Hi! I’m Dustin. This is my family.
It’s a bit of a story, actually…
The story goes that in the Summer of 2014 my family was headed to Walt Disney World for the first time in a long time. My daughter was not even 3 and my two boys were still just an idea and a hope. We were traveling with my brother and his family of 6, as well as my mother-in-law.
Back then Disney used to do these “Star Wars Weekends” throughout May and most of the summer. This just meant that special Star Wars-themed events were scattered throughout the parks. One of those was at Hollywood & Vine where Mickey and his friends were dressed up as Star Wars characters. Maybe this photo will jog your memory.
If you’re still here, I’ll assume you’re here for the story. Continuing on…
It was during this process I recall Emily teasing the concept of MouseDining to my brother and me. Describing the challenges of booking dining reservations, she said something along the lines of, “It would be really nice if I could just be put on a waiting list and get notified when something opens up.”
Stop for a moment.
You know that look when someone has a curious idea and is caught thinking? That was my brother at that moment – just stopped in thought. He’s a talented systems engineer turned developer and was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop, as he often was. When he managed to finish thinking, there was an obvious shift in his focus. He continued down the rabbit hole we’d started, but in a very nonchalant, almost “hold my beer” kind of way.
I had worked with him long enough to know to leave him alone. This is when he performed his best and most productive work.
I recall and tell the story that about 45 minutes later he came up from his rabbit hole and had a working prototype of MouseDining. He’d made it so that it monitored Disney’s website for a lunch for 3 at Cinderella’s Royal Table on the dates we specified. It was a very manual, hard-coded version, but he said it “should work”. He then proceeded to make it so that Emily would get a text message when his prototype saw something other than “No availability” in the results. That’s all it did.
The evening hours set in and we had to get our young families to bed, so we left my brother’s house and wondered if we’d ever see anything from it.
I kid you not when, just hours later, in the wee hours of the morning Emily’s phone buzzes. I recall the buzz, but was only half awake settled back in. I could tell Emily had sat up in bed and I hear her say, “I got a text from your brother’s alert.” She sounded excited. I didn’t buy it. So many things could have caused his process to trigger a false-positive text message. Moments later the excitement turned violent and I was repeatedly beat on by a fist with Emily saying, “I got it! I got it! I got it!”. “It works”, she said.
And that was that. Here’s a photo of the reservation at Cinderella’s Royal Table that Emily likes to say, “started it all”.
UPDATE: January 8, 2023
After hearing from dozens of visitors that wanted the rest of the story, I responded to each with some version of the story that I’m now sharing below:
Following the success of my brother’s prototype, we used it privately for about a year. Of course, we also shared it with close family and friends when we heard they were making plans to go to Disney. Each time we shared it, we’d receive comments of how amazing it was and that we should build a service that does this. We always had the intention of turning it into a service, but we didn’t have capacity with our current developers to start a new project for a while. My brother owned a software company where I worked and we were regularly starting new projects, so we just had to wait until a few developers had some free time to spend on MouseDining. In the meantime, we continued to iterate on the idea and monetization structure.
About a year after the prototype, we had some developers free up and had them get started on a public version. The first version we planned to release was aimed at allowing customers to identify up to a 14 day window for their trip and set as many alerts as they would like in that window for a flat fee of $29.99.
Development began on that product and we began redirecting friends and family to that version of the service (still private) so testing was being done along the way. After about 5 months of part-time development, we prepared to officially launch MouseDining.com on October 19, 2015. This date is significant, because just days prior to launch we had heard that Disney’s legal team had sent all competing services at that time cease and desist letters…
“Well, that was a lot of work for nothing,” were our initial thoughts. We were deflated and disappointed. That turned into frustration and eventually led to us reaching out to as many of those services as we could to find out more about what happened. We ended up speaking with three of them. All three that spoke to us said they were caught on a technicality of scraping Disney’s website, but that the real problem was a couple of the services at that time were known to be scalping tickets – hoarding dining reservations under false names and then selling those reservations to guests. It sounded as if many legitimate services were being shut down because of a couple bad apples.
