How Bindle Systems CEO Carlos Korten grew Bindle Systems to $4.2K revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Carlos court and he's building a tool called joinbendel.com it's covered credentials as non-fungible tokens call us you ready to take us to the top let's go all right so explain this to someone that has no idea what a fungible means or a token means or what an nft is yeah so uh so uh this is derivative technology from um from cryptocurrency right so you can buy Bitcoin you can buy ethereum but it doesn't have to be money it could be other things it could be documents and in the case of what bindle is doing we've decided to take Health credentials like vaccine records and test results turn them into tokens that you can carry around on your phone that are cryptographic assets that are encoded that are yours that you can carry as as permanent assets and then we've got a rules engine that sits on top of that and let's say you want to go to a movie theater or you want to go to a show um the venue is going to have some sort of rule by which they're going to allow people to come in um and what our rules engine will do or it does today is it scans through your wallet to find tokens that meet their criteria so if they say hey you need to have been vaccinated or you need to have been tested in the last two days and come back negative it's going to look for the tokens that meet and then create what we call a zero knowledge proof which is a cryptographic entry pass that says this person's good and what's great is the venue can then look at that without actually taking any medical data and know that this person's safe time who's who's issuing that token why couldn't Joe schmoe in his basement in Kentucky just act like a healthcare provider and give sell a bunch of these tokens like vaccinated tokens to a bunch of people online totally so uh uh so the answer is Joe Schmo can create his own tokens but it's up to like the venue whether they want to accept those tokens right so typically in the best tokens you can get are going to be issued by the state of California issued by the state of New York and there are verified credentials that are out there that you can ingest into bindle and that stuff becomes part of your your bindle wallet and then those things can be presented as proof if you live in a jurisdiction where that's not available CBS help is actually also creating verified credentials in Walmart and a bunch of other administrators but if you don't have access to that you can do a self attestation and it might get you into your your yoga studio but it might not get you into the Kennedy Center for example so um so we handle each of those scenarios and it's really up to the venue themselves to decide hey which of these things is you know meets the you know the criteria of uh of what we think is uh is appropriate and just I have thinking through a business model like this like your biggest competition in my opinion is like I was just up in New York last week and every venue uh it was it was show me your vaccine card and your thing and I was just a system I just carried my passport with me I had the vaccine card taped inside right above my ID and I would just open my passport boom it took two seconds to get in it's not a ton of pain so like how do you connect how do you convince someone like me to like go learn what a token is and a wallet is and like get all my Healthcare Providers to use it and then get all my Walmarts and the local and the start local Starbucks to use it so I can get in and out how do you do all that yeah I Think It's tricky because I do think that it's really convenient just to show your paper card your CDC card right hey I've been vaccinated and that's easy and it's universally accepted I think where it gets tricky is where um where you're trying to see 10 000 people into a stadium and you've got people that need to be kind of going through this stuff with volume and you've got people that were vaccinated in Europe you got people that were vaccinated had different kinds of credentials and if you don't have some sort of mechanism to get the line moving and get people in and out um it's gonna bog down and so uh we're spending a lot of time um talking about rapid Ingress types of solutions um Universal scanning where it's a single scan and it can read credentials from around the world um and then also you know you know I think the nature of what we've learned about the pandemic over the last year is it keeps changing and the rules of it keep changing like in what the epidemiologists say is critical and not critical like how long is a vaccine good for like the science is constantly changing the opinion is changing so you know now we've got a booster how do you accommodate that operationally into you know safe safe business practice and the answer is it's a lot easier if you've got it if you've got a system that's running on pivot uh disagree with any of that statement that you just made I the tech to me makes perfect sense where I think something like this like dies or doesn't work is go to market right so like how do you convince FedEx field and Landover Maryland where the Washington football team plays to announce ahead of the game that you must bring your bindle wallet on your phone and show it at the entering they're never going to do that because it's going to kill ticket sales so uh and you know I think