Coin Out, Acquired
On March 31st, IRI Worldwide acquired Coin Out Inc. in a deal that will propel the industry forward. We want to thank all of our investors, partners, friends, supporters, clients and members who have helped us build the business into one of the top rewards apps in the world along the way. We are honored to now be apart of such a storied organization and look forward to working with IRI’s first class team and clients. We are also incredibly proud to deliver a return to our investors and prove those folks right who believed in us when nobody else did.
A special thank you to every institutional investor we spoke to who said no (there were MANY, MANY no’s).
Thank you to every potential client we spoke to who said no.
Thank you to every customer at Just Salad (our first merchant partner) who looked at me like I was a crazy person.
Thank you to every member who deleted our app in the early days who told us our product was terrible.
Thank you to Mr. Wonderful, Mark, Lori, Robert and Barbara for not doing a deal with us.
All of your rejections powered our success and helped us get to where we are today.
A bit on our journey:
7 years ago I was poking around Legal Zoom during a Columbia Business School lecture. I had just completed a Lean Launchpad class taught by the legendary Steve Blank, and had a real itch to start my own business. Partly out of boredom, partly out of seeking something new, I said screw it, let’s try this out, and incorporated Coin Out Inc. on Friday, Apr 25, 2014. The only way to truly jump into something is lock yourself in with no turning back (or so I thought… for better or worse, this idea worked… at the time).
I had the entirely unoriginal idea that people who paid with cash didn’t want to get coins back in return. I started working on the high level concept in 2013 and it took me a good solid year to flesh it out. I genuinely had no clue what I was doing.
Thankfully, I found a mentor in Dave Lerner — the hidden gem of NY angel / entrepreneurship world — who guided me through the building blocks of starting a company and being an entrepreneur. He suggested I take Steve’s class, and got thrusted into trying to build a business. Here is our original presentation on Coin Out, the Digital Coin Jar: https://www.slideshare.net/sblank/coin-out-columbia-univ-jan-2014
To say we were shut down a million times would be an understatement: many people thought the idea was awful and impossible to execute. But I didn’t care — the entrepeurnial fire was lit. Every time someone told me what was wrong with it or why I would fail, it drove me even harder. You hear that a lot from people building startups, but it really is true. One of the keys to turning that into productive fuel is realizing that they might actually be right. Your idea might flat out suck. But that doesn’t mean you have failed.
Why? Because you can pivot. You can use data to improve your original idea or flat out change it. Pivot is a word that has gotten a bad wrap in recent years. Pivoting is something I learned from Steve and the lean model. At its heart is a data driven approach to building — data being customer interviews, app downloads, really anything quantifiable. How can you truly know you have a good idea until you get real world data about what strangers think about it (remembering to violently exclude anything your friends and family tell you)? Once you get that data, if it is telling you your idea needs some work, you must pivot to find product market fit.
And that pivot does not need to be major. It could be a minor pivot; perhaps a product tweak or change in sales strategy. This concept took me several years to fully internalize, and it wasn’t until our Shark Tank taping in 2017 that I understood the power of a well-timed and well-executed pivot.
(Here’s my favorite Shark Tank clip when Mr. Wonderful was being particularly difficult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdXFr_hlN2Y)
From the time we taped our Shark Tank segment in June 2017 to the time the segment aired in February 2018, we radically changed our business. At the time, we were not doing well: we had a few coffee shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan using our point of sale app to save your change from a cash transaction, but it was a brutal slog. It was (I guess) a novel enough concept to get us on Shark Tank, but the business had real challenges and was virtually unscalable. But maybe Shark Tank could turn the tide!
Alas, we realized the opportunity to have our segment air on Shark Tank meant we were forced to change things to a model that increased our probability of success. Andy — our Co-Founder and CTO — understood this better than anyone and spearheaded the pivot. The stakes were too high and we needed a product people could use wherever they were, not just at a few locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan. So we ended up bulldozing the product, and decided to capture people’s attention when they came to our website after watching our Shark Tank clip with an entirely different product: get cash back for uploading your receipts.
Shark Tank gave us our start, but we still had no idea what we were doing. We pivoted at least 100 more times (no exaggeration) on everything from the product to the business model to our marketing to our partnership model… everything was in constant ebb and flow. We constantly focused on the data and measured it daily and somehow it worked!
Fast forward to today, and we’ve grown to 1.5m members with a thriving, diversified business model and will now be powering an omnichannel platform for some of the largest companies in the world.
Thank you to Andy, our brilliant Co-Founder and CTO, for putting up with me all these years and having a religiously disciplined approach to building great product. I have no doubt you will go on to do even bigger and better things in the future and am thankful to have had you in our corner.
Thank you to Jeremy Allen and the wonderful team at IRI for bringing us into the family and embracing out approach to building product and community.
A special thank you and shout out to all of our early clients and partners who took a chance on us. Without you, we would have failed.
And most importantly, a special thanks to my wife Jenna, for putting up with me all these years. All the late nights and weekends. Without you, we would have failed. I love you.
