Pool your points!
Pool is a startup aiming to revolutionize the loyalty rewards industry — as companies begin to move their points to the blockchain, Pool aims to be one of the first startups to consolidate, trade and make sense of these points in one marketplace.
The greater Loyalty Management market is worth 17.65 billion dollars and is growing rapidly. We seek to narrow our target consumer base to young adults aged 20-35, an age group tech-savvy enough to engage in a points marketplace and at an age of higher consumption and spending. Our SOM is still to be determined — we are researching verticals where a points marketplace can have a competitive advantage. These especially include places where a larger competitor might already have an established loyalty point system, such as boutique hotels or local coffee shops (their competitors being existing rewards points for, say, Hilton and Starbucks, respectively).
We’ve decided that a mobile app offers the most frictionless experience possibly, especially needed for loyalty points where a high ease of use is crucial for usage. The difficulty of our tech stack is interoperability — a simple React Native frontend needs to effectively hide a complex system of web3 microservices such as Alchemy, Crossmint, and other connectors to legacy services, all running on GCP.
Our business model canvas, simplified:
- Value — a centralized, simplified guide to the points you already own, and an easy way to exchange and trade them for the points you want.
- Customers — our customers are young adults looking to make the most out of their money. This can be further broken down into high spenders, such as frequent travelers and business professionals, and frugal spenders, such as students.
- Getting customers — our strategy begins at the B2B market, working with deals with companies who want to expand loyalty systems. Ideally, we can also promote with points offers themselves.
- Keeping customers — the exciting prospects of this aspect are social — gamification, social networks, and the shared usage of points.
- Revenue — simply, we take a transaction fee for each trade, and support ads.
Part of our ethical considerations is the effect on small versus large business, and whether point strategies negatively or positively favors one or the other. Will democratized points give small businesses a leg up over large businesses with established points systems, or does consolidating points simply favor those larger businesses? Will points systems get killed off entirely? Will too effective gamification lead to unhealthy relations with points that will encourage addiction and gambling?
Furthermore, we worry about data collection, and whether the way we track and exchange points may open up privacy concerns.
