❓ Problem

Coupons rest on one assumption: only some people find them. That’s how a brand offers a lower price to the shopper who hunted for it and keeps full price for everyone else. AI agents remove the hunting. When Patrick Collison mused on what agents mean for coupons, his view was that tools like coupons may get weaker once everyone has a personal agent. If an agent can find every live code in seconds, a “secret” discount is just the real price with extra steps.

This was already a slow leak before agents arrived. Every new promo code risks escaping through Honey, RetailMeNot and Capital One Shopping, where far more people use it than the brand intended. Merchants now pay to fight it. KeepCart blocks 125+ coupon extensions from auto-applying codes and alerts brands when a code leaks to coupon sites or ChatGPT. Brands are paying to hide their own discounts from their own customers.

Brands still want what discounts used to deliver: a reason to visit, a new customer, a bit of excitement. Local shops and cafés want it most, and they can’t win an online coupon war against agents. What can’t be scraped is a physical place. A code can be copied a million times. A walk to a corner café can’t.

✅ Solution

PerkDrop is a mobile app where brands drop rewards onto a real-world map, and you only unlock them by turning up.

• Brands place drops. A café drops 50 free flat whites within 200 yards of its door. A trainer shop hides 20% off codes across a neighbourhood. Each drop has a reward, an expiry and a set quantity, so scarcity is built in.
• Users go hunting. The map shows what’s nearby, with some drops visible and some hidden until you’re close. Reach the spot and the reward unlocks.
• Every claim is a single-use pass. The reward is tied to the user’s account and redeemed at the till via a QR scan or staff tap. No code to copy, nothing for an agent or extension to scrape.
• Verification does the heavy lifting. GPS checks, device signals and on-site confirmation (a QR at the counter, a staff scan) stop people claiming from the sofa.
• Brands get the data they never had from coupons: views, claims, walk-ins, redemptions and repeat visits by drop.

The wedge is deliberately small: one city, independent cafés and shops, simple drops. On top of that sit treasure hunts, multi-stop trails (“hit five indie shops on Saturday, unlock a bigger prize”), event activations, and eventually national brands paying for verified footfall at scale.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• TAM: location-based advertising, a $109.6 billion global market in 2025. PerkDrop sells a narrow, performance-priced slice of that.
• SAM: digital coupons and local promotions. The global digital coupon market was worth $10.6 billion in 2025, and an estimated 169.2 million Americans redeemed digital coupons that year.
• The local supply side is huge. BLS counted 627,086 US restaurant and bar locations in 2025, before you add coffee shops, boutiques, gyms and salons.
• SOM: a single US metro with about 2,000 paying venues is a realistic early beachhead.

Pricing benchmarks

• Niantic has already priced this. Pokémon Go sponsors pay under $0.50 per daily unique visit, and the game drove 500 million visitors to sponsored locations.