Your first 30 minutes

Thirty minutes, start to finish. At the end you will have a live program, a link customers can join from, and at least one member holding points. Every step below is something you can do today without waiting on us for anything.

Decide two things first

Both are faster to settle over a coffee than in a form:

• What one reward is worth having. A free coffee, 20% off a cut, a free wash. One is enough to launch with.
• Roughly how many visits it should take to earn it. Five to ten is the usual honest answer. Fewer and you are giving margin away; many more and nobody believes they will ever get there.

The checklist

1. Create your account — 3 minutes. Sign up at /signup with the I run a business toggle on, confirm your email, and log in. You are now looking at Overview with every tile at zero. Detail: creating your business account.
2. Open the builder — 1 minute. Programs in the left nav, then New program. Steps 3 to 5 all happen on this one screen.
3. Name the program and its unit — 4 minutes. Program name is what customers see, so use something they would recognise on a sign: "Coffee Rewards", not "Loyalty v2". Then What is one unit called?, singular and plural. "point / points" is clear and safe; a name of your own is more memorable. Naming your points has the trade-off.
4. Set the earn rate — 3 minutes. Earn rate is how many units a customer earns per 1 unit of currency spent. Start at 1 and move on. Setting earn and redeem rates does the arithmetic properly when you have time to think.
5. Add your rewards — 5 minutes. Under Rewards, give each one a title and a cost, and use Add reward for more. Add the reward you decided on, plus one cheap one so a new customer sees something in reach during week one. Leave the Status tiers and Referrals toggles off. Then Create program.
6. Find your join link — 2 minutes. Open the program you just created. Its page shows the earn rate, the rewards and their costs, the member count, and the program's public join link, which looks like /j/your-business/coffee-rewards. That link is how people join. How customers join covers where to put it.
7. Read your own join page — 3 minutes. Open the link on your phone and look at what a customer sees: your name, what they earn, what the rewards cost, and a join button. If any of it would confuse a regular, fix it now while you have nobody enrolled.
8. Enrol one real person — 4 minutes. Send the link to a regular and ask them to join while you watch. They sign up or log in, land back on the join page, and finish joining. Their name appears on Customers.
9. Give them their first points — 3 minutes. On Customers, find them and award the points for what they just bought. Issuing points at the counter is the routine to teach your staff.

What you should be looking at

Say that regular bought a coffee and a pastry, it came to 6 in your currency, and your earn rate is 1, so you awarded 6 points. Overview now reads Members 1, Active (30d) 1, Points issued 6, Points redeemed 0, Outstanding liability 6, Redemptions 0, Programs 1.

Six points owed, one member, one live program. That is a working loyalty program. Everything after this is volume.

What to leave until later

Tiers and referrals are each one toggle away in the builder, and both are a bad idea in week one — you do not yet know what a good customer looks like in your own numbers. Add them when you do. Editing a live program never erases what people have already earned, so waiting costs you nothing.

Next

Setting up your first program is the unhurried version of steps 2 to 5, with the decisions explained rather than rushed.