Building the World’s First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip (Part 4)

Sramana: When you reached out to major brands, were you reaching out to the CMOs?

Brian Wong: I reached out to CMOs and agency partners. I reached out to anybody that I could get a hold of. I realized that the community was quite small. If you had a few key people on your side, then you could have first conversations with just about anybody. That first conversation was extremely easy to get. It was more about the second or third conversation. That is where I focused my energy.

I put together a lot of pitches, and I had to spend time editing and modifying these pitches and understanding what they were actually doing. They may not have seen the market the same way that I did. I had to modify my pitch each time. I got my ass kicked when I first flew to New York City and made pitches. A lot of the people I talked to just did not understand what I was proposing. I had to go through a lot of revisions to figure out ways to move forward without getting too hung up on the terms we were inventing. There were a lot of things we had to learn just from exposure.

The vision of the company has not changed. We still work for achievements in some form or fashion. It is the way we package the product, the way we pitch it, and the way we created processes around our customers that have evolved.

Sramana: Would you talk more specifically about that evolution?

Brian Wong: I was spending time with the Sephora product manager on the e-commerce side. I had met her through a mutual friend. I went into a meeting and showed them what the product was. She brought me back for a second meeting with the rest of the team so that I could explain the product to them. About a month later we had a third meeting with their VP. That meeting was 20 minutes because the VP was very busy and had little time. We finally got the green light after that.

Sramana: What did you learn in the process of early customer engagement?

Brian Wong: We learned that advertisers do not respond to unique metrics. You need to use something like CPC or CPM to back into and explain the effectiveness of your metrics. You have to show those data and be explicit about them. We also learned that game developers have a lot on their plates. You need to be very compelling on both fronts. You absolutely must have case studies.

The problem I faced in the beginning is that we did not have case studies. I had to find the one out of 100 that was willing to do something new like what we were proposing with Kiip. When we found that first few on the advertiser side, and the first few on the game developer side, we knew we had to kill it. We had to do extremely well, and we did. There were campaigns that we did not do too well on, and then there were campaigns we blew completely out of the park. We learned from the bad campaigns, and we made sure we never repeated those mistakes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building the World's First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip
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