My customers don't live online — lessons building SaaS for local businesses
I'm building digital loyalty cards for local businesses. Here's what surprised me about distribution.
I started working on FaveCard over a year ago. The idea came from watching cafes and restaurants hand out paper stamp cards that nobody carries. The owner prints hundreds of them, customers shove them in a wallet, lose them, and never complete the card. Meanwhile the owner has no clue which customers actually come back.
FaveCard lets any local business create a digital loyalty card that goes into Apple or Google Wallet. Takes about 5 minutes to set up. Customers tap once to add it — no app download. Staff scans stamps with our mobile app, owner sees real-time stats.
The product works. Building it was the easy part.
Distribution is where it got interesting.
I spent weeks doing what every SaaS founder does — posting on Reddit, building an SEO content engine, submitting to directories. Standard playbook.
Then I realized something: my customers don't live online.
A cafe owner in their 40s-50s running a 12-hour shift is not browsing r/smallbusiness or reading SaaS blogs. They discover new tools through:
1. Their industry association newsletter
2. Whatever their friend who owns the place next door is using
3. Facebook groups (yes, still Facebook)
4. The review they read on Capterra when they Googled "loyalty card software"
This completely changed my approach. I shifted from "post everywhere online" to "get in front of association members." Restaurant associations in the US have 10-20K members each. One partnership = access to thousands of verified local business owners. Zero ad spend.
I'm still doing SEO because it compounds long-term, but the honest truth is that for local business SaaS, online communities are not where deals happen.
Currently working on:
- Association partnership outreach (5 restaurant associations in wave 1)
- SEO grind
Anyone else building for offline/local customers? I'd love to hear how you cracked the "my users aren't online" problem.
