Where Physical meets Digital - Smart Business Cards and How Mobilo Created its Hybrid Product

Joey Madej:
So, all you have to do is tap the card to somebody's phone, and that will actually transfer all of your contact information.

Artem Daniliants:
And then the server looks at my profile and sees what I want to happen next.

Joey Madej:
You can actually have your card behave in a different way.

Artem Daniliants:
If everybody has NFC smart business card, then you cannot use it anymore to stand out. What's next?

Hi guys. And welcome to another Daniliants Ventures podcast. Today. I have Joey Maday or Maday. You, you tell me how to pronounce it correctly.

Joey Madej:
You guys can call me whatever you want. Joey's fine. Maday or Madej.

Artem Daniliants:
Madej, Okay. Very good. Very good. So Joey's from Mobile Card. It's a smart business card. I use it personally myself. I actually have it right here. And this is the reason why I wanted to get Joey on the podcast. Cause I wanted to know more about the company. How did you guys get started? What did you guys use when you were starting out and getting your initial customers and so forth? So we can all learn from you and get to know your company better as well. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Joey Madej:
Yeah. Appreciate you reaching out and yeah, always it's a new market and a new technology. So the more eyes that we can bring the better, just because you know, what we're really trying to do is help people, companies save a lot of money, be sustainable. So the more eyes the better.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and obviously about your company. What do you guys do? What do you do at the company and a little bit about yourself?

Joey Madej:
Yeah, absolutely. So me personally, I've traditionally been from a sales background working for some larger companies like Motorola Group, a lot of startups in San Francisco and my previous venture before Mobile, I worked for a Montreal based company with an event planning platform, which is where I actually met my co-founder currently here at Mobile, which is Peter. He was actually my, my old boss at my old company.

Artem Daniliants:
Wow.

Joey Madej:
And then when he decided of the idea of Mobile, which was originally came about from being at a conference, he was in Detroit, Michigan had just finished a conference. He had a hundred business cards on him and he always states that, you know, at the end of a conference, all you wanna do is have a beer at the bar. Nobody really wants to do data entry or data management. And so he thought that there had to be a, a better way to, you know, just follow up with leads quicker. And that's when he actually poached me about doing this venture with him. This at the time was basically a week and a half into when COVID first hit here in the states. So there was a, you know, a question of are people ever gonna network ever again? And so it was obviously a weird time because, you know, if you put yourself back in that mindset, it was, you know, how long is this gonna last?

So nobody really knew at that time, but, and initially when he reached out, I was a little on the fence because you know, really when I think about it initially from a, maybe a consumer perspective, you think just a business card. And I personally just didn't think it was that sexy and ultimately decided that there would be a lot more benefits to, you know, doing our own company together. You know, it was a little bit of a hesitation to willingly quit my job when everybody was losing their jobs at that time. But then we ultimately decided that the vision of the company was something that, you know, people weren't really trying to, to focus on because really the vision of our company was it is to bridge the gap between say LinkedIn and Salesforce. So people come to us for a business card, but quickly they realize that we're offering more of a business tool.

And so the vision is where LinkedIn, you don't really have a lot of follow up activities with Salesforce or a CRM. You don't really use it in a social situation. So that is the vision of our company. What we're really trying to accomplish is creating a digital Rolodex, a contact management opportunity or application that really comes right from a business card. And so we're really offering like a marketing solution at the end of the day, something that's integrated with a lot of different solutions. And so initially when we started this company, you know, there, nobody was taking meetings, you know, the world was sort of on fire. And so we actually took those that time where we knew that regardless of a vertical people were not having meetings, they were at home. And we just took a few weeks to just do some customer research, just determine, you know, what is the business card process for paper within your company?

Who's purchasing it, who is giving the approval, would something like this actually work for you, would you be interested in it? And so that was actually a very influential time for us to determine like who we really wanted to go after. Who were the, the best companies or verticals. It's something we're still trying to define as well. I think that's one of the really strong aspects of this market is it's not really tied to a specific industry. You know, we work with real estate agents. We work with software companies, professional sports teams, international banks, roofing companies, construction. It, it really is endless. So that's really healthy for us to be in a market like that because so many people are interested in a product like this because ultimately the alternative, which is paper, it's a little archaic, it's expensive as well. So that's why we're really trying to help companies save money too.

