hopefully bring on our next doll up who seems right ready.
So, please welcome to the stage George Farras and John, John Sebastian from Rewardly.
My name is George. Sure, clap clap. Thank you.
My name is George. This is JS and we’ve been involved in start-ups for a long time either as co-founders or as early employees. Something that happened to me last year is I walked into the Apple store and just for buying 3 or 4 Mac Books on the same day, I all of a sudden had a volume deal, I had corporate sales people all over me.
And it got me thinking how many missed opportunities there were, where these big companies are getting volume deals all the time and a small business doesn’t and to be honest I think it’s a little bit unfair. It’s unfair to me and it’s unfair to a lot of you. And I may be a small owner, but in my social graph, I know maybe a hundred other small business owners.
Rewardli let’s me tap the buying power in my social graph so I can get better deals on the things I need to run my small business and here is how it works. When you join Rewardli you connect your social graph, either your Linkedin or Facebook, we automatically create what we call a buying group for you, so your buying group starts out with anyone in your social graph whose also rewardli user.
As new people in your social graph join up on Rewardli we automatically add them to your buying group. And anytime you or someone in your buying group makes a purchase though this platform. Your buying power increases and your deals get better. Now what are some of the deals that we have on Rewardli.
We have over sixty vendors that work today, everything from Go Daddy, Skype, Priceline, Vista Print, FedEx Office, so we’ve got a really, really broad set of deals that a lot of people in this room probably use, you know, every month if not more often. And the deals are anywhere from two fifty percent off depending on the vendor.
And they’re always on. So, you don’t have to wait for a daily deal or anything like that. Now let’s look at this Go Daddy deal. Now right now Rewardli tells me I can get eleven percent discount on anything I buy on Go Daddy. That could go as high as twenty percent if I have more buying power, but eleven percent is still pretty good, so I want to get this deal.
So, by clicking “Get Deal,” Rewardli redirects me to the vendor site. I go through the regular check out experience on the vendor site, pay the full price, initially, and then Rewardli sends me an email after the transaction, and the title of the email is “You’ve got cash.” In this case I can see that I’ve earned eleven dollars in cash back from an eighty five dollar transaction.
reward reminds me that I could have earned seventeen dollars if I had a larger buying group so I have the opportunity again to invite more people to my buying group, and then once a month Rewardli tallies up all of these emails and sends me a payment right to my Paypal account. So it’s that easy. Now, what if I don’t want to spend time going back and forth between the rewardli site every time I’m about to make a purchase?
We have a browser extension which completely automates the process of you getting your group deals. Let’s say in this case I go to the Price line website. Didn’t realize there was a deal there, we will notify me that by displaying a bar on top of the page saying there’s a deal for me on Price line and by just clicking the yes button.
The message fades away into the background, and then Rewardli will automatically track any transaction on Price line, just like they did with one as well. We’re after a very, very big market. There is 26 million small businesses in the US, 18 million of them are one person shops, a lot of you are in this room right now.
So, one person shop is not getting any deal, typically. On average a small business spends a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year on non payroll expenses. That’s four trillion dollars in purchasing that we want to be the conduit, we want to be the aggregator for all those transactions. We’re monetizing by taking a, keeping a cut off of the savings for the small business user.
We’re not the only ones who think that this is a big deal, today we are also announcing that we closed a seed fund, a seed round of five hundred thousand dollars led by some awesome investors. One of our investors is 500 start ups and as part of the portfolio, we realizes about 40 deals right now that are exclusive, that different vendors have, but they only want to push to this portfolio and the fund was previously managing it in a Google doc and no one knew where the deals were so people were missing out on opportunities to access these deals.
What we did for 500 start ups is we built a cobranded landing page, where they’ve basic we invited all of the companies in the portfolio. They’re onboard, they become a regular Rewardli users but also have access to a private deal group on top of it and then the admin user can push all these exclusives deals to the users, and it works with our browser plug in as well.
So I’m about to make a purchase there are certain sites that offer me a deal that the Rewardli browser extension will notify me of that others won’t see an that’s because I’m part of this private deal group and when you think of all the groups that you are a member of, a lot of them already have different kinds of benefits and group deals.
So, things like AAA, Alumni associations, frequent flyer programs, and in many cases, you don’t know where these deals are, in some cases until after you’ve actually made the purchase. So we see a huge opportunity here for both a distribution goals as well as access opportunity in working with these different infinity groups and basically storing their deals in the cloud and they rewardli cloud so that they can more effectively distribute them to their users.
We launched about fifty minutes ago here live at the events and happy to announce. So we’ve also set up a deal group for TechCrunch attendees, so everyone in the audience and watching on the webcast, you can go to Rewardli.com/disrupt and sign up and start saving. Thank you.
Rewardli everyone.
Ok, Hillary?
So, the thing I love most about this is actually the Chrome extension. So, is there a way you can just make that work for every public coupon, for AAA, for everything I’m a member of, or do those groups have to sign up with you for they will be available through the extension?
Ya, so, I mean I think, from a technology perspective, we, one of the things that we’ve looked at is that, we could have actually index that some of that ourselves, in as much It’s publicly available and I think the experience may not be as seamless but I think there is definitely value in just being able to push that out in kind of a light, you know, lighter way fashion and it also a good way to onboard some of these groups as well.
So I think there’s, you know, going to be a high, you know a network affect and some switching costs as we on board some of these groups that’s going to give us a moat we think around the business, Kevin?
May be you can address competition because as an investor I still get like one daily deal a day. It almost seems like we need, you’ll save for deals, besides which is getting concerning. Can you just talk about how you position against the competition? Who is the real competition?
Ya, so, we’re not, we’re not a dailly deals site, we don’t have any daily deals. One of the reasons we decided to focus on the S;B vertical initially is because the. The purchase behaviors that for the small business that tend to buy things on impulse. So we think that just gives us a lot more white space.
So the positioning is really, you know, S and B focus, and then we’re also demand driven. So I think some of the tools over time that we’re going to launch are going to help better aggregate and account for demand and small business purchasing and match that with the vendors.
Got it. So these are persistent deals correct. Ok.
Correct Karen.
So I was a little confused about the first transaction that you placed with Go Daddy you got a certain percentage off. When does that increase, and how do you get it to increase? Do you have to invite more friends in? Where you post transaction ?
Either one. We basically take a snapshot. We have this concept of buying power. So it’s a number from zero to one hundred. Your buying power is just a function of the total aggregate volume of you and the people you invited, all the purchases they made on So they don’t have to buy Go Daddy, they don’t have to buy anything else?
They don’t have to go buy Go Daddy, at the moment you go to make that transaction on Go Daddy, we take a snapshot of what your buying power is at that moment in time. And that dictates what the discount is that you’re going to get. So in future transactions that will increase.
Or it will go down if I don’t use the slide that off.
Ya, right now it doesn’t go down. I mean, we can play with those knobs and we can play with the formula in anyway we want but we’ve basically put a lot of thought into creating a system that in sense you to use a platform and also to invite others who will use it so we don’t count, if you invite a thousand people and they don’t anything or you spam a million people and they don’t sign up, that doesn’t help you at all.
John?
Congrats on launching and getting the funding. I’m really excited for you guys. I like it, I think it work, I think initial focus on S and B is really smart for a lot of reasons.
Any other comments? That’s it, ok. Big round of applause then for Rewardli .
I used to think it was a bad thing when there weren’t any more questions, but I sort of realized it’s not, it’s just like the pitch was good. So I guess good news for
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