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The Background
Every day, across thousands of hospitality venues, customers place orders in different ways: scanning a QR code at the table, ordering ahead online, or calling through to place an order by phone. Behind those moments sits HungryHungry, a hospitality technology platform designed to help venues increase revenue, streamline ordering, and give customers the flexibility to order the way they want.
Co-founded in 2019 by Mark Calabro and Shannon Hautot, HungryHungry was created to solve the gap between what diners expect and what venue operators can deliver. The platform powers digital ordering, contactless payments, AI phone ordering and marketing and loyalty tools for more than four thousand venues, from neighbourhood cafés to multi-location enterprises.
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The Challenge
When Every Missed Call Is a Missed Experience
For a diner calling a restaurant at 7 PM on a Friday, the experience is simple: they want to place an order, book a table, or ask a question. If the phone rings out — if no one picks up because the kitchen is slammed and every staff member has their hands full — that diner moves on. They try another venue. The booking is lost. The order never happens. And the restaurant never even knows.
For HungryHungry, this wasn’t just a customer frustration. It was a signal.
As the team began building and embedding AI into their own operations, a new question emerged: how could they use the same technology to help venues capture more revenue without adding pressure to already stretched teams?
The answer became a new product.
HungryHungry introduced Otto — an AI-powered voice ordering agent designed to answer every call, take orders, handle bookings, and support customers in real time. Instead of adding more staff or increasing operational load, venues could extend their capacity instantly, ensuring no call — and no opportunity — was missed.
This was the reality HungryHungry existed to solve for its venue partners. Hospitality operators were time-poor, overwhelmed during peak service, and losing revenue to missed calls and slow follow-up. They needed technology that could capture every opportunity without interrupting the guest experience or pulling staff away from the floor.
One Marketer, Three Brands, Zero Budget
Behind the scenes, HungryHungry faced its own version of the same constraint. Liz Cherry joined as Head of Marketing with a mandate to drive acquisition, retention, and a brand-new product launch, across three distinct brands and multiple countries. Her growth targets were ambitious. Her budget was zero. Her team was herself.
"I was given very ambitious growth targets," Liz recalls. "No marketing budget, no human team, but I still had to find a way to get growth for the company."
The challenge wasn't just about doing more with less. It was about building a system that could scale personalised, data-driven marketing, the kind that would help hospitality operators understand HungryHungry's value and act on it, without adding headcount or sacrificing brand quality. Manual campaign cycles and quarterly planning horizons weren't going to cut it. Liz needed a way to move as fast as the market she served.
The Solution
Giving Venues the Right Message at the Right Moment
For HungryHungry's restaurant partners, the operators juggling orders, staff, and guest experience simultaneously, generic marketing emails disappeared into inboxes. These were people who investigated new technology at 11 PM after a brutal dinner service, not during a leisurely morning scroll. Reaching them meant understanding their context, their timing, and their pain with precision.
Liz turned to HubSpot's Marketing Hub and the Loop Marketing framework to build what she calls her "hybrid team", a system where a marketer sets the strategy and AI-powered execution carries it forward, continuously.
Express: Teaching AI to Sound Like the Brand
The foundation was context. Liz built custom AI agents for each of HungryHungry's three brands, feeding them not just brand guidelines and tone-of-voice documents, but real customer data from HubSpot, support tickets, survey responses, and sales emails. The result was agents that understood the difference between HungryHungry's playful, emoji-friendly Australian voice and MOBI's more data-led, enterprise-grade tone. She then specialised agents by role: a product copywriter, a social media expert, each trained for a specific channel and job to be done.
"It didn't really have a great knack of the customer until I started using the data from HubSpot," Liz explains. "We've got our account managers, our sales team, and our support team all using HubSpot, so I could actually get data from support tickets, from surveys, and feed that into my agents so they would have more detailed context about each individual brand."
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Tailor: Proving That Personalisation Pays
With brand expression locked in, Liz ran the experiment that would justify her entire approach. She designed an A/B test: a plain-text email control versus a personalised video email featuring an AI-generated avatar of HungryHungry's Chief AI Officer, Scott Fox. The segment was built in HubSpot using lifecycle stages and intent signals, contacts who had engaged in the last ninety days, visited the website, or shown interest in AI-related content. Her custom "Otto GPT" wrote the email copy and avatar script. Vidyard generated the video. HubSpot delivered it.
