Phone-first training wiki for restaurants

The idea

Most restaurants have their recipes, prep specs, and closing procedures in a manager’s Notion, a Google Doc, or a laminated binder — and the line cooks have never opened any of them. Notion at $12 per seat per month proves knowledge tooling gets paid for, but per-seat pricing collapses against 30 hourly staff with 100% annual turnover, and hourly staff will not read a document-shaped wiki on a cracked phone screen between rushes.

The wedge is building for the workforce instead of the author: photo-per-step SOPs that read like Instagram, QR-code joining with no email, one-tap translation for kitchens where Spanish is the working language, and quiz sign-offs so the manager can prove who was trained on what. That last part quietly turns a wiki into a compliance record, which is what the owner is actually buying. LLM translation and quiz generation make the expensive parts nearly free now.

Who pays

The owner or GM of independent restaurants and small groups (1-10 locations). Flat $49/mo per location — no seat math, which is the entire pricing pitch against Notion. Distribution: restaurant owner Facebook groups and subreddits, food-service consultants who implement it for clients, and local restaurant associations.

MVP scope

• Constrained photo-per-step SOP editor with categories and versioning
• QR-code staff onboarding with name-plus-PIN, no email
• Cached AI translation with per-SOP language toggle
• Auto-generated quizzes, role-based required lists, and a sign-off compliance grid
• Re-sign-off flow when an SOP changes
• Skip for v1: scheduling, video steps, corporate multi-brand hierarchy, POS integrations, offline mode

Build LinePrep, a phone-first training wiki for restaurants. Stack: Next.js (App Router) as a mobile-first PWA, Supabase for auth, Postgres, and image storage, Claude API for translation and quiz generation.

Core flow: 1) Manager creates a location and builds SOPs in a deliberately constrained editor: title, then numbered steps where each step is one photo plus one or two sentences — no freeform documents. Categories: recipes/plating, opening/closing, cleaning, equipment, service standards. 2) Staff join via a QR code posted in the kitchen — no email required, name plus PIN — and browse SOPs on their phones with big type and photos. 3) Every SOP has a one-tap language toggle; Claude pre-translates content to Spanish (and any enabled language) on publish, cached per version so translation is instant and reviewed once, not re-generated per view. 4) Manager marks SOPs as required for a role; Claude generates a 4-question quiz from the steps, staff pass it to sign off, and the manager sees a compliance grid of who has signed off on what, with re-sign-off triggered when an SOP is edited.

Pages: manager dashboard with compliance grid, SOP editor, staff home (my required list, search), SOP viewer with language toggle, quiz screen. Non-obvious details: version every SOP so sign-offs bind to a version; make the QR join flow work without app-store installs. Pricing: $49/mo per location flat, unlimited staff, 30-day trial.