Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey, everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. With acquisition costs rising and margins tightening, expanding the value of the customers you already have is the new growth strategy. Now with more app users than Starbucks, closing in on 12 million in the US, Fetch Rewards is supercharging the ongoing engagement of consumers with their favorite brands. Wes Schroll, CEO and founder, joined Rob and me to talk about the opportunities available to brands to both monetize and innovate through creating loyalty at scale.
Peter Crosby:
So Wes, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's great to have you on. Fetch Rewards has been on such a juggernaut journey of late. Matter of fact, back in April you raised another $210 million in a series D round led by SoftBank. It was based on a billion dollar valuation. How are you enjoying your unicorn status for whatever it means?
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. I remember talking with the team shortly after it, and at the end of the day, the way that we view it is, it's just external validation that the hard work that we are doing, the relentless focus on consumer experience and delivering a world class app gets appreciated by investors and by the market. And people get really bullish off of the longevity and long-term potential of companies that can do that. It's becoming harder and harder to break through and have world class applications that have engagement at the level that we do. We actually have more daily active users than Starbucks according to App Annie now.
Wes Schroll:
So to get that level of engagement and usage, and only being around for four and a half years since we launched the product I think is rare. So the unicorn valuation or name, it felt fitting. It was appreciated. And then the team rolled up its sleeves and they're like, "All right. Far from done though, so let's just keep going."
Peter Crosby:
What do our consumers need next? Right?
Wes Schroll:
Absolutely.
Peter Crosby:
What do our [inaudible 00:02:17].
Rob Gonzalez:
More than Starbucks. More than Starbucks, that's amazing.
Wes Schroll:
That's hot off the press. I know, it's an amazing stat. We love App Annie just because it does allow you to really see apples to apples these other amazing applications that are out there that we all use on a frequent basis. And to have our name next to some of those behemoths, it's awesome. It's really awesome.
Rob Gonzalez:
Awesome, congratulations.
Peter Crosby:
And I think because now the last stat I had was more than 11 million users in your app. Is there an updated number?
Wes Schroll:
We're knocking on the door of 12. Every time I check, it seems to go up, which we're super thankful for. But yeah, no, really excited. We think that we're fairly under penetrated into the US still, actually. It's a huge market. We believe that our product is super relevant to your average, everyday household. And that's what we want to do. We want to help everyone save money, have fun while doing it. And we have a long ways to go, but getting to 12 is super exciting.
Peter Crosby:
Loyalty and long-term customer value are such an important topic for brands right now and for retailers because it's tough out there. Margins are tough and acquisition costs are skyrocketing. And so it really requires, and you know this, and I would love you to talk about sort of the need for leaders to step back and really think about: Where are our next dollars coming from? And what is the lowest cost way to do that? And then how do we harness that enthusiasm for our brand to drive even more of that at a lower cost than sort of the usual fuel that people put on these fires? So I'd love you to just talk about Fetch and sort of how it fits into that sort of ... A, am I right about sort of that narrative? And B, if so, how does Fetch sort of fit into that?
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. And this is something that's obviously very near and dear to my heart. It's the reason why I started the company is an experience that I had moving from freshman year dorm going to school at University of Wisconsin Madison, where I was being fed every meal at the cafeteria and moving into an apartment for the first time ever my sophomore year, and actually having to go shopping. And it was always just amazing to me that every brand I was buying, retailer I was shopping at was telling me how much they cared about me as a consumer. They told me how much they care about my loyalty. And then they would say, "Here's all the hoops you can jump through if you want to actually get rewarded for it."
Wes Schroll:
And for me, that always felt backwards. And it makes sense, right? Because brands and retailers, you have executives that are sitting around the table thinking, "How do we stand out? How do we generate more value, or more revenue, whatever the case is?" But I think very few people actually put on the hat of the consumer. They're thinking of that brand, no matter how big the brand is, that brand or retailer, they're probably only thinking of them for a teeny fraction of a day. And while the loyalty program may sound great when you live and breathe your brand as you should in your company, maybe your most loyal customers will love it too, and use it, and get enough value out of it.
