5 Questions
| 5 Questions | ||
David Douglas Stone | ||
 | What is your job title, and what are you responsible for? I am the founder and CEO of CashStar. I'm responsible for classic CEO/Co-Founder stuff. First, I’m responsible for setting the vision and strategy of the company. I’m also responsible for attracting and motivating talent; we actually do have a very strong team even though we are in Maine. Part of my job is also creating the culture at the company. We are a high performance yet fun and innovative company, we definitely have a meritocracy. We say a lot about plain-speak, and making sure people are first. We spend a lot of time talking to our customers. We’re trying to be one part Apple in terms of our design and user experience, one part Google by trying to be a new and innovative player and then one part Zappos which is kind of a fun innovative place to work. Of course raising capital is important as we are a start up. We are doing very well but we still need capital to grow. Another responsibility is to lead product development. We have four or five new products coming out this year, and finally sell, sell, sell. It’s imperative to sell our vision to our clients and get us new customers. |  Job Title Founder and CEO Company CashStar |
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 | Describe your biggest challenges, both short-term and long-term. Short term: It’s changed a lot in the last year. A year ago it was all about getting clients and now it’s all about growth. We have a wealth of opportunities. Last year we brought on 24 new brands such as The Home Depot and CVS, but the challenge is prioritization, we need to know how and where to focus. We have so much demand right now, but it’s a good problem to have. Long term: Strategy is the problem in the long term. Is it market share or value that will get us to where we want to be. Should we capture more market share or should we have higher price. We have to try and maintain the high ground and remain a neutral company. We also want to help change the conception of digital gift cards, a lot of people didn’t think it would work but we’re trying to change the misconceptions that digital cards will not work. The internet allows you to create much richer content and a greater experience for clients that is inherently personal and intimate. This type of intimacy and personalization is a first in the digital world, and we are proud to be at the forefront. | |
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 | What is the most innovative prepaid card program you've seen or heard about in the last year? There’s a ton of innovation out there right now, most of it is actually happening in the digital market right now. I’m not sure how much innovation is happening in the plastic world, I think the market is saturated and it has seen its best days. I think the square program by Jack Dorsey of Twitter is very innovative and it’d be interesting to see how they do. And then of course there’s Apple. The app store has been open for just a few years and now there are 100,000 apps on there and I think we’re going to see more payment functionality through the iPhone. There’s some really interesting stuff going on there. PayPal did exactly this almost 10 years ago in the online, ecommerce space. It enabled folks like you and me to be able to accept payment cards in real time – for non-card present payments. For CashStar, the digital gift card is great because there’s even more revenue because there’s no more inventory, and the gift card is great because there’s two customers really, the purchaser and the recipient. We’ve worked with companies to layer on extra value for purchasers to buy gift cards. Our GOGO program, give one, get one, gives a 5$ gift card for every 25$ card bought. We used social media with CVS this year and the GOGO program and saw a 1000% increase in their sales by using social media. The bloggers took it and ran with it and CVS really benefited. What’s great is that our upper management actually made social media work for us. | |
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 | Describe how prepaid will fit into your industry in five years. We’re all about prepaid, what we like to think about is digital and virtual currencies. Clearly the online and the more broad digital market will play a huge roll and CashStar has built its platform based on this premise, There’s a lot of opportunity. We’re at a bit of tipping point in the digital market and we think that in the next 20 months we’re going to see a pretty large shift to digital because of the usability and shift in behavior, and as more and more companies try and compete with the iPhone, we want to be able to take advantage of the mobile format. Research has proven that consumers prefer the convenience of purchasing a gift card online over traditional plastic gift cards. We’ve been working hard to make gift cards not only convenient, but personal, attractive and accessible. So I think you’re going see a lot more in the digital currency sector. Mobile Gifting may be the next evolutionary step in the world of gift cards. The majority of the retailers are now considering mobile gifting as more and more users buy and gift goods online. So why not allow your customers to purchase gift cards that can be delivered, including a personal message, via SMS. Our goal over the next five years and beyond is to continue to expand our platform to deliver new types of digital currencies to clients complete with digital and social media tools, real time analytics and proven best practices that obtain unprecedented results. It will be an exciting time for our company! | |
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 | If you weren't working in the prepaid sector, what would you be doing and why? I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years of my life and I worked in financial services before that. Entrepreneurship is in my blood and if I wasn’t at CashStar I’d probably be starting another tech company on the cusp of an emerging trend, it’s what I do. It’s really about catching a market trend at the right time and the right place. | |