Thoughts |Launching Birdback, a fintech API to bridge them all

Bridging banks, large retailers, offer providers and developers to build a more accessible fintech platform

That “K” kept falling all the time!

I joined Birdback as the growth and business development person and quickly got involved in product iterations. Birdback was a financial technology startup based in London that raised $2.4M and went on to be acquired.

The problem

Birdback’s initial iteration was aimed at Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) sick of managing complex loyalty programs and users sick of forgetting said loyalty program plastic cards. Birdback set out to link your loyalty programs to your existing payment card.

Slowly however, it became clear to the team the problem lied deeper. Connecting to the financial data stream and linking any sort of interaction to payment cards was, in and by itself, a challenge to fintech players. As a consequence, Birdback then set out to solve this infrastructural problem.

What we built

• Team // We were a team of 4 that slowly grew to 10 people. Our API play made it easy to stay lean while steadily iterating our way to a better product.
• Product // In its first iteration, Birdback launched a proprietary loyalty program. We signed up small and medium merchants to the Birdback program, reached out to users to link their cards to the program and took a cut from every transaction whose success we could attribute to our platform.

Birdback 1.0, a proprietary loyalty program

As we interviewed market players and received inbound interest, we quickly realised there was more value in the card-linking technology we were building than the loyalty program we had devised. Birdback then moved on to become an API for developers.

An evolution! Birdback 1.0 (left) and Birdback 2.0 (right)

Becoming developer facing meant creating a documentation, building Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) for stakeholders to better understand the effort involved in integrating and, yes, organising hackathons. Our biggest product feature was to be an auth system for any developer to allow their users to link loyalty and coupon programs to their payment cards.

• Execution // The team held meetings every other week. I often met with the CTO after meetings with clients to re-think how developers (from large and small companies) could use the data we had plugged into securely. The team was close and conflicts were solved as they emerged.

What we measured

• Metrics // Transaction volume, amount, merchant location and time were the 4 parameters we were able to collect from our financial data partners. This allowed us to match qualifying transactions made by users registered to a given program. Matched transactions was our core tracked metric as it determined the efforts we had to do upstream (signing up more data partners and offer providers) and the revenue we generated downstream.
• Tools // As much as we loved iterating on product, Jira, and our sales funnel, Asana grew to become our best friend to track productivity and next steps.

What we learned

• Assumptions // We were correct about our main assumption: There is a pain point for both merchants and customers around loyalty programs. As we focused on the infrastructure play, our assumptions focused mainly on the innovation appetite and execution speed of offer providers, banks and large retailers.
• Opportunities // As we dove into the industry, we discovered other players, such as offer providers, were seeking a way to close the online to offline attribution loop. Solving that problem meant unlocking a $1b+ green field industry for advertisers and publishers.

Eventually, Birdback didn’t conquer the market but successfully breached the status quo and built a relevant product that went on to be acquired. Here’s to an amazing team 👏🏻