Digital Loyalty App Pouch Graduates From JKTFI, Aims for Philippines Expansion

Pouch is a marketing and loyalty program app which allows customers to collect digital stamps on their smartphones from merchant partners. It was founded by three people who all met up in Singapore - Tami Abadi, Ilya Kravtsov, and Duc Le Tu. Instead of Singapore though, the startup decided to focus on other emerging markets in Southeast Asia, with Jakarta as the first stop, and Manila in sight for early 2013.

Since the startup’s launch one and a half months ago, it has seen interesting progress [1]:

• There are 48 brand partners, more than 100 200 store partners in Jakarta, and about 6,000 8,000 users.

• Partnered with Indonesian mall Central Park Jakarta, and is looking to partner with two more malls in the Jakarta area in near future.

• It Is now a case study subject for 700 online marketing students at the London School of Public Relations’ this semester. The case study asks students to give their suggestions on how to make Pouch a success in Indonesia.

To use the app, merchants need to show customers the QR code manually after every purchase. The team is looking to integrate these codes into the cashier’s receipts in the coming months to make the whole process more convenient for the stores. At the end of every month, the Pouch team will give detailed reports to each merchant about its customers’ data, such as gender and most-bought products. Whenever the customers share their Pouch activity on Facebook, they will also earn another stamp. Pouch also provides add-on services to help its merchants’ marketing programs even further, such as mobile customer surveys and online news advertising.

Ilya Kravtsov, the co-founder of Pouch, told me that they are backed by a Singaporean investor, and will be looking to start a first major round of funding in four to five months time. The app is available for Android and Blackberry devices. They are looking to approach the local Apple community as they are going to launch the app for iOS in the next two weeks.

Pouch is one of the three startups that graduated from the Jakarta Founder Institute (JKTFI) a couple of days ago. Stay tuned for profiles of the other two!

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1. A previous version of this article had different numbers, but we have since been updated by Pouch. ↩