LeadBounty

I hate advertising.

Grew up in Paris in the 90s with billboards everywhere. Later I worked in ads and learned the only way noise becomes signal is if you collect a mountain of data on people. I didn't want to build that.

What I do trust is a friend saying "you should try this place." That's the whole bet behind LeadBounty.

I started building it for local businesses: barbershops, coffee shops, gyms, restaurants. Places that live on walk-ins and word of mouth, not funnels.

First real test was the bakery next door to my wife's barbershop. New business, good foot traffic, a POS like everyone else. The POS knew every croissant they'd ever sold and nothing about who bought them — which is the normal state of a bakery. Nobody's standing at the counter during the morning rush asking for an email, and nobody in the queue wants to give one.

That's a problem, because a referral program needs a customer base to run on. You can't reward people for bringing friends if you don't know who your people are. Every referral tool assumes that list already exists, fair enough for ecommerce, where it does. For a walk-in shop it's the whole obstacle.

So I flipped it. The customer starts the relationship.

We put QR codes on the tables. Someone scans, signs themselves up as an advocate, and they're in. No staff chasing emails. No "join our Wi-Fi to get the password" trick. We added a Mailchimp integration so they could actually use the list.

That one change turned LeadBounty from "referral software" into "lead capture that happens to run on referrals."

People lump referrals and affiliates together. They're not the same thing. A referral comes from someone who actually walked into the shop and bought something. An affiliate is someone paid to promote a business they may never have used.

That line matters because of where I want this to end up: a referral score you can trust the way you trust a friend telling you about a place. Let paid promotion into that number and the number is worth nothing. So affiliation doesn't factor in.

The product now:

• Reward ladders instead of a single discount code

• Two-way rewards so the friend gets something too

• QR codes for in-store signup & In-person redemption with a scanner

• Alliances so two neighbouring businesses can send customers to each other

• Square, Shopify, Lightspeed integration power-up efficiency. Works without them.

Free to start. leadbounty.io

I'm also shipping small free tools around it. Last week I built ReferralWiz in an evening so someone can design a reward ladder and see projected ROI before they launch anything. referralwiz.quest

Where it actually stands:

We just came out of beta, so most of these accounts are beta testers rather than people who found me cold.

• 18 accounts, 4 of them actively running campaigns

• 8 live campaigns

• 3,200 customers imported or collected

• 3.7% of those became active advocates

• 67 referrals, 46% completed

The 3,200 is the part I was least sure would work. The 4 out of 18 is why I'm posting.

Where I'm stuck:

I have one customer I got by walking next door, and 222 emails that went nowhere. Neither of those tells me much about how to get customer number five.

So far I've gone after it with cold email. I'm targeting five segments for now: restaurants, coffee shops, barbershops, hair salons, nail salons. On the theory that these are the low-hanging fruit. Here's exactly how it's going:

• 764 businesses discovered

• 222 with an email address I could actually use

• 222 emails sent

• 81 opened

• 2 clicked through to the landing page

• 0 replies

A 36% open rate tells me deliverability and subject lines aren't the problem. Everything after the open falls off a cliff, and zero replies from 222 sends is the part that bothers me most, a barber who's interested would hit reply, not click a link.

If you've sold to local SMBs as a solo founder: is this fixable with a better email, or is cold email just the wrong channel for this customer? And if it's the wrong channel, what replaced it for you — walk-ins, POS resellers, local Facebook groups, something else?

Roast the product too. I'd rather hear it now.