Artem Daniliants:
Good. Good. Good. So tell me what is mobile card anyway, right? Yeah. So like smart business card. Does it mean it has a chip or yeah. You know, do I have to upgrade firmware or what, how does that work? Like, because I think what is really cool about you guys is that you have a physical marketing product kind of like a hybrid. There is, you know, the physical aspect, the cart itself, right. That it can be, I think plastic, metal and wood, but there is also a digital aspect to it. So there is like a landing page builder. There is a lead form. Yeah. There is so much more that you can attach to it. And that's what initially drew me to the product is that I thought like, Hey, cool. I can change the function of the smart business card based on a meeting I'm going to, or based on an event or whatever that is. And I think, I thought that was cool. Cause I kind of thought like, okay, so this is basically the last business card I'll I'll ever need to buy. Right. So tell me a little bit about the product and how did you come up with the idea?

Joey Madej:
Yeah. So the product is an NFC smart business card. You can go back and forth in the market between digital business card, smart business card. We lean in with smart business card. So it's a physical product. It varies, as you mentioned, between plastic wood metal, you can mix and match materials, but we've embedded an NFC chip inside of the card. So all you have to do is tap the card to somebody's phone and that will actually transfer all of your contact information. So as you mentioned and alluded to really, it is the last business card that you would need. As you can see here with a specific design like this and as a name on it has a logo, but there's no phone number. There's no email, there's no fax. So the benefit is if you have to change your information, you don't need to purchase a new business card anymore.

Cuz that's actually where a lot of companies are spending a lot of money. Every three, six or 12 months, somebody gets promoted, somebody gets married and they change your name. And then they have to purchase all these cards again that they probably don't use and they waste. And it sits in their drawer. As you mentioned though, we do really like our solution, cuz it's flexible. It's both online and offline. So we have a mobile app. Your QR codes always live within the app so you can access it at any time. So even if you forget your card at home, it's okay. Recently we actually launched a widget on your home screen that has a QR code. So both online and an offline product, we have some clients that actually don't opt in for anything physical. They only use the digital app, but we really like the physical product because one thing that we wanna do, and one reason we created this company was also to bring the magic back to the business card.

A lot of companies over the last 15 to 20 years have sort of actually gone away from wanting a business card cuz they think we live in a digital world. Now I can find you on LinkedIn, those sorts of things, which is not wrong. But being able to now offer you a digital product for the digital world, really compensates the preferred method of how you actually should step into the new way or the new generation of networking. So something that's always at your fingertip, something that's efficient because you know, 88% of business cards get tossed in the trash within a week anyways. So having something that is eco-friendly really goes a long way because a lot of people want to look like they are on the cutting edge of technology that they are sustainably driven. That's obviously a, a, a really big motion or you know, movement right now.

So being able to do those little things to, you know, contribute definitely goes a long way, going into the product itself and where it initiated the idea Peter. So he we're sort of a, a thunder and lightning combination because as I mentioned, I pride, predominantly handle the sales. He's more on the technical side of everything. So he comes from a 3d printing background. So he's very familiar with printing and production and the supply chain of how all of this works. And he had been playing around with NFC a little bit, you know, N NFC isn't a new technology. People are actually get a little bit taken back by that. Cuz if you recall, I think it was back in 2012, 2011, they actually had commercials with two Android phones where they would bump each other and share contact information. That's NFC. So NFC specifically, isn't new per se, but it's becoming more and more mandatory back in 2018.

Apple actually decided that they weren't gonna make phones anymore. That don't have NFC out of the box. It's becoming more and more of a mandatory technology requirement for smart devices, which definitely, you know, caters to our use case. So we're always very eyes to the screen when it comes to any new apple updates, because you know, we're sort of playing in between apple and Android and really trying to offer a product that caters to both. So our cards are compatible with an Android device and an apple device. And so that's what we're really wanna make sure that no matter who you meet, you could always transfer your information.

Artem Daniliants:
I actually, when I ordered my card, first thing that I did is I did a little bit of snooping around. I wanted to know how it works. So tell me if I'm wrong. So the way that it works is you touch a phone with a card and then NFC, you know, reader reads the chip and actually what it does, it just reads the URL just does that. And then it goes to your server and then the server looks at my profile and sees what I want to happen next. So if I want to redirect to my website, I can do that. It just redirects from that URL to my website. If I want to display a form, you have a lead form. If I want to display a form to gather contact information, for example, at an event or something like maybe I could have a form and that people fill out and then I send them samples or something like that. Right. I could have a form or I could just, or you, I think open a, a VCV file and that's like the contact file. And then that gets pop up, popped up. And then we basically be able to add all the information with one click or I think there was another option as well. Oh yeah. And then there was the landing page that contains all the social media links. If I remember correctly, that's pretty much all of it, at least for now.

