Pool One-Pager DRAFT

by Jacob Eisenach | Posted on

Pool One-Pager DRAFT

(1) What is our solution in two sentences.

Pool will provide a platform for small business owners to cultivate joint loyalty communities (called “Pools”) with other businesses. Within “Pools” customers will be able to earn and trade loyalty rewards, and businesses will be able to glean customer analytics insights, communicate with loyal customers, and reach new customers.

(2) What is the value it brings to the customer?

After speaking with a number of Santa Barbara-based small business owners, we identified several key problems they face:

  1. Small business owners in Santa Barbara do not have the marketing dollars to compete with larger businesses (especially e-commerce businesses)
  2. Most small business owners in Santa Barbara do not formally track customer loyalty or retention
  3. Businesses that do track customer loyalty and retention report that they don’t know what to do with that data
  4. Most small businesses in Santa Barbara do not have loyalty rewards programs
  5. Santa Barbara-based entrepreneurs who own multiple businesses have trouble integrating sales and customer data from multiple businesses and have no way to track customer loyalty between their businesses

After speaking with consumers about their loyalty rewards programs, we identified several key problems they face:

  1. Many consumers do not know about all the loyalty rewards points and programs they are a part of
  2. Even when consumers know about their loyalty rewards, often consumers are unsure how to use their loyalty rewards
  3. Loyalty point programs can be a hassle to sign up for and manage
  4. Sometimes consumers earn loyalty points for businesses they do not plan to return to

Pool will bring value to business owners by helping them track customer retention/loyalty and enabling them to collaborate with other businesses to mutually benefit from each other’s loyal customer bases. Pool will bring value to consumers by centralizing many of their loyalty points in one place and allowing them to trade loyalty rewards between businesses.

(3) What is the main customer case study that we have done, and what are taglines that show it has brought value to them.

Consider the following mock case study: Katie is a small business owner in Santa Barbara who runs a boutique hotel. Before using Pool, Katie did not track customer loyalty and did not offer any loyalty rewards to her customers. She struggled to compete with large chain hotels that operated in Santa Barbara – many of them have robust loyalty rewards programs that allow customers to trade loyalty points between hotel brands (and even between other businesses like airlines). Now, using Pool, Katie has partnered with several other locally owned small businesses including a restaurant, a boutique, a coffee shop, and a wine-tasting room. Katie and the other businesses in her Pool have all seen an increase in new customers. Customers who come to Santa Barbara to do a wine tasting are more likely to stay at Katie’s hotel; many customers who stay at Katie’s hotel trade some hotel rewards points for restaurant points and get to eat dinner at Katie’s partner restaurant. Additionally, Katie is able to track customer retention, easily manage and market promotions and loyalty rewards, and communicate with her loyal customer base.

(4) What is our strategy to reach many customers like this (go-to-market strategy).

In order to reach customers, we will sell directly to businesses that do not already have a formal loyalty rewards program. Initially we will rely on our personal connections to get meetings with business owners in order to sell them our product. We will also cold contact businesses in target areas (particularly businesses based in California). Hopefully, if our product is popular, business owners will encourage other businesses to adopt the app in order to effectively collaborate with one another. Businesses will then direct their customers to the app in order to participate in their loyalty rewards program.

(5) What are the top THREE roadblocks we will need to overcome to reach these customers?

Most small businesses are severely resource constrained. Pool will need to be able to show businesses that it will provide monetary value to them. We will need to appropriately price our product if we wish to be successful. Additionally, Pool will rely on a network effect to be successful – when talking with potential customers, some of them said that they would only be willing to use Pool if another particular business they worked with also used Pool For instance, one winemaker mentioned that they would only use pool if their vinters’ collective also signed up for the service.

(6) What other solutions exist that solve similar problems.

(7) Why is our solution superior to our competitors (draw on features and timing)?

(8) What is our timeline to bring this to market?

(9) What are the main signals we will measure to test whether our go-to-market is successful?

(10) What are our top three areas of uncertainty and the plans to explore each one?

  1. Willingness from small businesses to participate
  2. Consumer appetite for small rewards
  3. Consumer appetite for trading

(11) What prior research related to this opportunity has been done?

In regards to tradable loyalty points as a means to maximizing value, there are three notable areas of research:

(12) What are the leading signals we might observe to determine success?

The leading signals might be metrics such as trades made per user, marginal business revenue for each point released into a pool, and retention of users who first download the app.

(13) What other options did we consider to address our core problem?

We considered several different options to solve the problem of tradable royalty points. Here are a few:

  • Everything for everything model
  • Having a centralized pool coin
  • Having one centralized pool of businesses rather than many disparate ones
  • Approaching existing royalty networks such as Toast and Square and selling Pool as an additional tool they could use
  • Approaching large businesses for Pools rather than small ones
  • Beginning with one “Lifestyle Brand” of multiple hand-picked businesses
  • Centering our efforts around the boutique hotel industry

(14) What is our rough time frame for development?

We plan to spend 6 months developing the mobile app. At month 3 we will also begin our efforts to attract businesses to join our platform and plan to launch our first Pool of small businesses in 9 months.

(15) Why now?

There are three primary reasons why right now is the time to launch Pool:

  1. Right now small businesses, especially those that rely on e-commerce, are being crushed by competitors with large marketing budgets. This trend accelerated during the pandemic when more retail moved online, and low interest rates allowed larger businesses to furiously spend money on marketing in order to grow their businesses. Pool help small businesses compete with larger businesses’ marketing budgets by enabling them to reach new customers by taking advantage of each others’ customer bases
  2. Small businesses are trying to re-establish in-person communities of loyal customers as they recover from the pandemic. Pool will help businesses re-establish those in-person communities of loyal customers by helping businesses easily manage their loyal customers and reach new customer bases.
  3. Many larger businesses are currently in the process of creating blockchain-based loyalty rewards programs. There have been large strides made in blockchain technology over the past few years, and the technology is finally at the point where it is good enough to be used in everyday applications like loyalty rewards programs. Pool can take advantage of the momentum created by large businesses starting blockchain-based loyalty rewards programs in order to encourage small businesses to also create blockchain-based loyalty rewards programs. In the future perhaps large businesses will make their loyalty rewards programs interoperable with Pool. Because Pool loyalty rewards will be digital assets stored on the blockchain, in theory, customers will be able to trade Pool rewards for blockchain-based loyalty rewards from large brands as well, which could encourage adoption of Pool.
Jacob Eisenach

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