Kyle
Loyalty and reward is the hottest space for startups right now. Within a years time (probably by the next sxsw) many of the loyalty and rewards startups out there will have disappeared and only the brightest and best will survive. One of those is California based startup RewardMe.
RewardMe was founded by four friends that were college buddies from UCLA. The company provides a point of sale based loyalty and rewards program that provides great information back to the business owner. RewardME rewards those loyal customers but it can also assist in bringing lost customers and sales back into the retail store or restaurant.
One of the unique things about RewardMe is while you can get incentives, messages and discounts via your smartphone or regular mobile phone, a smartphone isn’t required.
RewardMe’s merchant dashboard is available to any user anywhere. This is great for when the owner or manager goes out of town or if you’re managing multiple locations from one centralized office.
RewardMe has thought of everything that should be built into a solid reward and loyalty program. We got a chance to interview the guys behind RewardMe. Check out the interview below:
What is RewardMe?
RewardMe (http://www.rewardme.com) is a customer loyalty platform for the restaurant and retail industries that captures customer data at the point of sale and empowers businesses to use the data to influence customer behavior. The platform analyzes customer demographics, purchase patterns, and behaviors while providing tools that enable businesses to:
- Drive lost customers back to the store
- Provides targeted marketing messages to consumers through personalized emails and text messaging
- Incentivize actions via gamification techniques
RewardMe currently serves businesses from the largest multinational franchises to small single-store and single-restaurant local businesses.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Yu-kai Chou, CEO
7 Years of entrepreneur experience. Regular Social Media and Gamification Speaker/Lecturer for Stanford, Google, and various conferences etc. Co-Founder/CEO of FDCareer (“Top 10 Social Networks for Gen-Ys” – Mashable) & Viralogy. BA UCLA.Adam Gervin, Business Development
Co-Founder/BizDev for: Onebox.com (sold to Openwave for $850M), SEVEN Networks (profitable and #2 after RIM), Caustic Graphics (sold to Imagination), VerdiSoft (sold to Yahoo!). VP Global Product Marketing of Rovi, Sr. Manager of BD at Openwave Systems. MD Stanford & BS Yale.
Stephen Johnson, Product
15+ years programming experience. Lead Developer for BunchBall and built large scalable gamification platforms NBC, P&G, MySpace, and Victoria’s Secret. Co-Founder/CTO of FDCareer and Viralogy. BA & BS from UCLA.Jun Loayza, Chief Marketing Officer
Founder/President of SocialMediaMarketing.com in SEOP and Untemplater. Grew company to $12M in revenue within one year with customers like LG, Levi’s, and Activision. Sold Untemplater. BA UCLA.
The three founders met at UCLA.Yu-kai and Jun were pledge bros at Delta Sigma Pi – International Business Fraternity. Stephen was the first engineer to join the team and later became a founder.
Restaurants and retailers do not have an easy and effective way to create a loyalty program. Archaic solutions such as the punch card or loyalty card are expensive, subject to fraud, and are annoying for users because they take up wallet space or are easily forgotten at home. New solutions such as iPhone or Android apps aren’t accessible to all customers and can’t capture dollars spent or item-level data, greatly diminishing the value of a rewards program.
Our solution is unique because it’s accessible to all customers, captures dollar value, and captures SKU-level data that a business can use to better market and advertise to customers.
Our secret sauce is our patent-pending technology that allows us to capture dollar value and SKU-level data directly from the point of sale without requiring full POS integration.
What is one lesson you learned in the startup process?
Startups don’t kill startups: it’s easy to get caught up in chasing the competition: they may launch a new feature that you do not have or they may close a deal with a business that you were chasing. This can cause a startup to doubt the product and pivot directions in order to catch up to the competition. Instead of chasing the competition, it’s important to think of the competition as your best teachers, but nothing more. Stay true to your product vision and focus all energy on execution. The startup that executes best (as oppose to the startup with the best features) is usually the startup that wins.
The next step is to close our series A of funding.
On the product side, we are in the process of launching our customer dashboard.
