Newfoundland and Labrador may get a chance Thursday to defend its title at the Fierce Founders bootcamp at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, Ont.

Niki Pryor, the CEO of St. John’s startup Brownie Points, will find out in the afternoon whether she is one of eight entrepreneurs to compete for a total of $100,000 in development money at Fierce Founders, a mentoring program for startups with female CEOs. The company offers an online loyalty program for locally-owned coffee shops and boutiques. This year, it was the only Atlantic Canadian participant in the program, which comprises two week-long sessions.

Last year, when the program was known as the Women Entrepreneurs’ Bootcamp, the winner was Sarah Murphy of St. John’s-based Sentinel Alert. She took home the $35,000 first prize and has tapped the expertise at Communitech to aid with the growth of her company.

“We’ve got a tremendous amount of learning out of it,” said Pryor, when asked her impression of Fierce Founders. “We’ve got a great startup community in Newfoundland but we do live on an island. It’s really great sometimes to get off that island.”

Pryor recently joined the three-year-old company as CEO and has been focusing the company in terms of both the product and its market.

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The product previously featured a tablet near a boutique’s cash register that allowed the customer to swipe a loyalty card. But that is now being replaced with a mobile app that keeps all the details of the customer’s account. Beacons positioned in the establishment can detect when customers with the app enter and how long they stay. That means it can award points not only for purchases but for how long the customer stays. It also provides the business owner with data on the customers’ purchases and frequency and length of visits.

“Brownie Points is more than just a loyalty program — it allows businesses to have better control over the customer relationship,” Pryor said. She added that the shops that use it “want big data without the cost of big data.”

Meanwhile, Brownie Points is also refining its market by targeting not just small business but those that could be described as “boutiques” — those whose clients cherish a local business with a unique ambiance.

Brownie Points is now used by 26 outlets in Halifax and St. John’s, and 24,000 people have downloaded the app. In the coming months, Pryor hopes to deepen the penetration in Atlantic Canada and then move into other markets. The target is boutiques in cities of fewer than 1.2 million people, such as Ottawa or Guelph, Ont.

She’s also hoping to raise capital, though the team is still working out a target for the amount to be raised.

The participation in Fierce Founders is the last chapter in the company’s storied history. Over the past three years, Brownie Points has been led by four people and participated in two programs outside the region.

Matthew Stenback and Adam Puddicombe started the company in 2013. They took the company through the FounderFuel accelerator in Montreal in 2014, but eventually moved on to other ventures. They were succeeded by Dana Parsons, who is still involved as Brownie Points’ chief operating officer while working full time at the Genesis Centre at Memorial University.