I think the Emirates stuff was OK - OK but not great. Notably,...

I think the Emirates stuff was OK - OK but not great. Notably, if you go back and look at the deal it looked suspiciously like a glorified master services agreement, not a definitive "we will pay X for functionality Y delivered on day Z and if we don't pay and you do deliver you can sue us" type deal.

I also think that 99% of the technical effort that Loyyal put into their platform was, essentially speculative consulting for Emirates and maybe 1 or 2 other customers - maybe in Japan. So I think what it comes down to is not that the product was crap or totally unsuited to Emirates or anything like that - it was just effectively a unpaid consulting gig that was on the verge of becoming a bit more formalized.

The problem is, like the old historical saying: "another victory like that and we are done for". Lots of effort - effectively paid for by Reffind (!) - to get to one customer, and very late in the history of Loyyal. They clearly didn't have any other real customers much earlier as their financials showed.

What's obvious is that Loyyal didn't have anything that could be sold on a turn-key basis to lots of different customers. Steve Blank's definition of a startup is "... an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". They clearly weren't achieving that.