Tremendous

In 2010, Couple and Nick quit their corporate jobs, moved to Berkeley, and got into Y Combinator with an idea for a location-based gift card product called Gift Rocket. The YC interview was serendipitous—they'd pitched a "terrible" referral marketing idea, but three days before the interview, Nick came up with the gift card concept over cocktails. Paul Graham was so impressed he initially accepted them, then rejected, then reversed course again after consulting with Patrick Collison at Stripe. This connection to Stripe and other payments experts proved crucial for two young founders with no experience in fintech.

Gift Rocket launched as a "paperless post meets Venmo" product—money with a suggestion of how to spend it. It grew to around $400,000 in annual revenue by 2012, but the business hit a ceiling. Retention was abysmal because consumers only sent gifts on occasions like weddings and holidays. Even if someone sent four gifts a year, that wasn't enough volume to sustain venture-scale growth. By 2012-2013, the founders realized they were "hitting a ceiling" and needed to either find new levers or pivot entirely.

After gift Rocket's struggles, Couple left to start two real estate ventures with Nick and others, selling nine homes in a summer in 2014. Meanwhile, Nick stayed loosely connected to Gift Rocket, which continued generating cash flow with one employee managing operations. When their banking partner shut down its fintech programs in 2014, Nick had to rebuild the banking integrations—a six- to nine-month project that re-engaged him with the business.

While doing a sequel query on Gift Rocket's user data, Nick discovered the real insight: businesses sending payouts repeatedly had *zero retention problem*. Market research firms, in particular, were using Gift Rocket to incentivize survey respondents. Unlike consumers, these firms needed to send gift cards as part of their core operations. Nick created "Gift Rocket Rewards," a B2B fork of the original codebase, and started outreach to market research firms on LinkedIn. Within two years, they'd closed multi-million-dollar deals with some customers now spending $9 million annually on the platform.

Couple rejoined as co-founder in 2020 when the team was 8-9 people. They've scaled to 55+ employees with plans to reach 75 by year-end, growing year-over-year with transaction volume in the hundreds of millions. Tremendous is now a fully founder-owned, profitable, eight-figure-revenue business serving 5,000+ customers across market research, customer incentives, referral programs, and employee payouts. The company operates in "hyper-growth" mode—doubling customer count and team size roughly annually—without raising venture capital after buying back their original investors' equity from Gift Rocket.