Douglas Drouillard builds software, which makes him an interesting person to consult about whether you should commission any. Bring him a loyalty program and a plan for a mobile app, and the conversation may take an inconvenient turn. He wants to know whether your customers need the app. The icon on the home screen will have to earn its little square.
His recommendation for a new or early loyalty program is usually to start on the web. Let people join with less fuss. Collect information about what they do. Work out which behavior matters to the business. Then decide whether an app offers enough value to justify asking customers to download it. This is advice from someone whose company can build the thing you are being advised to postpone.
Drouillard is the founder and CEO of Society, a platform built around digital collectibles and community loyalty, and co-founder and CEO of Shrine Development. Across those roles, a recurring question runs underneath the technical decisions: what will this actually do for the people using it?
The app can wait
He gives the mobile app a fair hearing. A good app can improve the experience and support push notifications. It can make sense when there are useful features that simpler alternatives cannot provide. But he also asks about the audience’s habits and the team’s ability to maintain what it launches. A download is the beginning of an obligation. Software has a way of remaining on the payroll after the launch party.
His suggested sequence puts learning ahead of commitment. On the web, a business can observe customers and identify the metric that best predicts their longer-term value. With the economics clearer, it can consider what incentive would make an app download worthwhile for both sides. Existing web technology may also support a later app, preserving some of the work already done.
“I recommend launching on the web first.”
Douglas Drouillard, on early loyalty programs
A return ticket to Detroit
The roots of that approach reach back before Society. Douglas and Shrine co-founder Malissa Drouillard were born and raised in Metro Detroit. Both graduated from the University of Michigan with computer science degrees. Software careers took them to Silicon Valley. Their account of returning home to start a company centers on dissatisfaction with software sold without enough attention to its eventual user.
Shrine was founded in 2017. The company’s founding story describes an ambition to keep the technical work connected to the business it was supposed to serve. Detroit was home, and it offered a community of entrepreneurs to work with. Shrine has named Plain Sight and Pocketnest among the local startups it helped. The move back gave their company a setting and a purpose.
Earlier colleagues supply a more specific glimpse of Douglas at work. At Moovweb, Naseem Makiya recalled him connecting user analytics to a Marketo outreach campaign. Makiya also described customers having trouble setting up SSL, the technology used to secure web connections. Drouillard built a system to automate the process. The anecdote is modest enough to be revealing: he noticed a repeated difficulty and worked on removing it.
Makiya described him as patient and communicative. Another colleague, Ajay Kapur, credited his judgment, hiring, leadership, and ownership. Those recollections put people alongside architecture in the picture of his earlier career. A system might need a better connection; a team might need someone who can explain what is happening. Both are part of getting useful work finished.
Who owns the relationship?
Society takes the customer relationship into a different technical setting. It offers brands, enterprises, and creators tools built around NFTs, or digital collectibles. Its advertised features include managing collections, setting loyalty tiers, distributing rewards, and running votes through Discord. Wallet linking establishes which collectibles a member owns, giving the platform a way to connect ownership with participation.
The proposition is that organizations should have more direct control over their communities and data. A member’s collectible can become a way to recognize a relationship and offer benefits. Society also describes integration with existing software, placing those interactions inside a broader business workflow. Its website identifies Drouillard as founder and CEO; Shrine lists Society among its products.
For Drouillard, the stated ambition is greater autonomy for businesses and consumers in their digital lives. That is a substantial aspiration to attach to a loyalty platform. The practical test remains familiar: members need reasons to participate, and the organization needs a relationship it can sustain. A reward tier has to contain something worth reaching.
Verify collectible ownership through a linked wallet.
Offer loyalty tiers, benefits, and distributions.
Invite community voting through Discord.
The plumbing gets a vote
His later writing at Shrine spends considerable time beneath the attractive surface of customer loyalty. In November 2024, Drouillard reported that more than fifty conversations with loyalty leaders had repeatedly brought him to data integration. Getting information from one system into another sounds tidy until the systems, their owners, and their assumptions begin to disagree.
