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We're thrilled to be joining Jarrod Webb in his mission to help people control and share their identity online. It's great to be investing alongside Blackbird Ventures.
The Problem
Managing contact details on the internet is quite broken. The contacts app hasn't changed since the first iPhone and is likely to be the last place you'll find up to date information. Business cards have been outdated for years but are now falling out of use without a strong replacement.
As a result, we're constantly juggling contacts between an array of different social media sites. You might connect with one person on LinkedIn another on WhatsApp, some just on work email, others on Messenger or Instagram.
For most of us this fragmentation can be a bit messy. But it's a disaster for the millions of professionals who need to make a great first impression and manage hundreds of contacts. They've lost a key "moment" in their sales journey - the exchange of business cards - which can leave them guessing how to best follow up on a connection. Any information they do glean can easily go out of date.
The solution
Blinq is a live-updating contacts layer for the internet that can reunify our balkanised identities and give us control over what info we want to share with whom.
Users get an "always up to date" address book and the ability to create layers of their identity for sharing. For example you might want to share all your contact details with close friends but just work details with work contacts. Sharing can be done with a single tap via link, email signature, or message.
For in-person experiences Blinq is a beautiful and speedy business card replacement. Anyone can instantly share their details via a custom digital card that they can update any time. If you prefer the physical world a custom card will bring up your contacts with a quick tap via NFC.
Replacing business cards is just the beginning. The core of Blinq's idea is that it is a live-updating identity layer that can be used anywhere - from business cards, to email signatures, zoom backgrounds or as a link in bio.
It's also a compelling value proposition for businesses. Blinq integrates with CRM platforms and directories to help businesses keep their customer data up to date. It also allows an administrator to easily manage their entire team's contact details - so that new logo can be pushed to the entire team instantly.
The founder
Jarrod is a business-obsessed software engineer. He was one of the first employees at Uber Eats in Australia and chose to work on the strategy team because he was fascinated with operational problems. He’s a rare combination of creativity, resilience, vision and detail orientation. He invented some of the core functionality for Blinq years ago as a side project only to see it start to explode in usage as the general population learned how to use QR codes during the pandemic.
The future
Blinq is growing incredibly quickly. As conferences come back post lockdown people are using Blinq to make their connections a bit more magical. A single Blinq user can introduce scores of new potential users driving ongoing network effects. Ultimately these create benefits for the whole network as we get granular, ongoing, control over who has digital access to us on different channels.
We'd love you to join us and sign up for Blinq here. And if you're looking to get in touch my Blinq is available here.
