Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What experiences shaped Max Denevich's approach to business and leadership?
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Learn more at getunblocked.com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time, before it's stored or analyzed.
That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. To see how it works, get a demo at mezmo.com slash codestory. That's M-E-Z-M-O dot com slash codestory. Hello, listeners. Today, we are dropping another episode in our Chats series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks.
This episode is Founder Chats, hearing from those scaling the companies themselves. In this episode, we are talking with Max Dinovich, co-founder and CRO of Loyalty Plant. Max is going to share with us the road he traveled entering into this industry, his go-to-market strategies, scaling across geographic regions, and much, much more. Well, Max, thanks for being on the show today.
Thanks for being on CodeStory. Thanks for having me, Noah. Absolutely. Before we talk about products and scale and all the things we're going to get into with your journey, tell us a bit about your path to this point. What experiences shaped the way you think about business and leadership before Loyalty Plant?
Honestly, I believe it all started with video games. I was a serious gamer as a kid, and that's what pulled me into computers, into logic, into math. That curiosity eventually turned me into the IT. But somewhere in my first or second year of university, I wasn't wired to just code. I wanted to create things, come up with ideas, pitch them, talk about them with people.
So I needed the product side.
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Chapter 3: At what point did Max realize he wanted to work with traditional industries?
So I started to find some opportunities for me couldn't find that combination in just a regular job traditional roles were too narrow for me you are either a marketer or a developer or a salesperson but I wanted to touch all sides of the product at once so I started looking at startups figured that was like the only place for me that like a student with no experience could actually do that
So it landed me in my first story, my first startup. It was like Android TV connectors. It was early days before Google Chromecast, before smart TV, all this stuff. And it was some kind of device that turned your regular TV into Android machine. I did marketing. I did B2B sales, B2C sales. And we sold actually thousands of units, I believe, something like that. Landed one big retail deal.
But the company's margins were really bad. Money ran out. And that was my first real lesson that enthusiasm does not pay salaries. You need revenue, real recurring revenue, or you just burn time. Yeah. And the second thing was like, was beacon technology. It was iBeacons, little slow, low energy technology.
This was the hyperlocal marketing, proximity marketing, the early Internet of Things types. So the idea was to connect brands, advertisers with the audiences of different mobile apps by detecting them and those users walk past the store or something like that and pushing them relevant offers in real time. It was very ambitious, very complex. It was like three different audiences to serve at once.
It was like brands, app developers. physical retail locations. We had some pilots, had zero commercial sales again, three years in, money burned out again. So the pattern across both great product thinking, broke and go to market. I learned earlier that beating around technology instead of around the problem is almost always a wrong starting point.
So actually, the Beacon startup is actually how I met Vas, our founder at Loyalty Plant. At the time, he was running early versions of Loyalty Plant. It was some kind of multi-brand loyalty app startup, and they were using QR code scanning for customers checking in the restaurants.
I went to pitch him, why are you making customers scan a QR code, just put an iBeacon in the store, and customers just tapped their phone, done. Much smoother experience. He said, nah, interesting idea, wrong moment, blah, blah, blah. But that conversation stuck. A couple of years later, then I was looking at what to do next and noticed that mobile apps were really becoming a real thing.
It was like 2014, 15, 16, 17, the rest of the loyalty, digital engagement. That whole space was like exploding. And I just remember was, and that's how I ended up at Loyalty Plant.
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Chapter 4: Why did Max choose to join LoyaltyPlant and what potential did he see?
Excellent. I appreciate that overview. I'd love to dive into, you know, your entrance into this industry. At what point did you realize that you wanted to work with complex traditional industries rather than consumer apps or quote unquote, easy tech? And really alongside that, why food tech and QSR, which stands for quick service restaurants?
What made you believe this industry had deep structural problems worth solving with technology?
I don't think it was like deliberate choice, honestly. I just keep noticing that the biggest problems and the places that nobody was really using technology yet were all in these traditional industries like restaurants, for example. And there was the gap, real gap. And I just started searching a new place for me. It was like consumer apps were exciting, but also incredibly crowded.
Everyone was building the next social thing, the next consumer product. Competition was brutal and just take all. Traditional industries like restaurants, for example, retail chains were full of the opposite problem. Massive scale, real money moving through the system, but technology adoption like 10 years behind.
And the keep between what was possible and what was actually being used was enormous. And there was also something about the sales complexity that appealed to me. In consumer tech, you're chasing virality. This is good in B2B as well, but in B2B, for traditional industry, you're solving operational problems for real people. And you can see the impact clearly.
And the rest of the industry, so while loyalty plant, the rest of the industry touch billions of people every day, around some incredible thin margins and the relationship between the restaurant and guests, like fundamentally personal, a massive scale, thin margins, human relationships at the core. Once I saw that, I just couldn't look away.
It was some kind of personal frustration around this food tech market and all these restaurants. Because as a consumer, I kept losing those punch cards, these punch cards, the ones that you get stamped every time you buy a coffee. And after 10 stamps, you get a free one. And I'd lose them constantly. And I thought, This is the entire loyalty strategy of most restaurant, a piece of cardboard.
