This week’s 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation featured pitches for Royal Loyal, a mobile app to encourage customer loyalty at independent retail stores, and Ligo, a mobile app for college students to connect on campus.
Royal Loyal founder Babir Sultan said that traditional loyalty cards offering deals and discounts to repeat customers were difficult to keep track of, typically underused and eventually thrown away. A better idea, he said, is a simple-to-use and free-to-download customer loyalty mobile app.
But the $30,000 to $80,000 to create such an app is prohibitively expensive for the owner of a convenience store or other small retail business, Sultan said. Royal Loyal’s solution: A customer loyalty app that pools the deals of many different participating retailers, none of whom is closer than three miles to the next, and which lowers the cost to retailers to about $60 a month. Or as the company’s slogan to retailers goes: “Let’s get Appy at $2 a day.”
“It will level the playing field for independent store owners when it comes to marketing …” Sultan said. “We’re dealing with a niche market that wasn’t being served.”
Royal Loyal partnered with Kansas City-based app builder RareWire to develop his customer loyalty app, which does not require users to sign on using social media and eschews collecting personal data available from such a practice.
However, the Royal Loyal app does monitor which specific customer loyalty deals are claimed by retail store customers, as well as when they are claimed, how often they are claimed and by whom they are claimed, because that’s the “most valuable” information to retailers, Sultan said.
Up next was Munro Richardson, founder of Ligo, which is currently developing a mobile app to better connect college students who want to know what’s happening on campus and share information about events.
If there are 30,000 students on a college campus, Richardson said, you can’t be Facebook friends with all of them. But by downloading Ligo’s free app and logging on with a university email, users would have instant access to all students, faculty and staff who were doing the same on campus.
The app has been tested with hundreds of students attending the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, William Jewell College and Washburn University. Besides “Events,” categories of student interest on the app include “Jobs & Internships, Swap & Shop, Housing & Ridesharing, Class Life, Get Involved and Lost & Found.”
Ligo would make its money from charging app advertisers who want to tap into the wallets of 22 million university students in the United States. Outside of room and board, Richardson said, each of those students is responsible for an average of $5,300 in discretionary spending each year.