Joey Madej:
Yeah. So in my opinion, the coolest thing about our product or solution is that based on the situation that you're in, you can actually have your card behave in a different way. And so that's such an advantage because every meeting has a different objective, whether you're meeting new clients, existing clients, you know, you need to, to, to have it manipulated differently. So to summarize what you said and to con to give you some confirmation as well, just to make sure we're aligned, you can use the card as a normal business card. I tap my card to your phone. It transfers all my information. And as you just mentioned, that's exactly right. It points to our server, populates your profile and shares that information. There's another option where you can actually tie in a specific direct URL. The advantage there is perhaps I'm going to a meeting with clients that I've known for years.

They already know my name. They already have my email. I don't need to share my business card, but I do wanna share something quick, relevant contact list. Maybe it's a presentation I'm about to give. Maybe it's a Google review, a PDF, anything in a URL format would work. It's the same idea of when you go to a restaurant and you scan a QR code and take you to a menu. It's the exact same idea. It's not the most used function within our platform, but in a lot of ways, it's actually the most powerful cuz you could really point anywhere you want. There's a lot of cool, interesting use cases that these companies can now, or these users can now develop in terms of like something that actually is even like a leave behind like a promotional item, cuz you could purchase a hundred cards. You could give those cards out.

And the cool thing is if you gave your card to me, you know, this is now something physical, tangible, sort of like a marketing collateral that I can now put on my desk, my fridge, my in my office. And it's also a little bit of a differentiating factor now because rather than you send an email that gets lost with 10 other 50 other emails in your inbox, now there's actually something in your house that you, you can look at. And at any time you can tap that to your phone and see updated information that you, that this person you know, wants to send you. So it, in this way, it's also sort of a living, breathing, physical marketing component, which can be really used in a lot of interesting ways. So that's another option in terms of how you could actually use the card or how it can function.

And then another function, which is arguably also our most powerful function and that's our lead generation feature. And so lead generation is designed to flip the script and really stay in control of a conversation. You know, historically if you go out to a conference or an event, you give out your paper card, you cross your fingers, you hope they reach back out to you. And so with lead generation, the idea is to actually capture information. So any scenario where it's more valuable to absorb a business card rather than to give it out, you can usually lead generation. So if I met you, I could tap my card to your phone. And then rather than my information immediately pop up a form will generate on your device. And so the prospect, which if we were to meet and is you in this scenario, you're gonna actually enter your information on your own smartphone.

And the reason why that's actually key to note is based on auto fill, because you're doing this on your own phone, this actually should already auto populate. You submit your information. Usually that takes just two or three seconds. And then once that form is submitted, the first thing that's gonna happen is an SMS exchange will take place to both parties. So I get your information and you get mine. So you can think of lead generation as really the new way for two business cards to be transferred digitally. So those scenarios where this is very beneficial are exactly a conference, a tr a networking event, a trade show, any scenario where you're meeting a lot of people at once and you also want to follow up with them because the idea is not only is this SMS exchange going to take place, but also naturally since this data was submitted, it's obviously captured. And so then from there you can have a lead book or a, a, a list of all of your leads within our application that you can follow up with. You can make set a status, a follow up, add them as a favorite export. These leads put them into some sort of drip campaign. The whole idea is just to ensure that you can follow up with your leads faster. So we connect to over 4,000 different applications. So like, if you want, you can pipe your data into Salesforce, HubSpot, Google sheets, MailChimp, Microsoft

Artem Daniliants:
Via Zapier or something

Joey Madej:
Through, correct? Yeah, yeah. But for companies or users that don't have a CRM, the benefit of using our platform is we will actually act as a mini personal CRM for you so that you have all of your context in, you know, a, a, a managed area.

Artem Daniliants:
Cool. Very cool. Very cool. I see that you actually handle sales. It, it, it feels like it, you know, you're very good at persuading people, but you don't have to sell to me anymore. I already have your product, but you're doing a very good job. I think it's very, very interesting because from my perspective, it's like, what got me really interested in the product is that it's a hybrid product. It's kind of like the PHY the, the, the card is just an avatar for the service, basically, in a sense. And I mean, there are many, many, many, many NFC powered like business cards, and it's like, they compete on price and on design, mostly as I've seen at least, but I've seen very few offers where you actually have a digital service attached to it. I think now your competitors are starting to do that as well. Cuz maybe they've seen what you're doing and some other companies are doing and they're starting to kind of playing catch up a bit. But tell me a bit, how did you finance your company? How did you get started? So you had an expertise, you started the company. Did you just use your own money? Did you use VC? How did that work?