Yeah. And this was really interesting for me. Then the digital loyalty started appealing, apps, digital cards, point system. And that was exciting. But the loyalty programs, like the Logic before them, were terrible. A coffee chain offers you like three cents of an ice cream cone after your, I don't know, 10th visit. And they call it loyalty. So how does that change my behavior?
How does it make me feel anything about the brand? And most loyalty problems were just discount machine and bad ones. So no personalization, no journey, no reason for a customer to actually care. And on top of that was the delivery problem.
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Chapter 5: What decisions changed LoyaltyPlant's trajectory during financial struggles?
Because all the segregators, like the leaders of the food tech market, were absolutely sure. But again, customers were ordering through delivery and operates, and restaurants were paying a huge amount of commissions, like 30% to the segregators. And they had no idea who just... both from them.
The loyalty app and just app and the ordering experience most of the time lived in like completely different worlds. So you just collect points in store, but order the delivery through a third party aggregator and the whole just guest journey was broken. So that's why I really love QSR, for example, because it's like the most competitive business in the world.
And you are fighting for a few extra visits per month, a few extra dollars per order. And at that scale, even small improvements in how you keep customers engaged and coming back translated to millions, that's what made it real for me. Every technology decision actually matters for them.
Sure, you saw some problems that needed to be solved and you saw some optimization opportunities in this industry and you went for it. That's great. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. Building with AI coding tools is exciting until the moment things start breaking. You ask for a small change and suddenly three other features stop working.
AI gets confused, misses edge cases, and loses track of your intent. The problem is not code generation.
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Chapter 6: What key milestones turned LoyaltyPlant into a global enterprise?
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And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive dot com. Looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? Nothing. What I did find cost me an arm and a leg. So I did what every founder does under pressure. Threw in extra letters, settled for the less than optimal name.
And here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a .tech domain. Tech startup, .tech domain. It could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website, really, that tech is at the core of your build.
And I've kicked myself plenty since, especially when I see the clean and sharp names tech companies have landed on .tech. Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech, Ultra.tech, Alice.tech, Neon.tech, Blaze.tech, Pi.tech. You get the idea. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it.
Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. So what made you choose Loyalty Plant then?
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Chapter 7: What lessons did Max learn from scaling across different markets?
I believe the first thing that got me was the core idea behind the product. It was a B2B SaaS. It sounded really cool back then. And it also had this B2C layer, a consumer-facing app that real people actually used. And I was one of those people. I tried our clients' apps as a customer and I could feel the potential. The product was very different from what we have today.
For example, no online ordering at all. None of the marketing gamification mechanics that are now our core. But the foundation was there. The idea was right. And that's rare in B2B. Then you can feel the value from the user side as well. And that tells something. Yeah, so the foundation was real. Coming from two startups, the product itself was the problem. This was different.
There was something worth building on. It needed a lot of work.
Chapter 8: How did Max's new go-to-market strategies drive sales in enterprise QSR?
The product went through massive transformation after that, but the starting point was solid. And what wasn't really working was the go-to-market, specifically partnerships and international sales. Nobody had cracked it yet. And that was exactly the kind of challenge I'm drawn to. The team had mostly given up on partnership, to be honest.
I remember salespeople joking, another guy who is going to try partnerships, good luck. Yeah, and that kind of skepticism doesn't scare me at all. It motivates me. Then there was a bigger picture. The company had raised investment, but was still searching for a repeatable growth model. That's a pretty normal stage for a startup.
You're not sure yet, but that uncertainty is also where you learn the fastest. And I also already knew Vas from this Beacon startup I mentioned, and I knew how he thought, what he was building towards. And that really matters. Joining a company is also joining the person leading it. So I just believe the timing was right.
Mobile apps also, digital loyalty, restaurant tech, it was all accelerating. The window was open. But I was not joining a success story. I was joining really a problem that needed solving and actually the more interesting opportunity.
So with Loyalty Plant, you're often referred to as a co-founder today. How did the transition happen from an executive role to shaping the company's future at that level?
Not typical co-founder story. I didn't start the company in a garage. When I joined, it was already a team. There were investors. There was a product. But here's the thing. The company that exists today is a fundamentally different company from the one I joined. And it had to almost die for transformation to happen.
And the co-founder part came from being the person who chose to stay and help rebuild something new. So in time I joined, it was a company, it was a big player on the local market, but we also raised a couple of millions of investment to spread abroad, to become a real international, big international player. But it was a tough way. Yeah. And it was actually a situation that many startups
And the growth stage companies face, especially if they raise the investment that haven't reached break even yet. You just hit a wall and that wall forces a decision from everyone in the room. So our investment was running out. Bas was very transparent with the team. It was like a couple of months after I joined the team. Roughly six months of runway left. And it was like two options.
close enough big deals passed with upfront payments to keep going or get additional funding from existing investors. Neither was granted. And then the growth team, the real story, then the growth team, the people who could have actually driven sales and pulled us through almost entirely left to a competitor. Then the people who are supposed to save the company
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