This months Founder Stories at 1871 featured Logan LaHive, the founder and CEO of Belly, a digital loyalty platform that's increasingly inescapable. The goal of the Founder Stories series is to help the audience define and solve problems in ways that are innovative and meaningful.
On Wednesday night, LaHive shared the origins of his ideas, his entrepreneurial history, and his tips on how to survive the early struggles every founder faces with the 250 people who attended the sold out event.
The origins of Belly
Belly is a digital loyalty platform that creates custom, unique loyalty programs for small businesses. Known for it’s quirky rewards, Belly helps businesses create, manage, and run better, smarter loyalty programs. On the consumer side, the goal of Belly was to replace a wallet full of clutter with a mobile app or a single card.
LaHive points out that there are three main parts of a small business: new customer acquisition, how much customers spend and how often they come in, also known as loyalty. It was the problem of loyalty that he was set on solving with Belly. Although the start-up also improves new customer discovery it began with a focus on increasing customer frequency and providing a great experience.
“Most small businesses will tell you they would love to acquire new customers—that is the core of how to drive a business. [But] new customer acquisition is typically 6 to 8 times more expensive than keeping the current customer,” LaHive said. To do this they needed to create a system with little friction that added value to the merchant and the consumer. “What we really set out to solve was to convince them of the value, ROI and tractability of a loyalty program,” he said.
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