LevelUp is Down to Half Its Former Headcount, and Needs to Raise Money Fast

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2013/04/02/levelup-is-down-to-half-its-former-headcount-and-needs-to-raise-money-fast/

by smit • 13 years ago

54 29 13 years ago

bostinno.streetwise.co

mpayments• 13 years ago

Interchange zero was such a weird move. They were losing money on every transaction and they decided to get to scale by losing even more money on even more transactions!

When SCVNGR pivoted from daily deals to this it seems they forgot to pick up a business model on the way.

bigsteve122• 13 years ago

it all starts with thinking a green, bizarre little troll could actually build a profitable company that is easily repeatable by anyone with 2 years of university

zaidf• 13 years ago

Leading with the words "LevelUp is Down..." is not the smartest choice for a headline.

jefflinwood• 13 years ago

At SXSW Interactive this year, LevelUp was pushing big for its mobile app payment technology.

I'm curious about the market for payments with mobile apps - to me it seems similar to QR Codes, where pundits get excited over the possibilities, but users just aren't interested. I'm guessing this is different outside the US, where credit and debit cards are extremely popular.

tibbon• 13 years ago

Yea, they did a killer job at SXSW this year getting in front of a lot of people and making real transactions. The hardware is great, but getting stuff into vendors is hard.

nym2• 13 years ago

They should integrate bitcoin, I stopped using levelup after a little while, but I would like to pay with bitcoin everywhere where levelup is accepted.

Just my 2 cents :)

nym2• 13 years ago

Whoha... downvotes and no constructive criticism.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

This isn't a good idea.

1 - Merchants don't take Bitcoin. LevelUp would have to convert BTC to USD for the merchant, and swallow any exchange rate fluctuations that may have occurred in the meantime (the value of BTC is, after all, far from stable). Even highly stable currencies are not completely free to exchange due to minor fluctuations in value over time. This is a money-losing proposition for LevelUp. This is part of why if you're spending GBP with your USD credit card the fees start piling up.

2 - Who would use it? Bitcoin has basically no presence outside of the tech community - and even there it's a tiny corner of the tech community (it's also the corner that thinks it's larger than it actually is). It would be nonsensical to invest that much effort doing such a niche thing in a product that is intended to be mass-market.

3 - Opportunity cost. LevelUp is in a do-or-die situation, there is no way they should do this over the thousands of other things they can do to save their company.

ry0ohki• 13 years ago

This to me was an example of too many pivots. First a FourSquare clone, then a Groupon clone, now a Square clone. Seth seems like an interesting guy, but it's hard to feel the company doesn't have the right focus, always hopping to the next thing without perfecting the last one.

I remember I went to a bar that actually had LevelUp when it first launched in Philadelphia, and no one there had any idea what it was. Finally they got the manager on the phone and he had a vague recollection of talking to some rep about signing up. That just showed me how the marketing/education aspect was completely missing, despite their slow thorough rollout.

burgreblast• 13 years ago

LevelUp has commented in the past how store employees were driving sales (and everyone gets/got $5 credit to try.) So it seems LU has been burning $5 of VC money to inflate revenues, but guests didn't repeat.

I guess the lesson is: no matter how much you raise, it's never enough if you keep firing in different directions.

rscale• 13 years ago

I became concerned for LevelUp when I saw this graphic in a recent marketing email: http://i.imgur.com/QC0PEDk.png

Here's to hoping it all ends well for them.

mikec3k• 13 years ago

Sad, I use it all the time since most of my favorite places use it and they don't support Square Wallet.

adamio• 13 years ago

What service is LevelUp providing? A loyalty club and CRM for only customers that use LevelUp? It seems that shop owners are either town between forcing a major change on customers or just having a LevelUp POS incase a customer wants to use his phone to pay for stuff. For this to be sustainable, shop owners should have incentive to go LevelUp only. Also are the reduced merchant fees contracted?

mackey2• 13 years ago

As a consumer, if you use LevelUp at the merchant, you get x dollar credit for every y dollars you spend. For the merchant, you aren't paying any credit card fees on that y amount. For LevelUp, they take a cut from the x dollar credit amount.

