Not all customers are created equal — that’s the idea behind a new product from Y Combinator-backed loyalty startup 500Friends.
The company already allowed businesses to reward customers for activity like referring friends, writing reviews, checking in on Foursquare, and so on. Recently, however, it released an enterprise product that does a lot more.
CEO Justin Yoshimura says the new product creates “archetypes” of different kinds of customers, then uses the businesses’ data to determine which archetypes are going to be the most valuable, either in terms of dollars spent or social influence. Then, when a new customer comes to a website, a business can match them against the different archetypes, effectively identifying which ones are likely to be the most valuable and allowing businesses to give them special service and offers. Yoshimura says:
