At a startup, time flies fast. While that makes for an exciting ride, it also makes it difficult to see and appreciate just how far you’ve come.
That’s why I’ve made it a tradition to take time at the end of the year to reflect — on how much our team has achieved, and where we intend to go next.
At a high level, I see 2024 as one where we worked more on the business than in it, bringing on the right talent, beefing up the right parts of our product, and forming relationships with the right partners to serve as a springboard into the future.
Here are some of the things that I consider our biggest achievements for the year and how they’re setting us up for some major growth in 2025.
Laying the foundation in 2024
Looking back at 2024, I’d bucket our accomplishments into three distinct categories: people, product, and customers.
People
This section comes first. People really are what make Kard special and keep us moving toward our goals. And in order to become the kind of company we want to be in 2025 (and beyond), we had to expand our leadership team.
This year, we welcomed some fantastic senior hires across the team. First up, Blake Ziolkowski, our Senior Director of Merchant Sales. Blake is the kind of sales leader that’s taken every team member (not just reps) to the next level at every place he’s worked, from Patagonia to AdRoll to Launchnotes. We’re lucky to have his expertise. Blake put it best himself:
“What gets me really excited is seeing how quickly we can close household logos for above-average pilots. Though we’ve only been marketing Kard for a few years, we’re able to immediately build trust with enterprise and strategic brands, leading subscription companies, and classic American restaurants. To me, that shows the strength and value of our product, our audience, and our data.”
Pooja Panse, our Director of Engineering, was our next big get. At Toast, she led the backend payments team, which powered the business of over 100,000 restaurants and fintech products that drove over $3B in revenue. She grew her team from just seven developers to a 135-person organization. We’re thrilled to have her decades of engineering management experience onboard — not only at Toast but at companies like AOL and SAP.
“Kard has so much valuable data that can eliminate a lot of the guesswork in adtech. And it’s already differentiated from other products on the market with evergreen offers. I'm really excited to lead the team as Kard becomes an end-to-end loyalty product driving innovation in how we serve card-linked offers to all our customers.”
Recently, we brought on Lars Bowlin as Director of Data Platform. Like our other senior hires, he brings a wealth of experience to the table — as an engineering lead at Lonza and VP of engineering at Kollective. His sweet spot is helping data teams improve their efficiency and drive business value, and he’s already brought that to Kard in spades.
“Kard is sitting on a gold mine of data. I’m excited to build it into our product in a way that helps merchants and issuers become the authorities on loyalty in their industry, consistently delivering offers that consumers actually appreciate and act on.”
Product
You’ll notice a common thread in our senior leadership’s take on Kard: our greatest asset is our data. To capitalize on that advantage and expand beyond core CLO, we needed to make some significant changes to our product.
The largest effort has been the new version of our API. Version 2 is built out in a much more modular, enterprise-ready way. This “plug and play” concept gives our customers much more flexibility with their rewards programs, allowing them to customize not only their loyalty program look and feel, but the offers within it.
Along with our API V2 release, we are launching offer boosts (which can lead to even clearer attribution measurement) and other gamification opportunities. These new types of offers not only drive more excitement from consumers, but attribution for our merchants, making it easier for our issuers and merchants to reach the right consumers at the right time.
Customers
Our GTM team has done an incredible job growing our customer roster this year. But what’s even more impressive is how many customers we’ve retained. Here’s an overview of the headway we made in our merchant business, issuer business, and data business.
Merchant
I’m always excited by the logos we pull in, but this year, I was particularly impressed. Fazoli’s, Forever 21, and Verizon (Straight Talk) are just a few of the huge brands trusting us to help grow their businesses.
We saw some remarkable results from our existing merchant customers, too. A national meal kit delivery company boosted revenue by 81% during a Kard campaign, shifting their market share by 6%. Another lifestyle brand gained 13% market share in just 60 days with Kard’s help.
Stories like these are what motivate our team to keep delivering stellar results, and what keeps our customers around. The reliability of our platform and the dedication of our teams has led to retention rates that are double what we see at others in the performance media space. Crazy for a Series A company!
Issuer
In anticipation of API V2, we rolled out a few new API features throughout the year to our issuer customers to great success. Two of our major issuer customers saw big gains after adopting these changes, most impressively in what we call “match rate”. Match rate is an indicator of whether cardholders are engaging with offers — the higher the match rate, the more transactions were associated with a reward.
One issuer 3.75x’d their match rate in six months, helping each rewarded user earn $6.46 in rewards on average per month. The other 20x’d their revenue with Kard rewards after adopting our new API!
Data
Last year, we were excited to be processing tens of millions of dollars per month. Thanks to our merchant and issuer growth, we’re now processing billions. This growth allows us to build an even smarter rewards platform, driving more relevant offers to the right consumer at the right time.
2025: Reaching for more
In the coming year, we’re focused on answering two specific questions:
- How do we expand into new markets?
- How do we continue scaling our company?
Though we already reach 10s of millions of consumers, we aren’t stopping there. The good news is we’re already well on our way. We are poised to more than 4x our entire network through several partnerships we’re launching in the beginning of the year, expanding into new types of fintechs and banks with increasingly more unique data sets.
Besides adding new partners, we’re also adding more high-value features to our product. For one, we’re ingesting more kinds of data that will help our customers personalize their offers and target even more effectively.
For example, after our revamped API goes live, we’re planning to release new offer types, at the SKU, location, and category level. Combined with our first-party transaction data, we hope to eventually suggest specific offer types based on audience behavior, allowing customers to maximize offer performance and ROI.
Follow our journey
We’ll be sharing our newest partnerships, customer success stories, and conference wins on LinkedIn. If you’re not already keeping up with us there, please give us a follow!
