One human. Not an agency. On purpose.

ShortOrder Labs is Derek Bobola, based in Nashua, New Hampshire. That’s the whole org chart.

Before this, Derek spent 30 years owning and running small independent restaurants. Three decades of writing menus, costing plates, setting prices, and keeping a small room full — the same job you’re doing right now. That experience is behind every site this shop builds and every piece of advice it gives.

ShortOrder Labs exists because independent restaurants keep getting a raw deal online. The big platforms are built — and priced — for multi-location operations. The DIY builders assume you have a free afternoon, which you haven’t had since you opened. So too many great restaurants end up with a website from five years ago, or no website at all. Derek lived that from the owner’s side of the counter; now he builds the websites, marketing, and tools he wished he’d had.

The bet is simple: one person who has actually run a restaurant, working small and local, can do this job better for indie restaurants than a platform can — and charge honestly for it. When you text about a menu change, the person who answers is the person who fixes it. When something on your site looks off, you know exactly who to call, and he picks up.

The other bet is about taste. Your restaurant’s whole appeal is that it’s real — real food, real room, real people. Marketing made of AI-generated food photos and machine-written captions works against the only thing you’ve got that the chains don’t. So we simply don’t do it. Ever.

If that sounds like your kind of deal, the front door is the free menu audit. No pitch, one page, yours to keep.