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Digital loyalty cards that live in Apple Wallet and Google Pay so the coffee shop's customer never installs an app — resold by marketing agencies at roughly $150 a month per account
roughly $150/month per platform account plus volume-based add-ons · 3,000 paid licences and $300K in net revenue from a two-month AppSumo campaign in 2022 · $400K pre-seed (figures as of August 2023)
"It's too complicated right now to be rewarded." The insight is that the loyalty app was always the problem: a wallet card takes two or three seconds to add, needs no install, and needs no integration with the shop's point-of-sale system at all.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Mike Inishev spent twelve years running his own digital agency — 54 employees and around $2 million in annual recurring revenue — and came out of it, in his own words, totally burned out on the service business. During the COVID lockdown he decided to build a product company instead. The product is a loyalty platform for small local businesses whose entire economics depend on repeat visits: coffee shops, pizza places, beauty salons. His argument is that those businesses already understand retention and simply have no usable tool for it, because the standard answer — install our app to get your eleventh coffee free — asks too much of a customer standing at a counter. Boomerangme issues loyalty cards as Apple Wallet and Google Pay passes. The customer scans a QR code and the card is in their wallet in two or three seconds, with nothing installed. The shop needs no point-of-sale integration and no CRM: the platform runs standalone, with 111 ready-made card templates and a promotion that can be live fifteen minutes after signup. He sold his agency in 2021, became the first investor in his own product, and hired two developers to build the MVP — about six months before there was anything to sell. For roughly the first two years the company sold directly to shop owners in its Eastern European home market, then opened a Delaware C Corp and raised a $400K pre-seed to go global. The direct-to-SMB motion is not what worked. The AppSumo campaign that followed brought in marketing agencies asking to resell the product to their own restaurant and café clients, and the company rebuilt itself around them. At the time of the interview it was doing about $20K MRR, growing 9 to 10% month over month, with every sale coming through agencies.
The first six months produced no customers at all, by design: Mike funded two developers out of the proceeds of his agency and shipped an MVP before selling anything.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. The exact words are quoted below, with a timestamp that jumps to the second each figure is said.
“I think it's just in one month and we can sell 3000 paid licences and achieve $300K in net revenue after just two month AppSumo campaign.”
7:32 · hear it in the video“So right now we about 20K in MRR right now and we are growing around 9% to 10% month to month.”
9:24 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder interview on an agency's podcast; every number is self-reported and unaudited, with no dashboard, screenshot or third-party source shown at any point. ⚠️ The interview was published in August 2023, so the $20K MRR, the 9–10% month-over-month growth, the $50K year-end target and the planned $2–3M Series A at a $15–20M valuation are all a snapshot of that moment and say nothing about the company's position now. The AppSumo results (3,000 paid licences, $300K net revenue, roughly two months, 2022) and the $400K pre-seed are the founder's own account. The prior agency — twelve years, 54 employees, about $2M ARR, sold in 2021 — is also self-reported. ⚠️ The founder's dates are internally inconsistent: he says the product began in 2020 in one answer and in 2021 in another, while also saying two years were spent in the home market before the 2021 Delaware incorporation. We have reported what he said rather than trying to reconcile it. Product details (Apple Wallet and Google Pay passes, 111 templates, 14-day trial, 15-minute setup, no POS or CRM integration required, roughly $150/month plus volume add-ons) come from his own description on the call. Location: he states the home market was Eastern Europe and the company opened a C Corp in Delaware to sell into North America; no city or country is named, so none is asserted here. The group file's "India" tag is a search label and is contradicted by the interview.
The first dollar came from a shop owner paying for platform access after a classic fourteen-day free trial, which is still how the product converts.
The turn came from AppSumo in 2022. The campaign sold 3,000 licences and produced $300K in net revenue in about two months, which Mike describes as cutting the rope — validating product-market fit globally rather than chasing customers one by one.
There were two quiet stretches. The first was the six months of MVP build with two hired developers, his own money and no customers.
A loyalty platform built on wallet passes. The end customer scans a QR code at the counter and a stamp or points card lands in Apple Wallet or Google Pay in two or three seconds — no app install, no account creation, which is the entire product thesis. Mike's framing is that the loyalty app was always the friction: asking someone to download software to earn a free eleventh coffee is too much work for the reward on offer. On the business side, the merchant gets a card designer with 111 ready-made templates and can have a new loyalty promotion configured in about fifteen minutes on a fourteen-day free trial. The deliberate omission is integration: the platform runs standalone, requiring no point-of-sale system and no CRM. That decision costs the product transaction-level data and gains it the ability to be live the same afternoon in a shop whose till is fifteen years old — for this customer, that trade is the right one. The layer that turned it into a business is white-label. Agencies rebrand the platform, resell it to their own local-business clients, and absorb onboarding, support and customer success themselves. Boomerangme becomes a vendor to the agency rather than a supplier to a thousand cafés, which is a completely different support burden at the same revenue.
