How you can easily exchange contact information with a tap of a card, with Pieter Limburg

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going to New York to talk to Pieter Limburg, who's going to talk to us all about mobile business cards. Pieter, welcome to the show. Tell us about you and the business you're starting and how it can help entrepreneurs get noticed.

Hey Jim, thanks for having me. Glad to be a part of the show and I'm looking forward to chatting with you about how to get noticed. We started about 2 and a half years ago and Up until today, our cards have been used over 1.5 million times in 199 countries. So we're starting to get noticed.

You are indeed. This is MobiloCard, right? MobiloCard is the name of the company.

Yes.

And you're originally Dutch, but you're in New York. So what problem did you see that entrepreneurs needed to solve, which is why you started this whole business, Pieter?

Yeah, I am indeed Dutch and the Dutch are, in my opinion, quite And when it comes to networking and making new connections, they're very relaxed and toned down. But when you move to New York and all of a sudden the buzz here and everybody's going fast, fast, fast, it's a completely different environment. So when I was going to a trade show in 2019, after 3 days, I came back with 90 paper business cards. And so that's good, right? So you meet a lot of people, you have an idea, okay, we invested. Lots and lots of money to go to this trade show. So you want to see a return as well. And the return was there as I had 90 people to follow up with. But also, when you're in New York, and I think this goes global, if you do not follow up quickly, people will forget about you. And you might lose out on the opportunity to reconnect and think, okay, what if I met Jim? What did we talk about? How was this important to me? Everybody comes back from a trade show with this buzz. So you got to stand out. So the one that follows up first is the one that usually gets the hook. So here I was, 11:00 PM in my hotel room, looking at a stack of 90 paper business cards sitting on my desk. And I thought, oh my, how am I going to ever put this quickly in my computer and not ending up going to bed at 4 o'clock in the morning? So I tried apps to scan them. I tried apps with OCR. I tried all kinds of things to To do this quickly and easily, but it really didn't work. And I thought, why are we still walking around with a paper business card? Everything else is digital all around us. So how is it that nobody solved this? And it's kind of like this paperclip or stapler kind of idea where you think, this is so simple, this has to be fixable. And so I looked at all these apps, didn't work. Most of them require you to install another app and other people. And so it's not seamless. It also doesn't really work with, you know, if you have a CRM system already, if you're on HubSpot or Pipedrive or Salesforce or any of that, doesn't work with that either. Then I understood, okay, an app is not the solution because it's not sexy enough. It's not cool when you meet somebody and say, okay, let's pull out LinkedIn and link there. And then 2, for instance, if you mentioned LinkedIn, there's no follow-up, right? If we would meet 50 people and we all connect on LinkedIn, How am I going to know when I get home who I need to follow up with? And how does that make it easier? It doesn't. So I came off of an RFID project. And all of a sudden, I thought, this is it. It has to be a physical thing that you tap onto your phone, magically, my contact details show up on that screen, no app necessary. And then that's how I share my contact details. So building the first version, Showing that to a real estate friend of mine here in New York, I said, hey, yeah, I want to give this a try. If you're meeting new people, showing them around the house, that was still during COVID So it was, that was still happening. People were still buying houses. So I thought, okay, this is a good test. Try this. And they said, yeah, works great. Everybody loves it. Big smile on their face. But I also want to exchange contact details. So that's when we developed the lead generation mode and really built all of that stuff. So this was the start. And here for the people that are on video, here's one of my cards. This is a wood card. And so this is what I'm doing for people that are listening only. I'm just grabbing my phone. I don't have to unlock it. The only thing I do is I take my card and I hold it against the back top of the phone. And a notification shows up on screen. And it says, open MobiloCard. And the only thing I do is click on it and poof, there are my contact details, including LinkedIn, website links, Twitter, all the socials, and a photo even ready to be saved on your phone. And that's the start of a trusted relationship.

