Geopon’s team is racing to get its ‘wallet solution’ out there.
Ido Meros, CEO (left front, center) and Rachel Fiegler, (right front center) the president of product development of Geopon, with their team in their Hollywood offices.
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BY NANCY DAHLBERG
NDAHLBERG@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Nine months doesn’t seem like a long time to be developing the technology that will power a new company’s flagship product.
In mobile time, though, it seems like an eternity to Ido Meros and Rachel Fiegler, the power team behind Geopon, a geography-targeted coupon, loyalty program and payment solution that won first place in the Business Plan Challenge FIU Track as well as the People’s Pick. Their company of 11 people is racing to release its apps, and they say it will be worth the wait.
“Unlike most of our competitors in this space that are singling in on one feature, we are the entire wallet solution — payment, coupons, loyalty and more. It’s behaviorally targeting, it’s geo-targeting, it’s demographically targeting, it’s a combination of many features and many technologies in one,” said Meros, the team’s 31-year-old CEO who previously co-founded Check21.com, a provider of credit card and electronic check gateway technology, and Axis Interactive Media, an interactive media buying agency.
Adir Mobile of Hollywood, which is developingGeopon, is part of a growing group of emerging tech companies that are developing products first — and often solely — for the mobile market, rather than developing first for the Web and then adapting the products to the smartphone. Fiegler, 24, Adir’s president of product development who also worked at Check21, said the team is very close to launch — the Geopon app for Android is in final testing and an iPhone app is just a few weeks away.
That reality is a long way from where they started. The idea came about on a trip to Panama when they saw someone using a coupon at the hotel. “We decided to take that idea and convert it to mobile and somehow that became an entire wallet solution,” Meros said. “We’ve been seeing the trends in the industry and it has been going strong, so we decided to add loyalty features to it and then a payment feature. That’s how it all came about.”
The massive, growing market is the magnet: Nine out of 10 U.S. consumers own a mobile device, translating into 216 million owners. More than one-third (37 percent) of these owners are using their devices to make purchases, a recent study from the Consumer Electronics Association showed.
Furthermore, the mobile coupon industry is expected to generate more than $43 billion in global redemptions by 2016, up from a predicted $5.4 billion in 2011, according to Juniper Research. According to Juniper analyst and report author David Snow, “mobile coupons are going mainstream . . . To ignore the potential of mobile coupons would be to ignore the future of mobile commerce.”
The team has experienced some delays as it continued to add features. “If we are going to give you a coupon or a loyalty card for a movie theater, we’re going to give you the movie times, too. If we give you a coupon for a restaurant, we are going to give you the menu for the restaurant,” Meros said.
That all-in-one solution is what differentiates Geopon from the pack, as well as its advanced technology that combines behavioral and event targeting functionality to offer merchants an efficient method of interacting with new and existing consumers, said Fiegler, who is studying criminal justice at FIU. “This type of service affords merchants the ability to present their business at exactly the right moment, in a variety of languages, to influence purchasing decisions, increase revenue, drive more traffic to storefronts and improve upon brand recognition in the marketplace,” the team said in its plan.
Fiegler said that apps like Geopon can help reverse a recent troubling trend: Customers are shopping less often at their local merchants, opting for the ease of online buying. Geopon makes it easier for local businesses to get consumers’ attention when they are out and about with their mobile phones.
The company anticipates revenues coming from nine income streams grouped into three distinct categories: digital ad services (the main driver), loyalty services and payment services. It would not disclose its revenue projections. Currently bootstrapping, Geopon is seeking $3 million in investor financing to further build out its system and fully execute its marketing strategy.
It was the all-in-one solution in the very hot couponing and mobile payments space and a well thought-out marketing strategy that most impressed the judges. “If management is able to execute, I believe that there is significant opportunity in leveraging these services that are now being offered by diverse vendors into one single point of contact for the small merchant,” said Ricardo Weisz, an early-stage investor and a Business Plan Challenge judge.
Judges expressed concern about the competition, and the team acknowledges the risks. Companies such as Google, Groupon, LivingSocial and Coupons.com could append their existing services with similar solution offerings, the team said in its plan.
But the Geopon team argues its technologies — specifically its geo-targeting, event targeting and multi-language capabilities — “are complex and will supply our company with the substantial time needed to enter and dominate a controlling part of the mobile wallet market. Furthermore, by expanding our solution nationally, Geopon will become an acquisition target as opposed to a solution that can be easily replicated.”
