Aireka Harvell spent over ten years at AT&T’s loyalty and retention division, where she saw firsthand how effective a sophisticated loyalty program could be at both drawing customers back and reaching new ones. She was struck by how effective universal rewards programs were at driving customers to action with points that consumers could redeem at numerous coalition partner businesses. This was in stark contrast to the chaotic marketing landscape that Aireka witnessed at local businesses—many of which were struggling to compete with national and online brands.
She noticed that very few local businesses were employing digital or loyalty marketing. Worse, those that were using platforms like Groupon to attract customers or static loyalty programs like Fivestars, were actually losing money as these solutions failed to deliver enough long-term value to justify their high-ticket price. On the other hand, passive directories like Yelp and Google Local drove new customers to only the top ten listings and did little to help businesses retain customers. Nearly every business owner Aireka interviewed complained about the complexity of existing marketing solutions as well as about being lost in the patchwork of disparate solutions.
Aireka knew there must be a way to bring action-driven customer acquisition and retention marketing under one solution that was easy for small business owners and managers to use.
This vision germinated into a full-blown community marketing platform, Nodat, which Aireka launched in 2017. Nodat quickly gained over 10K users and 1,500 businesses in and around Nashville, Tennessee. After launching the first version of Nodat, Aireka found that consumers were asking for a universal point system that essentially could serve as a virtual currency at participating Nodat businesses allowing users to quickly earn points and redeem them for meaningful rewards. Just as she had witnessed at AT&T’s Plenti program, the fungibility of the points was a key driver to consumer action. Aireka and her team followed the market demand and created a new version of Nodat that puts the universal Nodat point system front and center of the new experience.
Nodat 2.0 drives new and repeat customers to small local businesses through a universal point system that incentivizes customers to promote their favorite businesses as well as to discover new businesses in the Nodat network. In the Covid-19 era, small local businesses need effective, easy-to-use marketing solutions more than ever, and Nodat seeks to be the go-to platform for owners looking to drive both new and repeat customers to their small business in one easy-to-use community marketing platform.
Aireka and her team will be pitching Nodat at our upcoming virtual Female Founders Summit on September 24th. This event will bring together investors and supporters supporting female founders. We’ll have a nation-wide pitch competition, demos from the startups in the Women’s Startup Academy, and curated networking with investors. To register for the Summit, visit https://betaboom.com/summit/