How we helped Novi Sad book a table without a single phone call
Ask anyone in Novi Sad how they booked a table last weekend and you will hear the same story: a phone call during the dinner rush, a message left on read, or an Instagram DM answered an hour later. No idea which tables were free. No idea where you would end up sitting. For restaurants, it was just as messy - reservations scattered across notebooks, chat apps, and memory, which meant the occasional double booking and a lot of manual coordination.
We partnered with a Novi Sad-based startup to fix exactly that, and the result is MyHost - a reservation platform where guests browse venues, see the real floor plan, and reserve a specific table in about a minute.
The problem: reservations with no visibility
The regional market simply had no unified place to discover restaurants, see real table availability, and book a precise seat. Guests were flying blind and venues were drowning in manual work. The experience felt stuck a decade in the past while everything else - food delivery, ride hailing, ticketing - had moved on.
So we did not start with code. We started with the market: competitor analysis, user interviews, and a hard look at what would actually change behaviour. The insight was simple - people do not just want to reserve, they want to choose where they sit.
The hard part: a table map that works on a phone
The centerpiece - and the toughest engineering challenge - was a fully dynamic, interactive table map. Managers lay out their floor plan in an admin editor, and those exact layouts render interactively on mobile with reliable touch, scaling cleanly across screen sizes and handling complex, real-world floor plans.
Under the hood we chose a flexible document model (MongoDB) so a floor plan can be as simple or as intricate as the venue needs, a .NET Core API as the backbone, a React Native (Expo) app for guests, and a React web admin for operators.
"Finally, I can book my favorite table without making a call. I see the space, pick the spot, and I'm done in a minute." - MyHost app user
More than booking
Treating MyHost as a product rather than a feature list meant designing for retention from day one:
- For guests: discovery and filters, tap-to-reserve on the table map, reviews and favourites, loyalty points and discounts, and event booking.
- For restaurant managers: a visual table editor, real-time reservation management, events, push notifications, and a clear daily schedule.
- For the platform team: network-wide analytics, venue and user management, and promotional campaigns.
The results
The product found its market quickly:
- 10,000+ users in Novi Sad within months
- 50+ restaurants onboarded and growing
- ~20% month-over-month user growth during the campaign period
- Consistent feedback that table-level booking beats the old phone-call routine
We shipped one of the region's more advanced digital table-reservation experiences - with the performance, UX, and architecture ready for city-to-city expansion.
The takeaway
A good product does not just digitise an old process - it removes the friction that made people avoid it. For MyHost, that meant turning a phone call into a tap, and turning a notebook into a live operations tool.
You can explore the full MyHost case study, or see it live at my-host.rs. Building something similar for your city or venue? Let's talk.
