We’re Bonyad Nouri and Dennis Achtziger, and we’re building Treuly, the digital stamp card for small businesses. This isn’t a grand startup hero’s journey, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But we get asked a lot why two AI engineers of all people would build a stamp card app, so we wanted to sit down and write it out properly.
Two people who know the counter from the inside
Before we wrote a line of code, we both worked in hospitality and service. Not as a summer-job anecdote, but long enough to learn customer loyalty from behind the counter rather than from a slide deck. We know how a Saturday feels when the place is packed and someone still asks whether you do a stamp card. We know what it’s like when a regular walks in and you’ve already started their coffee before they’ve said a word. And we know how a paper card ends up in the other jacket, goes through the wash, or disappears into wallet chaos, taking every collected stamp with it.
That experience is why Treuly looks the way it does. We didn’t stand at a whiteboard guessing what a café might need. We remembered what would have annoyed us back then.
Why AI engineers are building a stamp card
We both studied mathematics and work as AI engineers today. From the outside that sounds like the opposite of “the little shop around the corner”: big systems, a lot of tech, not much counter. But that’s exactly what made it interesting to us.
Most customer-loyalty tools are built for chains: point tiers, VIP levels, and a level of complexity that a business with two people at the register never wants to carry. We wanted the opposite: something that respects the plain old stamp card, because everyone understands it without explanation, and only takes away its downsides. No lost cards. No extra device. For your guests, no app, no account, no email; they scan a QR code at the counter, tap “Add”, and the card sits in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.
What we bring from our engineering work mostly lives in the things you don’t see: that a scan doesn’t get lost even with no signal, that the pass updates itself after every stamp, that the data stays minimal. The math behind it isn’t the point. The point is that none of it is allowed to feel complicated at the counter.
Bootstrapped, and glad of it
Treuly is entirely self-funded. No investor, no venture capital, no growth targets handed down from outside. That was a deliberate choice, and we stand by it.
Bootstrapping means being slower and shouldering a lot yourself. But it also means full freedom to build the product exactly the way we think is right. We don’t have to add a feature because it sounds good in a sales pitch. We don’t have to collect data to feed some metric. When we say guests stay anonymous with the stamp card, that we don’t build profiles, and that we don’t sell anything, that’s not a marketing line; it’s simply how we want to work. On our own steam, and with heart.
We’re honestly proud of the result. Not of big numbers, those are still at the very beginning, but of the fact that the thing works at the counter and feels right. There’s more about who we are and how we think on our about page.
Where we are right now
Treuly is fresh in the App Store, and we’re right in the middle of our pilot phase with the first businesses here in Hamburg. That’s the honest state of things: not a finished product with millions of users, but an app we’re sharpening together with the first shops actually using it at the counter. That direct line to real businesses is worth more to us than any roadmap we could dream up alone at a desk.
It’s built in Germany, and the servers sit in the EU. That matters enough to us that we don’t leave it to chance.
Where we want to go
Today Treuly is the digital stamp card, and first of all, it should be really good at that. Still, we have a sense of where the journey could go.
Further down the line, we’d like to go beyond the plain stamp card: loyalty cards and points systems are models we’re thinking about, because some businesses reward differently than “one visit, one stamp”. And we’re having early conversations about how Treuly might one day connect to point-of-sale systems. This is explicitly an outlook, not a promise: we’re deliberately naming no names, no dates, and no features that don’t exist yet. We’re only saying where we want to go, so it’s clear there’s a longer thought behind Treuly.
If you’re reading this and feel like helping build something like it: we’re a small team, and we’d love to hear from people who take small businesses as seriously as we do. What that means is on our careers page.
Frequently asked questions
Who’s behind Treuly?
Two founders: Bonyad Nouri and Dennis Achtziger, both AI engineers with a background in mathematics, and both people who worked in hospitality and service themselves. Treuly is operated by Printproof UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Hamburg. More on the about page.
Why are two AI engineers building a stamp card app?
Because we know customer loyalty from behind the counter, from our own experience, and we noticed that most of the tools for it are made for big chains, not for the shop around the corner. We wanted to keep the simple stamp card and only take away its downsides: lost cards, extra devices, complicated steps.
Is there an investor behind Treuly?
No. Treuly is completely bootstrapped, entirely self-funded. That sometimes makes us slower, but it gives us the freedom to build the product exactly the way we think is right, and not to collect or sell any data just because it would pay off.
Can I use Treuly already?
Yes. The business app is in the App Store, and we’re in the middle of our pilot phase with the first businesses in Hamburg. If you want to be one of the first shops, you can start right away, and your first card is set up in about ten minutes.