Festivus for the Rest of Us
Sixty seconds ago, I told you the restaurant version of what Salesforce just paid $5.7 billion for already exists, for a fraction of the price. It does, and it's a Branded partner, so here's your Shoutout.
Please meet Hang (hang.com).
Hang calls itself "the AI-native guest experience platform for restaurants," and the tagline is "every layer of guest engagement, one connected platform."
That isn’t marketing fluff. It's the exact stack Salesforce just spent billions assembling, purpose-built for our industry and bundled into one place: loyalty, a custom app and ordering, personalized offers, a full CRM, gift cards, and a customer data platform that merges every order, visit, and preference into a single profile per guest.
One platform that allows you to know the guest behind every order.
Here's the core idea. The old way is segmentation: you draw a circle around 100,000 "lapsed" guests and blast them all the same $5 off. Hang's bet is that marketing should be “1:1,” not “1:many,” a different offer for each guest, generated automatically. And here's the thing every marketer knows, and nobody likes to say out loud: a lot of your offers get redeemed by guests who were coming anyway. Hang's AI figures out who was coming regardless and who wasn’t and uses each guest's price sensitivity and check size to build the offer that earns its keep: get the guest who wasn't coming in the door or bump the check on the one who was. It's pointed at incremental business, not redemptions.
And here's what makes it special in practice. The AI isn't a bolt-on feature, it's woven through every layer, and b/c it's all one product, it doesn't hand you a to-do list. Remember the five-tab journey? Here it's one sentence, "win back the guests who haven't been in for 60 days without giving away the store," and it finds them, builds each guest's offer inside your limits, writes the emails and the texts, builds the journey, and puts it in the app. That's the flow Salesforce just bought the pieces for. Hang already runs it. But, and this is the part I love: you stay in control the whole way. Nothing sends until you approve it. Every AI offer lives inside the margin and discount limits you set, and you see the rationale and the projected cost before it acts. It plugs into the systems you already run on.
The roster includes Just Salad, Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, Firehouse Subs, La La Land, Killer Burger, and many others. The receipts: Jeni's is doing 6.6x the monthly loyalty revenue it did on its previous provider. Boba Guys grew net offer revenue 41%, after discounts and cannibalization. And my favorite, b/c it's the whole game in one line, Killer Burger drove 4.7x loyalty participation while cutting its discounting in half.
So here's the bow on this week's edition of the Hospitality Headline.
Salesforce paid $5.7 billion to put the data, the AI, and the messaging under one roof.
KFC gets the messaging piece from Braze.
You can get the whole stack from Hang, loyalty, CDP, CRM, and offers, all AI-native, for about what you'd pay for loyalty alone, and it starts with a free prototype.
Go see it at hang.com.
If you'd like to explore opportunities with Hang, please contact me directly.
