A Coupon Startup Popular Among CEOs Challenges the 49 Trillion Won Food Ingredient Market

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Choi Jae-seung, CEO of Spoqa, who developed Dodo Point, a platform that assists small business owners and franchise customer management, expressed his ambition to support the digitalization of small business owners and self-employed individuals through various services that help store management.

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] “One day, I saw a thick stack of paper coupons in my wallet and wondered why people still collect coupons on paper. So I immediately started developing a mobile coupon service, and through that process, we launched a model that is convenient for both store owners and consumers.”

Dodopoint, a business-to-business (B2B) service operated by Spoqa, is a customer management platform that helps small business owners or franchises manage their customers. It is praised for simplifying the previously manual system of recording transactions in ledgers or stamping paper coupons into a mobile app and a single tablet PC.

As word spread about the convenience of collecting and managing data on consumers, especially regular customers, which was not possible with paper coupons, store owners began applying for membership themselves. CEO Choi explained, “After launching the Dodopoint service, we installed and operated tablets for point accumulation mainly in stores near Hongdae, where many people gather, and the response was good. Suddenly, however, we received a flood of membership inquiries from small business owners in the Bucheon area. It turned out that people living in Bucheon had tried the service in Hongdae and asked if there was anything like it in their area, leading store owners to voluntarily apply for membership.”

CEO Choi explained that the text coupon service, originally used for birthday and event promotions, was applied to delivery and point accumulation, allowing self-employed business owners who face difficulties in offline customer attraction activities to achieve increased order volumes and encourage repeat visits. Photo by Spoqa

Point Accumulation Crisis Due to COVID-19... New Start with Text Coupon Service

Dodopoint, which became well-known through word of mouth, currently has 23,500 cumulative stores and 25 million cumulative users. CEO Choi added that the stores that initially joined, mainly cafes and restaurants, have recently expanded to include hair salons, nail shops, laundromats, and more.

The resurgence of COVID-19 brought great challenges to both small business owners and Spoqa. Store operating hours were restricted, and with strengthened social distancing, consumer visits to stores dropped sharply, naturally reducing point accumulation. Delivery sales, which are difficult to accumulate points through Dodopoint, also posed a negative factor. CEO Choi said, “As visitor data clearly decreased, the pain of store owners who were paying to use Dodopoint was confirmed through the numbers. To overcome the crisis, we sought to serve as a communication channel between store owners and customers by providing a service that sends coupons via text messages to consumers registered with Dodopoint.” This self-help measure was proven effective as coupon sales grew by 50% compared to the previous year in last year’s revenue.

Dodocart is a service that helps store owners manage their stores efficiently by organizing purchase details and analyzing expenditure proportions and status when they input receipts for food ingredient purchases. Photo by Spoqa

Challenging the 49 Trillion Won Food Ingredient Market with a Self-Employed Food Material Management Solution

In August last year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Spoqa launched ‘DodoCart,’ a food material cost management service for efficient store management by self-employed business owners. Since food ingredients are the largest expense item in store operations but usage details were mostly managed blindly, this service was developed. CEO Choi said, “In store operations, costs come in the order of food ingredients, labor, and rent, but most store owners do not know how much they spent on food ingredients last month or what they purchased the most. We developed this service to improve that situation. The enormous 49 trillion won food ingredient market is still operated in a makeshift manner, but by applying IT technology and providing B2B services, we expect to reduce inconvenience and waste felt by store owners when purchasing food ingredients and help them manage efficiently.”

DodoCart is currently offered as a free service. Within four months of its launch, more than 7,000 store owners signed up and entered food ingredient purchase receipts. Collecting that information revealed 12,000 food ingredient suppliers and 140,000 transaction items. Last year, DodoCart’s cumulative food ingredient transaction amount exceeded 20 billion won. After the value of the data was proven, Spoqa signed a ‘Big Data Distribution Activation Agreement for Agricultural and Food Products’ with the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation (aT) in December last year and joined in providing data on price information. CEO Choi stated, “Although Spoqa faced a crisis as offline self-employed businesses struggled due to COVID-19, we are developing an app that allows consumers to directly check their accumulated points and functions to overcome this. We will devote ourselves to service development with the mission to elegantly connect stores, customers, and store owners through technology, providing everything they need.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.