomfortable truth is this:

The money was always hiding in the menu.

Most startup ideas fail because they start as answers.
NTE Pro starts with the questions nobody’s comfortable asking.

Examples inside NTE Pro:

• The product that turns regulatory chaos into a distribution advantage
• The quiet business hiding inside something everyone thinks is “unmonetizable”
• A tool that exists only because incentives finally broke in plain sight

None of these look like startups at first.
That’s the point.

If you like ideas that feel obvious after someone explains them, you’ll want to see what’s inside.

NTE Pro isn’t about more ideas.
It’s about seeing the ones you’d otherwise scroll past.

Stop scrolling. Start seeing companies that are actually starting.

WhoFiled shows you early company, market, and funding signals before they hit the headlines by tracking where founders, developers, and investors move first. Not hype. Not hot takes. Real activity.

Explore live signals from Form D filings, GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News, and more -all in one clean intelligence layer. Browse freely or personalize it when you’re ready.

If you need signal, not noise, this is for you.

It’s 100% free during beta — but it won’t be forever.

Sign up now.

One More Meme

Last Time the Market Was This Expensive, Investors Waited 14 Years to Break Even

In 1999, the S&P 500 peaked. Then it took 14 years to gradually recover by 2013.

Today? Goldman Sachs sounds crazy forecasting 3% returns for 2024 to 2034.

But we’re currently seeing the highest price for the S&P 500 compared to earnings since the dot-com boom.

So, maybe that’s why they’re not alone; Vanguard projects about 5%.

In fact, now just about everything seems priced near all time highs. Equities, gold, crypto, etc.

But billionaires have long diversified a slice of their portfolios with one asset class that is poised to rebound.

It’s post war and contemporary art.

Sounds crazy, but over 70,000 investors have followed suit since 2019—with Masterworks.

You can invest in shares of artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

24 exits later, results speak for themselves: net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*

My subscribers can skip the waitlist.

Skip waitlist

_{*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.}