The RewardMe Loyalty Program becomes mainstream in the SF Bay Area
When I was building RewardMe, my mobile loyalty platform for restaurants, I had no idea I was laying the groundwork for the Octalysis Framework. RewardMe was my hands-on laboratory, and restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area actually loved using it.
Here’s a look at how RewardMe established traction in Silicon Valley and what it taught me about real-world gamification design.
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About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
RewardMe: The Dominant Loyalty Program for Restaurants
In a short amount of time, RewardMe established a strong presence and became a fan favorite for restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Some notable places include:
- Denny’s
- Coupa Cafe
- Posh Bagels
- Cantankerous Fish
- Pho Garden
- Barracuda Sushi
- Sweet Corner
- Han’s Korean Cuisine
Our users loved RewardMe too. Thousands of users were using it regularly, even weekly, at restaurants participating in RewardMe, enjoying their points and rewards.
How RewardMe Gained Traction in Silicon Valley
Edo Peno, a Yelp Elite for three years straight, wrote a blogpost on how much he liked RewardMe.
Since we were in the center of Silicon Valley, we also got attention on Quora, where people asked about how we established our initial traction.
We were excited to continue supporting the community and creating closer relationships between stores and their best customers. We expanded to Vancouver, Southern California, the East Coast, and other cities across the US and Canada.
The Behavioral Design Lessons Behind RewardMe
Building RewardMe taught me firsthand how Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity and Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession drive real customer behavior in loyalty programs.
When users earned points (CD4, they felt ownership over their progress), and occasional surprise rewards kept them coming back (CD7, the unpredictability made each visit exciting), the combination created real repeat visits.
These weren’t abstract theories. They were patterns I observed in thousands of real transactions. The experience of building and scaling RewardMe directly informed the Octalysis Framework, especially how the game loops in loyalty programs mirror the scaffolding phase of user engagement.
Related Reading
- Hotel Loyalty Gamification Case Study: LuckyDiem
- A comparison between Belly and RewardMe, by the stats
- How I started my Entrepreneurial Career Freshman Year in College