I have a friend who worked for Rewardle and I also know a few high street business owners who have or have had the platform. Take what I say with the grain of salt you should take anything said on the internet with.
Their 'Local business listings' are QR code vouchers they send out as physical mail to a local area with 4-5 deals grouped together. The businesses that want to participate need to lock in at least 3 months of Rewardle and are pressured to take a full year up front for a discount + $199-400 setup fee. Most businesses are taking the 3 months to jump on the local area mail-out as it works out relatively cheap for a mail-out and they get to keep the customer data of anybody who scanned the QR code.
The sales team tries to tee up multiple meetings a day by cold calling they are doing a 'local area showcase' type thing and then try to sell the merchant on the whole Rewardle system. It is a trojan horse to get more long term subscribers, many suburbs have already been burnt through and I think this model is not sustainable unless it becomes desirable enough you don't need to drag businesses into participating kicking and screaming.
One of the issues with this is, it really is no improvement on a Groupon/Scoupon model and a lot of businesses are being turned off by giving out these kinds of discounts to win customers over as they generally don't become regulars.
This may work as a revenue stream for Rewardle, however, I feel it pulls the brand further away from being something totally fresh and independent in the market and moves it to try to compete with existing business models.
There are crazier things Ruwan has dreamt up to monetize both the network and merchants but that's a story for another time...
IMHO DYOR of course.
RXH Price at posting:
0.3¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)