After speaking with those three individuals we concluded that if we were to continue to pursue launching our service, that we would need to be under the umbrella of a travel agency. We also were informed by several others that if the tool were free, that Disney wouldn’t care that these tools existed, as it no longer gave advantages to guests willing to spend money with third-parties.
We still wanted our tool to see the light of day, so we took this information and ripped all billing out of our service, set up a travel agency, and launched the service a month later than we had planned, roughly November 18, 2015.
We operated 100% for free just to see what would happen and, honestly, the entire team went back to work on other projects. It wasn’t a focus of mine any more… until about 10 months later. That’s when I was going through my credit card expenses and saw a near $900+ charge from Twilio.com. Twilio handled all our SMS messaging and we had a couple other small projects that used it as well. So I had to understand what was triggering so many text messages to be sent. Turns out it was MouseDining.
With very minimal effort in the remaining 45 days of 2015 and then as an afterthought throughout the majority of 2016, MouseDining had somehow accumulated several thousand users (many travel agents) over 10 months and we had sent over 100,000 messages the previous month, resulting in that $900+ charge to my credit card.
At that moment I knew we had something special, but it was debated internally if we should shut it down because we weren’t confident in our ability to charge for it without Disney sending us our own cease and desist letter. Before our Twilio invoice could grow, I sent a survey to users explaining the situation we were in. I proposed a few possible solutions – putting ads on the site, taking the site offline, removing text messaging, and charging a fee for the service… Almost unanimously users commented how much they enjoyed the service and that they’d love to support the product by paying something to help keep it online and available for their use.
So we quickly re-integrated our billing system (Stripe.com, whom we still use to this day), changed the previous price to a $29.99 monthly fee instead of a one-time fee (because our most egregious users were travel agents using MouseDining to help plan multiple clients’ trips year-round) and put a few limitations in place such as 50 alerts to ensure the $29.99 would cover the costs of the average travel agent, as well as any users who were using the service, but unwilling or unable to pay for it.
It’s important to note that we retained the free version of the service, but limited alerts to 6 to help mitigate expenses incurred by free users. I felt (and still do) that offering a free version of our services would/will help prove to Disney, should they choose to investigate us, our willingness to help every guest get dining reservations, regardless of their ability or desire to pay us anything. This was also something one of the three individuals we spoke to about the cease and desist letters helped us to understand – Disney didn’t want guests who were able and willing to pay to have an advantage over guests who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. Keeping the free version of the service allowed everyone the same opportunity whether they paid or not. They just couldn’t use the service in the same volume as paying customers.
This model kept us afloat for another year or two, but other projects still demanded my time and development was mostly stagnant unless something broke or became high priority by way of customer complaints. As the service grew in popularity, so did its expenses. Free users began to significantly outweigh paying customers, so adjustments to the pricing model had to be made.
This is how the tiered pricing models were introduced – $5, $10, $20, and $30 monthly plans were rolled out, with increased savings on annual plans ($45, $80, $140, and $180, respectively). The free account remained unchanged. For the new tiered plans, the number of alerts supported went to 20 ($5 monthly), 50 ($10 monthly), 100 ($20 monthly), and unlimited ($30 monthly). I believe at this time we also began supporting international numbers for SMS texts, which increased our average texting costs further.
I had thought that this model would propel MouseDining to actually turn a profit, but it continued to barely break even the next few years – losing a little money some months and profiting a little other months. Keep in mind, this was before anyone even took a salary against it. So this was just hardware, cloud services, monitoring tools, email services, and texting services. It didn’t scale at all. I jokingly considered it a non-profit business due to its financial reports – we spent everything we took in and didn’t profit much, if at all.
Meanwhile, I was still working on other projects, but we did have a buyer on the hook for the primary service service I was committed to. As I prepared to sell that business and transition it to a new owner, I began to look at MouseDining as my next full-time focus.
In order for MouseDining to support an annual salary for me and a small support staff, I knew text messaging had to no longer be included as part of our free service. It’s the decision I didn’t want to make, but knew I had prolonged that decision as long as I could. I had surveyed users multiple times up to this point to share my thoughts for growing the service and improving it, but texting was always something users held on to dearly. So it was one of the most difficult, but critical decisions I had to make in MouseDining’s history.