that the society is still normalizing on what is right and what's appropriate and what's what's suitable and what's safe um and uh and it keeps changing and so we don't really know and in terms of like you know are the you know is we've been talking to specific NFL teams into NBA teams and and and maybe Major League Baseball and they're and they say things like hey if if the pandemic gets worse we're just gonna stop right and and we think that there's a middle space right where you can be responsible and uh and and deliberate um and if someone's not willing to download an app and do this in terms of digital registry then you know they may just be watching the game from home and and you know that's I think I think that's just very that's fair and reasonable um I will say that this is I mean my dad by the way is 80 81 years old he goes to football games that land over Maryland to watch watching football team he doesn't even have an iPhone he doesn't know how to text so like this wouldn't even be like this is a tough one for him totally but like this is the risk that FedEx field has if they ever made an announcement that said you need your bundle wallet to enter right they're just it's just gonna kill someone they'll have five people sitting in the stadium how do you how do you deal with a Marketplace issue we think that we think that the binal solution needs to coexist with paper like for as long as we can imagine right I don't I don't think that this solution will displace paper I think it's going to be a little bit like hey there's going to be a fast lane for bindle and then you got your slow lane for paper and that makes more sense that makes more sense to me it's more like it's more like uh what's the airport one it's like clear I think yeah yeah yeah for the airport security type stuff which is like hey if you want to get through faster you're pre-checked you can go right in and you know just flash your your bindle um your identity and and yeah so who's paying you then is it jcm analytics or Daybreak or is it more like the envoys or the employers quartz pretty bird Etc it's different in every case but it is on balance of verifiers are the ones that are paying for this service there's a verifier so who is that Court's the employer who won't let employees in the office unless they have it's the employer themselves or it's the venue that's you know that's hosting the show so um uh yeah those are the ones that are that are paying for the service so what do they pay you then on average per month to use the technology um it's different in different verticals but as a benchmark we shoot for something on the order of 10 cents per scan so um okay yeah and you know I think you know like industry benchmarks are like dollars per you know dollars per seat right like five dollars per seat and so we just feel like it we the price point should be much lower so um yeah well so when you look at your customers today and you count like on average how many scans are doing per month how many scans they're doing per month on average um right now I think we're doing a couple thousand a month and I don't have the fresh data but um yeah uh we have I think short of a hundred thousand wallets installed and and we're operating in 30 states in the US and then I think two or three Canadian provinces okay so I mean 10 cents a scan unless you're doing 4 000 scans a month like times 10 cents so you're you're early you're doing like four or 500 bucks a month in Revenue right early yeah and I think that we're still discovering the revenue model I think the pricing models continues to reveal itself to us uh we're still like we're learning right now in terms of what utilization rates are going to be um at large events public events closed events um you know you know at weddings at you know at celebrations um these are one-time private events um where people are looking for uh for some sort of reassurance that it's it's going to be uh safe for my my elderly Aunt to attend and they want to have some sort of assurance that um that there's some protocols in place and Carlos how many customers do you have that did at least one scan in October um geez I should have I should have I should have looked at uh more closely at our volumetrics in October um we set our new high in October I'm just trying to get into how many customers you're working with who are actually paying yeah oh like we've got like we've got 200 active clients right now how do you define active though uh so paying like invoice clients in the month of October so there were 200 in October that did at least one scan and paid you at least a 10 cent invoice at least 10 cents yeah fair fair this is great okay so you have some momentum here when did you first like write the first line of code for this what year uh so you know a lot of this technology has its Origins and you know pre-pandemic stuff we're talking about digital identity and cryptography and stuff back in 2018 so um we're playing with the technology and then when uh the pandemic hit in in 2010 and started becoming meaningful the company was founded in June of 2020 and uh and we had our first release in August of 2020. so okay uh yeah and bootstrap to date or did you raise capital and we raise Capital um our CEO uh comes out of uh Samsung Global Ventures and has a um you know a really strong Boosie background and uh right now we've been raising uh through