Joey Madej:
So we raised money. We wouldn't at this point be able to disclose how much,

Artem Daniliants:
Of course, of course, of course.

Joey Madej:
But we try to definitely just focus though on building a sustainable pipeline in terms of finances, we believe that's the best way to go. You know, we want to ensure that this is a well, you know, breathing machine, but yeah, there was a mix of different investors, but yeah, that's sort of standard in order to, to prove growth, you know, it's the classic thing of, you know, you gotta spend money to, to make money. So yeah, you know, we went through a period where we, you know, really tried to build a, a customer base, you know, the, the business card absolutely, as you just mentioned is sort of the MVP, you know, getting all these users in and allowing them to use our platform in different ways. And then once we were able to, you know, improve a little growth, you know, we went through a few months of, you know, fundraising and, you know, the, the most important thing when it comes to fundraising is, you know, finding people that believe in the product because we, as, you know, founders we're, we don't want to have the mindset that we know how everything works.

You know, if you, if you have that mindset, you'll start to get a little complacent. And so when we're looking for people to, you know, invest in mobile, we're looking for people that, you know, can give us advice to, you know, teach us the, the strengths, the weaknesses of other companies, where other companies have, you know, sort of made the wrong decision so that we can ensure that we make the right decisions. It's always an uphill battle and we'll continue moving forward to, you know, ensure that our pipeline, in terms of like how long we have as a, a roadmap is always situated. You know, the, the exciting part is up until now, our cards have been used 2 million times across 199 countries. And I think if you were to ask Siri, how many countries in the world there are, I think there's only 196.

So a few of them are territories that we consider. So it's really exciting to see our product being used in so many different countries. I think that's the one thing that when I look back on it, where I look at it today and I see the map of where our cards being used, that really strikes me because, you know, we, we did just start this just a couple people. Now we're almost around 50 users or employees within the company and that's scattered across the globe, but primarily our offices are here in the states, in New York city. We also have an office in the Netherlands. So we do production shipping from the Netherland or Europe, from the Netherlands. And then we also do production and have people within the Australian and Oceana region as well. So that's always good, especially for customer support because based on those time zones, there's at least somebody up at all the times of the day and yeah, up until now, you know, we're working with over 25,000 organizations, 50,000 customers.

And the exciting part is every single one of those customers is an early adopter. You know, I think one of the benefits of us talking today on this podcast is really to bring awareness to the market. You know, you mentioned competitors, we don't necessarily always view competitors as a bad thing because it really brings us a lot of customers as well. People see some ad for a competitor, then they realize that maybe that competitor doesn't really fit what their use case is. And then they actually search mobile or they find us it's healthy. You know, anything time you can bring eyes to the market, especially something new like this, it's only helpful. And yeah, we're, as I noted though, like with between all those customers, you know, everybody's an early adopter. If you know, you go to a conference right now, there's a hundred people.

Joey Madej:
You're probably one of the only few people there that actually have a smart business card. And that's powerful because we've actually done a lot of customer research. And the number one reason why people purchase a digital business card is to stand out. And to be honest, when I got that feedback, I was a little taken back because I think there's so many cool reasons why you would migrate to something like this. Environmental reasons, economical reasons, analytics, efficiency, lead generation. But honestly though, when you really think about it for a little bit further, you know, that is actually the reason why anybody buys a, a paper business card it's to stand out, to be remembered, to create a lasting impression. And so one of the reasons why I think we've been very fortunate to have a lot of success so far is that we stay true to the value of what a business card should do for you, which is create a lasting impression or this wow moment.

And that really is with the NFC tab. You know, people are sort of dumbfounded their, their jaws, you know, hit the floor and they're like, wow, that's so cool people. Actually, our customers sometimes tell us that they go to a conference and their prospects are actually more interested in the mobile card than whatever the heck they're selling, which is always funny to hear. So yeah, that's what we wanna do is we want to create this wow moment, make you different from the rest. Because I mentioned earlier, when we were talking that, you know, we wanna bring the magic back to the business card and there's a lot of co cultures still, where if you go and hand a business card, they're still giving it to you with two hands. It's very important. My co-founder Peter always mentions that, you know, years ago, when he would get a stack of business cards on his desk on his first day, you know, that was a powerful moment.

