Building the World’s First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip (Part 6)

Sramana: Would you talk some about your co-founder? What are the skill sets each of you brings to the company?

Brian Wong: I have two co-founders, Amadeus Demarzi and Courtney Guertin. I knew Courtney from my time at Digg. He was one of the engineers who first interviewed me. He left a month before I got laid off and he was planning on starting his own business. We spent a lot of time talking about Kiip, and the idea proved to be organic. It got legs. He and Amadeus jumped on board during the early stages of the company.

Courtney is on the technical side. He is managing all of our design engineering and product. Amadeus is very design and front-end oriented. He creates amazing user interfaces and experiences which is extremely important for us as a company. We have a lot of user-facing products. I manage all business such as marketing, PR, strategy, sales, and business development.

Sramana: What are you betting on as a company to take you to the next level?

Brian Wong: We anticipate that brands are going to become more and more willing to spend money through our platform. It is not so confusing to them now that they are seeing us everywhere. It is only a matter of time before we see this platform dominating, and a lot of the brands want to get in early.

Sramana: Would you talk about the competitive landscape in terms of what you are doing at Kiip? When you go into brands, whom do you see in those deals trying to compete for the same dollars?

Brian Wong: Anybody who is selling ads in the mobile space comes up as a competitor. I don’t consider them to be direct competitors, but rather category competitors. Usually they are there because when a brand spends there are specific objectives. If a brand’s objectives are specifically focused on getting ‘Likes’, driving video views, or increasing the number of downloads, there are other companies that do that really well. We don’t focus on that. We focus on something more organic that does not require forced action. We are very non-cannibalistic, we have not created a product that forces people to choose between. The only reason they choose between us and anyone else is they do it for budget. Many times there is room for both us and another company in the budget.

Sramana: What have you learned about segmentation? Where is your sweet spot?

Brian Wong: Our sweet spot is working with brands that care about users. Surprisingly, that is not all brands. Everything about the concept and the business is well received. It is typically a matter of time. We started this process last year, and a lot of brands are starting to adopt it now.

Sramana: Has your value proposition remained the same? Are you still rewarding users for achievement?

Brian Wong: We do focus on rewards centered on finding the right moment in the applications. It is hard to do that. You need to integrate with application developers and then build a brand reward model that makes sense for that application.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building the World's First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip
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