Tim Parry-Jones is a self-described “serial entrepreneur” – and like any serial entrepreneur, he hasn’t let failed businesses and steep learning curves stand in his way.
Tim co-founded the marketing solutions platform Tonza Deals with Benjamin “Benji” Taini. Tonza Deals is a rewards platform that businesses can use to incentivise their customers and gather data: customers scan a QR code for the chance to win a prize from the business, and the business gets valuable data in exchange.
While still in its early days, the business has gained solid traction with hospitality and entertainment businesses – success that has been a long time coming for Tim. This current venture is the product of an earlier business that went awry, months of R&D, and dogged perseverance on its founders’ part.
ISB spoke with Tim about his business journey, the failed venture that came before Tonza, and the lessons he learned along the way.
Lesson 1: Learn from your failures
Before launching Tonza Deals, Tim had already attempted a similar idea: a membership program for university students that provided rewards and discounts at local businesses.
However, the venture failed for several reasons. Firstly, the entrepreneur chose a customer base that had a short lifecycle – students aged out of the membership in just a few years.
Secondly, communication within businesses proved to be a major challenge: “Businesses had to tell their staff what the discount was, and it just didn’t work,” Tim explains.
Finally, the venture was too expensive to run in its original form. Customers would access their rewards by showing a physical token at participating businesses, a system that was both pricey to manufacture and inconvenient to log for business owners.
Learning from his mistake, Tim make his new product a digital one, making it easier to use for both of his target audiences.
Lesson 2: Be prepared to develop as you go
Tim also reveals that some of Tonza’s most crucial features were not present at launch. It was only after Tonza Deals first went live that its creators quickly recognised some of the gaps in their platform.
“We realised very quickly in use case that we needed to add more features,” Tim explains. “For instance, the ability to add a headline, to add a business logo… and to make sure that the wheel couldn’t be spun multiple times, locking out users after they’ve won something for a period of time.”
That last feature – preventing users from winning multiple prizes – proved difficult to develop, but has now become one of Tonza’s most important selling points.
Lesson 3: Invest in customer trust – particularly if you’re handling sensitive information
System reliability is Tim’s single biggest business cost, but he explains that keeping things running smoothly is crucial for maintaining customer trust. And in his business, trust is paramount.
“For a consumer, if they’re scanning something and it goes to a 404, or an error page, you’ve instantly lost their trust and your product, and they’re less likely to scan you later,” says Tim. “On top of that, if it goes down, a business owner feels like they’re missing out on valuable data.”
To ensure a smooth experience, Tonza whitelists all of its business email services through Google Cloud, ensuring that discount emails land in inboxes.
Another important aspect of trust is vetting businesses before they join the platform. Tim carefully selects which businesses can use Tonza to maintain a positive reputation. Not only are businesses banned from on-selling data, they need to actually hand out the prizes they promise.
“If you scan something, and you don’t get given the prize – well, then you don’t only just hate the business you want it from, but you also distrust our system,” Tim points out.
Lesson 4: Effective communication with your audience is crucial
Tim quickly learned that communication with both businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) needed to be clear and effective.
For consumers, he initially adopted a “magician” archetype for the brand’s voice, thinking it would make the experience feel exciting. However, he soon realized that this approach confused people.
“Our messaging after spinning and winning was along the lines of “behold your prize”, which sounds cool until you start to see numbers start to decline a bit with conversions, because people just don’t know what that means,” Tim explains.
For B2B communication, Tim took a different approach. Many business owners struggle to grasp the value of data, so he focused on making his messaging as clear and jargon-free as possible.
“We did ‘everyday man’ for our B2B, which is just simplified business speak with no jargon,” says the founder. “Trying to make it easy for people to understand, because data is actually of huge value, but misunderstood by a lot of different businesses.”
Lesson 5: Design your product to show its value – and know your product’s value yourself
A great product still needs to demonstrate its value clearly. Tim says he designed the backend of his product to highlight its value through a user-friendly interface.
“You show a business and go, ‘Oh, look, you’ve had 9000 scans’, and they’re like, ‘Great. What does that mean?’,” Tim says.
To make sure business owners understand their wins, the system’s dashboard displays metrics like number of emails captured and amount of traffic. They can also rank the value of the data as opposed to the product given away to the consumer.
It also took Tim himself a while to fully honour the value of his product. The entrepreneur reveals that he wildly undercharged the businesses he worked with in the prior, analogue version of the venture. Not only did the practice devalue the business, but it also led to the operation’s collapse.
“I completely underestimated the cost of running a business,” Tim admits.
As for where Tim’s going next – he says he has a few exciting collaborations lined up and is meeting with some big players in the retail and entertainment industries. For now, he and Benji are going to continue ploughing into the unknown.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” says Tim. “We’re finding our feet as we go, but developing very quickly. We have some big plans in the next four months.”
