[darrelld]

So back in 2021 I built a loyalty platform for a chain of gas stations in the Caribbean. Thought it would be a quick deliverable, then hands off.

It's turning into a full time side gig that's paid off in handful of batches (~$25K and running)

I'm trying to become a loyalty vendor API.

Would really like to work on my own interconnected systems of blogging tools and social media. Kinda a blend between having your own site and myspace? Not really targeting a market or anything like that, just think it would be cool to do for personal use and sharing with family and friends

[wyclif]

I'd really like to hear more about how this works and how you got it off the ground.

[darrelld]

Broad strokes:

I went to school with the son of the owner. For about 3 years off and on he'd been asking me about building apps, where he could find good devs, what price to pay.

I'd sent him some info, but never got too involved. Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself with a bit more time to kill, so I listened more to what they needed.

They basically wanted to get a loyalty program going at their gas stations and partner gas stations, but wanted custom rules which their current provider couldn't do with their off the shelf solution.

They also wanted to use one of those old school CC machines that were everywhere before the likes of square showed up. But getting your hands on those units is expensieve.

So I started planning it out. They needed to store customer data, and needed a point of sale device to swipe customer loyalty cards on, which needed to read in customer info, do a deduction, or a store credit top up and print a receipt.

I found a android terminal machine off alibaba, opened up android studio and started hacking away. I hadn't done more than a basic android hello world at this point.

For the backend I used django to get started quickly, and they were very happy to use the django built in admin panel to do stuff as needed, and view transactions.

After I got the devices talking to django, I had to integrate a loyalty vendor they already sourced, and just went along with it, but that was a mistake. The vendor points API doesn't really add much value on what django can already do for me, and my new goal is to become that vendor since I think I can do their product better.

But basically I iterated on it for about a year, launched a little over a year ago, still working out some edge cases and kinks, but they do roughly 25K transactions a month on devices spread out at over 20 stores.

They want to bring it to new islands, so I'm trying to remove some of my duct tape fixes with more stable fixes so that can be smooth sailing come next year.

EDIT: Might get back to writing and update with a much longer post. Draft:

https://darrelld.com/signal/21/

[wyclif]

Wow, thanks. This is fascinating and it's also a useful outline or storyline for how these sorts of B2B projects come about. Particularly the part about how their current provider couldn't or just didn't want to provide or develop new services or perhaps just didn't see the customer base developing. Driving a wedge between big enterprise solutions and "move fast and break things" guerilla solutions.

[EDIT: Just wanted to add that I'll definitely be circling back to read the rest as you finish it and the lessons learned.]

[CrispinPowers]

Interesting. Can you share more?

[darrelld]

yeah check out this other reply thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353838