Wes Schroll:
But if you really want to move the needle in the long-term, you have to talk to and tap into the long tail of consumers. Loyalty programs have been amazing at capturing and communicating with your top 20% of customers, who may account for 80% of your revenue today. But if you want to really move the needle, there's not that much more you can get out of those customers. And you need to fight to retain them, which is what traditional loyalty programs are really good at. But if you're going after that long tail of the 80%, you have to think differently. You have to go and meet those consumers where they are telling you they want to be met. And that's what we think we're doing at Fetch, is we've created this platform for them to participate, for them to submit transactions, for them to use that daily active, on a daily basis.
Wes Schroll:
And they will react in a really positive way and shift their behavior to the companies that come and meet them and show them that they are loyal to those households by offering them rewards in a way that is meaningful and on a platform that they're already comfortable using. So I think that's been the perspective shift, is it's not that there's anything wrong with traditional loyalty programs. They're good and they have their place. But we need to think differently if we're going to try to tap into those long tails. And the thing is, a customer is part of a long tail for one brand or another. Not everyone is going to be the loyal customer for one place, maybe a long tail customer for another. And that's where someone like us as a third party can sit across all of that and not lose it because there's no such thing as a long tail for us because you can submit every transaction, so everyone's a core.
Wes Schroll:
And then again, it's just those forward thinking brands, retailers, companies, that come and communicate to those consumers, offer them the rewards, using our currency, that get more loyalty from those consumers and more dollars. And that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to really just help play that connection between the brands and their end consumers.
Peter Crosby:
So lay out for us the experience of a consumer using your app.
Wes Schroll:
So completely free application that pays you to use it, so go check it out. Why not? Right? But at the end of the day, all that we talk about with our consumers when they first come on board and using the application is we encourage them to just start submitting transactions. And you can do that by either taking a picture of a physical receipt, or you can link your digital accounts, so think like your email, your Amazon account. You can just link those digitally and we'll pull in those transactions. And you're going to get rewarded every time you submit a transaction guaranteed.
Wes Schroll:
Now what we'll do though is we'll also utilize that information that you're providing us to then go out there and advocate on your behalf. We will fetch you incremental value by going out there and talking with those brands or companies in the categories that we see you care about, and we're going to get them to try to come and offer you incremental points for either retaining your current behavior, maybe shifting your current behavior just slightly, maybe trying something new that we think you'll be interested in. And we'll deliver you points for doing that. So we might be ... And that will just take place when you scan a receipt in the future, and you've accomplished whatever the task was that was set out to earn points. You'll earn those points and then you accumulate all of these points across all of the hundreds and hundreds of partners that we have. And you can go and redeem them for really hundreds of different options, everything from virtual gift cards, or you can donate them to charity at this time of season, or this time of you.
Wes Schroll:
You can enter them into sweepstakes, all kinds of things that you can do. We just want you to find something that's meaningful and valuable, and then we'll just help you keep earning more and more points.
Peter Crosby:
So roll out some of those top stats for me that I know we talked about when we first got introduced to you of sort of what scale people are actually doing this at.
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. So from the top level, you have over 11 million monthly active users on the platform. We see that represents about 7.2 million households that are active on the platform. Those households on average are submitting 26 to 27 transactions per month. And we just actually broke, if you took the dollars that are represented on those transactions, on an annual basis, we're capturing more than $100 billion of sales. And that's really important. It's over $14,000 per household that we're capturing. And that for us is again a consumer telling us, "Go get us rewards on all of these types of purchases." And it gives our sales teams the information and the ammo needed to go out there and find those companies that want to reward these millions of households and active users and win their unfair share of the spend within those actual households. So again it's-
Peter Crosby:
Their unfair share, I love it.
Wes Schroll:
Exactly. And it's changing from a mentality of having to activate on a specific channel, like one off channel. And you can now actually treat a household as a household, which means you're going to have full picture to ROI. You're going to have a much more holistic message that's relevant to the consumer because you're treating them as their whole self and not just as what they do at any one place.
