Boston • New York • Detroit
Boston • New York • Detroit
MyCheck is the hospitality industry’s leading mobile payment technology provider, with a product set that equips hotels and restaurants for digital customer engagement. In Israel, it had been a genuine success.
The US was a different proposition. The consumer payments market was crowded, well funded, and already contested by companies with far deeper pockets. Entering it head-on meant spending heavily to win attention that might never convert into the outcome the founders actually wanted.
The question was whether the same technology could be sold to a different buyer entirely.
Success in one market doesn’t transfer automatically to another. We looked at what the US consumer payments landscape actually cost to compete in, and concluded that the obvious path was the expensive one.
We moved the product from a consumer-facing app to an industry SaaS platform. The core technology and functions stayed as they were. What changed was who it was sold to and how it was described — a positioning problem, not an engineering one.
Hotels and restaurants were a more lucrative buyer than consumers, and a base of enterprise accounts is the kind of asset a strategic acquirer values. The repositioning served the founders’ actual goal, which was never market share for its own sake.
MyCheck was acquired by Shiji Group, a leading provider of hospitality technology solutions. The platform carried more than seventy customers, partners, and integrated platforms, among them the Red Lion and Wyndham hotel groups and Alipay.
The founders got the outcome they were after. Not by winning a market they were never going to win, but by selling the same capability to someone for whom it was worth considerably more.
Thirty minutes. Bring the business. Leave with the one thing worth building everything else around.
Find your Right Angle