Our Seed Investment In Blinq

Date Published:

August 1, 2022

We wanted to share our investment thinking on Blinq, one of the fastest growing viral SaaS businesses in the world right now. We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Jarrod Webb, the founder of Blinq, a Melbourne based business that is redefining how professionals connect.

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You can learn more about Jarrod’s story in Wild Hearts, which returns this Wednesday. Subscribe here to be the first to listen.

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Augmenting your first impression

‍Blinq’s first product allows people to have the freedom to design their own digital business cards, quickly swap details via a QR code and then manage these new connections going forward.

QR codes became ubiquitous with COVID-19 training the world to scan into venues everyday and with QR codes becoming a natural part of our everyday life, Blinq has built its product around this new behaviour.

It’s rare to see a digital product create a ‘magic moment’ unfold right in front of you. Yet, the product is so simple that each time a Blinq QR code is scanned the recipient's eyes open wide with delight. We dare you to try it!

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The centre of gravity for new relationships

Substituting the $8B of annual global spend on dogeared and out of date paper business cards is ambitious enough. But Blinq’s ambition is bigger: it wants to solve the problem of managing a team’s professional identities and therefore the company’s identity. At the click of a few buttons, businesses of all sizes can create, automatically distribute and manage dynamic digital business cards and email signatures en masse. By integrating directly with Google/Microsoft directories, role changes, branding changes, office address changes, the onboarding (new cards created) and offboarding (old cards destroyed) are all handled either automatically or by decision makers in the firm. Think about the number of email signatures or business cards out there in the ether that are wrong or out of date. Even already sent emails are automatically updated to reflect reality. The internet without Blinq is static and fragmented. The future with Blinq is a live professional identity layer on the internet.

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Owning the first interaction‍

Blinq also integrates directly into businesses’ customer databases, recording who you gave your card to, why and when. In doing so, this information adds valuable fit for purpose point in time context on the first interaction that can help the sales funnel close a sale faster or make the next interaction with a future employee special.

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Combining virality with bottoms up SaaS

Each time the product does its job, it's viral in nature where a new person downloads the product for their own professional identity. Not only is it viral on a 1 to 1 basis, but Blinq has a wonderful business model advantage where a 1 to 1 connection leads to Blinq spreading throughout the organisation, which leads to large AND organic subscription revenue with an entire company onboarded. This is a beautiful viral and bottoms up SaaS business where word of mouth leads to an entire organisation using Bling and as that business adds more people, Blinq’s revenue will continue to upgrade.

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Product obsessed founders

Finally, product obsessed founders often have a knack for building products that solve their own problems. Blinq’s founder, Jarrod, solved his own problem after becoming frustrated with 4 different stacks of UberEats business cards sitting on his desk. He built version 1 over a weekend for fun. Once the stars aligned with businesses reaching out to pay Jarrod for Blinq’s non-existent (at the time) business offering, he took all the business building lessons as an early employee at UberEats and began working on Blinq full time in January 2021.

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Jarrod is the type of founder Blackbird loves to find and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with him and the entire Blinq team. If you would like to learn more about Blinq, then head over to their website here. Or tune into the next Wild Hearts episode to learn what product obsessed sounds like.

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