um Angel Investors private private investors we haven't raised the series a um I think we're working to that now so you already closed your seat or pre-seed or no it's still open uh it's still open yeah we still have it we still uh yeah we're still working in a seed context it's all it's all pre-series a and got it and when you say Angels you're talking like hundred thousand two hundred thousand sort of deal yeah fifty thousand dollar checks hundred thousand dollar checks that we're looking at you know yep yep that makes sense and and why do you need Capital to scale this why can't you fund from customers like what's the engineering heavy lifting that has to happen here yeah I mean there's a lot of blockchain stuff right in the data management um and there's a new feature function that we're constantly looking at um like we we know that we need a solution to handle miners um so you know uh like children and the children's vaccine records are distinct from their parents records that's infrastructure that we know we need to build we want to build out our institutional infrastructure as well um for return to work and those types of use cases to have you know better reporting and and better throughput and a lot of this investment is into digital identity networks which are more generalized than pandemic or health records this is stuff that we could we could be doing um digital ticketing we could be doing um academic records we could be doing voter registration on on a lot of the same rails that were using health credentials for uh so I think that becomes really interesting in terms of future proofing a lot of our investment we actually think that like tokenizing data and these just decentralized types of networks um has got a lot of legs that'll uh that'll you know that'll be the next decade worth of growth yeah yep so so moving forward tell me more about the team you so are you one of the founding members do you have Equity yep yeah I'm one of the founding members there were six co-founders six co-founders you get nothing done with six co-founders I disagree I think it's worked out really well who the hell I think the decisions uh we yell at each other a lot but I think it's a very constructive yelling um what's what makes it work is that the six of us have perpendicular skills very perpendicular skills so did you split Equity evenly amongst all six yeah it makes it easy it makes the math easy yeah wow okay so everyone owns basically like 15 15.3 something like that roughly and of course it's been diluted since then right so uh yeah yeah interesting so how many are you total today then obviously six plus any full-timers yeah I think we're on the order of 15 full-time I think right now and then of course we've got um uh we've got an engineering team we've got a design team and I mean Carlos this is a lot of expensive companies so this is a lot of employees for basically pre-revenue company how do you think about burn I mean you guys are operating right on the right on the edge yeah the burn is the burn is very high for the the the the maturity of the company but we're punching way above our weight class um and uh and competing with really highly capitalized companies competitor uh we talk about you mentioned clear the airport security company they're doing a lot of Health credentials type business and and competing for the NFL teams that we're talking to as well right so um and they just had their IPO last summer um and uh we're competing with IBM which is the service provider for the state of New York um and they've got you know they've got a solution in the market and you know that's that's our competitive base very cool well listen we're obviously rooting for you hope the pre-sea round closes down nicely and you scale to 400 locations by the next time we chat but in the meantime Carlos let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite Business book um uh Lean Startup number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh Elon Musk number three favorite online tool uh Nero I love Nero me spell it Miro am I oh Miro yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh I sleep really well uh nine ten that's great and what's the situation married single kids single uh any no kiddos no kids all right and how old are you uh 52 52 take us home last question here what are you wishing you when you were 20. what I'm saying again something you wish you knew when you were 20. something I was wishing when I was 20. that's something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh when I was 20. uh jeez um uh I think I I was just um I was uncertain of myself I should have just been more confident I ended up doing the right things but it took me too long so guys join bindle.com launched in 2020 they want you to use their wallet to prove your vaccinations status or other health records at venue entries airports Etc we'll see if they can scale they're currently serving call it 200 Brands they charge 10 per stand at 4 000 scans last month installment across 100 000 wallets they've got 15 folks on the team six co-founders 200 000 plus and sort of pre-seed capital they're using to try and compete with the likes of clear you know the state of New York Etc see if they can do it Carlos thanks for taking us to the top see one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big 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