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...