Tango Card, Inc.

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July 15, 2013 Issue

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Pioneering the Next Generation Platform for Modern Loyalty and Engagement for the Enterprise, Tango Card, Inc. Offers Rewards as a Service™, a Simple Platform that Enables Companies to Offer Employees and Customers Engaging Rewards

About Tango Card, Inc.:

www.tangocard.com

Tango Card is pioneering the next generation platform for modern loyalty and engagement for the enterprise. Our Rewards as a Service™ or RaaS is helping companies drive real business results by delighting customers and employees with real rewards delivered the right way and at the right time.

 

Customers depending on Tango Card to deliver Rewards as a Service™ for their business needs include Microsoft Bing, Shutterfly, Extole, Opower, Concur and Salesforce. Whether you need customer loyalty, customer acquisition or employee engagement Tango Card makes it easy for you to get the results you want.

David Leeds

CEO and Founder

David Leeds is the founder and CEO of Tango Card - an enterprise company bringing rewards, recognition, and loyalty to the cloud. Tango Card’s RaaS (Rewards as a Service™) API enables software providers to elegantly knit sophisticated rewards programs for their customers and employees into their business. 

 

Tango Card provides solutions to both large enterprise customers (Microsoft's Bing, Salesforce’s Work.com, Extole, T-Mobile, Zendesk, University of Washington, and Opower) and to key emerging companies (Beintoo, Plink, Mobee, Punchtab and Earndit to name a few). Tango Card’s solutions have been covered extensively by TechCrunch, Mashable, Forbes, and others.

 

Prior to Tango Card, David co-founded FiberTower, a telecommunications infrastructure provider and a disruptive force in 4G mobile infrastructure – a company he took public in 2006. He has an MBA from the Stanford Business School and a BSBA from The University of Vermont and University of Copenhagen. He serves on the Board of Summer Search Seattle and is an advisor and investor in the Seattle and Bay Area start-up community.


Business Services

Enterprise Rewards and Recognition

 

Tango Card, Inc.
4745 40th Avenue SW, Ste 204

Seattle, WA 98116

877.558.2646
www.tangocard.com

 

 


 

Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – July 15, 2013
 

CEOCFO: Mr. Leeds, would you tell us the concept for Tango Card?

Mr. Leeds: The concept for Tango Card, in some sense, is quite simple. Enterprise customers, today, spend about fifty billion dollars on two core things. One is engaging and recognizing employees. The other is basically inspiring customers; inspiring them to use a service for the first time or remain loyal to the service over time. The way this has been done in the past is not really serving today’s customers very well. Tango Card, as a company is really building a modern loyalty and engagement platform for the enterprise.      

 

CEOCFO: What does Tango Card do?

Mr. Leeds: Usually, when companies are thinking about key programs in these areas they have certain goals in mind. They might have spot rewards or reward programs that are designed to enhance performance. They might have social referral programs that are designed to bring new customers in. They already know what their business goal is. What they really need is a very simple, elegant way to tie a real reward into their business. Therefore, Tango Card has created something that we call RaaS, Rewards as a Service™. It makes it extremely easy for companies to offer their employees and their customers an incredibly attractive, engaging modern rewards platform. What we do is we basically offer a simple either software approach or a web based approach that allows companies to come onto these programs instantly with at no cost to them and with no fees involved.               

 

CEOCFO: What is the revenue model for you?

Mr. Leeds: The revenue model for Tango Card is also simple. We have a basic belief that one hundred percent of a rewards program or a loyalty program should go to the loyalty program. As I mentioned, we charge no fees for what we do. The way that we make money is that the organizations that benefit from what we do will pay us a commission at some time. If we have a gift card as part of our program, the gift merchants or the gift card brand pays us a commission when their card is involved in a program or when their digital card is involved in a program. If we facilitate a non-profit contribution the non-profit will typically pay an administrative fee for special curated products or special deals or offers, then the organization that is benefiting from that deal or offer will pay us a commission of some kind. The notion is just that the recipient is getting the full value of the reward, the company is paying only the full value of the reward and then we make our money from that commission, as I mentioned. Hopefully, all of the incentives are properly aligned in the model.               

 

CEOCFO: Who is using your service today? Where are you in the development and availability of your service?

