Why we're building sticki.
A short note on paper stamp cards, retention, and the loyalty product local shops actually deserve.
Walk into any coffee shop in America and count the loyalty cards at the register. A little stack of cardstock. A hole punch. A Sharpie. A regular who's filled nine slots and is quietly rooting for their tenth drink.
It works. Kind of. It's been working since the 1980s. But it also means two things: the shop has no idea who their regulars actually are, and the regulars are carrying around a piece of paper that a washing machine can destroy in one cycle.
When we talked to shop owners, the pattern was almost universal. Everyone knew loyalty mattered. Nobody had numbers to prove their program was working. And the digital alternatives — branded apps, points systems buried inside POS dashboards, third-party platforms that took a cut of every transaction — all felt like overkill for a corner shop with 400 regulars.
The product we couldn't find
What we wanted was a loyalty program that:
- Lived in the customer's Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. No app download, no password, nothing to forget.
- Felt like a game more than a transaction. Something a regular might mention to a friend.
- Actually proved its own ROI with an A/B test — not a vanity dashboard.
- Didn't care which POS the shop was using.
That product didn't exist in a way that made sense for sub-ten-location shops. So we started building it.
The bet
Sticki is a loyalty layer that sits on top of any POS. We ship ten templates — four games, three classics, a hybrid, and two programs — and let the merchant pick what fits their shop. Variable rewards are the headline, but the punch card is right next to them. We don't think one is right for every shop. We think a shop owner should get to choose.
The bet underneath all of this is simple: the owner of the shop down the street deserves the same loyalty infrastructure Starbucks built for itself. Not a worse version. The same one. In 90 seconds of setup.
We're in private pilot now. If you run a cafe, a nail studio, a juice bar, a fitness studio, or a neighborhood bar, and you want to be early — get on the waitlist.
More from us soon.