For the past few months, we have been developing Meed. This unified loyalty platform unleashes enterprise-quality loyalty capabilities and makes them accessible for any business, especially SMEs in retail, F&B, hospitality and eCommerce. It can do this because of the unique properties of building it on a Web3 foundation.
It is now time for the company's name to reflect the product we are building.
On the inside, Meed is very much a child of Web3 technology, allowing for some powerful features:
An open interoperable on-chain infrastructure that allows businesses to connect their programs, or even merge them, to create powerful loyalty groups and their own effective Super Apps. For those in Hong Kong familiar with YUU, any businesses can team up and make their equivalent with mutual recognition and the benefits of a much larger addressable customer base.
Programmable rewards that evolve with the customers' spending habits and create new value and incentives in the customer longtail, turning less frequent customers into more frequent ones
A decentralised identity mechanism through the Meed app means customers can control what personal data is shared. By giving up the name and email address in data form, businesses can access much more information about their customers and customers within their geography and in similar companies anywhere in the world.
Meed will feature an AI-powered assistant - codename Meedy - that analyses data to recommend campaign actions and, using generative AI, can create and execute those campaigns. This is essential for small businesses that need more time to analyse analytics.
The Meed app features a gamification layer which encourages consumers to use the app for additional rewards.
The Meed app is already at the alpha stage and being tested on mobile phones internally, as is the brand portal where businesses will create and manage their loyalty programs. We expect to have a public alpha later in July and will sign up some local businesses in Hong Kong to participate for free.
However, the most innovative feature of Meed is the one that you cannot see.
Although Meed is entirely built on a backbone of blockchain technology and smart contracts, on the outside, it is just an app where customers can see their latest rewards and redeem them at the point of sale.
We have strived to keep it simple and require no learning curve. For example, if a customer walks into a shop and sees the Meed logo by the cash register, they snap the QR code in the app and are a member. The cashier snaps the QR code when redeeming vouchers - discount, redemption, or event/VIP pass—no signing or dealing with gas fees. These crypto-like processes are internalised and kept away from the user interface.
Later, transactions will be recognised using NFC technology and simply tapping devices together. We are also under NDA with several leading point-of-sale solution providers looking at ways to integrate the loyalty mechanism directly into POS systems.
This simplicity in UI is essential to make it attractive to small business owners. For example, many shops use printed stamp cards. Meed will electrify the stamp card process, but it must be simple and take a little time. Meed has achieved this through extensive UX design, smart contract-driven automation, and AI.
The Move to Loyalty
Since the company was founded the past year, our primary focus has been using Web3 as the retention mechanism built into the product, not the on-ramp where access is through the pre-sale of tokens and NFTs, effectively limiting your target market. At first, our efforts concentrated on the player ecosystem around games, but over time we realised that we were building a loyalty mechanism that could work for all.
The Meed Platform will initially focus on SMEs and be delivered as a scalable SaaS platform. However, at the same time, we are also talking with established enterprises running legacy Web2 loyalty mechanisms about using the tools on the Meed Platform to experiment and augment what they already have.
We continue to build games for loyalty programs which extend brand engagement beyond the core customer experience. One example is Skysurfer Games, our JV with Hong Kong fintech company divit, which creates games for airlines which customers can play when they are not flying to interact with the brand and win more miles.
There are five times more SMEs worldwide than there are crypto wallets. And those SMEs have billions of customers. So the scale of the opportunity in front of us is massive.
Why did we call the company Meed? It’s an archaic English word that means:
A person’s deserved share of praise or honour.
If that is not the perfect name for a loyalty platform, I don’t know what it is!
Phil Ingram
Founder
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