Company description
Loyalty Dice is redefining customer loyalty. Loyalty Dice is a mobile app for iOS and Android that leverages game mechanics to help merchants enhance their customer's experience at their business and in turn have them coming in more frequently. Customers simply scan a QR code at any participating business and are then are given a chance to shake their phone and roll the dice. They can either win instantly or collect points towards winning a prize.
Here are a few of the problems Loyalty Dice is solving:
Increasing Frequency - Most loyalty programs pretend to effect customer frequency but end up simply being a way of rewarding existing customers for doing what they've always done. Loyalty Dice solves this problem by enhancing customers experience at participating merchants which increases these customers frequency. In doing this we give smaller prizes more frequently to increase engagement.
Customer participation - Most loyalty program participants extend only to existing loyal customers. With interesting game mechanics and instant win possibiliies Loyalty Dice is able to attract even the most mediocre of customers to join the program.
Analytics - Loyalty Dice provides its merchants with a rich analytics backend so they can get to know their customers in ways they never have before.
Profitability - Loyalty Dice is the first loyalty program whose #1 focus is on increasing participating merchants profitability.
Team
CEO and Founder - Jordan Simkin has spent the last 5 years as the marketing director for Sports Giant where he focused on customer retention and acquisition. He graduated from The University of Southern California in 2006.
Jordans accomplishments at SportsGiant include growing their database from 275,000 to over 450,000 hockey players in the United States, increasing margins by 2%, opening a succesful retail store in Cherry Hill, NJ and most importantly helping the company reach its highest level of profits.
I outsourced development and have recently quit my job and brought on 4 interns to help with sales and marketing.
UPDATE 5/28: Took 9 months of looking but I've reached an agreement with a CTO. He's been a lead developer at a venture backed startup in San Diego for the last 3 years and has a CS degree from Berkeley and a master in CS from UCSD.
I'm proud of how far I've gotten on my own and believe it's a good indication of both my resourcefullness and determination but have now reached a point where I need to rase a seed round to sorround myself with a great team.
Traction: We are currently live with 11 beta merchants(6 of which randomly found us online, signed up and got up and running on their own. This includes businesses in Europe and Canada). We are seeing very encouraging user adoption with zero marketing and training. Currently cleaning up some minor bugs, porting new design and animation over to Android and adding a few features based on merchant feedback before launch on June 1st.
Update: We signed up 7 businesses this week. 6 of which left existing services as they found them to be unprofitable. This product is in demand and we are filling the exact need we envisioned. We've now signed on EVERY SINGLE merchant whose sat down with us.
Business model
Loyalty Dice plans to deploy a freemium business model. Some premium features that have yet to be built include but are not limited to: customer data, turning existing customers into facebook fans and twitter followers, a premium game mechanism feature that will leverage existing customers relationships to bring in new qualified customers and an additional premium game mechanism that will demand increased frequency.
Competitive advantage
Perspective - Our deep marketing background, specifically regarding profitability and examing the true ROI of endless marketing initiatives gives us a better understanding of what works then our competitors. For example, everyone knows the problems that Groupon and Living Social present most local businesses. We believe time will show customer retention market is just as broken as the customer acquisition channel. The services available today do not increase local businesses bottom lines. While others focus on rewarding customers, we focus on loyalizing them and more importantly, unleashing them into advocates for these businesses.
Distribution - We've built our product so it can be distributed at a fraction of the cost and more importantly scale at a rate that others simply cannot. Our competitors need sales people and hardware, we need neither.
There is a ton of noise there in this space, and it's forced us to differentiate ourselves and we've taken a completely different approach to distribution. Hiring a huge field sales force is expensive and difficult to coordinate. We plan to deploy a top down model where we approach businesses with 20 - 1,000 locations verus the standard field sales fleet bottom up approach. This industry is a followers market and what really counts are the businesses that fellow owners look upto and respect. We plan to capture these businesses starting with our pilots at Sammy's Woodfired Pizza and Tony Roma's.
This model is unique to us because our thesis basically states no one else actually increases your bottom line. That sales pitch is more effective on larger merchants as they understand profitability and would never sign up for any of our competitors.
Marketing - Due to our game mechanics, we are able to attract all customers into program as opposed to most services who are only able to get existing loyal customers to participate. This is incredibly powerful and we are seeing it with early numbers. Think of it like a sign up today and get a free appetizer but on steroids and without being annoying.
Competitive advantage
Perspective - Our deep marketing background, specifically regarding profitability and examing the true ROI of endless marketing initiatives gives us a better understanding of what works then our competitors. For example, everyone knows the problems that Groupon and Living Social present most local businesses. We believe time will show customer retention market is just as broken as the customer acquisition channel. The services available today simply do not increase local businesses bottom line. While others focus on rewarding customers, we focus on loyalizing them and more importantly, unleashing them into advocates for these businesses.
Distribution - We've built our product so it can be distributed at a fraction of the cost and more importantly scale at a rate that others simply cannot. Where our competitors need sales people and hardware, merchants simply need a printer and paper.
Due to the amount of noise there in this space, we've had to differentiate ourselves by taking a different approach to distribution. Hiring a huge field sales force is incredibly expensive and difficult to coordinate. We plan to deploy a top down model where we approach businesses with a 5 - 1,000 locations verus the standard field sales fleet bottom up approach. We believe this industry to be a followers market and what really counts are the businesses that fellow owners look upto and respect. We plan to capture these businesses starting with Sammy's Woodfired Pizza and Tony Roma's.
This model is unique to us because our thesis is that nothing else out there in this space actually increases your bottom line. That sales pitch is often more effective on corporations then mom and pop businesses.
This is a sales and marketing company but the reality is that distribution is the key to this business. We are currently grabbing businesses and then deploying what is now a common b2b2c model. In the coming months we will be releasing what we believe to be a revolutionary distribution method that will certainly dramatically lower the amount of feet required on the ground to get businesses up and running but has the potential to make the number of feet on the ground zero. We will not only rise above the noise, but by doing so, we will actually end up making more noise then anyone else.
Marketing - Due to our game mechanics, we are able to attract all customers into program as opposed to most services who are only able to get existing loyal customers to participate.
Jordan Simkin