Rob Gonzalez:
This is really interesting. So you're taking the entire trend of the consumer being in charge of the journey and really putting the power in their hands. And unlike a traditional loyalty program where the rewards are kind of narrow in the span of an individual retailer, you're even giving them power of points to spend across a whole range of options. I mean, this is really interesting. And it's also very modern internet in the sense that you're taking an existing idea, the loyalty program, which addresses only a very small section of the market, and you're then expanding it to literally everybody as an addressable market who can participate. I love it.
Rob Gonzalez:
So where my head goes on this, and our audience are brand manufacturers, where my head goes is you've got to be capturing crazy amounts of data here. You've got every household purchase, $14,000 per household, 11 million households, and $100 billion in purchases overall. It's staggering amounts of data. How does this data help a manufacturer grow faster? Can you give us a case study on where that unfair share comes into play based on the data that you're collecting and the system that you built?
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. So I think early on when we were relatively small in terms of the number of households, the problem that we encountered, we just couldn't influence enough sales to make it really worth the time of the people to think about how to segment and go after. So during that time in the history of the business, we were very focused on providing insights, helping them test things within our platform, then roll it out through other channels that have larger scale. And that was super exciting for them because we could identify, hey, a consumer who's buying this brand new product, here's what else is in their cart, here's where else they're shopping, a lot of those traditional type insights you look for.
Wes Schroll:
But as we've scaled up and as we've continued to ... I mean, at $100 billion per year, that's the equivalent of the seventh largest retailer in the US. And by the way, with a growth rate that will put us at number three within the next year. So at that type of scale, that is starting to be a fundamentally different conversation in the value we can provide to our manufacturers. If we help them win an extra 5% with our households, we're talking about, depending on the brand, tens of millions of dollars of incremental sales that we're delivering for them.
Wes Schroll:
And the way that we're doing it is much more akin to how you would think about spending money online in digital marketing or advertising, where I think Facebook and Google revolutionized the way marketers thought about it. Instead of buying demographics, they were all of a sudden going to use lookalike targeting to test campaigns and then roll it out to whoever was it was most interesting to, regardless of demographics. We're essentially taking that same disruptive power and applying it to the terrestrial world because what Facebook and Google lack is a data source that can track a consumer across all of their spend in the physical world, where 90% of their spend is still taking place, especially on traditional CPG type products.
Wes Schroll:
So what we're now able to do is, a brand can come to us and say, "We want to drive market share in this region by 2%. And we're willing to do it at a profitability of X." And then our system will start rolling it out in different values, you might get a different offer than I get. The system is just understanding who our consumers are, understanding their price sensitivity, understanding when they go shopping. And it's deploying those dollars on behalf of that brand to achieve those objectives. So we're moving from something that was much more human directed, these types of consumers get this offer, to something that's much more objectives based. We want to do X, Y, or Z, and how it gets there is less important than actually just achieving the objective.
Wes Schroll:
And what we love about it is when we turn around and then provide the reports back to any of our brand partners afterwards, we do realtime controlled, statistically relevant sample sets that are holdouts. So if there's say three million of our households are directly applicable for an offer, maybe it holds out 150,000 of them that won't get the offer, won't get any additional points, but will keep submitting all of their transactions because of all of our other brands and offers that they have. And then we can actually see. What was the different behavior that was displayed by the consumers who got that offer versus the control group? And then we can truly tell them incrementally in ROI. And that's something that is I think going to be a game changer and something that should be demanded across all partners at some point, is that level of rigor to determining ROI and value.
Rob Gonzalez:
So what's so interesting about that to me is if I'm going to reason by analogy here, Facebook increased the size of the advertising market in aggregate. They didn't take traditional dollars that were spent by Proctor and Gamble and Ford Motors and Coca-Cola and whatnot, and move it from TV to Facebook. What instead they did was they created an advertising model that was easy enough for small businesses to get in, but was really sophisticated. And they did it in kind of a very similar way to what you're talking about, where what you would do as a business is you would say, the value to a conversion for me is a buck fifty. I'm willing to spend up to X in order to make a conversion happen. And you put that in the bidding model, and they almost do the rest. It's sort of they figure out the optimal demographic. They do all this AB testing in the background. They're building [inaudible 00:16:16] models.
