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🚀 AMA: We are Google & Honey alum and we just launched Kudos, your new checkout assistant!
Hi Product Hunt community! 👋🏾
My name’s Tikue, co-founder of Kudos, and I’m so excited to announce that we’re LIVE on Product Hunt! 🎊
🤔 After spending several years helping build Google Pay and Affirm, my co-founder and I came to the realization that card issuers make credit cards unnecessarily complicated.
⚒️ So over the past year, we brought on a team — many from Google Pay and PayPal Honey, and built Kudos. Our mission is to make every purchase as delightful as possible by streamlining the checkout process and taking the guesswork out of credit card rewards and benefits.
💳 Kudos is a free shopping extension that helps you pick the best card at checkout on over 2 million sites and doubles your credit card rewards across 15,000 partners.
💜 As this is our first time launching on the platform, your support means the world to us!
⬇️ Let us know what you think and drop us a comment below.
👉🏾 Link: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
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Replies
Hey Tikue! Thanks for doing this, how has Google and Honey experience benefitted you the most In your founder journey?
@aaronoleary thanks for your question Aaron.
Both Google and Honey emphasized building for the customer as the first priority and that is embedded in the DNA of how we prioritize our roadmap at Kudos. One key difference between us and Google Pay was that at Google Pay we solved for the merchants as the "customer", while at Kudos we've chosen to focus on the end user as we build delightful and rewarding experiences!!
One thing that I definitely got spoiled with at Google was distribution, it mostly came for free for every product I launched, given our sheer scale. As a founder, I've had to do a lot of things that feel very manual and that don't scale to acquire customers - the journey is tough, but very rewarding.
Kudos is very useful for shopping on the web. I can see myself using this for all my purchases with my six different credit cards. But as the world is moving more and more to shopping on mobile, how does kudos continue to compete with Apple and Google currently completely monopolizing and gatekeeping the mobile payment space?
@kuntajts that's a really good question Jordan.
Right now, Kudos also works on mobile web (specifically Safari), we'll support other mobile browsers as they support extensions. Apple and Google Pay are dominant with natively built apps, but still have low coverage on web (Kudos works on all sites right off the bat), and many consumer transactions still happen on mobile web today.
We also have a core value proposition to make every purchase more rewarding, starting with helping you earn more credit card rewards and benefits, and with our Boost launch we now double those rewards across 15k sites, and we have many more launches in the works that continue to amplify that value prop.
That's an amazingly useful tool! I'm excited to try this on. You have my support for sure, we just launched today as well!
@andrew_bagby Thanks Andrew, best of luck with your launch! Looks like a great way to make presentations - supported it.
@oxana_ivanova hi Oxana we mostly leveraged our networks across social media to ask for support.
#9 is great! Best of luck on the launch 😊
@iamtikue thank you for the support! 🤗 PH do not allow to put direct link in comment on the launch day, so maybe this one will work https://bit.ly/3JLY0bG
Thanks!
Congratulations on launching Kudos! Your mission to simplify the checkout process and maximize credit card rewards is much needed in today's world. Excited to see what's next for Kudos. 💜👍Congrats on the launch of Kudos! Love the mission to simplify the checkout process and maximize credit card rewards. Excited to try it out. 👍🏾
@alekswatch thanks Alexis! Really appreciate your support. Please don't hesitate to send any feedback my way once you try it out
@edworking
For us 0 ==> 100 was very manual.
- Friends & family
- Userinterviews.com participants: We used screeners to setup user interviews on userinterviews.com and a number of people we interviewed became early users. Also we found a hidden gem, that you can get thousands of answers to survey questions for free when you submit the screeners on userinterviews.com, even if you only plan to interview a few dozen users. Survey platforms like Survey Monkey charge an arm and a leg for the volume of survey answers we essentially got for free.
100 ==> 1k we started leaning into bigger platforms
- Reddit played a big role here. We posted, with permission, on subs like r/CreditCards - communities on Reddit are usually supportive if you follow their rules.
- We tried working with micro-influencers on TikTok, but learned quickly that the algorithm suppressed views on sponsored posts, so this was a flop.
- We built out our own social presence on TikTok by posting daily videos about our niche (helping people earn more from their credit cards) https://www.tiktok.com/@joinkudos
1k ==> 10k we did this in 3 months via a combination of PR, referrals, YouTube influencers & remnant newsletter integrations
- We announced our launch on Techcrunch & Axios which was a good momentum event and also helped with social proof
- We launched our referral program over the holidays, which was also a high shopping period
- We worked with YouTube influencers, both niche influencers in the credit card space, and more general influencers with low CPMs
- We found cheap remnant ad slots in newsletters
- We tested paid ads, but decided to discontinue. Apple's privacy changes make the cost and attribution of FB/IG/TikTok ads untenable for a lot of early stage companies.
As we plan our path to 100k, we plan to lean more heavily on product led growth levers like referrals and built in product incentives that make the product work better with friends e.g. group discounts when you make purchases using Kudos with friends.
We appreciate you being so candid about your personal journey. For you as an entrepreneur, how have your interactions with Google and Honey been most helpful?
@thefidelavedano Both Google and Honey emphasized building for the customer as the first priority and that is embedded in the DNA of how we prioritize our roadmap at Kudos. One key difference between us and Google Pay was that at Google Pay we solved for the merchants as the "customer", while at Kudos we've chosen to focus on the end user as we build delightful and rewarding experiences!!
Kudos - Put Your Cards to Work