Startup Spotlight #205: Swapt
Swapt enables businesses to capture data and deliver personalized consumer experiences in the physical world powered by intelligent QR codes and NFC technology.
Growing up in a small town, Trevor Brown found an early passion for community building and gathering. After moving to Washington DC to pursue a career in diplomacy, studying International Relations and Chinese, he let go of his desire to work in diplomacy and moved to Beijing in 2017 to pursue fluency in Mandarin and international business. After returning to the US, Brown accepted a role in Apple retail, training incoming sales associates, where he sold the co-founder of Lumasol a laptop. Brown moved to LA in January 2020 as the first hire to join Lumasol as the Director of Operations, bringing the DTC sunscreen company from FDA approval to launch and growth, where he fell in love with the fast-paced startup environment.
After leaving Lumasol to support his father’s battle with brain cancer, he founded GTHR, an app-based marketplace for cycling enthusiasts, before a traumatic cycling accident led me to pivot to Swapt. Swapt enables businesses to capture data and deliver personalized consumer experiences in the physical world powered by intelligent QR codes and NFC technology. The company is laser-focused on enabling businesses to create experiences that match consumer behavior, making everyone feel like VIPs.
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Startup Spotlight: Swapt
Problem: Companies don’t know how to engage with customers offline; retail stores use QR codes that go to generic landing pages (resulting in little to no engagement), thinking consumers will enjoy going out of their way for an advertisement. With sky-rocketing customer acquisition costs (60% over the past five years), marketers pay premiums to bring consumers into their stores, only to not recognize them and miss the opportunity to deliver a memorable customer experience.
Market: Global e-commerce stores with a retail presence, with a projected audience size of a 50k person list on average, leads to a $564 billion TAM.
Solution: Swapt makes consumers want to engage with businesses offline. Swapt makes it seamless to engage consumers and deliver personalized marketing (messaging, incentives, etc.) based on the consumer's previous engagement behavior with the brand, using intelligent QR codes and NFC tap technology as engagement tools.
Team: I’m co-founding Swapt with Andrew Smith (CEO), an early employee at Klaviyo, a visionary in building retail technology, working for four years as a retail/e-commerce technical consultant for enterprise brands. We’re supported by three incredible founding teammates: Alyssa Donovan (Product Designer), Nazir Doğan (Full Stack Developer), and Archie O’Connel (Software Engineer Intern).
Recent Success:
Brown: We’ve exceeded in finding and developing connections with early adopters to prove and test our technology. Our persistence in rapidly pushing the product and team forward allows us to expand use cases and stay ahead of the puck. Constantly studying and asking ourselves where the market is headed and executing multiple steps ahead based on those hypotheses.
Recent Struggle:
Brown: Building new technology is like moving mountains, especially regarding enterprise opportunities; we can’t do it overnight. We need to start with small proof of concept use cases and slowly expand as we prove value and trust within organizations. Thus, it has proven difficult to maintain consistent revenue while finding customers willing and able to disrupt their retail experience that’s likely not been disrupted at this level before.
Founder Advice:
Brown: If not you, who? If not now, when? Just start building; the rest will follow.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Brown: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Rory Garton-Smith, Founder of Checkmate: Checkmate pulls all your shopping into one place, tracks your packages and saves you money on 40,000 online stores.
Anish Patel, Founder of Tinto Wine: We craft natural wines for mindful enjoyment. Delicious, sustainable, and unpretentious, always.
Nikhil Gupta, Founder of Limechat: LimeChat is the World's First Level 3 Chatbot Technology and a leader in AI Conversational Commerce.
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Startup Spotlight #204: Yofi - Yofi is a platform that enables you to better understand your customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them.
Startup Spotlight #203: Simplify - Simplify helps you discover and autofill job and internship applications on millions of sites in 1-click.
Startup Spotlight #202: SkillBank - SkillBank is a 1:1 mentorship and training platform for entry-level marketing roles.
Startup Spotlight #201: Chloe - Accessing your home equity should be simple. With Chloe, you can be approved in minutes.
Startup Spotlight #200: Capable Health - Capable Health empowers healthcare innovators to provide affordable, personalized, quality care at scale.
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