It was confirmation of your status within a company. This is my title. This is what I'm doing. These are my responsibilities and the generation that's coming up. Doesn't experience that. I think there's a lot of people that don't really, or haven't had business cards or they haven't had the need due to a lot of different reasons. And so that's one thing that we want and that's one of our initiatives is we wanna bring that cool factor, that wow. Factor back to the business card. Cause that will only, you know, make people feel a little bit better about their brand and their title.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Completely agree. Only thing that comes to mind though, is that when the novelty kind affect, wears off, what happens then? I mean, if everybody has NFC smart business card, then you cannot use it anymore to stand out. What's next? I mean, of course, you know, I, I mean, you will be a unicorn company if, if you manage to sell to everybody or NFC smart business card, but still, I mean, novelty does wear off, right?

Joey Madej:
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. But I wouldn't say like, even like, as I mentioned, the business card is our MVP. So if we get everybody, if we acquire a large market share of people that are interested in that novelty, that's great. But then, you know, as a, as a company, what we need to do is we need to prove that we're building new features that are gonna accommodate their use cases. So, you know, it's a standard model that a lot of companies use, especially like, you know, similar to like slack, where they get you in on a free service, get you testing out the product and then, you know, really upsell you on the features. And so, you know, that's something that we want to, that we need to prove is, is there value in this product? Can we show you that value? Because you know, most of our products are a subscription.

So it is our responsibility for the first 12 months to really show them that, you know, you can use this in a lot of different ways, but we're definitely building new things really on a, on a consistent basis every day to ensure that, you know, the next wave of customers are gonna have a lot of other cool things to, to look at, to work on, to utilize. That's another exciting part about what we're doing is there, isn't a single aspect of our company or our solution that's finished. So we're, we're constantly working on new developments so that, you know, we can really prove that value as well.

Artem Daniliants:
Cool, cool. So basically I think your cards are more or less inexpensive and that's your kind of way to get customer hooked on the experience. And then real real monetization comes from add-on services. And I think later down the line, that's where you will focus your energy probably, right? I mean the cards, maybe there will be some improvements, new material, better finishing, obviously economy of scale. Maybe things will get even cheaper and so forth, but I think you will focus on the add-on services, right? Cause that's very hard to copy compared to the physical product.

Joey Madej:
Exactly. So we will always, and we are currently in the development of new physical upgrades, especially to our wood and our metal cards, but yes, the, the bread and the butter, the meat and the potatoes is in the software. That's really what companies and people are investing in is the, the back end. And so that's definitely something that we're aware of. One of the reasons why we also launched that widget on your home screen, which is super unique. You know, we, we've always though wanted to offer something that's both physical and digital because you know, the, a business card exchange should be simple. And so, you know, there are a lot of competitors in the market that are digital only, we don't necessarily want to just off, we will offer you digital only if that's what you prefer. That's okay. You're, you're the boss, but you know, if I show you my phone right now, I have all these notifications here.

Like if I had to take out my phone every time to exchange information, it sort of disrupts the whole process of what a business card exchange should be. And so that's why having something physical quickly you could tap in. That's it? I think that there's there. You can't really, even though it is a novelty, I think that that's something that regardless of it's a novelty, if it becomes less of a novelty, it's be going to be the norm in terms of efficiency, because, you know, ultimately at a very, very, very baseline level, I mean, mean who really likes carrying around stacks of business cards, you know, of course that's that alone, you know, can, can drive people mad. There cannot be a understatement in terms of doing something efficiently. And, you know, that's the goal of technology, regardless of what the product is, you know, it should make your life easier. It's not always the case, but you know, it should.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, for sure. For sure. The only problem that I have is that you never know where the NFC reader is on the, on the device. Sure. So sometimes, you know, it requires a little bit of fiddling, just a few seconds just to see where it scans, but otherwise it's a pretty frictionless process

Joey Madej:
That's completely accurate. You know, it takes a second to understand the ins and outs and you need to be, become an expert, just like everything practice makes. Perfect. Yeah, of course. You know, if it comes to an apple phone, the sweet, spot's always gonna be on the back of the top. Think about it. If you use apple pay, you're always tapping this section to the, the POS system. And so it's the same thing. That's the trigger point with an Android device. It is in a different location. It's still on the back, but it would be in the middle. And so yeah, it takes a second for people to, to, to understand that.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. I, I became an expert after a few taps started to right away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I started to realize like, oh, it's an Android. Okay. Middle, oh, it's an iPhone. Okay. It stores that's up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it takes a few taps before you kind of get the hang of it. And I think that's pretty cool. By the way. How did you, when you had an idea, you got some funding, you got your first cards, your first batches, how did you get your first customers? Cause many times we have an idea. We get maybe some seed funding, we create a prototype and now it's time to sell it's time to get our first customers. So how did you, how did you find your first customers?

