BetterYet is a two-sided marketplace, bringing deal marketing to vendors like Facebook did to digital advertising. BetterYet has been completely bootstrapped by the founding team up to this point but is actively fundraising for a seed round. Although, not yet revenue generating, BetterYet has 20 customers signed onto the platform from which revenue generation will begin as soon as the first week in September. Currently, the management team is getting by on ramen noodles and cereal.
What is BetterYet’s vision and how will it change the world?
BetterYet’s vision is to do to deal marketing what Facebook has done to digital advertising, by creating an automated and optimized platform where businesses can see a clear ROI on their marketing spend. We have talked to hundreds of small & medium sized business owners and their current approach to marketing is a black-box, they’re throwing money at the wall and hoping more people walk into their stores. Business owners are wasting time and money they don’t have on marketing with no measurable return. Meanwhile, on the consumer side, customers aren’t getting the personalized deals, rewards and loyalty benefits from small & medium sized businesses (SMBs) that they have become accustomed to from larger brands. SMBs are unable to provide this individually-tailored customer experience and are losing business as a result. BetterYet was founded to level the playing field between SMBs and big enterprises. With BetterYet, as a consumer, you can now get personalized deals, rewards and loyalty benefits from your favorite local businesses, not just big brands. BetterYet enables any card in your wallet to be your local rewards card. You simply link your card of choice to the BetterYet mobile app, spend as you normally would and BetterYet will provide you personalized cash-back deals and loyalty benefits, putting the money earned straight in your account. No more carrying five different loyalty cards, no more having to show your phone at the register, no more hard-to-track points system. Cash-back, straight to your account, it’s that simple. In under five minutes, BetterYet business partners can set up programs for customer acquisition and loyalty. BetterYet then uses consumer transaction data to track against the exclusive offers provided by the businesses, automatically crediting users’ accounts and debiting businesses’ accounts when those offers are triggered. Additionally, BetterYet’s proprietary recommendation engine, utilizing k-means clustering and logistic regression, identifies trends in the transaction data and learns from consumer behavior to help businesses send the right deals to the right consumers at the right times, resulting in a higher conversion percentage and larger net profit.
Tell us about the Founders of BetterYes
All three BetterYet founders share a long history together dating back to their days at St. Lawrence University. During university, they had always talked about starting a company together, but at the time those ambitions seemed distant and intangible. After graduating they stayed close while all working at different Fortune 500 companies, with Alan working in Derivatives Trading at Barclays, Mark in Investor Relations at General Electric, and Colin as a Software Engineer at UnitedHealth Group. After three years of working in their corporate jobs (and paying off student loans) they decided it was time to take the steps toward pursuing their passion of being entrepreneurs together. Armed with an idea and a burning desire to build something great Alan and Mark applied and were accepted into the Techstars partner Startup Boost pre-accelerator in NYC. They called their friend Colin, left their corporate jobs and began the journey with BetterYet.
Describe the journey so far and what is next
BetterYet was conceived in March 2018 when we applied and were accepted into the Techstars-partnered Startup Boost NYC pre-accelerator armed with just an idea and founding team. Over the following two months we refined the idea, model and go-to-market strategy with the Startup Boost advisory team of successful entrepreneurs while beginning to build the product. Through this, we were able to go from idea to MVP in under two months and began developing the framework for a July beta market launch with the Toronto Beaches BIA. After launching the MVP we spent the following month maintaining a tight feedback loop with business owners (signed up our first 20 businesses) and consumers (150 organic downloads) to further refine our product and functionality. Having determined the adjustments needed on the technical front, with a larger launch around the corner, we wanted to ensure our marketing strategy was airtight. We were able to strike a strategic partnership with Clue Digital, a digital marketing firm in Toronto that saw the potential in the unique macro-level insights we could provide if we get to scale, and offered to provide their expertise and digital campaign management to us at cost to help achieve that scale. We have been working with Clue over the past month to ensure proper alignment of brand, growth strategy and effective marketing distribution for our larger launch. Additionally, we were recently accepted into the MaRS START program and have been leveraging their network to establish strategic growth partnerships with other startups with a similar target customer base. We will be having the official launch of the platform the first week of September during University Frosh week in Toronto, and are currently in discussions with the organizing teams at U of T and Ryerson to work out a coordinated sponsorship opportunity to launch with their students. We are confident that we will be able to get our first 1,000 active users on to the platform and establish market traction following the launch.
What is your growth strategy
We have increasingly noticed interest for the platform from multi-unit operations with anywhere from 4 to 40+ locations (we have not yet found an upper bound on this) that understand the value of providing a personalized customer experience but do not want to invest thousands to millions of dollars developing a proprietary loyalty/rewards solution that may not immediately resonate with their consumer base. One of the biggest problems with consumer loyalty and rewards today is that there is too much apathy amongst consumers, no one wants to maintain 15 different loyalty programs with variable point systems. BetterYet provides a centralized point with an existing consumer base and a multi-pronged offering for businesses to plug into to offer their own branded deals and loyalty. Going after these multi-unit operations will help BetterYet scale faster and decrease barriers to entry into new geographies. Additionally, our early success working with the Beaches BIA here in Toronto points to a scalable model working with further local government organizations to get BetterYet disseminated from the top-down as the go-to piece of software for helping support businesses within a local economy. Features such as geo-segmentation could be used to offer community-wide deals to help keep dollars circulating within a given local economy, making BetterYet valuable to all businesses within a community.
Tell us something you’ve learned and want other founders to remember.
Everything is going to be 10x harder than you think it will be. You have to be resolute in your endeavour and be willing to climb over every obstacle that will inevitably come your way. In order to do that, you need to surround yourself with teammates that believe in the vision as much as you do and are willing to work equally as hard, pulling each other up, and peeling each other from the pavement to always keep moving forward. We went door to door talking to hundreds and hundreds of businesses to refine our ideas, methods, and product based on real feedback from the market, but it was not an easy process. After getting the 50th door slammed in your face it’s easy to get dejected. Having a supportive team around you who are both great colleagues and great friends is key to never lose sight of what you’re working towards.