STARTUP STORY
BREWING A BETTER WAY TO LOYALTY
When you’ve run a café for 16 years, you get to know your customers and the small inefficiencies that chip away at the day.
For Barney Hyde, Managing Director of Custom Based Software, that inefficiency was the humble cardboard coffee card.
“We wanted to eliminate cardboard coffee cards,” Barney recalls. “We tried other digital loyalty tools, but none fit what we needed. So, we built our own.”
That decision sparked the beginning of Coffee Stamp, a digital loyalty and ordering platform designed to make customer rewards simpler for both businesses and customers, and to give cafés something even more valuable: meaningful customer insight.
Born in a Café, Built for an Industry
Barney and his team spent a year developing the first version of Coffee Stamp, testing it live in their own Robert Harris café in 2017. Within weeks, hundreds of customers were tapping in to earn their digital stamps using a simple on-counter tablet, no smartphone app required.
We designed it to be effortless for all demographics. Just type your phone number and you're in.
From Loyalty to Insights
By digitising loyalty, cafés suddenly had something new: data. Each transaction was tracked, each visit recorded. Businesses could see who their regulars were and when they were most likely to visit.
Previously, staff manually entered handwritten email addresses from completed paper cards, a process prone to error and painfully time-consuming. With Coffee Stamp, data became clean, immediate, and actionable.
The system helped Robert Harris franchise build a database of tens of thousands of customers, which proved invaluable during the pandemic when digital communication became a lifeline.
“Most cafés had never had a proper database before,” Barney says. “Now, they can connect directly with their customers.”
This dataset, spanning dozens of cafés and hundreds of thousands of transactions, has quietly become one of the most comprehensive snapshots of café loyalty and behaviour in New Zealand. Barney sees immense potential in turning it into insights cafés can actually use, like understanding when to roster staff, launch promotions, or predict quieter trading weeks.
Growing Beyond the Café
What began as an in-house solution has grown into a network spanning 126 Robert Harris cafés, BP 2go, Caltex Fix stores, and independent cafés across the country. Customers can earn and redeem loyalty rewards at multiple stores using one central system, a convenience that’s helping Coffee Stamp become part of everyday café life nationwide.
Now, Barney and his son Jesse are taking the business further. Jesse leads customer-facing development, including Coffee Stamp and Coffee GetGo and GetGo Kiosk, while Barney manages the cloud infrastructure.
The Next Frontier: Self-Service Kiosks
The team’s latest focus is the GetGo self-service ordering kiosk, designed to streamline service and reduce pressure during peak hours. After nearly a year of testing, the kiosks have already proven popular, with new sales secured at a recent Robert Harris conference. Fully powered by Android and built with hardware sourced from China, the kiosk is also opening the door to international expansion, particularly into Australia.
“Even in a service-focused café, there are moments where self-service just makes sense. It's about giving cafe owners flexibility."
Data: The Untapped Goldmine
Behind all this growth lies what Barney calls their “hidden asset”, a rich, underutilised data set showing real-world spending patterns across New Zealand’s café sector.
He sees a future where Coffee Stamp moves beyond digital loyalty to become a data insights company, helping café owners understand their customers in ways never before possible.
“We can show a café not just who’s coming in, but how loyalty drives their business over time,” he says. “There’s real power in that.”
Coaching Support: Turning Vision Into Strategy
While Barney and Jesse have built powerful technology, they knew they needed help turning that innovation into a scalable business. That’s when they turned to Startup Aotearoa and connected with Benji and Nick from The Factory, whose startup coaching and support have helped refine their growth strategy.
“Working with The Factory has been really good for us,” Barney says. “They’ve helped us structure the business better, given us clarity on financials, and challenged us to think bigger about where this can go.”
With their guidance, Barney is exploring partnerships, revenue-sharing models, and new go-to-market strategies that will help Coffee Stamp reach more cafés, faster.
Benji Pritchard - Startup Aotearoa Coach
Nick Gain - Startup Aotearoa Coach
The Challenge Ahead: Sales and Scale
The next chapter is all about growth. Barney knows the technology works—it’s now about expanding market reach and maintaining momentum.
“Our goal is to be one of the top five self-service kiosk providers in New Zealand,” he says. “We know the tech is solid; now it’s about getting it into more hands.”
Coffee Stamp is proof that innovation often starts with a small frustration—and that the café counter can be just as powerful a launchpad as a laptop.
For Barney Hyde, that spark has grown into a platform helping cafés not just reward customers, but truly understand them. With years of hospitality experience behind him and data shaping what’s next, Barney is brewing a smarter, more connected future for cafés everywhere.