Twelve months ago, order-ahead app Hey You hit reset – and business is thriving
Popular coffee and food ordering app Hey You has switched up its strategy to chase long-term growth instead of “hypergrowth”.
When Melbourne and Sydney’s CBD emptied almost overnight during COVID, order-ahead app Hey You found itself at a crossroads.
Built originally for busy commuters wanting to skip the café queue, Hey You’s core use case was suddenly gone. For a business whose model relied on daily, habitual use, the impact was severe.
Twelve months ago, the company effectively hit reset. Led by co-leads Asheesh Chacko and Calum Fraser, Hey You underwent a management buyout and began rebuilding the business with a new philosophy: measured, sustainable growth over speed-at-all-costs expansion.
“We weren’t interested in chasing hypergrowth,” Chacko says. “We wanted to build something viable long term, for our team, our venues, and our customers.”
Finding the right place in a crowded market
Today, Hey You sits in a deliberate niche. It’s not an in-venue QR ordering platform, and it’s not a delivery app. Instead, it focuses on on-the-go ordering. Those everyday moments when people want to order ahead, personalise their experience, and keep moving.
That positioning has allowed Hey You to differentiate in a crowded market dominated by giants like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
For venues, the value isn’t just speed. Hey You enables cafés and food outlets to recognise repeat customers, understand preferences, and build loyalty through data-driven insights, without losing the human interaction that keeps people coming back.
Growth, but on their terms
Since the buyout, the team has focused on fixing historical product and operational gaps, expanding nationally, and broadening its customer base beyond CBD office workers.
“It still feels like a startup,” says Fraser. “But we’re much more intentional now about how we grow and what we build.”
That intention shows up in how Hey You thinks about infrastructure, especially payments.
Payments as invisible, mission-critical infrastructure
For Hey You, payments aren’t an afterthought. They’re the backbone of the business.
“The first thing we check every day is settlement and payment data,” Fraser explains. “If payments aren’t working, everything else stops.”
User expectations are uncompromising. They want stored credentials, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a fast, seamless experience. That’s two to three taps, maximum.
Any friction at checkout doesn’t just slow things down, it directly impacts conversion and trust. That reality shaped Hey You’s approach to choosing a payments partner.
Why partnership mattered more than features
Hey You’s relationship with Fat Zebra spans several years, including early implementations of tokenisation, Click to Pay, and digital wallet support.
At one point, the business moved to a global payments platform, attracted by pricing and technical capability. But over time, something was missing.
“Technically, the platform was strong,” Chacko says. “But there was no relationship. No-one to call.”
As Hey You entered a critical growth phase post-buyout, that lack of support became a risk.
What brought them back to Fat Zebra wasn’t just pricing or features, it was partnership. “Being able to pick up the phone, Slack someone, or have a real conversation when something goes wrong matters,” Chacko says. “Fat Zebra understands our business and shows up when it counts.”
Beyond day-to-day reliability, Fat Zebra has played a proactive role, introducing new payment methods, flagging opportunities like least-cost routing, and helping Hey You optimise performance as volumes grow.
Growing together
That partnership approach has allowed Hey You to focus on what it does best: building an innovative product and serving venues and end users all over Australia.
With around 1200 venues live across Australia, the platform now supports thousands of daily customer interactions, each one dependent on payments that “just work”.
Looking ahead, Hey You is preparing to launch two new products:
- Last Call Deals, offering end-of-day discounts that reduce food waste, increase venue revenue and save end customers money.
- Hey You Corporate, enabling businesses to offer employee rewards and group ordering to encourage office attendance and improve corporate culture.
Both rely on payments infrastructure that can scale without adding complexity.
The quiet role of the right payments partner
Hey You’s story isn’t about dramatic pivots or overnight success. It’s about rebuilding thoughtfully, choosing partners carefully, and recognising that some decisions (like payments) quietly shape everything else.
“Good payments infrastructure is invisible when it’s working,” Chacko reflects. “But when you’re growing, having the right partner behind the scenes makes all the difference.”
For Hey You, that partnership with Fat Zebra has meant the confidence to rebuild, expand, and grow, without losing sight of the people and experiences at the heart of the business.
Download Hey You from the App Store, or learn more at heyyou.com.au.
Payments infrastructure matters more as businesses scale. Learn how Fat Zebra supports growing Australian businesses
