Restworld: a hiring platform for restaurants and hotels at $35K a month

Restworld is a hiring platform for restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses in the HoReCa sector that connects them with workers, and its founder reported $35K a month in revenue in a July 2023 interview (Starter Story).

How it started

Luca Lotterio, born in Rome, is a psychologist who worked in restaurants across Europe and was based in Turin when he built Restworld. The idea came out of his university thesis, where he mixed human resources and restaurants: a platform to match people and companies, as he put it, "like Tinder but not for having sex, but for working."

He first talked with his colleague Davide Lombardi, who became the co-founder, then the two walked through 102 restaurants around Turin asking owners which staffing challenges they faced, and did the same with workers. They ran a small university program with two schools to validate the idea, entered hackathons, and later brought on two other co-founders with engineering backgrounds. Restworld started in February 2020.

The first version was deliberately simple: a job advertisement posted on job boards, applicants collected and selected through Google Docs, Gmail, Typeform and a couple of basic automations.

What it sells and how it charges

According to its official site as fetched on 2026-09-30 (Restworld), Restworld is a staff recruitment platform dedicated to the HoReCa sector, serving restaurants, hotels, bars, chains and groups of every size. The business sells access to a hiring workflow rather than a one-off placement.

Pricing is published on the site's pricing page: €19,90 per day, with no commitment, VAT excluded. Payment runs through card or PayPal, handled by Stripe, so card details never pass through Restworld.

What the fee includes: - An optimized and sponsored job ad, published on Restworld and on the main job portals in one click. - Pre-selection on WhatsApp, where candidates answer the questions the business sets (availability, experience, distance, hours). - Only applications that match the role and location, with a shortlist of verified profiles within 72 hours. - A real-time dashboard showing cost per candidate and hours saved versus traditional channels. - The ability to pause and resume a search at any time, and live chat support.

The homepage also states 225.000+ registered professionals and 3.000+ completed hires since 2020. Those figures are from the official site as fetched on 2026-09-30; the site does not publish revenue there.

How it got its first customers and what kept growth going

The founder's early move was to "do things that don't scale": walk into restaurants, talk to people and meet applicants one to one. As he described it, "we decided to walk through 102 restaurants around Turin and ask the owners which challenges they were affording with staff."

From the worker side, job boards were the first acquisition channel, a method that carried through as the company later added a more omnichannel approach to lower cost per applicant. On the customer side, Restworld found an easy funnel on Meta, and the founder pointed to an LTV/CAC ratio of more than x20 as the business's disruptor in acquisition. Growth was held together by retention work and a focus on lifetime value rather than raw year-on-year multiples.

The numbers

Revenue: $35K a month, founder-reported in the July 2023 Starter Story interview. This is what the founder said at that date; it is not presented as current revenue.
Team: 4 founders and 13 employees at the time of the July 2023 interview.
Customers and community: the founder reported more than 800 customers and a community of more than 72,000 subscribers in the interview.
Startup cost: the founder did not state a startup cost, and the official site does not publish one.

How it compares

The comparisons below come from 1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported cases: 1,997 businesses interviewed by Starter Story between 2015 and 2026, a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed rather than a random sample of all businesses. Within the Marketplaces & platforms category, 89 businesses reported revenue.

Median monthly revenue in the category is $51K. Restworld's founder-reported $35K a month sits below that median.
44% of the category reached $1M a year or more in founder-reported revenue.
Median employees in the category is 5. Restworld reported 13 employees at the interview, well above that median headcount.
38% of the category was started by a single founder. Restworld began with four founders, so it falls in the multi-founder group.
Top growth channels in the category, among the 69 businesses that reported channel information: organic social media at 62%, SEO and organic search at 56%, paid ads at 44%, and email and newsletters at 33%. Restworld's own early channels were job boards on the worker side and a Meta funnel on the customer side.

The dataset is self-selected, so these medians and shares describe the founders who spoke to Starter Story, not the whole market.

What a founder can take from it

Do things that don't scale first. Restworld walked into 102 restaurants and talked to owners and workers one to one before automating anything. You can validate demand by showing up in person before you build the machine.
Talk to both sides of a marketplace early. Restworld tested its idea with restaurant owners and with workers before committing to a product, which is how it learned restaurants were not ready to run hiring themselves.
Pair a domain founder with technical co-founders. Luca came from psychology and restaurants; the team later added two co-founders with engineering backgrounds. You don't have to close that gap on day one, but it is worth planning for.
Treat acquisition as the thing to engineer. The founder cited an LTV/CAC above x20 and a low-cost Meta funnel as the real edge. Watch your own acquisition cost as you grow rather than assuming growth solves it.
Keep lightweight operating habits. Restworld ran team meetings twice a month, a board meeting quarterly, and daily standups, then shared monthly updates with shareholders and quarterly updates with everyone involved.

None of this guarantees revenue. It is one founder's reported path, not a template with a promised outcome.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure