Steep Me

The vendor opportunity at Steep Me

Steep Me is a retail food concept headquartered in North Dakota with exactly 2 company-owned locations as of its 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document. The number of franchised units is not disclosed, and no year-over-year unit growth rate is reported. For a software vendor, the immediate addressable market is those 2 units — a single-owner, single-decision-maker environment where a successful pilot could lock in the entire system.

Average unit volume (AUV) is not disclosed in the FDD, so revenue-based sizing isn’t possible from public filings. The royalty rate sits at 6.0% on a 10-year initial term, with renewal options for up to two additional 5-year terms. That long initial commitment suggests stability, but the tiny unit count means any software sale here is a niche play, not a volume play.

Who controls software purchasing

The 2025 FDD lists one executive: Jerry Hintz, Agent for Service of Process. In a system this small, Hintz is almost certainly the sole decision-maker for all operational and financial software. There is no CIO, CTO, or procurement officer on file. Vendors should prepare to engage directly with the owner-operator level — there is no layered buying center to navigate.

No operator footprint is mapped in our corpus, meaning no multi-unit franchisees exist to create a secondary purchasing channel. Every software decision runs through the HQ in North Dakota.

Mandated and current tech stack

Steep Me’s 2025 FDD mandates exactly one technology system: QuickBooks by Intuit Inc. This is the financial backbone of the business. No POS system, inventory management platform, payroll provider, or CRM is named as mandated or recommended in the filing. That absence is itself a signal — the tech stack is either minimal or entirely ad hoc beyond accounting.

For vendors selling complementary or replacement financial tools, the QuickBooks mandate is a hard constraint. Any pitch must integrate with or displace Intuit’s ecosystem. For vendors selling operational software (POS, scheduling, loyalty, delivery), the field appears wide open — but you’ll need to prove value to a 2-unit operator who may not yet see the need.

Procurement, renewals, and timing

Item 8 of the FDD — which typically discloses procurement restrictions, designated suppliers, and rebate structures — contains no extract in our data. That means Steep Me either does not impose procurement controls on franchisees or simply did not disclose them in the standard format. Without that signal, assume an open procurement model until proven otherwise.

Renewal conditions (Item 17) require franchisees to sign the then-current form of franchise agreement, comply with all obligations, renovate to current standards, and execute a general release. The renewal term is 5 years. For a software vendor, those renovation requirements could trigger technology upgrades — a natural insertion point for new tools. However, with no franchised units currently operating, renewal-driven sales cycles are theoretical for now.

How to read the Steep Me FDD

The full 2025 Steep Me Franchise Disclosure Document is embedded below. It is the primary source for every fact on this page. Use it to verify the QuickBooks mandate, the 6.0% royalty, the 10-year term, and the single executive contact. For vendors building a ranked target list of franchise systems, Steep Me represents a micro-cap opportunity — small today, but with a centralized buyer and no entrenched enterprise tech stack to displace. Talk to FranCloud if you want to see how Steep Me compares to other retail food franchisors in your pipeline.