Rob Gonzalez:
And it just makes it super easy for somebody who's not a sophisticated data analyst and advertiser to reach people that are most likely to buy. So you're effectively doing that for shopping across all channels. So the next question I've got for you is then: If my reasoning by analogy is accurate, if Facebook's expanding the advertising market to lots of small businesses and game studios that are small, and other folks that traditionally haven't been able to participate, are you seeing the same for Fetch Rewards? Are you seeing smaller up and coming, direct to consumer brands that are looking to grow share growing it through your platform? Or is some of that just dependent upon these brands first getting brick distribution through traditional retail before they can take advantage of it?
Wes Schroll:
So I think, I mean, there's multiple lenses there to when we talk about up and coming products. Right? Every major CPG has new innovations that they're trying to launch. And what they're trying to do is support the ACV build when they're rolling out region by region. And the beautiful thing about a platform like Fetch is we can roll out with them because we can target people who are shopping at, let's say it's starting out at Target, starting at Target within Missouri. And we can then communicate to those customers, letting them know of this new product that maybe Frito Lay just launched, help them continue to build that volume that they need to then go get the reorder and expand into additional brick and mortar locations and show it's a great story to carry that product.
Wes Schroll:
So we do that for our large CPG partners, but we also absolutely do it with our smaller up and coming partners. I mean, Back to the Roots, which is growing mushrooms at home in their little packages, is a big partner of ours that we've been super excited about because as we've rolled it out, our consumers have loved it. And we see there's a huge, especially as more people are spending time at home, this concept of, wow, I can grow my own food at home and eat it at a cost that's really low and feels good, they're interested in it. So we've partnered with them, we're going to continue partnering with them moving forward.
Wes Schroll:
But there's dozens and dozens of others like that, that we're super excited that we get to help them build their brand, help them accelerate and break through the noise of what it would normally be to find shelf space or anything like that because at the end of the day, our shelf space is the consumer's eyeballs looking at the phone. And we can definitely again, through our lookalike modeling, see which types of consumers are going to be really excited about this product and make sure that they're seeing it.
Rob Gonzalez:
And it seems to me like an absolutely killer new route to market for customer acquisition for a brand that wants to take over. It was funny though when you said, "Companies helping people grow mushrooms at home." I was like, "Whoa, wait a second."
Peter Crosby:
I had a completely different thought.
Wes Schroll:
Maybe they'll do a line extension. We don't know yet.
Rob Gonzalez:
Line extension.
Wes Schroll:
So far it's the kind that you would use in a saute.
Peter Crosby:
Make my bolognese even better.
Wes Schroll:
Exactly.
Peter Crosby:
Wes, you were talking earlier about sort of the 80/20 that traditional loyalty programs have often focused on, or are able to only engage with the 20% that's most enthusiastic. What I'm super interested in now is one of the newest campaign types that you're supporting is actually tapping into your network to get reviews created. And that to me, A, I'd love to know whether you're seeing those reviews come from sort of that 20% enthusiastic, most enthusiastic, or because you have the long tail, you're seeing coming from almost anywhere. But that's sort of a detail next to, holy crap, 11 million possible, or 12 million possible reviewers sitting there, who you know they bought the product. They have experience. So I would love to hear about sort of this new campaign type [inaudible 00:20:17].
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. The lens we always challenge ourselves to look at these type of problems with is a consumer first mindset. So when we thought about reviews, we thought about: Well, what is the pain point for the consumer today? And what we see that consumers are wanting to see is they're wanting to see recency of reviews and they're wanting them to be trustworthy because nowadays, the market's being flooded with ones that you cannot trust. And so we identified that both of those, if we could help solve those for our users would be super valuable, and that our consumers, we've even seen Facebook groups where someone will submit a receipt, have bought Back to the Roots Mushrooms, and someone will say, "How are they?" And we'll see entire Facebook conversations with our users advocating for a product that they may have tried and liked and all of those things.