And Peter, that's absolutely fantastic. And I can absolutely concur with you having been in charge of trade show data collection before and done OCR and data export. You are solving a huge problem. Let's just dive in a little bit to some details, Peter. You get the details from MobilaCard. onto someone else's phone. You just tap yours and I scanned your QR code before we started recording and I received your VCF, your virtual card file, and I can save that as a contact. One small question. What if you change your contact details? Do you need a new card or do you program the card?

Yeah, the card comes with an app. So whenever you make an update, maybe you want to change your web link, maybe you want to add a new social, like we have over 25 social platforms that you can share. Like TikTok or your whatever comes up next. You can simply go into the app. In that app, you can update your contact details, and the moment you hit save, it's reflected on the card immediately. So if I would change the office address because I'm working from a different location, after that, I would just go to the app, update it, hit okay, and that's it. Update my photo, immediately reflects. And what else you'll find in the app? So even though it works without an app, this app is sort of like a companion app. You can see how many times you've used your card, where you've used your card. If you use lead generation mode, you can see where you met that person and also have a sort of a mini CRM in the app. So you can say, okay, I met Jim and I need to follow up, or I met Jim and I'm waiting for his outreach. So you have an idea of what to do the next day.

Okay. So wonderful. So you can update it as and when you're ready. You keep that physical card. You've got a wood one. Are there options, Peter, for different styles? And people, for example, could have it with their own corporate identity for a sales team?

Absolutely. So we offer the classic card, which is PET plastic. It's up to 7 times recyclable. So it's reasonably durable. It goes a long way. There's a 2-year warranty on it. So you can use it well over 100,000 taps before it would start to wear out. It's fully printable front and back in full color. So that's great for most people. And then the wood one that I have, we plant a tree for every wood card that we sell. So to give you an idea, one tree is enough for 10,000 of these cards. So we're giving back to nature way more than we take. And so with that, we help the environment. And if you source wood responsibly, it can also be considered very much a sustainable resource. And then we have metal cards as well, Jim, and these are pretty cool and doing very well with the executives here in the US and also in Europe, by the way. But we have a black card. It's laser etched with your design. It feels strong and heavy. It's durable. And it really is modeled after the Platinum card from American Express. So we have black, silver, and gold, nicely lasered with any kind of design you'd like.

Wow. So it really can be part of a company's corporate identity then, Pieter, as well, which is Really important, especially if you've got a bigger sort of group of people. You mentioned just about being able to update the details for one card, one app. If you are an organization and you need to do the whole sales force, could an administrator update everybody's, for example, corporate information, maybe NASDAQ details, corporate email address changes? Because in my experience before running a marketing department with salespeople, getting everybody's contact details to be current was a challenge. So how could a corporate client manage that, Peter?

Yeah, we have various steps in which we can integrate with your company. So you create a team of 5 to 10 people within the app. And so on behalf of those team members, we can assign an admin and that admin has access to all the team members to update their contact details. So now you have 500 employees. We can even create departments within your team. So we have the organization. That has separate departments, sales team, marketing team, operations team, customer support team. And they have different settings for organization, different logos, different styles, different information. You can all set that up in the backend and we can even lock fields. So Jim, if we want to make sure that the new marketing intern is not changing their title into the CEO, you know?

Yeah.

Could happen if somebody has big ambitions. And then we can make sure that doesn't happen. So we have all kinds of controls in place to make sure that nobody can abuse the system. And then if you have more than 500 employees, and I think we have companies from 100 employees up already using this tool that you can connect to your HR system. And so you have usually companies have one system that has all the correct information. So we simply connect to that. And then every night we pick up the latest version of that information, of that data, and then update Mobilo with that. So if the HR system would have a title change because somebody's promoted, then the next day it would be on their card.

Okay. So Mobilo, you'd update that centrally. And are you saying the individual who has the card in the field, let's say they're out in Texas or something, how do they update their card? Do they need to touch that close to their phone to get the latest updates? How are the updates being delivered to the card?