He draws attention to three demands: reliable inputs, persistence, and security. Inaccurate information can spread mistakes through connected systems. Enterprise projects bring multiple stakeholders and competing priorities. Technical skill matters, but somebody also has to keep working when organizational boundaries and compatibility problems make the job slow. His phrase for the balance is “50% Skill, 50% Energy.”
Conversations with loyalty leaders informed Drouillard’s published discussion of data integration.
The number describes his research conversations, rather than a customer count. It helps explain the emphasis of the work: he is listening to the people responsible for programs after the initial excitement has passed. His discussion includes validating information, monitoring quality, and taking security seriously throughout the integration. These are continuing responsibilities, with very little launch-day glamour.
A spreadsheet at the party
Drouillard’s treatment of loyalty economics is similarly practical. In an article about modeling returns, he describes speaking with someone in the solar-panel industry about a referral program. A lower referral cost can look attractive beside a conventional sales expense. But the comparison also needs to account for management, attention, and alternative uses of the money. An appealing subtraction is only the start of the decision.
He points readers toward a spreadsheet for working through the economics. Finance and procurement need an argument they can assess. A program also competes for resources with projects that have nothing to do with loyalty. The model gives its advocates a way to explain why it deserves investment and to revisit the assumptions as they learn.
In another article, he examines the risk of a loyalty program being treated as a cost center. A successful program can lose support if leadership does not understand its contribution, particularly during executive changes. He recommends updating return models and keeping the core vision inside the company, even when outside specialists help deliver it. There has to be someone who remembers what the program is for.
He is also wary of borrowing another brand’s rewards scheme wholesale. Familiar names can make a proposal feel reassuring before anyone has examined whether it fits the customers. His discussion of timing is equally pointed: when earning a reward takes months, expecting a return almost immediately ignores the experience members are actually having. The calendar deserves as much attention as the points balance.
The work before the work
His assessment of delivery options includes a dry little story about consulting advice. A company, he recounts, spent millions with a large firm and received the recommendation to personalize its loyalty program using data. His response was withering. The anecdote makes his standard of usefulness fairly plain: advice should help a team decide what to do. A familiar recommendation can be expensive without becoming any more specific.
Those concerns shape his assessment of delivery options. He has written about building internally, hiring a large consultancy, using an established software platform, working with loyalty specialists, and commissioning an agency. Each route brings tradeoffs in control, resources, and coordination. His interest in specialized loyalty expertise is explicit. So is his concern that even a ready-made platform may fit a company badly.
Shrine’s discovery offering makes the preliminary work tangible: a prototype, an architecture plan, and an estimate of time and cost. Development is divided into phases so usable code can be tested earlier. The underlying promise is to clarify the project before asking a client to commit to the whole build. A drawing and a difficult conversation can be useful deliverables.
There is a practical limit to outsourcing in his account of loyalty. An outside team can bring dedicated expertise and help a program avoid getting lost in an internal development queue. The company still needs to own its purpose. That division of responsibility leaves work on both sides of the contract. It asks the specialist to understand the business, and the business to remain involved after choosing a specialist. Buying the platform does not buy permission to stop thinking about the customers.
By October 2025, the same concern with preparation appeared in his comments on AI coding tools. Discussing his own attempt with Lovable, Drouillard endorsed separating planning from execution and auditing the code. His warning concerned the technical debt that can arrive when an apparently easy build stops working. The tools had changed; the need to understand what had been built, and how it would hold together, was still there.
In August 2020, Drouillard joined Phil Bak for a podcast conversation covering startups, app development, technology, and digital distractions. The topic list offers another point of contact with his working concerns: the digital products people make, and the attention those products ask of them. In his loyalty writing, the customer’s willingness to do one more thing is treated as something a business has to earn.
That makes the proposed app a useful place to leave him. The software founder is willing to question the software purchase. Society asks how a community relationship might be owned and maintained; Shrine asks what should be built to serve it. Before either question reaches a developer’s keyboard, there is a customer with a phone and plenty of other things to do.