Dougyster
Recap and Reflection
Coalition
Coalition was the first pivot that demonstrated growth – however small – in understanding how to deliver value to consumers. After Wunna, I was thinking about how to continue. Thinking along the line of discounts, and how both Flutter and Wunna were just another glorified discount platforms, we landed on the thought of loyalty programs. In the end, our previous endeavours were less so dating, less so social scheduling, but more so bringing more traffic to the local restaurants around us. We knew that restaurant loyalty programs – especially for small merchants – were ineffective, and needed innovation to compete with the bigger players. Coalition sought to bring the loyalty program ecosystem infrastructure to SMEs – we’d provide the first end-to-end solution to help small businesses form, join, and implement loyalty program ecosystems.
A new frontier for value, growth, and visibility for merchants.
By harnessing the power of network, small businesses can now join together and offer a loyalty program that has much greater value, consumer base, and marketing visibility, allowing consumers to earn and redeem across a wide array of products. Small businesses would be able to list items such as discounts, freebies and deals for points, and these would have a fixed ratio of conversion with money spent within the coalition. Sounds like a wonderful concept – and in truth, it did for us – but of course, there were some pretty jarring problems. More on that!
Aggregation and reward mobility for consumers
All the coalitions would have been listed on one singular app. Consumers would thus be able to keep track of points and spendings across multiple stores and coalitions through one unified place, without needing install 5 pages of apps and signing in or keeping a thick stack of punch cards. This convenience is coupled with the benefit of being able to earn points at one store and redeem it at another – loyalty programs have never been more valuable.
If your idea isn’t already in the market, it’s probably for a reason
Is it feasible?
We saw that McKinsey predicted that the future of loyalty was in ecosystems, and we were excited. What that also meant is that our oh-so novel ecosystem idea for small business probably has been attempted before. While there was a clear value proposition for both the consumer and merchants, there were many problems on an execution level. How can we be sure that people spend at each store in the coalition, and not just spend at a collective favourite? How can we bring incentivise loyalty to businesses, and not to the coalition as a whole? How would we ensure synergy and not cannibalism of businesses? That would require finding the perfect combination of small businesses, requiring a degree of local knowledge. Farewell, scalability.