Joey Madej:
So when it comes to acquiring customers, I mentioned earlier on the podcast, you know, it, you need to spend money to make money. And so when it comes to our marketing team, our marketing stack, you know, that's really the driver there. So, you know, it's a mix of both old and new strategies, you know, we're using traditional tools, but we're also exploring, you know, new and upcoming tech in general though. Like our strategy though is, you know, our traditional B2B SAS product and we market it that way. And you know, the, the benefit is we actually do also have a very simple and low level of point of entry. Like you can buy a card for $7 once, no strings attached, no subscription. And it sort of just brews its worth immediately. And so that is really the benefit of, or one of the benefits here of our customer bases.

Our customers are actually our advocates, you know, they're using a product that they're showing off all the time. And so it's sort of this snowball effect of, you know, if we sell a card to one person, they meet 30 people, then maybe five of those become customers or engaged or curious or want demonstration. So, you know, it took a while for that to, to accumulate. You know, we're definitely trying to ensure that from a SEO perspective, that when people search for a smart business card, a digital business card, whatever the keywords are that, you know, we have pretty strong ranking so that people can come to our website, request a demo because that's one thing about a solution like this is because it's new people are always gonna have questions. So we really pride ourselves in being the most approachable company because we know that people need their hands held a little bit.

They need understand, you know, what it is, you know, seeing is also believing. So being able to show somebody visually how it works on a demo can really go a long way. And so, you know, in terms of like, you know, acquiring a customer base, you know, is really just trying to offer the best customer service because you know, somebody that, you know, some average dove, if they want to switch to a digital solution, there's a lot of companies that they could probably invest in and, and, and utilize for their provider. But we really want to have a human element. You know, somebody that you can talk to, somebody that will listen to your concerns and your, he, your hesitations, and also just point you in the right direction. You know, people don't buy for my reasons they don't buy for your reasons they buy for their own reasons.

Yeah. And so what we wanna do is we wanna ensure that people are making the best educated decision for them. We like to consider ourselves the market expert because somebody, you know, could go to another vendor and they could be completely satisfied. It's not our, our, our specific right to say like, Hey, you have to go with mobile, but people wanna be educated and we want to educate them. And I think that approach definitely goes a long way because you know, a lot of our customers, even today, they come from referrals say, Hey, like I love this product, Joey or his team. We're really nice to work with, like, take a look at them. And you know, that goes, you know, you can't actually underestimate the value there because that's the same thing, regardless of what you're doing. Even if you're, you know, looking for a date, you know, if somebody says, Hey, like this person, I know them, they can, they can vouch for them. Yeah. And make sure that they're not, you know, some lunatic, you know, that, that means something they're, it's sort of that two degrees of, of separation. So we really, really want to offer a great experience so that, you know, ultimately outside of our, our SEO ranking can, can play pay dividends.

Artem Daniliants:
If I decipher it correctly, basically you use paid advertising to get your initial customers with focus on SEO, because you knew that that's gonna be long term, like long, long term, like a very, very good and, and very valuable channel for you. But you do realize you also in a demand creation phase. So people necessarily, they don't necessarily search for smart business cars because ma many people just don't know. Correct. So you have to basically use maybe paid advertising and, you know, kind of generate the demand in a sense, but because your users are advocates like me, for example, I like the product, like honestly like the product and told about it to my friend who is a VC. And he thought like, oh my God, I'm gonna order the wooden one. Cuz that's the coolest one. And then I told another one and then I told a customer and so forth.

So basically, and obviously didn't get any kind of like, didn't get paid for it or anything. I just thought it's cool. Right. People want to be known as the person who shares cool ideas. Right. So for me that was the value. Also. I didn't get to use it as much the card, but being able to help others and create value for them as well was really cool for me. But I think there is an opportunity, right? Like you have to somehow empower people in a sense so that they can maybe benefit or there should be some reinforcement, you should reinforce that behavior. Right. I mean, now they do it on like on their own. They just tell their friends and so forth. But maybe you could create some sort of like wild engine or something that encourages people to share and to help maybe like a discount code. So Hey, you know, because I'm a user, you can get it like a bit cheaper or you can get like the first month of edit services for free or something like that. I think that'd be really cool.

Joey Madej:
Definitely our target market is, you know, enterprise companies.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay.

