CYRIAC ROEDING:
If you talk to every store owner in America and you asked every one of them, "What's your biggest problem?" the answer will be, "I need to get people through the door." They call it foot traffic. If foot traffic is so important, then how come nobody ever rewards anybody for visiting a store?
I'm Cyriac Roeding. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Shopkick.
The biggest innovation Shopkick brings to the market is it's the first program that rewards you simply for walking into a store. You open the Shopkick app and the second you walk in it says, "Welcome to Best Buy" or to Target. You get a small token of recognition and appreciation. That's Shopkick. The appreciation is called "kicks." If you go shopping at a few stores and pick up a few products and scan their barcodes, you get additional kicks. Before you know it, you already have enough kicks to get a Best Buy gift card, or a Target or a Macy's gift card -- all immediately on the phone. That really hasn't happened before.
When we went live in August of last year, we already started making revenue, because Shopkick's business model is based on performance in the physical world. If somebody walks through the door and earns kicks, we get a share of the kicks. So, think of Shopkick as a model that goes like this: Consumers get kicks, retailers get customers, Shopkick gets cash. You could call that the cost-per-click in the physical world. We call it the cost-per-visit. So, Shopkick's business model is the first 100 percent performance-based business model in the physical retail world.
I have been in mobile for a long time. So has my co-founder. We have been looking for an idea that has the potential to become a really large company as a startup. I think, in mobile, there's a lot of small opportunities but not too many that can potentially turn into large companies.
…If you're asking which struggles and challenges we've run into, I'd say the correct question would be, which struggles and challenges we have not run into. We offer the first walk-in rewards. Then, you go to a retailer and you say, "We've got an idea. We don't have the technology yet. And we also don't have funding yet. But wouldn't you want to become a launch partner?" And then the retailer would say, "Why don't you come back when you have the technology. And maybe you should also be funded." I would call that the chicken and egg problem. Breaking through that chicken and egg problem is one of the biggest challenges and jobs of an entrepreneur.
Our vision is much bigger than what you've seen so far. So, if I look out six months, I would say we will need to grow much larger. We're already at 1.5 million. But what if we can bring it to 3, 4, 5 million people? We have a lot of ideas on the product. In the next three, four months, you should watch very closely at what Shopkick is doing because, step-by-step, we're gonna realize our vision.
What I've learned is that innovation is very tightly related to culture. The more you have a culture where innovation is the core ingredient, the more it happens. If you have people who are creative and who are constantly questioning the status quo then you can have breakthrough ideas.
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