I assume that LevelUp must batch credit card transactions in order to make the fees cheap for them, and that probably requires floating a good amount of money on a daily/weekly basis.

I use LevelUp almost everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. A lot of places in downtown Boston take it, and it seems like it's great for both the merchant and the consumer.

ben10402• 13 years ago

>I assume that LevelUp must batch credit card transactions in order to make the fees cheap for them,

Interestingly enough it was only this past week that they mentioned they were going to start doing this (at least going off the email I got from them). They sent the message to advise customers that they'll start batching up transactions across a few days' span and then sending a second email when they settle them all at once.

ben10402• 13 years ago

I've used LevelUp a few times when it seemed novel to me, but that's about it. Just last week I got an email from them offering me a $2 credit to a frozen yogurt shop near my office, and I figured I'll stop in for a froyo for next-to-nothing. I get there and they don't even have the scanner on the counter anymore. Oops.

Honestly I think Square, with their auto-tab functionality, is the only mobile payment system I find myself consistently using as it is the only option that reduces the amount of work I do. Google Wallet, LevelUp, and friends require that I hold up the line to dig out my phone, unlock it, open an app, and present it to some reader. That's more work than just pulling out my wallet and giving them a card out of it.

krschultz• 13 years ago

I don't know much about the startup, but I was definitely rooting for the founder Seth after his father died in a skiing accident last year on Mt Washington (with Seth present). Tough year for sure, hoping things work out for him and everyone else at LevelUp.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/04/05/adventurer-prieb...

smit• 13 years ago

I agree with you

paul9290• 13 years ago

Man I had no idea about his Dad.

My condolences!

xoail• 13 years ago

Mobile payments is such a hard push right now. It might be useful to both merchants and consumers to jump on board but man the technology barrier is the killer in getting anyone comfortable using it. We are toying around the idea of mobile payments at carddrop running some pilots and I admit its disappointing despite the advantages advertised. The only company that could find Okay success is Starbucks through their prepaid mobile card. Even Google wallet seems to be struggling. I've seen LevelUp in couple of stores and I made sure to ask how often people use it to pay and the answer is always almost never.

malandrew• 13 years ago

TBH I only ever use LevelUp when I think I might shop at a place a few times and get a few bucks of credit from LevelUp's investors. Never once have I used LevelUp because it's a more convenient form of payment. If I want to pay for something, I flip open my wallet and pull a credit card out because it's right out in front. With LevelUp, I need to look through multiple pages worth of app icons to find my payment options. No thanks. Yeah, a user could organize their apps, but why would they do so for your benefit. They will just use a credit card or cash because it's the path of least resistance. The truth is that this will only ever change once we reach the point that I only carry around a cell phone and never carry around a wallet. As long as the wallet is in my back pocket, I have a path of least resistance that will beat my phone every time and that is really unlikely to change until cell phones never fail. i.e. phones will need days worth of battery life, be water proof or at least water resistant and everything in my wallet can exist on my phone, including government issued identification.

If you want to make payment apps gain widespread adoption then campaign to get governments to let my put my ID on my phone, until then I will carry around a wallet and a credit card will be sitting there right next to the ID.

TimPC• 13 years ago

I've got to say the 'facebook deployment strategy' for LevelUp is really solid. I was at a conference in Boston and near campuses all the employees at restaurants I went to knew what it was and had people using it. The problem is people are used to thinking of this as an online payments problem, instead of a ubiquitous solution -- the average region will have isolated stores with no adoption, but there are pockets where the solution works really well and has widespread usage. Density is really important to the consumer value proposition, as are having the right demographics in your early regions. From what I saw in Boston they got it right. It will be interesting to see how that plays out with expansion through channel sales with Heartland. I think LevelUp is different enough from Square that there is room in the market for both of them. Also, Seth is a really great guy who's easy to root for. A lot of the problems that got mentioned in this thread are being solved for instance reducing hardware fees reduces the chances of a retailer pulling the platform.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

I remember hearing about SCVNGR back in 2010 before the pivot to LevelUp (I think it caught my eye since I'm a Princeton grad). Back then the company really seemed to be touting allowing brands to let people have fun with their friends through various location based things, and it seemed pretty appealing to me especially if I lived in a city like SF, NYC, or Boston.

