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:
- GiftRocket Lets You Send Gifts That Can Be Redeemed At Specific Locations [March 2011]
- GiftRocket Makes A Gift Card Accepted Anywhere [May 2011]
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 moved to a kibbutz (just kidding, kind of).
GiftRocket returned the money it had raised back to investors (doubled it, actually), and the founders ran it as a side business.
Tremendous
In 2015, Nick decided to return to GiftRocket full-time, and Ben joined a year later. They worked out of Nick's San Francisco apartment, trying their best to avoid being discovered by Nick's upstairs landlord. They focused on growing the most promising elements of the GiftRocket business:
- Bulk gifting use cases
- The gift card API
The corporate gifting platform launched as GiftRocket Rewards in late 2016 and over the next few years, headcount stayed small while the business grew steadily. Our product improved as we responded to client requests and we'd frequently closed major deals contingent on the development of new features that competition didn't offer.
We initially anticipated that the bulk of our revenue would be from a long tail of clients (everybody needs gift cards, right?), however, we quickly learned that the market was top-heavy and we'd need to build a sales team. We hired experienced reps from competitors — a mistake that taught us that the market was ripe for a talented team. Nick and Ben realized it would be best to do sales themselves during this time.
By combining some nascent sales skills and nimble engineering, we closed a few monster deals and added some flashy logos:
- FocusVision dropped their longterm partnership with Virtual Incentives since we were a product-focused team that could build custom features
- Evolus launched a $20M incentives campaign that required collaborative software development
- Spotify's UX research team needed that a solution with both digital and physical rewards
- Pinterest wanted a simpler way to send gift cards for employee rewards
In 2018, we rebranded the corporate business to Tremendous. Why Tremendous?
- It projects the sentiment of "Nice job!" which is relevant in rewards & recognition
- It's a memorable dictionary word
- Tremendous is tremendous
How the heck did we get tremendous.com? No magic here. Nick did a lot of outreach to domain owners and found one with the right feel and right price tag.
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.