🚀 AMA: We are Google & Honey alum and we just launched Kudos, your new checkout assistant!

@aaronoleary thanks for your question Aaron. Both Google and Honey emphasized building for the customer as the first priority and that is embedded in the DNA of how we prioritize our roadmap at Kudos. One key difference between us and Google Pay was that at Google Pay we solved for the merchants as the "customer", while at Kudos we've chosen to focus on the end user as we build delightful and rewarding experiences!! One thing that I definitely got spoiled with at Google was distribution, it mostly came for free for every product I launched, given our sheer scale. As a founder, I've had to do a lot of things that feel very manual and that don't scale to acquire customers - the journey is tough, but very rewarding.

@edworking For us 0 ==> 100 was very manual. - Friends & family - Userinterviews.com participants: We used screeners to setup user interviews on userinterviews.com and a number of people we interviewed became early users. Also we found a hidden gem, that you can get thousands of answers to survey questions for free when you submit the screeners on userinterviews.com, even if you only plan to interview a few dozen users. Survey platforms like Survey Monkey charge an arm and a leg for the volume of survey answers we essentially got for free. 100 ==> 1k we started leaning into bigger platforms - Reddit played a big role here. We posted, with permission, on subs like r/CreditCards - communities on Reddit are usually supportive if you follow their rules. - We tried working with micro-influencers on TikTok, but learned quickly that the algorithm suppressed views on sponsored posts, so this was a flop. - We built out our own social presence on TikTok by posting daily videos about our niche (helping people earn more from their credit cards) https://www.tiktok.com/@joinkudos 1k ==> 10k we did this in 3 months via a combination of PR, referrals, YouTube influencers & remnant newsletter integrations - We announced our launch on Techcrunch & Axios which was a good momentum event and also helped with social proof - We launched our referral program over the holidays, which was also a high shopping period - We worked with YouTube influencers, both niche influencers in the credit card space, and more general influencers with low CPMs - We found cheap remnant ad slots in newsletters - We tested paid ads, but decided to discontinue. Apple's privacy changes make the cost and attribution of FB/IG/TikTok ads untenable for a lot of early stage companies. As we plan our path to 100k, we plan to lean more heavily on product led growth levers like referrals and built in product incentives that make the product work better with friends e.g. group discounts when you make purchases using Kudos with friends.

@joinkudos @iamtikue Interesting Journey!

@thefidelavedano Both Google and Honey emphasized building for the customer as the first priority and that is embedded in the DNA of how we prioritize our roadmap at Kudos. One key difference between us and Google Pay was that at Google Pay we solved for the merchants as the "customer", while at Kudos we've chosen to focus on the end user as we build delightful and rewarding experiences!!

@shaur_ul_asar thanks, really appreciate the support!

@andrew_bagby Thanks Andrew, best of luck with your launch! Looks like a great way to make presentations - supported it.

@kuntajts that's a really good question Jordan. Right now, Kudos also works on mobile web (specifically Safari), we'll support other mobile browsers as they support extensions. Apple and Google Pay are dominant with natively built apps, but still have low coverage on web (Kudos works on all sites right off the bat), and many consumer transactions still happen on mobile web today. We also have a core value proposition to make every purchase more rewarding, starting with helping you earn more credit card rewards and benefits, and with our Boost launch we now double those rewards across 15k sites, and we have many more launches in the works that continue to amplify that value prop.

@mutlusakar thanks Mutlu!

@alekswatch thanks Alexis! Really appreciate your support. Please don't hesitate to send any feedback my way once you try it out

@shubham_pratap thanks for the support!