Joey Madej:
But naturally based on the product, there's always gonna be the B to C segment. And it's something that we've catered to since day one over the last, I would say 12, 10 months, our product team has been focused on creating a feature set that does support large scalable teams moving forward within the next six months. It is going to start to even out. And we're also gonna cater more to the individuals as well. And one thing that we will do is create a, a unique affiliate link within your account. So if you do want to share this, then you can and get, you know, also some sort of reward for that. You know, people will actually email us pretty much every other day. Like what's your affiliate program? Can I get involved? People wanna sell this and we want to enable them, like you said, we wanna empower them.

Joey Madej:
We just also from a, a UI perspective, from a application perspective, really wanna make sure that everything is really ironed out to a T before we, you know, go through that development. We actually just last week launched our new app, our new UI it's been something that we've been working on for over a year on. And so our heads are just been down, just focusing on that. And now that this new launch has been deployed, it really gives us now a new base to sit on to now develop other opportunities. Cuz we didn't really want to develop a, an affiliate link in an old app that would sort of just, you know, be a little bit difficult. And one of the, the benefits of wanting to work with mobile, as I mentioned from the human perspective is we're very interested in our customer's ideas. It's as I mentioned before, like we can't feel like we know everything.

Joey Madej:
There's some of our customers that are out in the field naturally more than us. And so we accept that feedback. Our mindset is if one customer is gonna tell us, Hey, this would be really cool to build maybe a hundred will at, at some point, that is really the exciting part of a technology like this is even though it's so new people have a lot of ideas. There's so many ways that you could use this. It's very flexible. You know, a sales team could use this differently than the marketing team and the marketing team could use this differently than what HR does. Yeah. There's a lot of interesting things, but I agree. It's always been something that I've personally within our company been focused on is how do we set our users up for success? How do we create a mobile academy of documentation, collateral, best practices, cuz people want to know how is the best way to use this. And because there's so many different ways, sometimes people can be a little intimidated. And so one of the benefits is, you know, we have a, our, our biggest team here at mobi is actually our support team so that we cater towards people and their needs and, you know, fix any potential issues that they're facing. So yeah, we're, we're always there every step of the way as well.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. That's very, very cool. So if you think about it, what, what is your like in terms of marketing, I'm always interested. Like what tools do you use yourself? Of course you use probably something like, you know, CRM system, you know, of course of your own. You probably have a CRM system. If you focus on enterprise customers, I'm sure you have that, you know, in order you, of course use PPC paid advertising, that's for sure. But that's very, very normal, nothing special there, is there anything in your stack that is interesting in terms of, is, is there something unique in your marketing stack?

Joey Madej:
The thing is the most interesting things from our, our stack would probably be our just internal and systems, which naturally are, are things that we NA can't, you know, disclose. So I apologize for that, but yeah, we, we have a CRM we've used a couple, we started with pipe drive if you're familiar. Yeah, of course. A very basic, but also intuitive platform. We current U use fresh desk and fresh works for a lot of different sales and support related management. But yeah. And then I think just a few basic players when it comes to from marketing, what we're doing also now is, is really trying to build out our marketing department as well, so that they can be a, a, a strength for us because you know, that naturally with any sort of startup bandwidth is always a, a bottleneck. Of course, you know, what we've really tried to do over the last few years is prioritize like, okay, like what can we do today? What is in line for tomorrow? And what do we need to push 30 days from now? And you know, it actually, when bandwidth is an issue, like you do need to use a lot of different applications in order to be efficient. I don't think we, from a sales perspective we'd really be anywhere without a CRM. There's too many people to talk to and we need a lot of reminders that these people need following up with.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I think you make the most of your money from enterprise customers, but if you think about like ambassadors and advocates, I think it's individuals who fell in love with the service and then they start telling others about it. At least that's how I kind of feel because your pricing is kind of maybe geared towards enterprises, not ordering one, but ordering maybe a hundred cards, so maybe 200 or 500 and so forth. And I think the focus in terms of your tools is like on managing teams, right? You will have more and more tools where you can manage many different cards at the same time or do some bulk management and so forth. So I think that's pretty cool. So as we are now starting to wrap up what is your vision for the next six months? So what, like, what do you wanna achieve in the next six months? So what's next for Molo?

Joey Madej:
Our objectives for the rest of like this year is to specifically build the best platform for teams and individuals. If we can create something that is as user friendly as people want it, that just, you know, is gonna go such a long way because you know, one of the reasons we created the new app and worked on it for, you know, over a year is that we got, you know, some people that didn't really like the old UI, they thought it was a little outdated

Artem Daniliants:
Old school.

Joey Madej:
Yeah. You know, our, our philosophy is always let's build it so that it's functional. We'll worry about making it prettier later.

Artem Daniliants:
I agree completely.

