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Myron Rivers has always been an impatient person. After becoming a single father trying to please three kids, he quickly realized a problem when taking them to concerts, movies or shows: the time spent waiting in line. From the soil of sore moods, the seeds of Lerch were born.
“If you’ve ever been to an event and had to stand and wait in line, and you’ve missed that game-winning shot or your favorite song, Lerch is the solution for you,” founder and CEO Myron Rivers told The Black Wall Street Times.
Founded in May of 2020, Lerch is a mobile application that allows you to order food, beverage and to find your way from your seat to the bathroom, all from the convenience of your phone.
Moving from Cincinnati to the home of the original Black Wall Street, Rivers remains one of a select list of Black founders who has joined Tulsa’s Techstars accelerator program.
Tulsa’s Techstars participants reflect a resurgence of entrepreneurship in Historic Greenwood District, and Myron Rivers has joined the creative community intent on building on the legacy of Black economics.
Lerch solves a major problem
Like any entrepreneur, Rivers noticed a problem and worked to solve it.
As a single father, Rivers said he strives to make his children happy. Taking his two daughters and son to events, Rivers has learned firsthand the problem facing both customers and facilities. During an intermission, Rivers once found it impossible to take his kids to the bathroom and to the concession stand in time.
“So you have to go to both bathrooms, wait, and then they’re thirsty or hungry. And you really can’t do that in the amount of time available,” Rivers told The Black Wall Street Times. “That really stuck with me.”
While doing consulting work for a client, the seeds of Lerch began to sprout.
“It really is kind of silly that in this day and age, we don’t have the ability to order something as simple as a drink or food at an event or concert when we have the ability to order food, beverage, anything we want at any other time at any other place,” Rivers said.
The problems facing customers appear obvious. Customers who pay for an event are also paying for the time spent waiting in line for concession or the bathroom, while missing parts of the show they paid for.
But the issue impacts facilities too, Rivers said, when people are either walking out of line or they spend so much time in line that they don’t come back to order more amenities.
“So, we created Lerch as a way to meet both of those needs and solve those problems.”
Building a premier event app
Aside from instant food and beverage ordering, the app also provides directions to the bathroom, your seat, or the concession stand. Like other wayfinding apps for traveling, the technology also tells you how long the wait is in the bathroom.
Especially for people with bowel problems, waiting in line for the bathroom can be disastrous.
Like Waze, once you have an aggregate number of people connected to the app, it uses telemetry to provide the relevant information.
Telemetry is a term for technologies that accommodate collecting information in the form of measurements or statistical data, and forward it to IT systems in a remote location, according to technopedia.
Currently, Lerch works with a facility in Cincinnati and local vendors in Tulsa. The go-to-market strategy involves targeting food trucks across the country as a way to connect to users. Tulsa food trucks have already signed up, and Rivers plans to expand his operations to Houston with a future headquarters in Tulsa.
“We want Lerch to be the premiere live-event app in the world,” Rivers said.
To learn more, visit www.asklerch.com, call 844.44.Lerch or email mr@asklerch.com.
Link to Black Wall Street Times>