That's automatically done. So whenever the card is used, it always checks for the latest information.

You know what? I realized I've showed my age. I thought the details were on the card. Of course, the details are in the cloud. God, there we are. I've shown my age. They're not locally held, they're centrally held data. Gosh, there we go. A bit of old thinking. So that's fantastic. Use case, Peter. What about a company has, you know, a trade show. You've talked about the data collection for sales. Do you want to just talk us through the bane of most marketing managers' life, which is data collection from all the salespeople at the trade show or people at the front of the desk, importing that into HubSpot or AWeber or some other marketing automation system and sending out, you know, what happened at the trade show or what happened at a convention. Can you take us through that, Peter?

Yeah, I know it's a big pain. And, you know, after used to be in sales, I know that most of my fellow sales friends are not a fan of administration. Nobody is usually. And so you could even, some would argue that salespeople are lazy when it comes to administration. I'm happy to admit all of that, you know, for me personally, at least. So any technology—

I'm not the best at that. Yeah.

Any technology that could help us here, Jim, would be welcome, right? If we could save time and money, just have it be automated, that would be the dream. So that's what we built. When you go to a trade show and whether you use this card on a trade show, or maybe you put your QR code on a presentation. I presented the other day on an RFID conference and I had my QR code on the presentation so everybody could scan it and immediately indicate if they wanted to chat more. Whether you use my card, tap it, the QR code, or I put that on a virtual conference even. Before I would go into a conference like that, I would switch my card to lead generation mode. And I briefly touched upon this. And the difference now is that when I tap my card, I do not only share my contact details, but we exchange contact details. So it would request for your contact details first. And that's super simple because on your phone, it automatically fills out the form. And we just need 2 things. We need your email address, your work email address, and your phone number. And then we can go to the internet with that work email address and enrich that data with 150 online sources. So we'll find your company name, we'll find the domain, we'll find the location, we'll find the size of the company. And so we'll create a complete profile. So Again, my name is Peter. I have a Mobilo card. I go to a conference. I use my card in lead gen mode, and I meet Jim. Jim puts in his email address and his phone number. Then Jim's information is sent to Peter automatically. After that, Jim will receive Peter's information because I have put everything in my Mobilo card already. And then when I get home, that information is not only sitting in the app, Jim, that information that I received from you. So I see Jim. New contact, but also if I want to connect it to a CRM system, I can automatically have that send that information to Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, you name it. There's over 3,000 apps that are connected through Zapier that we can immediately send that information to, even to marketing tools like Mailchimp or any kind of email automation platform. We can all connect that. And so we don't have to do any administration when we get home. Everything's there.

That's really nice. It takes me back to the old days when we used to use a platform called ACT, A-C-T, from Australia and import and export DBF files. And one of the issues was about synchronization, of course, and making sure you had the latest copy. Now, presumably, Peter, one record changes, the system automatically changes in a synchronized timing fashion. Remove any manual input. Is that right?

We try to eliminate as much manual input as we can, as long as it's set up in advance. And we help with that. We provide with onboarding support. So whatever your organization is, like we, the other day we had a large car dealership. They had 150 salespeople. The car dealerships in America are huge. I don't know. I've never seen that before, but 150 salespeople in a car dealership. And when they see somebody walk in. They exchange their contact details and immediately everything's in the system. So, and you'll be automatically called 3 days later because it's in that system already. So the salesperson doesn't have to do anything, right? You get a follow-up email. Hey, was service correct? Or any more questions? Or here's some more information about this car you were looking at. You know, all of that can be automated now that we have some of that input.

And of course that changes entirely the dynamic where salespeople quite often used to hoard their sales leads from the company, right? Which caused tension and disconnect. Peter, I can't have this conversation about data without asking about security. What about security for the person who maybe has their phone tapped or in other way hacked? How do you protect people with MobileAccard?

