Loyalty reward Archives - Serious Startups

Interview With Memphis Startup Stiqrd’s Founder Aaron Pranther On Expansion

One thing we all know for sure is that loyalty and rewwards startups are a flourishing space. A lot of the better ideas for loyalty and rewards are starting in small markets. Stiqrd is one of those startups.

The great thing about Stiqrd though is that when we first talked with Aaron Pranther, CEO and co-founder of the company they were already talking about taking their concept and scaling it as quickly, as possible but also honing in on what makes them special as well.

So what makes Stiqrd special? For starters? Pranther has a background in both tech and the restaurant business. He knows the real pain from a restauranteurs perspective as well as from the perspective of someone who likes to eat out. Pranther knows all too well what it’s like to try and keep tabs on multiple reward “punch cards”.

Most people have had the experience of thinking you were at the last punch tab of one card to find out you either forgot the card at home or you were in the wrong establishment.

Stiqrd has made loyalty and rewards easy by having a qr code based system and an app to track your purchases and rewards. A very real problem that many in the “loyalty reward app” business are experiencing is that soon instead of having too many key-tags or punch cards you’re going to have too many apps. Pranther is one of the first founders of a loyalty/rewards startup to acknowledge that.

What’s going to make a loyalty and rewards startup successful is going to be their ability to scale in both users and customers and for that Pranther has introduced the 15 minute loyalty program. Through rigorous testing he has found that the Stiqrd program can be implemented in most businesses in under 15 minutes complete with working dashboard.

But Stiqrd is more than a do it yourself loyalty program. He has real people available to speak anytime of the day to business’ that want to set up the loyalty program.

Pranther plans on implementing the system across the country at a few select retail partners however any business owner can sign up, and it truly is that easy.

We got a chance to interview Pranther about Stiqrd and the 15 minute loyalty program. Check out the interview below:

Interview With California Startup: RewardMe

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:

NY Startup: LocalBonus Offers Extremely Simple Loyalty Rewards Program

After this years South By Southwest we quickly predicted that the “social discovery” space would become a thing of the past and that “Loyalty Rewards” would take it’s spot as the startup du jour. Now that loyalty and rewards is filling up faster than you can say Groupon, what’s going to set these startups apart is effect on the merchant and ease of use for the user.

NY startup LcoalBonus has both of those factors in check. LocalBonus is one of the easiest reward programs to set up. You simply add an existing credit card account to your LocalBonus account and you’re ready to earn rewards. In fact you can set up all of your credit cards if you choose.

LocalBonus plans a national rollout. They started out in New York and expanded last month into Seattle, Portland, Sacremento and Denver. LocalBonus founder and CEO Derek Webster told us that there are over 800 merchants in the program already.

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