Wes Schroll:
But they're having to do it on their own, so we started to think, "Well, could we bring that to life for them in the application, make is so that they can have their voice heard, so that they can share their voice with the other real Fetch consumers and get it out there?" What we started to see, so then we turned that coin over and said, "Okay, well what have the problems been from a business perspective? Why are reviews so hard to generate?" Well, first is you have to either bombard someone with messages who just bought it online, where you actually have an email address. And it's really tough though. How do you know whether you should ask for a review, or you should show them the promotion that's available next week? Because you only get so much time and mind share when someone's getting an Amazon email or something like that.
Wes Schroll:
So it's hard to break through the noise, and not everyone's buying online for a lot of these products. And when they are, so then you have to either ship them the product and ask them to write a review, and then you ship a bunch of these products out, not everyone responds and it's really, really expensive, so that's tough too. So we started to identify that we could do is with our, not only are there more than 11 million active users on there, but we have historical data on them to see that these are real people. These are real customers. They display shopping behaviors that are clearly an actual human. Perfect, so now they're in our segment of being these are real people that we would believe if we could get a review from.
Wes Schroll:
Then we go into the item level and say, "Okay, well, we've seen that they bought Tom's Maine," because we actually did a program with them. We see that they bought Tom's Maine toothpaste at this retailer yesterday. Then we can prompt them and say, "Rate this. How was this?" And then we can generate that review without having to ship them a product. We can reward them with some points that are meaningful because there's not all the overhead costs anymore. And then we can generate 10, 20, 30 times more reviews from consumers through this methodology. And you can keep it going, ongoing, so that for Tom's Maine, those reviews get piped through our partnerships onto retail websites or online portals. And they can get a volume that they can actually afford to be consistent, ongoing, and from validated, confirmed purchasers, who aren't spamming the system or cheating the system.
Wes Schroll:
So I think because of all of those different factors, we decided it was going to be something we would start doing a little bit more on, and so far, we've been really excited by the results and continue to think ... We actually are releasing a social feed within the app, where you can connect with friends, you can compete on leader boards of points and all these kind of fun things, since so many of our users are friends and family members of one another. But we're excited to see. Hey, can you also show reviews through there too? So not only does it get piped into the website, but it's also then being displayed to consumers on the Fetch app. And Fetch can become a source of truth and trust for getting information about how a product is.
Peter Crosby:
And the numbers that you told us about Tom's of Maine was that they collected 3500 reviews in a three day period.
Wes Schroll:
Yeah, with had to slow it down at that point. I think we kind of blew through the allotment that we were trying to get through. Yeah, we were super excited by it. I mean, that's a single brand, single product that we were going after there. So yeah, really excited by the potential and scaling that up as a part of the platform.
Peter Crosby:
And you see the algorithms react. Right? Because I think you said that it had a big impact on where they show up in search results.
Wes Schroll:
Went up in search results, their overall rating went up too, because again, you're not just blinding sending out samples to people who may or may not like it, you're talking to people who are choosing to buy the product, so are probably already more predisposed to be interested in a product like that.
Rob Gonzalez:
And for the search rankings, real quick for the search rankings, are you getting those on where? Amazon.com, are you getting them, publishing them through the Bazaarvoice network, or just logistically, where do the reviews end up showing up?
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. So we've been working with PowerReviews, so it pipes in through theirs, and they can obviously farm those out to Bazaar or through their own channels, and they can start dispersing and populating through a host of different channels, all the ones that you mentioned and more.
Peter Crosby:
Oh, PowerReviews. Wait a minute. So you have Peter Bond working for you now, who is-
Wes Schroll:
Oh, yes.
Peter Crosby:
On the CPG Guys Podcast, we are great podcast cohorts, and he used to be at PowerReviews. I'm sensing a connection here.
Wes Schroll:
There may have been a slight connection and method to the madness there that was orchestrated from someone who knew what they were doing. But yeah, he's been awesome.
Peter Crosby:
I respect it. I respect it. That's amazing. One of other things, you talked about another case study with reviews that I thought was fascinating, which is the power of those reviews to actually impact product design. We hope that consumer voice will find its way into the entire organization. And often, the silos can stand in the way of that happening. But can you walk us through sort of how that has happened in an example?
