Emerging Irish business SQUID offers custom loyalty programmes for businesses and keeps all their loyalty cards in one app for ease of engagement.
SQUID Loyalty founders Katie Farrell and Matthew Coffey are focused on a problem that is confounding businesses. That problem is engagement in loyalty programmes.
“There is $26trn spent in retail per annum with most of the spend coming from repeat customers,” explained Coffey.
“SQUID is live in over 40% of Irish coffee shops and 1,250 businesses globally having launched in UK, Canada, Australia and sites coming live in the US”
“This is why 40% of the global advertising budget goes to customer re-engagement.
“Loyalty programmes are a cost-effective way to increase revenue, but suffer from low engagement due to long signup processes or being a hassle to use. This results in 60% of consumers abandoning them.
“SQUID solves this issue by aggregating loyalty cards in one app for easy interaction, increasing engagement 3X for partnered companies.”
Making loyalty stick like glue
Coffey explained that SQUID offers custom loyalty programmes for businesses and keeps all their loyalty cards in one app for ease of engagement.
“This increases engagement in loyalty programmes, resulting in more frequent purchases for businesses. SQUID also enables businesses to communicate with their customers when they leave the store through marketing tools.”
He said the SQUID app is free to use for a consumer. Simply tap a SQUID tag in a partnered business to sign up to their loyalty programme and collect rewards.
“SQUID is live in over 40% of Irish coffee shops and 1,250 businesses globally having launched in UK, Canada, Australia and sites coming live in the US.”
One app to unite them all
“Katie Farrell and I met in a scholarship programme studying engineering and co-founded SQUID straight out of college,” Coffey explained.
“We thought it seemed obvious that since 90% of consumers use loyalty programmes there should be an app that kept them all in one place.
“We recently appointed Thomas Brady as CTO, a previous founder of Rentalmatics, a SaaS company generating millions in annual revenue. Thomas led cross-functional teams of over 50+ engineers and built the cloud network for AT&T, now used by over 200 million people.
“Vincent O’Connor (our CFO) worked internationally with companies such as Ornua (which raised €420M during his tenure as CFO).”
Navigating the entrepreneurial landscape
Coffey explained that SQUID was founded in Schull, West Cork but has since relocated mostly to Dublin.
“We feel incredibly lucky to have set up in Ireland. People have been incredibly generous with their time and our experience has always been people looking to help us. The NDRC accelerator and Enterprise Ireland have provided critical government aids to us to help get started and provide guidance where needed.
“I feel the main area we could improve on in Ireland is to increase awareness and accessibility of early stage investment. Tax relief systems such as EIIS means Irish taxpayers can claim up to 40% back on certain investments but lots of people aren’t aware of this, and the tax landscape can be difficult to navigate.”
The business recently secured funding and added investors like Colm Lyon and Sequoia Capital to its cap table.
“Despite the challenging macro market, our sales have accelerated and product engagement has increased by 40% this year. With the cost of living increasing, people are looking for simple savings and businesses’ focus on retention creates a favourable climate for our sector which is exactly what SQUID does.
“We will be looking to raise more funds this year to accelerate our growth and to build out key partnerships that will see SQUID into more retail verticals.”
To stay agile the company uses the best-in-class available cloud and web apps, including a fellow Irish-led business. “We use Stripe to help us onboard Businesses efficiently to the platform, Hubspot to manage sales and see how well businesses are performing on the platform. G Suite is also a huge part of our day to day!”
Like all start-ups some of the earliest lessons have been profound ones. “At the very early stages, we were too narrowly focused on task-based hiring. We now understand the crucial role of cultural fit, well-defined processes, and early consideration of career progression in hiring.
“The tricky part is that these are challenging to implement effectively with a small team that needs to be adaptable, but they are vital for success.”
His advice to fellow founders is not to be afraid to ask for help.
“I’m constantly surprised as to how much people are willing to help and so probably just to not be afraid to ask for something. Particularly in Ireland, most people have close to one degree of separation so if you know where to ask you can get in front of a lot of people.”
