Rafflexchange, one of the 26 startups selected to join PhilDev’s incubator program this year, announced the official launch of their crowd-sponsored, loyalty-based raffle platform, slated for next month.
For founder Bong Misajon, entrepreneurship was an abrupt shift following an extensive career in the Chemistry and Computer Engineering industry. Working for companies like Procter & Gamble, he specialized in formulating and patenting laundry products, as well as building, piloting, and deploying global IT support portals in the field of IT Service Management. That was, until, he says he got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. “I resigned and took risks commercializing startup ideas,” Misajon says. “I failed so many times but kept going. I would say my real love is building something that impacts or changes the way people live or currently do things.”
Through Rafflexchange, Misajon aims to build a community of flourishing businesses that regularly “sponsor dreams”. By aggregating the values of rewards from their partner-merchants, small budgets can add up to massive, often life-changing prizes for Rafflexchange’s community.
“There is so much value exchanged in the form of discounts, points, vouchers and cashbacks,” Misajon explains. “These are rewards that are siloed around how much an individual spends and the rewards go back to the individual. In this system, the values continue to be dispersed and distributed. The dispersion of reward values does not build anything significant for a person or the community.”
Though raffles can be an effective way to incentivize customer engagement, not many businesses can afford to offer the grand-scale prizes necessary to inspire their communities to participate. “The more valuable, desirable, or aspirational your prize is, the more people will be incentivized to join and do what the sponsors want them to do,” Misajon says.
With their crowd-sponsorship system, even a small business with a marketing budget as low as P2,000 would be able to offer luxury cars as prizes. “The key to making this crowd sponsorship happen is the use of reward tokens as the unit of currency (like shares in a company) to crowd-sponsor prizes,” Misajon said. “Each member of the crowd contributes only the volume of tokens they can afford, based on the nature and size of their business. But since there are so many of them, they can challenge even the biggest raffle prizes the big malls, companies, or conglomerates can offer.”
In other words, a 10-peso discount to one million consumers might not feel like much. But on the other hand, a 10 million cash prize to one individual would be life-changing. Rafflexchange charges no subscription or membership fees. Merchants need only to purchase tokens at P20 a piece that they can then share with their customers towards joining the raffles of their choice.
“[For the winners of these prizes], this could be amazing capital to start a business that employs people and perks up the economy of a community, while the other 999,999 people do not mind losing that 10-peso discount,” says Misajon. “It is this challenge of consolidating reward values towards amazing prizes and endeavors that Rafflexchange wants to take on.”
Rafflexchange promises their partner-merchants promotion and increased sales, sans the high costs incurred from running grand-prize raffles.
“Imagine if we have the ability to get significant portions of the marketing or promotion budgets of thousands of merchants towards funding prizes that are designed to have the greatest impact on winners, their families and their communities,” Misajon says. “Imagine if prizes can be designed and morphed to fund and address anything important for society and where the consuming public decides what prizes get funded. Imagine how powerful, impactful, and urgent those can be.”
Starting April 25, participants joining these raffles can begin earning tokens from merchant partners and using them to take part in raffles.