RewardMe
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
RewardMe was a Mountain View-based social customer loyalty platform founded in 2010 by Yu-kai Chou (CEO), Stephen Johnson, Adam Gervin and Jun Loayza. It put iPads in brick-and-mortar stores to run rewards programs: customers joined with just a phone number, the platform read receipts from any POS system in real time, captured 27–51% of all purchases, and sent auto-triggered marketing messages via in-store screens, SMS and push. It reached about 20 pilot stores and 66,000 users, raising $1 million in angel funding (including from Telenav).
02 / RewardMe FAILURE REASONS
Why it failed
RewardMe failed because it was outgunned on capital. In his postmortem, CEO Yu-kai Chou wrote that the company 'took the best strategy to win in the market, but just was not funded enough to execute on it': rivals like Belly and FiveStars had raised tens of millions of dollars, and RewardMe — with barely $1 million — could not match their capital and momentum in a market where growth required massive spend. Early traction (66,000 users, ~20 pilot stores) never translated into scale, and the company was liquidated.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
RewardMe was founded in Mountain View by Yu-kai Chou and team to build a social loyalty platform for brick-and-mortar stores.
- Traction
RewardMe deployed in ~20 pilot stores with 66,000 users, capturing over a quarter of all purchases, and raised ~$1 million in angel funding.
- Bankruptcy
RewardMe went through bankruptcy liquidation on December 1, 2013, per PitchBook (the museum record lists event year 2015 — see notes).
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
RewardMe completed a bankruptcy liquidation on December 1, 2013, per PitchBook's records, which list it as out of business.
- 02
CEO Yu-kai Chou later published a postmortem describing it as a failed startup that could not compete with better-funded rivals. (The museum record lists event year 2015; PitchBook records the liquidation in December 2013 — discrepancy flagged for the coordinator.)