One place a merchant runs all marketing. One number it answers for: margin protected.
Blanket discounting is an unmanaged cost line. Targeting it is the only defensible product here.
Four teams keep their capability. I own the merchant surface and the shared Promotion object.
The agent climbs a trust ladder per merchant, against published gates. It can also fall back down.
The metric on the wall: margin protected per merchant, per month, the only number that can't be gamed by shipping a worse product.
The rule: left column = expensive to reverse. Right column = decidable later, with better information.
| If the real problem is… | …we're building | Who else can build it | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | A campaign workflow tool | Any POS suite, any loyalty vendor | Necessary. Not defensible. |
| Cost | A self-serve agency replacement | Marketing specialists, already | A wedge, not a moat. |
| Measurement | Cross-channel reporting | Hard for all, but it's a dashboard | Proof, not product. |
| Margin | A decision engine: which store, which offer, when, and when to stop | Only a platform between the operator and every channel | This is the product. |
Not dropped, sequenced. Speed gets them in. Measurement proves the claim. Margin is why they pay.
Not a marketing problem. An unowned cost line, and the one thing Deliverect's position lets us fix.
Targeted, condition-based activation. Measured in margin protected, not campaigns launched.
Human-approved, guardrailed, auditable. Trust caps every other ambition here.
Marketing becomes the second reason they can't leave. ARPU follows stickiness.
Create → Communicate → Measure → Improve. My addition: and stop, automatically, when it stops paying.
Codes, redemption logic
Marketplace discounts
Points, tiers, rewards
Segments, lifecycle
| mechanic | % · fixed · BOGO · code · member reward |
| target | locations resolved by condition, never “all” |
| condition | vs. baseline, daypart, weather, stock, event |
| channel | marketplace · direct · push · email · SMS |
| guardrail | margin floor · max discount · budget · blast radius |
Guardrail is the wedge: no team has it, every team needs it, and it only works shared.
To the team that built it: your logic survives, your surface doesn't. In writing, before I ask them for anything.
Does this offer need to know who the customer is?
Anonymous, store- and menu-level. Wins a transaction that wasn't going to happen, including on channels we don't own.
Known customer, history, entitlement. Changes the next transaction. Needs first-party identity.
Why it survives: anyone can apply it without me, it maps to a real dependency (identity resolution), and shared cases live on the object instead of in a negotiation.
One sentence owned by the CPO: the merchant has one place to create an offer. I'd ask for it in week one.
Versioned promotion contract with a public changelog. Alignment becomes an artefact, not a calendar invite.
I absorb front-end, guardrails, support and measurement. Integrating should delete backlog items. If it doesn't, my model is wrong.
One merchant, one quarter, one number. The first proof buys the next three integrations.
Agent proposes, we log what would have happened. Nothing executes.
“Store 114 is 22% below baseline, three offers from your library.” Human picks.
Agent proposes a specific activation. One click, expires if ignored.
Pre-authorised class: “≤10% off, ≤20 stores, weekdays, within margin floor.”
Activates and deactivates inside a signed envelope. Daily digest, not a request.
There is no rung five. The agent selects from a human-authored library and never invents an offer, otherwise every incident becomes unattributable.
Per item, per store. Neither the agent nor a human in a hurry crosses it.
Brand-level ceiling per mechanic.
Daily, per store and per estate. Hard stop.
Max share of the estate on an agent-triggered promo at once. Caps a bad rule.
Trust is destroyed by surprise, not by error. Operators forgive €4,000 they hear about within the hour. They don't forgive €400 they hear about from a store manager.
Metric: % of activated stores that acknowledged before launch. Below 80%, the campaign is a liability whatever the revenue says.
Judge me on: margin protected for 3 partners
Judge me on: acceptance rate ≥70%
Judge me on: share of spend orchestrated in-platform
| Margin | 60–70% of blanket discount spend recoverable, on the earlier model |
| Cost | Agency retainer partially displaced in mid-market |
| Speed | Live in minutes, weather and event moments become reachable |
| Ops | Fewer stock-outs on promoted items; protects rating and ranking |
| Stickiness | Second lock after order flow, holds the marketing team too |
| ARPU | Paid tier sold to a budget holder we don't touch today |
| Position | The only layer spanning first-party and every marketplace |
What I can't yet defend: clean incrementality where we don't control the experiment. Phase 0 uses matched-store comparison and says so.
Why free: cheap to serve, moves the habit inside the product.
Claim: one place, one number.
Claim: margin protected, in euros.
Messaging: credits at cost plus a transparent fee, hard cap, never a margin line. Profit per send makes our incentive volume and theirs efficiency.
Aha moment: a number with a euro sign on it
The paywall is scale, not capability
The franchise loop is the real virality
Time from first login to first targeted promotion activated. Not signups, not MAU, the moment the operator does the thing the product exists for. Everything upstream is optimisation of that one number.
A 900-store brand does not self-serve a margin policy. PLG wins mid-market outright and gets us into one region of an enterprise account. The enterprise close is sales-led, and pretending otherwise is how PLG strategies quietly fail.
Zero-CAC distribution into an install base that already trusts us with order flow. Most marketing platforms spend years buying the access we already have. First campaign: in-product, to existing merchants, not paid acquisition.
Different persona, different budget line, different objection set, and finance is the one who cares about the margin claim. Our AEs have never had this conversation. That's a bigger threat to this product than any competitor.
What I'd build before selling anything: an ROI calculator that turns a merchant's own estate data into a euro figure. Same engine as the free report. It's the sales asset, the marketing asset and the product hook, and without it “we protect your margin” is just a claim in a deck.
The only metric that gets worse when we build the wrong thing, and it's already on the operator's P&L.
| POS-bundled suites | Loyalty specialists | Campaign Manager | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owns | The till and the menu | The known customer | The layer between operator and every marketplace |
| Can't | Reach marketplace demand | Act on marketplace performance per store | Match their creative or CRM depth, so don't try |
| How we lose | By building a worse version of their product inside ours | By integrating where they're better and owning the decision layer | |
Naming and IA: “Marketing Manager” is the buyer's own word for the job. And the 1P/3P split is our org chart leaking into their navigation, channel is a property of a campaign, not a section of the product.
My model assumes integrating is cheaper than maintaining their surface. False if that surface is load-bearing elsewhere.
Two half-days per tech lead, before any spec.
Everything rests on item-level cost per store. Modelled or missing, and this becomes a targeting product.
Audit 10 merchants' data in week one.
A finance story sold to a marketing buyer. That mismatch may need a different route to the sale.
8 mid-market operators, 3 enterprise CFOs.
Which is exactly why four surfaces have to become one. You can't protect margin from four places at once.