Yeah, so luckily we can count on both the smart people from Apple and Android. To make sure that it's very hard to put malicious intent into the mix. Now, our data is stored in a manner that it has to be accessible. So otherwise, you know, when you share your card, it has to be a link, it has to be available. We do all kinds of things to make sure that we block robots, we block unhuman behavior, or we have rate limiters on top of everything. So we're working together with Cloudflare, which is a world-renowned service to assist with this. Below that, there's another layer of security that we've self-developed to make sure that only human behavior gets through. And then we are almost done with our SOC 2 certification. So I think before the end of the month, it's now time of recording, it's mid-June. So by the end of June, we will have our certificate done. And so we'll be the first smart business card company in the world that I know of that has SOC 2 certificate. So yeah, we're very much on the front of this and we don't want to get sneaked up on. And also we will never sell or share your data without your permission. This is in our terms and conditions, very much your data is yours. Otherwise we wouldn't have had these big brands because like we have 2 Formula 1 teams, Jim, as a customer. We have a large beauty manufacturer as customers. We have Big hotel chains. We have, I think, almost 10 banks that are using our services. So we have some very large security-aware companies that focus a lot on that. And we've all gone through their testing.

So, so there's plainly a great deal to cover off and we're going to run out of time, but I will just ask you the question about how you're getting the company noticed as an entrepreneur. What are you doing to get MobiloCard noticed?

Yeah, I like that question a lot. So I thought about it. And so if I go back to the first month of starting this business, the first thing I did was build a website and put $10 a day on Google Ads, because it's really easy to get people that are searching for an alternative to paper business cards. So I think that's where it starts, but then that's only the start. That's only the easy part because you can get 100 people a day to come look at your website, but how do you make sure you interact with them? How do you make sure that you communicate with them? So you immediately have to test and trial your messaging. You have to test and try your content. And you have to then figure out, is this something that people want? And then the most important thing after that is that you actually follow up. And this is where Mobilo helps as well. But let's say I get 10 people out of 100 people that visit my website, I get 10 people to ask me a question through a contact form or an email, I have to make sure that within 15 minutes, that's answered. First of all, it has to be quick, right? People want instant communication. They're used to it right now. If I send a text message and you don't respond within 15 minutes, who are you then? Right? That expectation has been set. You cannot wait until the next day before you answer an email. You cannot wait until the next day before you answer a text message. People will assume you've fallen off your bike or however you go to work. Right? There's something wrong if you don't answer within 15 minutes. So companies have to live up to that as well. And you have to Not only do it fast, but you have to do it in a personal manner. You cannot send standardized messages like, "Oh, we'll get back to you between Monday and Friday from nine to five or whatever." No, you have to listen to people and start a conversation. That's how you get noticed. Because if you then are slightly better in having that conversation with one person, they will let other people know and say, "Oh, Jim, you know, I spoke to Peter." And this guy, you know, he really knows what he's talking about. You got to talk to him. He responds quickly. He knows what he's talking about. This product is great. And if your customers around you don't do that, then the word of mouth is kind of gone. So for us, referrals are very important. We try to deliver the best product and therefore hope that people will spread the word. And it's really powerful, even at scale, even at a moment where, again, our cards have been used over 1.5 million times in 199 countries, very much rely on word of mouth. And it's a snowball that once it starts rolling down the hill, goes faster and becomes bigger and bigger.

Peter Lindberg, thank you so much for joining me. You know, we only have a short amount of time to cover what's a huge topic and an exciting sounding business. Thanks for joining me today on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Thank you so much. Pleasure was all mine, Jeremy.

It's been my pleasure. So we've all been listening to Peter Lindberg, who's in New York, a Dutchman in New York, who's running MobiloCard. And of course, I will put all his details In the show notes as always. And you've been with me, Jim James, on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And until we meet again, remember to just keep on communicating.