A Founders Letter
Hello There,
Back in 2016, the idea for Incent literally fell out of my wife’s purse – all over the kitchen floor. A ton of loyalty point plastic. How much value did it represent? Did we even know? Well, not much as it turned out most had expired. The conventional loyalty sector looks a lot like the contents of my wife’s purse; tired, bloated and segmented, with value leaking all over the floor.
This is because points loyalty is centred around the individual issuing entities. This leaves consumers cold because the digital “buttons” awarded only have any utility if redeemed with the issuer – and only then for a limited time. And issuers don’t like points loyalty either because nobody likes operating (or paying for someone else to operate) something that consumers – who are humans too – just don’t value any more.
humans don’t like restriction
Then bitcoin and blockchain came along – and everything changed. We glimpsed a better future; a future in which consumer spending decisions might better be incentivised with real, open, tradable value than digital breadcrumbs. In a post-GFC climate where ‘financial wellbeing’ is widely cited as the number one stressor in the first world, it seemed to us that anyone who rewarded desired behaviour with real, open, tradeable value was far more likely to secure customer loyalty than those offering time-limited IOUs.
humans love freedom and will come back to get more of it
Jins and I founded Incent on a shared belief that humans who are are doing a little better than struggling from pay-check to pay-check are happier humans; that the means to build a little capital as they go about their everyday lives gives humans the ability to make plans, to hope and to see the best in themselves and others.
We realised that the malaise of conventional loyalty represented an opportunity to re-engineer the mechanics of incentivisation writ large. After all, in the post-internet era, it isn’t just merchants vying for our spend. As the Attention Economy explodes around us, everyone who wants to incentivise anything is vying for our eyeballs. Humans have become the finite resource.
In the Attention Economy humans are the finite resource
Post blockchain we thought it ought to be possible to build technology that allowed anyone to reward any digitally trackable action – not just purchase behaviour. And then it would be possible for humans, just through living their everyday lives, to start accumulating real value – above and beyond their paycheck.
So we assembled a small team, started talking about our ideas and secured the backing to get to work. Our brief was to build technology that:
1. Puts humans first – because if the benefactor of a reward really values it, loyalty follows.
Not Loyalty but LoyalME
2. Removes barriers to entry – that is, seamless and frictionless for both issuers and recipients.
Set and Forget
3. Broadens utility – so that anyone can incentivise any desired behaviour, not just merchants and not just spending.
Buy, Click, Scan, Read, Watch, Send and Do
For the last 2 years, we have been building and testing solutions that nudge us towards this goal. We’ve had some setbacks and successes along the way but we have stayed true to our core values and brief and we’re very proud to announce that our first mainstream consumer launch is finally just around the corner – July to be precise. And it’s truly revolutionary. Using our global patent-pending technology it will be possible, for the first time ever, for humans to get rewarded seamlessly across their entire spend, irrespective of what they spend on (including rent, bills and even tax!) or how they pay. No cards or swipes are required – just set and forget.
And that’s just for starters. The next launch will make it possible for merchants to offer and track bonus rewards to our community for their custom.
Finally, by year-end, it is our goal that all of our users have the ability to reward and be rewarded for any digitally trackable behaviour by any other Incent user, instantly and seamlessly, with a real, open and tradeable digital commodity that revalues as a function of demand for it.
With all revenue funnelled back into the reward commodity itself, everyone benefits from the activity of everyone else.
It’s worth taking a minute to consider the potential good that this technology can bring to everyone from the smallest scale content creators to the largest brands, and consumers rewarded for their attention, actions and behaviours – building wealth as they go about their everyday lives. This is what drove us to build Incent. We’re excited to be approaching the next stage of what we hope and expect to remain a rewarding journey. If you fancy joining us, our Waitlist is open at Incent.com. Be sure to reserve your slot!
Read more from the founders and other members of the team on our News page
https://www.incent.com/news/