Seems like with each pivot, they've shifted from the social/fun side to the business/profit side, which parallels the way the startup trend as a whole has moved over the past few years. That kind of followership is a bit eyebrow raising.

paborden• 13 years ago

LevelUp's problems come (mostly) down to product.

Merchants - Don't know how to use LevelUp. Don't have it displayed. User experience for merchants is wonky and unintuitive to boot.

Customers - Also have a strange, unintuitive user experience. Paying via "QR Code" scares some. Many consumers would much rather pay by handing over their card, as "antiquated" as that may be.

These issues combined mean that paying via LevelUp is slow and annoying.

The pivot to white label makes sense - except for the fact that their sales team seemingly doesn't understand complex enterprise sales. So, success there seem unlikely as well.

Do I like the idea of LevelUp? Yes. Would I ever use LevelUp? No.

dmd• 13 years ago

LevelUp has their devices in dozens of merchants in my area (Brookline MA), and as an experiment, I tried using it in as many of them as I could.

So far I have been unable to pay using LevelUp even once. The cashier doesn't know how to use it, or it doesn't have a signal, or it's not turned on, or someone's put a sticker over the camera, or ...

I'd say I've tried 20 or 30 times and had zero successes.

mikestew• 13 years ago

It seems at least some on here know a bit about the company, and seem impressed by the concept at least. I know next to nothing about them, so let me give you the view of the proverbial "Joe Sixpack". Summary: I know of only one vendor that uses it, and LevelUp has to overcome my objections to using it right there at the point-of-sale.

There's one restaurant that my wife and I go to that has the POS thingy. We live in Redmond, not exactly a town full of tech-averse folk. So problem #1 is: is it worth the trouble of signing up, dealing with one more daily email newsletter (because I forgot to uncheck the box), and having to get my phone out and find the app every time we eat there? Answer: a resounding "no".

Problem #2: you have to sell me at the point-of-sale, because I frankly don't care enough to go look it up. What does LevelUp do, other than having a glowing thing that wants to have something to do with my phone? I have no idea, probably something to do with paying for my meal. If that's the only answer I can come with at the time of sale, I refer you to Problem #1.

Problem #3: I know of only one vendor in tech-savvy Redmond, WA that uses it. Why even bother to dirty my inbox and the app screen of my phone?

Problem #4: how's the user experience? Does it suck? Do rainbows and unicorns sprout from my phone when I use it? I have no idea. What I do know is that whipping out my credit card is quick and easy, and everyone involved in the transaction knows how to go through the motions. LevelUp competes against a known quantity, and that known quantity is actually pretty good.

From reading the comments, I gather that there's some kind of rewards system. Hmm, first I knew of it (see POS sales problem). Not exactly a positive for me, as I'm growing tired of loyalty cards and variations thereof.

So that's the view of a guy who knows almost nothing about LevelUp. Too much to fiddle with, and no perceived value for me.

ghc• 13 years ago

It surprises me to read about all these negative experiences people have trying to use level up. I've had only one experience where the machine was broken, and I use it to pay for everything from groceries to bowling. Where I live about 2/3 of businesses I frequent accept level up and they all offer great discounts, so I would be sad to see them go under.

dannowatts• 13 years ago

judging by the response of the tweets from seth himself, maybe this is just a hit piece? if it's sensational, let's let level heads prevail :)

LevelUp is Down to Half Its Former Headcount, and Needs to Raise Money Fast

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