A founder shares their experience building an AI voice agent for restaurants, detailing rejection from Clover, Toast, and Deliverect, and seeks advice on whether to pivot or continue pursuing integrations.
Hi everyone, I'm looking for some honest advice from founders and engineers who've built products that depend on third-party platforms. Over the last 6 months, my co-founder and I built an AI phone agent for restaurants. The product is production-ready and can: • Answer incoming restaurant phone calls • Take orders conversationally • Answer menu questions • Upsell items • Send SMS order confirmations • Transfer calls to restaurant staff when needed • Create orders directly in the POS The entire AI voice infrastructure is complete and working. The problem is distribution. We first integrated with Clover using their official APIs. After months of development and going through their review process, Clover's legal team rejected our app, saying they currently don't have an established policy governing third-party AI applications. During the review we clarified that: • Call recording is completely optional and controlled by the restaurant. • Recordings remain in Twilio and are not stored on our servers. • We only store transcripts for restaurant review. • We do not use customer conversations to train foundation AI models. Even after explaining all of this, the application was still rejected. We also explored Toast and Deliverect, but those paths haven't worked out either. What makes this confusing is that companies like Loman AI and Certus AI publicly advertise Clover integrations and appear to provide very similar AI voice ordering functionality. At this point we're wondering if we're chasing the wrong problem. Our options seem to be: Continue integrating with another POS (Square, etc.), knowing it could take several more months with no guarantee of approval. Remove the POS dependency and become an AI receptionist that sends orders to restaurant staff for manual entry. Pivot the technology into another industry (HVAC, dental, plumbing, legal, etc.) where phone automation is valuable but doesn't depend on POS approvals. Something else that we haven't considered. My questions are: • Has anyone here built software that required approval from Clover, Toast, Square, Shopify, Salesforce, or another platform? • Is this kind of rejection just part of building on someone else's ecosystem? • If you were in our position, would you keep pursuing restaurant POS integrations or pivot before investing another 6+ months? • Are there other approaches to restaurant automation that don't depend on getting platform approval? We're not trying to complain about Clover or any specific company. We understand they have legal and security responsibilities. We're simply trying to decide whether this is a normal hurdle that startups eventually overcome, or a signal that our business is too dependent on approvals from platforms we don't control. I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who's been through something similar. Thanks!
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