Interview: Chicago Startup Toodalu Has It All Figured Out, Reward With Cash, Donate To Charity

by Kyle in Chicago, Everywhere Else, Featured, Startups
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Great things happen in Chicago, despite what anybody else says. Toodalu is one of those great things. Founded by three friends that met in (dare I say) Chicago’s thriving tech scene, Todd O’Hara, Ravi Singh and Chris Lubinski, they set out to provide another mobile startup that caters to the reward/engagement/loyalty space but they’ve hit something on the head with greatness, and that is CASH IS KING.

With the new Toodalu app when you shop at a participating merchant you get 5% cash back on your credit card and another 5% donated to charity. Which charity? Whichever one you want. We know that Target lets you donate to a ton of charities but with Toodalu you don’t need to have your charity on a list, it just needs to be a real charity.

“The user can choose ANY non-profit to give to! That’s the key element that excites our users and merchants. In addition, a user can select up to one hundred different charitable organizations to support and select how, exactly, they wish to distribute the giving by allocating percentages.” O’Hara told us in an interview.

Not only is Toodalu of epic greatness because they’ve already figured out the reward and the charity but it’s simple. We got a chance to catch up with O’Hara, who by the way Trevor was up at 10pm answering questions for us, way past the 5pm Pando curfew. The first thing we wanted to know is how did you stumble upon such a great idea:

Toodalu is a new breed of loyalty rewards. Just link any credit or debit card to your Toodalu account and when you use that card any partner location, 5% of every purchase is donated to the charity of your choice. We are proud to help charities raise boat loads of money while attaching purpose to the purchases of our users. The idea was born from the question,”how can we increase participation rates for charitable giving?”

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Des Moines Startup: Freebee Cards About To Launch, Making Customer Loyalty And Engagement Fun

by Kyle in Des Moines, Everywhere Else, Featured, Mobile, Startups
1 Comment 0 Like 2,630

A new Des Moines based startup called FreebeeCards is preparing for launch. They are launching May 15th in Des Moines and they are currently signing up merchants and users, for what promises to be a fun and exciting new way to build customer loyalty and engagement.

Freebee Cards was founded by CEO Ken Lazzaro who is a consultant in the reward/loyalty card and credit card processing space so he has experience with this kind of thing. How did he come up with Freebee Cards? Their marketing guy Todd Razor told us in an interview:

“Ken’s consulting company, which educates and helps business owners implement gift card, loyalty and credit card processing programs, was working with the owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Austin, Texas.  Ken had just sold the business owner a point-of-sale system, and she was also very interested in increasing customer loyalty. Ken’s company approached her about offering preloaded gift cards with varying values of $5, $10, $25 and $50 to customers in her area.

She loved the idea of consumers having to visit her store to find out the value of the cards. Yet a concern over not being able to measure the customer acquisition cost stopped her short of running that program. 

Ken soon realized that developing an electronic version of this gift card marketing concept would allow merchants to track customer shopping habits, as well as open a direct line of communication to make special offers, reward customer loyalty and collect candid feedback outside of the public’s view.

It snowballed into an idea for a website and FreebeeCards was born.”

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