Two revenue streams, both stated plainly. The first is a conventional subscription for platform access at around $150 a month. The second is volume-based add-ons purchased on top, which is how a large agency account grows beyond the base price without renegotiating anything. The number worth studying is not the price but who pays it. When the buyer was a single coffee shop, $150 a month bought one location's loyalty programme and every support ticket landed on Boomerangme's desk. When the buyer is an agency, the same $150 a month sits underneath a portfolio of that agency's clients, the agency does the onboarding and support, and the agency has a commercial reason to keep the account alive that the café never had. Same price, different unit economics. At the time of the interview this added up to about $20K in MRR growing 9 to 10% month over month, with a stated target of $50K by year end to trigger a Series A of $2–3 million at a $15–20 million valuation. The AppSumo campaign sat outside this model entirely: 3,000 lifetime licences for $300K in net revenue, which is cash and validation bought at the cost of future subscription income from those same 3,000 accounts.
Our read: the interview gives no infrastructure details, no cost figures and no margin numbers, so this section is our analysis of what the model implies rather than anything the founder stated. The technical core is wallet pass issuance and — more importantly — pass updates. Generating an Apple Wallet pass requires an Apple Developer account and a signing certificate; keeping a stamp count current on a card already in someone's wallet requires a push update service that has to stay reliable, because a card showing the wrong number of stamps at a counter is worse than no card. Google Wallet has its own equivalent. That pairing is the part a competitor cannot copy in a weekend, and it is also the part that will wake you up at night. Costs should be low and flat: pass storage is trivial, push notifications are cheap, and the deliberate absence of point-of-sale integrations removes the most expensive category of engineering and support work a loyalty product normally carries. The real cost line is human. Mike's own account of why direct-to-SMB did not work is that shop owners needed strategy help he was not selling — that is support cost by another name, and moving to a white-label agency channel is as much a cost decision as a growth one, since the agency absorbs it in exchange for its own margin.
Copy the channel discovery, which is the real lesson here. Boomerangme did not reason its way to selling through agencies; it ran a lifetime-deal campaign, watched who showed up, and noticed that a segment of buyers wanted to resell rather than use. If you run a marketplace launch, treat the inbound requests as data about your distribution model, not as noise to be answered one by one. Copy the removal of friction at both ends: no app for the consumer, no integration for the merchant. Each of those decisions costs something real, and each converts a two-week sale into a fifteen-minute one. Change the lifetime-deal economics before you repeat them. Three thousand licences at roughly $100 each is $300K now against the subscription revenue those 3,000 accounts would have paid for years, plus a permanent support obligation. Our read: it was the right trade here because it bought a channel he did not know existed and 3,000 sources of reviews — but if you already know your channel, it is an expensive way to raise cash. Change the market you point it at. Wallet loyalty is crowded in 2026, and the defensible version is vertical: one category of business with a specific mechanic nobody has built — a coffee subscription pass, a class pack for studios, a service-interval card for garages. The agency channel then becomes agencies that specialise in that one vertical, which is a much shorter list to work through.
Start with the honest caveat on the numbers: this interview is from August 2023 and every figure is a point in time. The $20K MRR, the 9–10% monthly growth and the $50K target belong to that moment, and nothing here confirms what happened next. Platform dependency is the structural risk. The product exists because Apple Wallet and Google Pay allow third-party passes, and it lives or dies on developer-programme terms, certificate renewals and pass update services that neither the founder nor his customers control. A policy change at either company is not a bad quarter, it is a rebuild. The channel concentration cuts both ways. "Right now, we do all our sales from marketing agencies" is a clean, low-support business and also a business with no direct relationship to the end merchant — the agency owns the customer, can switch vendors, and can white-label a competitor next year without a single café noticing. Margin pressure follows, because the agency is the one setting the retail price. Competition is the last one. Wallet-pass loyalty has a low technical floor and a long list of established players, and the deliberate lack of point-of-sale integration — the thing that makes setup fast — also means the product holds no transaction data, which is exactly the asset that would make it hard to rip out.
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