Joey Madej:
So the mindset now is to create just the best, best option. You know, there's a lot of competition out there there, and we wanna make sure that, you know, we cater towards the most amount of use cases. So what I would like to see us accomplished in the next six months is definitely on the product side. You know, we have a lot of cool features coming out that can both contribute to an individual, to a team. But yeah, I mean, we haven't talked about it too much on, on today's recording, but typically you, you, you mentioned that, you know, these individuals, these entrepreneurs, these single business owners, you know, they want to purchase a card, they want something that's easy for them. And sometimes there's a lot of overlap. Sometimes we have these entrepreneurs that have their own, you know, entity, but then they're a part of another organization.

And then they roll that up to a team. And just in terms of that team perspective, you know, the benefit of our solution is if you do wanna roll this out to 50 users or a hundred users or 500 users, usually you want control over that. You know, you don't want people to put their personal Facebook and Instagrams into the card. So uniformity is really important, making sure that the branding is exactly the same for everybody. So the ability to restrict fields lock information, okay, really, really is powerful. You know, a company wouldn't really wanna roll this out to a thousand people if they don't really, they can't manage it. And so that's something that is a vision of ours that we want to continue to enforce. How do we make this simple for onboarding for offboarding? You know, we have a, a really cool integration that's upcoming as well.

You know, that's what we wanna do is we want to create a system that can connect other places. You know, cuz even if it's an entrepreneur, even if it's head of HR at a 5,000 person company, really people actually don't want to manage another system. They're already working with so many different applications on a daily basis. So sometimes people are less interested in actually developing a routine with another application. You know, everybody here has 50,000 apps on their phone. So I would like to have the objective of the last next six months actually be creating an application that you want to go to on a daily basis. Like we always have considered our app, a companion app because you could use your card 500 times before ever going into the app. You're, it's not mandatory that you need the app. It's just a nice to have to change modes, see your analytics, update your information. But if we can create something that has so much value that you want to log in every day, then I think that regardless if you are your own company or you are part of company, that's really what will I think make us different from the rest.

Artem Daniliants:
Cool. Very cool. I think one of the reasons why I would want to log into the app is to see if anybody clicked on my links, cuz you provide a little bit of analytics, like functionality, where you can see when somebody actually clicked on your links. If you have social media profiles and they clicked on those, you can see from where did the cl click originated from? Like, is it like Finland or us or something, what time and so forth. So after a meeting you could, for example, find out if they, if they were interested and actually started researching, which could be like a pink for you to get in touch with them as like, Hey guys, you know, have you thought about our proposal? That kind of stuff. I think that's one of the reasons why I would want to log in in terms of the application. Absolutely. And because of the analytics, of course.

Joey Madej:
Yeah. I mean all of that data with paper cards, it's just been in a black box, nobody's been able to analyze it. Nobody's been able to measure it. Yeah. So the goal from an analytical perspective is bring these data points online so that you can actually make some sort of impactful decision or insight, you know, build engagement, what channels are performing better? Where's the traffic heading? Should I be posting more content somewhere else? You know, that's something that, you know, really is, it can be powerful for certain users.

Artem Daniliants:
I was thinking, I dunno if you supported this feature, but I thought it'd be really cool if you could actually tag in some way and kind of like, so if I go to a meeting with a very important potential prospect, I could actually somehow tag that the next tab will come from a specific client and that would create unique links. So when he specifically, he then clicks on my social media links or, you know, clicks on other links, I would receive information saying that this specific prospect he clicked on the links. I think that would be so cool.

Joey Madej:
Yeah. It's, it's a very thin line of what can be happen from privacy and GDPR. Yeah. But with lead generation, naturally the prospect is willingly entering and giving their information. Yeah. So that usually mitigates a lot of that privacy concern. So if that function is utilized, then you do have more data. That's not as anonymous. So yeah, it it's, it's a pull and, and, and push

Artem Daniliants:
Kind. Yeah. It's, it's a fine line. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Very good. So thank you so much, Joey. I enjoy using your product very nice to have you on the podcast was a pleasure to talk to you all the best of luck to your company. And I'm going to log in and check out your, your new UI and see how it's faring. And I would got really excited about the home widget. So I'll take, yeah. Take that for a spin as well next time and go to a meeting. Thank you so much for doing this and have a great, yeah.

Joey Madej:
Thank you too. I appreciate your time and yeah. Head to mobile card.com. If you have any other questions, you can always reach out. As I mentioned, we're we're always here.

Artem Daniliants:
Thank you. Take care guys. Bye.