Mr. Leeds: I launched the company in late 2010. This is entering year four as a company. We have about one hundred enterprise customers that are using Tango Card in one form or another today. On the small side, there are literally hundreds of new mobile applications that are launched every day that have some engagement or gain reputation proponents involved; whether it is social sharing or leader boards or something of that kind. Many of these small companies will use Tango Card in their program. An example of this would be a company called Mobee from Boston is using Tango Card. A company called Shutterfly out of the San Francisco Bay area is using Tango Card, and many others. On the larger side, we work with companies that have much, much larger loyalty and engagement platforms. Probably, the largest social referral company today is a company called Extole, also based out of the Bay area. The have totally integrated Tango Card into their platform, so that all of their customers can incorporate a modern rewards program in their social referral business. We also work locally with the Microsoft Bing Team on their Bing Rewards program. If you go to Concur or if you go to Microsoft Bing, if you go to several of the Salesforce platforms, if you look at Work.com, if you look at Beintoo and many others you will see Tango Card in action.                   

 

CEOCFO: What is the competitive landscape?

Mr. Leeds: Every young company likes to say, “We are they only ones doing this and there is really no competition.” and so on. I will tell you what the competitive landscape is and where we are truly doing something unique. The industry itself, as I mentioned, is huge. It is a fifty billion dollar industry in the US. It is probably seventy to one hundred million globally. Therefore, as you can imagine, there are many, many companies that are interested in this area. The three key competitors today or historically are, first and foremost, the do-it-yourselfers. These are individual companies that have literally driven to coffee shops or a convenience store or a grocery store and purchased gift cards and other types of products on their way to work or on their way to a sales conference, or whatever it is; purchased cards and then distribute them by themselves. There are people that run webinars that want to thank webinar attendees with a gift card or something like that and just order gift cards by the box and then have to stuff envelopes and so on, for a good portion of their week. Therefore, a huge component of the industry today is do-it-yourselfers. The second is that there are probably a dozen or so very large companies that have been looking at rewards and incentives since the 1930’s. You have companies like Maritz and others who have built enormous businesses based on establishing huge catalogs, physically delivered goods, sophisticated distribution models and so on. Then you will have very large payment companies like Amex and Visa and MasterCard that have gift card products that are used in this industry. Therefore, there are three huge groups of people that are trying to address this area. What is lacking in the rewards and recognition industry and where we are blazing a trail; we have a basic belief which is the right reward delivered in the right way at the right time is able to drive business results. Therefore, we have built a platform, as I referred to, our Rewards as a Service™ platform enables companies to send a range of denominations of digitally delivered goods instantly to people that have earned them, in a way that does not cost the company any more than the actual reward. Therefore, approaching the industry from a software and solutions perspective, offering great products in a really simple way, is truly differentiated today and is why we have seen, at least to this point, the level of success that we have seen.              

 

CEOCFO: How do you reach perspective customers?

Mr. Leeds: This has always been a challenge for a growing company. There are basically three ways that we reach customer, or that customers find out about us. We certainly have a true outbound sales model where we approach very large companies where we believe an integrated reward or recognition platform makes sense. When we do an implementation like that where we may be working with a large HR oriented company or a large payroll oriented company; if we integrate with those companies and then their customers end up using rewards and recognitions, then they essentially end up using Tango Card, because we are the platform provider. Therefore, in that model, we approach a large company, we integrate with that company and then their customers end up using Tango Card. That is the model with Work.com for example and with other large companies that we work with. The second is that we have many inbound sales. We are a very enterprise friendly company. Our website enables anyone to sign-up, fund an account and then send rewards in minutes. If you are a developer and you have a rewards component or you want to connect into a real reward as part of your product of your solution; we have developers every day that find our SDK, our software development kit. They get that from our publicly available software on GitHub. They just integrate Tango Card into their platform, literally, in no time. Then the final is word of mouth. We are squarely an enterprise oriented company. Our technology and our core platform at Tango Card is involved with many enterprise programs right now. All of the folks that are involved in this industry know about each other and they are observing what works. Therefore, when people on the enterprise side see the Tango Card technology in action or they see our Tango Card products, the reach out to us and say, “Is there something that we could do together today?” 

 

CEOCFO: On the companies that participate, how do you reach those?