Wes Schroll:
Yeah. So through this one to one relationship with the consumer, it allows us the channel and the path to have a lot of different conversations with them, whether that's alerting them of promotionally, hey, if you go buy more of this product, you're going to earn more, so we can help drive sales, [inaudible 00:26:18] thing to drive reviews. But we can also talk to those customers. We can ask them questions. We could give them surveys. What do you think about this pack or this pack? Or what speaks to you more? We could look at the rest of the items that they've purchased and see, okay, well, they're clearly heading towards more matte finish type products that have this type of look. So there's actually a bunch of different ways that we're tapping into being able to answer those types of questions for our partners, whether it's through directly asking consumers, using the data to actually better understand and validate what consumers are saying that this flavor or this packaging is more interesting.
Wes Schroll:
So we definitely believe that for any partner out there who's considering launching new products, actively launching new products and trying to optimize and expand, we offer a suite of different tools that can help them from helping them gain sales and distribution, to refining down the actual product, the flavor profile, the look and feel of it, all the way through to reviews, and that entire lifecycle that really helps accelerate a product's expansion into a market.
Rob Gonzalez:
You've got now two different types of campaigns that we've talked about here. If you're a brand manufacturer, you can run a rewards campaign to raise market share within a region or within an area. The example you gave is, you want to raise it by two points. How do you raise it by two points? And so as a manufacturer, I can set a profitability limit and just kind of pump money and rewards into the system and see sales increase. And then the other one is I can get reviews. And I'd imagine that either today or from a roadmap perspective, given that you've got this one to one relationship with the audience, and given that you mentioned that you're building on social, there's a ton of other possibilities for campaign types, or action types that a brand could use.
Rob Gonzalez:
One example is brands are already spending a bunch of creative dollars and production dollars on short form video for Instagram, or TikTok, or wherever else they're putting their branding. Maybe that has a place in the app somewhere, I don't know. But what are the other types of things that brands can do through your network right now?
Wes Schroll:
One of our partners over at Kimberly Clark with Huggies, one of the programs that we ran with them, they had been working on their own loyalty program called Huggies Rewards for about a decade. But again, they ran into some of those fundamental problems that I mentioned earlier before. They were really talking with their 20% of their best customers, and struggling to then talk with the rest. And what they realized is in the Fetch ecosystem, we already had more diaper purchasers than they had in their entire program after 10 years. So we actually integrated it into the Fetch ecosystem, where you can now sign up for Huggies rewards directly in the Fetch app.
Wes Schroll:
So when you do that, we can identify, okay, here's diaper buyers. We can then let them know, hey, there's even more content for you if you sign up for Huggies Rewards. They provide us the date of birth for their child. They then get an annual subscription to Parent Magazine for free, automatically sent to them. And they're basically opted in to earn incrementally more rewards having now opted into that secondary program within the Fetch ecosystem, where maybe if they spend 300 points, we'll send you embroidered diapers with your baby's name on them, or something that you normally just can't spend to get. So what we love about that for our brands, and we now run Pepsi Tasty Rewards is another example. Their loyalty program run in the Fetch ecosystem, where you can now get other content and value above and beyond the base points that we're able to award.
Wes Schroll:
It's giving our brands the platform to create a space that is branded as their own, and to not have to worry about running their own mobile application, and to worry about driving acquisition. All the expensive things that we have to raise a lot of money to do, they can ride on our coattails to do that. And for us, we love it too because our consumers want that brand experience. They want certain ones to lean in more and be closer with. So that's another big way that we've worked with brands to really bring them to life within our ecosystem above and beyond all the things we've already talked about.
Peter Crosby:
So Wes, is all of this global? Where are those 11 million current users coming from? And what are your plans for global world domination?
Wes Schroll:
So today we are just in the United States. We're super fortunate that twofold, one, we're very good at finding consumers that are interested in saving money, having fun while doing it, and on a really easy platform. So we don't have to rely on a bunch of mass market, and even our brand awareness I would say is relatively low because we're very targeted. Once someone hears about it, we're really good at converting them to actually download, sign up, and use the application. And the other thing we're really fortunate with is they retain really, really well with us. So both of those things combined to why we can be at 11 million monthly active users, but still believe that there is four or five X in front of us. We don't think we've tapped out the market here in the US. So we are very focused to continue to accelerate in the US and to continue to get just more penetration into the market, make sure that we are serving as many consumers as we can, as many households as we can.