In November 2019 texting would no longer be supported for free users. I gave existing customers ample notice. I simplified pricing to the now current $9 monthly and $90 annually model, migrating all users on more expensive plans to this lower plan (decreasing the amount of revenue from our heaviest users), and grandfathered anyone on the $5 plan to remain at the $5 price point and receive the benefits of the now $9 monthly plan (50 alerts) so that they could retain their text messaging without any increase in cost.
The adoption was slow, but it did appear to have the effect needed to work full time on MouseDining. Things were looking up. And then, well, March 14, 2020 came (i.e. COVID-19), and both Disneyland and Walt Disney World would close indefinitely a day later.
Ouch.
I panicked, almost in disbelief. I decided I’d refrain from hiring any help and sat tight until I knew what was going on.
I managed to help sell the other business I was committed to and only had some transitory tasks on my plate before I was going to have to decide what I was going to do for income in a few short months.
Luckily, Disney World reopened on July 11, 2020, only 118 days after closing. Disneyland remained closed for the foreseeable future. However, this was enough to allow me to keep working on MouseDining myself (without a salary). My skills are limited to operations and marketing, so the service didn’t change much during this time. It did, however, allow me to regroup with my brother and make a detailed plan to refactor a lot of MouseDining’s underlying services and code.
Therefore, I set out to find a developer to help me get started on refactoring the service. Taking on as little risk as possible, I went with a freelancer so if the revenue dried up or Disney sent that seemingly inevitable cease & desist letter, I wouldn’t have overcommitted my budget or team in an already dire COVID-19 world.
Work started on refactoring MouseDining in the Summer of 2020. My brother continued to be a great (free) resource during this time as well. I’d organize a sprint (a series of focused development tasks), get a cost estimate, and hire the work out to freelancers as the money became available. It was slow, but I could see things improving and getting better. Unfortunately, none of this would really be visible or felt by users. This was all back-end, administrative improvements that would help set MouseDining up for success if it could ever turn the corner. My insurance policy on all this was at least I would have a tidy, clean package to hand off to a potential new owner if it came down to having to sell this business and find a new job. I didn’t want it to come to that, but I was prepared for the occasion.
After limping along (like everyone else) in 2020, Disneyland finally reopened after 412 days of closure as a result of COVID-19 (March 15, 2020 – April 30, 2021). This is when you could say the corner was being rounded. Apparently Disneyland fans had missed their theme park so much that after just 60 days of Disneyland parks reopening, I had the cash flow (and confidence) to hire one of my freelance developers on a more full-time basis, as well as someone to take the customer service duties off my plate and free up about 2-3 hours of my workday. It was around this time I began taking a small salary as well.
Since then, things have been much more relaxed and we’re hitting our stride. We ended up refactoring most of MouseDining’s original code in 2021, and were able to start rolling out some new features in 2022. For example, around August 2022 we rolled out the support of non-dining events such as Savi’s Workshop, BBB, and all tours able to be booked online. I was also able to renegotiate terms with Stripe.com and Twilio.com due to our significant volume increases in 2021 and 2022.
As for what’s coming, I have a new front-end design I’m working on. The current user experience isn’t as good as I think it can be, so I’m hiring some help to guide me through that process. Additionally, I’ve finished designing a rudimentary prototype mobile app that will run on our brand new API that should be live sometime during Q1 2023. Look for that on iOS first, and the Android (hopefully) not too far behind.
I have many more reports and data available to help me understand the status of our service at any given time. I plan to share a lot of this data with users in their accounts to improve the transparency and value our services provide. This means that 2023 will see many more features continue to be rolled out.
I’m excited to share more about these features in the coming months. I usually tease these on Facebook first before making any official announcements to users via email. So follow MouseDining there for the most current developments and features of our service.
Wow. This page ended up a lot longer than I’d hoped, so if you’ve stuck it out this far, thank you for your interest in MouseDining and support of our services. As always, you can reach me via the contact form to share your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, complaints – just about anything – and either myself or my customer service specialist will see it and pass it on.
Wishing you a safe journey wherever you are in life.
Dustin