Mr. Leeds: That is a good question. We do it very differently now than we did when I started the company. When I started the company back in 2010 it was challenging. We were a small company at the time without a track record. What we basically did was a lot of research. We found out, from customers and from enterprise users, what are the most attractive, motivating and engaging products that are used in rewards and incentives and engagement types of programs today. Through that process we heard about four or five key brands that are the most motivating, attractive brands. Then we just approached them directly with our vision, which is a vision of really exchanging how enterprise customers use rewards and incentives and just making it much more modern. We were successful in getting some of these very large brands to essentially buy into that vision. What that ends up translating to be is our philosophy that the size of the catalog is not a determinate of success. Having a catalog of one thousand products or five thousand products or ten thousands products is often more confusing and discouraging than it is encouraging and motivating. Therefore, we have a theory and philosophy that says that if we can offer incredibly attractive choices to people and to enterprise customers we could have an incredible catalog for them with thirty or forty of the best products in the country. Once we have got the initial brand to get excited and once we were successful in some of our early channels the process became very different. That is, now that companies can see what we are doing we get many more requests from our existing customers and from other brands that want to be included in these programs that are now reaching out to us and saying, “How do we get included in the Tango Card program?” It is a little bit of a one hundred eighty degree turn around, from what we did then to what we do now. The way that we evaluate new opportunities is to work with our customers and say, “Would these types of products be attractive to you and to your customers?” We will either make them available in discreet programs or we will make them available across our entire platform, depending on the feedback that we get.         

 

CEOCFO: How is business these days?

Mr. Leeds: Business is great. There are a couple of things that are going on in the industry. Often, when you find an industry of this size being measured in the tens of billions of dollars, you typically see these industries growing at one or two percent a year if not less. This industry is growing at double-digit percentages, right now. It is because more companies are using rewards and recognition in more ways. Companies are doing more spot rewards; they are engaging their team on safety measures more. They are trying to motivate their customers to stick with them and there is this whole industry of modern engagement platforms that is just exploding. It is just driving the use of rewards and incentives in a huge way. Therefore, what that translates to us is that from a sales perspective we have a richer and richer set of opportunities that we are going after. If you look back a year ago we might have had a new customer every month or every two months that we were signing up and bringing live on a platform. Now we measure back in days, so if we go one day without signing up a new customer; whether it is a small customer or a large customer on our platform, it is a surprise. The dynamics are good in the industry. We have carved out a very specific area that we are focused on and so far it is providing real value and solving real problems for our customers.     

 

CEOCFO: What surprised you the most as the company has developed?

Mr. Leeds: A couple of things. The biggest thing and I wish that I had known more about this when I started the company, is just how big the opportunity is outside of the United States. We are, like many companies, very focused domestically inside of the US. We have created a solution that is really great and is working well, but is also very focused on the US. As you can imagine, especially with our larger customers, they have employees and customers around the world. Therefore, we have spent a lot of time in the last three months and will be spending more time in the next year on making sure that we have really well thought out solutions internationally. I say internationally instead of globally, because we know from our customers what countries are really important to make an impact for them. Our goal is to have a very well thought out solution in these countries. That has probably been the biggest surprise and something that, if I could rewind back to 2010, we would have started thinking about international expansion much earlier than we have.           

 

CEOCFO: Why should investors and people in the business community pay attention to Tango Card?

Mr. Leeds: The very simple reason is this. This industry is a fifty billion dollar industry of employee engagement and customer acquisition and customer retention and is similar to many other cloud-based or SaaS based success stories that we have seen in the last decade. That transformation is absolutely happening on the reward incentive and engagement side and we are at the forefront of this movement. Rewards is yet another one of these industries that have been around for decades. It grew to be an enormous industry. However, the products and the delivery in the business model were built and optimized for a very different time. Tango Card is absolutely leading the effort to bring this huge industry into the modern age and solve this problem with modern technology and a very different business model. It does not take much, any longer, to look at what companies like Work.com have done in the HR area, what Salesforce has done for sales and Zendesk for customer service. Tango Card is doing exactly the same thing in a very, very large industry. I believe it makes sense for people to keep an eye on us for that reason.

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“Our Rewards as a Service™ platform enables companies to send a range of denominations of digitally delivered goods instantly to people that have earned them, in a way that does not cost the company any more than the actual reward.”- David Leeds

 

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