Try Your Best (TYB)

There is a familiar shape to the modern loyalty program. You spend a dollar, you get a point. You collect enough points, you get a discount on the next dollar. It is, when you look at it directly, a slightly circular arrangement: the reward for buying things is a small nudge to buy more things. It works, in the way that a coupon works. It has never been mistaken for a relationship.

Try Your Best - TYB, on its lowercase black tile - is a bet that the circle can be broken. The company, founded in 2021 by Ty Haney, argues that the thing brands actually want from customers is not just spending but participation: the review, the referral, the photo posted without being asked, the friend dragged into the group chat. That behavior has always been valuable and almost never rewarded, mostly because it was hard to measure. TYB's proposition is that if you can measure it, you can pay for it, and if you pay for it, you get more of it.

So TYB gives brands a community app. Fans complete challenges, leave reviews, refer friends and make content, and in exchange they earn collectibles, brand coins and access to exclusive drops. The coins behave a lot like loyalty points; the collectibles behave a lot like the small, slightly irrational objects people enjoy owning. The important distinction - and it is the whole business - is that a collectible is something you have, not just something you redeem. Ownership, it turns out, changes how people behave.

Haney's résumé is why this is worth taking seriously. She co-founded Outdoor Voices in 2013 and built it, before almost anyone was using the word, on community: recess-style group runs, a customer base that behaved like a fan club. Then, in 2020, amid board tensions and questions about her leadership, she was pushed out of the company she started. TYB is the second act, and it is essentially the same idea - people show up for each other, not just for the product - rebuilt as infrastructure that any brand can rent instead of having to invent from scratch.

There is a version of this story that is entirely about the blockchain, and it is the less interesting version. TYB's collectibles and brand coins live on Avalanche, which means the platform arrived during the web3 boom and was widely filed under "consumer crypto." A lot of things filed under consumer crypto in 2022 no longer exist. TYB does, with two million users and a client list of brands whose customers would riot at the phrase "connect your wallet." The reason is that the crypto is load-bearing but invisible: a Poppi fan earning coins for a review is not thinking about a distributed ledger, and TYB has gone to some trouble to make sure she never has to. The blockchain is the plumbing. Nobody buys a house for the plumbing.

The pitch to a brand is not spiritual, it's arithmetic. TYB reports that a customer who participates in the community buys about 40% more often and is worth roughly 28% more over their lifetime, with monthly engagement rates on brand programs cracking 40%. The company frames community as capable of driving something like 5-10% of a brand's revenue - not a rounding error, and enough to justify a line item.

The usual caveat applies: these are numbers the company reports about its own customers, and the people who join a brand's community were probably already its better customers. Some of the lift is selection, not causation. But that objection has a ceiling. Even if TYB only identifies the fans who were going to over-index anyway, identifying them - and giving a brand a direct, rewarded line to them - is itself the product a marketing team would otherwise pay agencies to approximate. A tool that reliably tells you who your two hundred most valuable evangelists are, and hands you a button to reward them, does not need to manufacture loyalty from nothing to be worth the money.

TYB raised roughly $10M to launch in 2022, then closed an $11M Series A in June 2025 co-led by Offline Ventures and Strobe Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and Unusual Ventures joining. Haney, who watched her first company slip away from her, has said she is now more precise about who she lets into a round and how much of the company she gives up. It is the kind of caution you learn exactly once.

The most interesting claim TYB makes is not about points or coins but about ownership. In every incumbent loyalty program, the loyalty belongs to the brand. Your Sephora points are Sephora's ledger entry; they mean nothing at Ulta and evaporate if you stop shopping. TYB's longer-term vision is that a shopper's loyalty profile could be portable - owned by the shopper, following her from brand to brand, an "affinity web" that describes what she actually cares about. That is either a modest data-portability feature or a genuine rearrangement of who holds power in the customer relationship, and it is hard to know which until it exists at scale. For now it is the ambition sitting underneath the challenges and the collectibles.

The go-to-market is quietly clever, too. TYB's first brand on the platform was Joggy, Haney's own plant-based energy company - a founder using her own product as the first customer, which is both a proof of concept and a hedge. From there the roster filled with beauty and beverage names whose fans were always going to post, review and evangelize; TYB just gave that free labor a place to land and a reason to keep coming. The bet is not that TYB creates obsession. It is that obsession already exists, unmeasured and unrewarded, and that the company that meters it first gets to keep it.

The risk is the obvious one for any platform sitting between brands and their customers: brands are wary of renting the relationship they consider their crown jewel. TYB's answer is to make itself the connective tissue rather than the destination, and to keep the crypto out of sight so the whole thing feels like software, not speculation. Whether that holds as it scales past its current roster is the open question. But for a second-time founder who learned the hard way what it costs to lose control of a company, building the thing that helps other brands keep control of their fans is a fitting kind of sequel.