I grew up around a grocery store. My uncles own Poco Loco Supermercado — a neighborhood grocery that's been running for as long as I can remember. As a kid I'd stock shelves after school, watch the register during rushes, help with inventory on weekends. That store shaped how I think about work.
What I didn't understand as a kid was how much of the store's daily pain had nothing to do with groceries. It was the software. The POS system was slow, the inventory counts were always off, the reports took forever to pull. When the internet dropped — and it drops a lot in strip-mall retail — the whole system locked up. Customers waiting in line, cashier apologizing, my uncle calling the vendor's support number for the third time that week.
The market doesn't care about these stores
Enterprise POS vendors build for chains. They optimize for a 200-location grocery brand with a dedicated IT department and a six-figure contract. The independent grocer running two registers and managing their own books? They get the leftover tier — a stripped-down version of software designed for someone else, sold at a price that still hurts.
I saw this firsthand every time a new system got pitched to my uncles. The demos looked great. The reality was always the same: features that didn't map to their workflow, integrations that required middleware they didn't have, and support that treated them like a rounding error.
Why now
I've been a software engineer for a few years now. I work in TypeScript and React full-time, I know what it takes to ship production software. My co-founder Naif has been designing product interfaces for over a decade. Between us, we have the skills to build what Poco Loco actually needs — not what an enterprise vendor thinks they need.
REVOLT started as a question: what would a POS system look like if you designed it for a two-register grocery store first, then scaled up? Not the other way around.
That means offline-first because internet goes down. It means fast checkout because lines are real and people are impatient. It means inventory and employee management built in because these stores can't afford separate systems for everything. It means pricing in a way that doesn't require a six-figure annual contract.
What we're building
REVOLT is a full point-of-sale and back-office system. Electron app for the register, web dashboard for management, API that ties it all together. We're building for grocery and convenience stores specifically — not trying to be everything to everyone.
Poco Loco is our first pilot. They'll be the first store running REVOLT in production. If it works for them — if it actually makes their day easier — then we know we have something.
Every neighborhood has a store that keeps it running. We're building REVOLT for them.