What made the campaign cut through wasn’t just the format. It was the relevance. Using CRM context and recent buyer signals, Liz tailored the message around the operational pain points hospitality teams know well: phones ringing off the hook during service, missed calls, interrupted staff, and lost revenue. The result felt less like a mass email and more like a timely, useful intervention.
The control email received zero clicks. The personalised video version delivered a 6.2% click rate and a 29% click-through rate, a 9x improvement, along with measurable traffic to the Otto product page.
"I thought my eyes were going blurry," Liz says. "29% click-through rate, that's usually about our open rate."
But Liz didn’t stop at engagement. To maintain momentum after the click, she partnered with SalesAI and used HubSpot workflows to triage out-of-hours leads, validating, qualifying, and routing them instantly. Within five minutes, a SalesAI agent calls the lead, shares key information, and books meetings, with full context synced back into HubSpot for follow-up.
The impact was immediate: across ANZ and North America, SalesAI-contacted leads converted from MQL to opportunity at ~25%, compared to ~6% for the control — a 4x improvement.
Amplify: Showing Up Without Burning Out
Consistency was the next problem. Liz knew that community-oriented social posts welcoming new venue partners, tagging restaurants, celebrating milestones generated the strongest engagement. But creating three original posts per week while managing acquisition, retention, and a product launch was consuming over four hours every Monday. And the posts were rarely timely.
So she built an automated workflow. When a new customer reaches fifty transactions in HubSpot, a trigger sends the venue details to an AI agent (affectionately named "Wof") who researches the restaurant, writes a community-style social post, and delivers it to a Slack channel for human review and publishing. What once took hours now takes minutes, and posts go live within a day of a customer's launch instead of a week later.
"Knowing that task was handled by AI removed a huge amount of mental load and let me focus on more valuable work," Liz says.
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Evolve: Turning Campaigns into Continuous Learning Loops
Inside HungryHungry, the transformation is structural. Liz moved from quarterly campaign cycles to weekly iteration. Instead of waiting for analysts to extract data from behind a wall, she uses Breeze to review performance immediately, feeding learnings back into her agents and her campaigns in real time.
"We used to have a quarterly campaign cycle," she says. "Now it's more like a weekly campaign cycle. The speed to market is exciting."
The social media workflow that consumed four-plus hours every Monday now runs in roughly ten minutes. Out-of-hours leads that once waited until the next business day for human contact are now engaged within approximately five minutes, improving speed-to-lead and meeting booking efficiency. And the proof-of-concept personalised video campaign didn't just validate a hypothesis, it justified continued investment in tools and automation by demonstrating clear, measurable ROI.
The Transformation
When Venues Win, Guests Feel it First
For the diners and operators that HungryHungry's venue partners serve every day, the shift was felt before it was measured. Venue operators who had once received generic outreach now opened personalized video emails that spoke directly to their pain, missed calls during peak service, revenue walking out the door, and clicked through at a 29% rate, nine times the industry baseline, against a control that got zero. Prospects reaching out on a Saturday night after a brutal service now received a call within five minutes, not a follow-up the following Tuesday. And newly signed partners, instead of going quiet after onboarding, were publicly welcomed to the HungryHungry community within a day of going live, a small moment that signals to a new venue they made the right choice.
The Confidence to Keep Building
But the numbers tell only part of the story. What changed most was confidence, the kind that comes from seeing data, acting on it quickly, and watching the system get smarter with each cycle. Liz moved from quarterly campaign cycles to weekly ones, not because she worked more hours, but because the performance data was in front of her the moment a campaign completed. When Otto messaging wasn't landing in Meta ads, she saw it in days and updated her agents immediately. The social workflow that had consumed four-plus hours every Monday now runs in roughly ten minutes.
"I never would have used Vidyard or created personalized videos if I hadn't been evolving from the start," Liz says. "For me, evolve is always the beginning of the Loop."
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