Wes Schroll:
That all being said, we're really excited that in Q one, we're actually launching Spanish in the app, so the app will be fully native in Spanish as well, which is absolutely we think the right thing to do, given all the Spanish first language speakers that we have in the US, and that we already have in the Fetch application. We think we'll give them a better experience. That all to say though that getting the app and the platform ready to hold multiple languages may be a signal towards some of our ambitions of where we want to go in the future.
Peter Crosby:
That's terrific. And also, I did hear that you just entered the restaurant market in September.
Wes Schroll:
Yes. We are super excited about that because traditionally, we had been really focused on grocery, mass, drug, convenience, all of those. But honestly, what we started doing is just listening to our users. They started submitting millions of receipts from restaurants. And we couldn't figure out why at first, but then we started to realize. Oh, they're just telling us they want us to go get them points from restaurants. And the beautiful thing was, when we went in and started talking with restaurants, we were saying, "Hey, there's this many million customers that we have that are already shopping at your location, or maybe your competitors, that we'd love to help you win with." So it was like we were able to go in there with an amazing sell story, and we found amazing early partners with Panera, with Papa John's, with Burger King, these groups that are very forward thinking of just saying, "You're right. We need to meet the customer where they want to be met at."
Wes Schroll:
And they come onto the Fetch platform and reward customers with points. We're starting to be able to do all kinds of different targeting off of items that they're buying, times of day that they're buying. Huge amounts of our users have geolocation already turned on, so we can do things that are super relevant based upon where the customer is going and the time of the day. So yeah, we're really, really excited about it. We think it's one of the fastest growing verticals for us of the business. We have an individual named Jason Marker, who came over, he was previously the CEO of CKE, or Carl's Junior and Hardees.
Wes Schroll:
So we have a great restaurant expert that is leading that vertical for us and continuing to see additional ones. But we think we're at the tip of the iceberg for what we're going to be able to do on the restaurant QSR front. But we have some awesome partners who are already live and seeing the results. And it's proven out. It can do the same things that we were able to do for CPGs and retailers on that side of the market we can do for restaurants too.
Rob Gonzalez:
Yeah. For restaurants, you named some of the big chains, the Papa John's and whatnot. There's also here in Boston we've got Toast, which recently had the mass monster IPO, which deals with a lot of the smaller chains for POS systems and runs their own loyalty programs. There's likely probably a collaboration somewhere in there. But what I will say is as you go into restaurants, I would love it if you fixed the restaurant review problem. Yelp I find very annoying for restaurant reviews because it's always like one star, the food was good, but too expensive, or whatever, just things that don't matter, to me anyway.
Rob Gonzalez:
And so I would love for a restaurant review system that somehow personalizes the reviews to people like me or whatnot. I'm going to throw that feature request in there as you guys move in.
Wes Schroll:
We'll add it to the roadmap and you'll be the first call to do user testing with us on it. But I agree with you, there's some fundamental problems that they're facing there, also with delivery companies in the mix. It's a really fascinating space right now. And again, the way we approach any new space is: What would make that experience better for consumers? And then we just go and fight for them. So I think that reviews one is a very real potential long-term thing that we will try to go and help with.
Peter Crosby:
Well, Wes, thank you so much for joining us. I mean, I think both Rob and I, and clearly 11 million other people just think you're ... It's so inspiring to her how focused you are on the consumer experience. Number one, what's their journey? And then everything else falls out of that. And I think all of us can take a lesson from that singular focus and coming back to that. So it's fun to hear that, it's great to hear your enthusiasm. And we really look forward to watching your growth and seeing where it all goes. So thank you so much for sharing this with the Digital Shelf Institute audience. We appreciate it.
Wes Schroll:
Well, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Wes for joining us. If you enjoyed this podcast, tell your friends. Hm, maybe we should use Fetch Rewards. Anyway, thank you as always for being part of our community.
