Wushiland Boba vs Papa Murphy's

Papa Murphy’s gives us a massive, ready-made TAM—965 franchised units that are already operating, already paying royalties, and already dependent on POS, scheduling, and back-office systems. That’s a deep, predictable replacement cycle. The downside is the -3.6% unit contraction, which signals a shrinking install base and franchisees under margin pressure. However, a 5% royalty on a $450K–$693K build-out means operators are running lean, and any software that demonstrably reduces labor or food waste gets a hearing. The approved-supplier procurement model also means we don’t face a locked, corporate-mandated tech stack, so displacement selling is viable across nearly a thousand doors right now.

Wushiland Boba is the growth story—61.5% unit expansion on a tiny base of 14 franchised locations. That velocity matters, but the absolute number is a rounding error for a software vendor that needs to book revenue this year. The investment range overlaps with Papa Murphy’s, so budget isn’t the differentiator; timing is. Selling into 14 units, even with a strong growth curve, means our pipeline depends on new openings that haven’t broken ground yet. The higher royalty (5.5%) and low ad fund (0.5%) suggest the franchisor is extracting value from operators rather than reinvesting in demand generation, which can squeeze the very store-level P&Ls we’d need to tap for software spend.

The tradeoff is TAM versus trajectory. Papa Murphy’s wins on immediate addressable market and replacement urgency, despite the negative unit trend. Wushiland’s growth rate is eye-catching, but the installed base is too small to justify dedicated sales effort today. We’d monitor Wushiland for a future play, but right now the volume of at-bats in Papa Murphy’s system—and the pain of managing a complex make-take model with thin margins—makes it the stronger near-term software opportunity.

Verdict: Papa Murphy’s is the stronger software-sales opportunity right now because its 965-unit installed base offers immediate, high-volume displacement potential that dwarfs Wushiland’s promising but tiny growth trajectory.