Kick Cashback started with a simple frustration: cashback was meant to make shopping feel more rewarding, but the traditional model often meant waiting weeks or months to actually receive anything.

We built Kick to make cashback faster, clearer and more useful. Shoppers can discover offers from Australian and global retailers, earn cashback through their everyday purchases, and increasingly access rewards much sooner than with traditional cashback platforms.

What makes Kick genuinely different is the technology we are building around the transaction itself. Rather than treating cashback as something that happens long after a purchase, our goal is to bring it closer to checkout, including through our instant cashback technology and checkout integrations.

For customers, that means a simpler experience, strong cashback offers and less waiting. For retailers, Kick is designed to be a performance-driven acquisition channel that can reward customers at the moment it matters most: when they are deciding whether to buy.

Today, most of our new customers come through organic channels – search, deal communities, direct traffic, word of mouth and people discovering Kick while actively looking for better cashback or savings options. We have deliberately kept paid acquisition very limited while we prove the product and economics.

Where we want that to shift is toward much more scalable, embedded distribution: retailer partnerships, checkout integrations, strategic partners and customer referrals. The ideal future for Kick is not having to constantly pay to acquire each user, but becoming part of the shopping journey itself, so customers discover and use Kick at the point they are already intending to buy.

I’ve genuinely handed over a lot of the first-pass work to AI – particularly research, SEO analysis, technical audits, drafting and stress-testing ideas. It’s become almost like an extra operator in the business. Instead of spending hours staring at a blank page or manually working through a problem, I can get to a strong first version very quickly and then make the decisions myself.

The thing I tried to hand over and pulled back from was relationship-building. I experimented with using AI much more heavily for outreach and partnership communication, and it can make everything sound polished, but polished isn’t always better. People can feel when something has been over-engineered.

For important retailer and partner conversations, I’ve gone back to being much more hands-on. I might use AI to sharpen what I’m saying, but the actual judgement, tone and relationship need to come from me.

That has probably been my biggest lesson with AI: it’s brilliant at removing work, but I don’t want it removing the human parts of the business that actually matter.

Definitely. People seem to arrive much further down the research process than they used to. They’ve often already compared cashback rates, looked at competitors, read reviews or searched for a specific retailer before they ever interact with us.

AI is starting to change that journey as well. We’ve been actively making Kick easier for AI assistants and search engines to understand, because I think discovery is going to move increasingly from “Google this and open ten tabs” to “tell me the best option for this purchase.”

I wouldn’t claim ChatGPT is a major acquisition channel for us yet because I don’t have enough data to honestly say that. We do see traffic and discovery patterns that are harder to attribute cleanly, and AI referrals aren’t always obvious in analytics.

What I find more interesting is that customers increasingly arrive already understanding the category. The job is shifting from explaining what cashback is to proving why they should use Kick instead of another option.

I’d tell them to focus on three things: make your business genuinely useful, make it easy for both search engines and AI systems to understand what you do, and build distribution you actually own or have some control over.

That means having a technically strong website, clear structured information, useful content, strong partnerships, referral loops, and a product people have a reason to come back to. I’d also be testing how AI can reduce repetitive work across the business, but I wouldn’t hand over judgement, relationships or anything customer-facing without oversight.

I’d tell them to ignore most of the hype.

Don’t rebuild your entire business because someone says SEO is dead. Don’t publish hundreds of generic AI articles because you think volume equals visibility. Don’t obsess over every new AI tool, and don’t assume putting “AI” into your pitch suddenly makes the business better.

The companies that will win over the next 12 months probably won’t be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones using it intelligently while still building something customers actually want.

For us, that means continuing to make Kick easier to discover wherever people are shopping or asking for recommendations, while staying focused on the underlying thing that matters: helping someone get a better outcome from a purchase.