WebFest.Me: Brian Wong from Kiip.Me Improved Mobile Advertising with “Moments”
Attendants of the most important regional Internet conference were impressed this morning by Brian Wong, the founder of Kiip.me (pronounced “keep”). This young entrepreneur started college at the age of 14, graduated when he was 18 years old and soon after that he started his own company. Kiip.me is a rewards network that changed the way companies advertise on mobile phones:
“Advertising today pissed me off because it was just making big billboards smaller and putting them on our phone. People are paying to remove advertisement and that is a very bad thing. We needed to introduce reciprocity and share great moments in peoples day like (unlocking an achievement in a game) and reward people for what they accomplished. For our advertisers, we wanted to choose big brands so that people can trust rewards. We are the first network in the planet that people send fan mail to.”
Brian’s business model is called a “moments” based model, because it happens in the moment when people are happy (Brian: “going YAY YAY YAY!“). It offers them something as a reward for what they have accomplished. People react better to those advertisements because they are useful to them, and by being able to gift them to their friends, the users themselves help expand the network. If you are interested in Kiip.me, you can watch this promo video from their website:
[vimeo width=”555″ height=”350″]http://vimeo.com/46252949[/vimeo]
Brian does not define “being an entrepreneur” as a career path. He says that nobody just wakes up one day with a decision to become an entrepreneur, it is something that just happens.
“Take what you love and what you have been doing for a while and make it into a company. That is being an entrepreneur. You do not start a company just to be an entrepreneur.”
Finally, Brian believes that you are the most important force in your life: “Fuck waiting. Create opportunities for yourself. You have Internet.” To help you achieve that, he shared his trick for reaching important people and building your own company:
Email CEO of big companies. My trick is to find their name, guess their email address is name.lastname@company.me and then email them there. But in BCC field I put any other guess I have for their email address. And it works!
Photography by: Marina Filipović Marinshe
