GiftRocket
Tremendous originally started out as a company called GiftRocket. You'll notice this in various places. For example, your employment contract is with GiftRocket, Inc— our legal company name.
The original idea behind GiftRocket was to simulate the experience of receiving a gift card by having someone go to a specific location, "check in", and then receive a payment.
We went through YCombinator's Winter 2011 batch, and launched the product in March.
Some press clippings:
The launch was relatively uneventful. And the 6 months after YC were challenging because no one wanted to use our product.
Profitability
Post YC, we moved into a house in SF and kept working away. Over the course of 2011-2013, we fixed the product (NPS went from -30 to being in the 40s), found a growth channel (SEO), and brought the company to profitability.
- Backed By Angel Round, GiftRocket Goes Beyond The Check-In To Make Virtual Gift Giving Even Easier [Dec 2011]
- Digital Gifting Startup GiftRocket Hits Profitability, Announces API and Reduced Fees [Jan 2012]
But the site also wasn't growing particularly fast. From 2013 - 2014, the original founders started focusing on other ventures. Kapil and Nick worked on two real estate startups (neither panned out), and Jonathan became an investor.
GiftRocket returned the money it had raised back to investors (doubled it, actually), and the founders ran it as a side business.
The return
In 2015, our bank partner informed us that they were booting their fintech clients. We had 90 days to find a new partner or shut down.
Nick returned to the business to save GiftRocket from an untimely demise. We formed a new bank partnership and rebuilt our code and ops processes to work with them. It was a lot of hurried work, but at the end of it, we were default alive, again.
Tremendous
Since Nick was back in GiftRocket-world, he began toying with new ideas to grow the business. We had a small, but growing corporate user base that seemed worth investigating. Big brands like Nike, SoulCycle, and Samsung were using GiftRocket.
These enterprise customers were using a site built for consumer gifting. The tooling was terrible for their use case, yet GiftRocket was the best solution they had found. We knew there must be many businesses that needed a simpler way to send money.
So we got to work. Nick recruited his college friend, Ben Plesser, to build the first version of the corporate rewards platform. Our clients were thrilled when “GiftRocket Rewards” launched in late 2016.
Over the next few years, headcount stayed small while the business grew steadily. Our product improved as we responded to client requests and we closed major deals with founder-led sales.
In 2018, we rebranded the corporate business to Tremendous. We chose “Tremendous” because it’s a memorable dictionary word and conveyed positivity (relevant to the rewards industry). Nick did a lot of outreach to domain owners and found one with the right feel & price.
2020 was a breakout year for Tremendous. We revamped our product while the team went from "5 brave souls" supporting 140+ clients, to a team of 15 supporting 500+. We grew sales, product, success and support, and Kapil rejoined the business after 6 years at AngelList.