The founding team at Bagel came from fuel retail and retail store operations. We didn't discover the problem through market research — we experienced it firsthand, every shift, for years.
We watched stores lose money to processor float — revenue sitting in someone else's account for a week while the operator scraped together cash to pay vendors. We dealt with dispenser controllers that needed a specialist to update a fuel price. We closed shifts by hand because the POS and the back office didn't talk to each other.
The more we looked, the more we realized the market had just accepted this. Legacy vendors had locked up the industry with expensive hardware and long contracts. Nobody had tried to build something better from scratch — something designed for the way these businesses actually operate today.
So we did. Bagel started as a working prototype built by the founding team — no outside engineers, no outsourced development. Just people who knew the problem building the solution they wished existed.