Badge: Building fan experiences in Apple & Google Wallet

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Sportsloft podcast where we hear from the people who are driving innovation across the world of sports, media and entertainment. Today. We're very fortunate to be joined by Eric uh, Sen, CEO and co founder of Badge and now Badge, one of the companies they presented at last year's Sportsloft Summit. And it, in fact one of the presenters said this was the company that I wish I'd built myself, which was kind of praise indeed. So Eric, welcome to the Sportsloft podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you, Charlie. Good to uh, good to be, uh, talking to you again.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Now Eric, I mean the way that I've described Badge before, that you enable organizations such as teams, leagues, brands to build and deploy customer experiences in Apple and Google Wallet, so effectively using the wallet as a direct fan engagement channel. Can you just explain expand a little bit more on that. What, what does that mean?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, well that's exactly what we do, first of all. So I mean, you got it, you got it down. But um, you know, we are a infrastructure layer for Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Samsung, uh, Wallet. So those, those three mobile wallets that are pre installed on consumers phones everywhere. Right? So we're kind of at this point in time where people have been making payments in their mobile wallet for many years. More people are now using mobile wallets than TikTok, which is pretty crazy. And I think that just kind of sets the stage for this massive shift, consumer shift that we've seen. Right. I think our kids may not even carry around a physical wallet. So you know, you can put your passport, your ID in your wallet, in your digital wallet. Now obviously credit cards have been in there for a long time, but we're at this phase where companies, teams, retailers, they're starting to digitize some of the plastic cards that you used to put in your physical wallet. So that could be a membership card, a loyalty card, a gift card. Um, and I think Apple and Google, you know, they've even expanded beyond that. Other things you might put in your physical wallet, like an airline ticket or a ticket to a concert or a sporting event. As all these things become digitized there, the opportunities for those businesses to interact with a card holder or a ticket holder becomes opened up, right? Because it's not just a digital version of the physical card. It comes with bells and whistles that your phone has, right? So the ability to send a push notification to a ticket holder or a card holder, the ability to set geofences, so someone that holds one of these passes or these tickets, um, receives a notification and at a certain location.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So it's contextual, um, the ability to change the artwork and how the QR code and the barcode, all of this stuff is now possible in this new world of digital cards. And what we do is we just built a single platform that enables companies to access all of these great features and functionality across the three wallets through OneAPI. Um, so it saves companies a lot of time and it allows them to do, uh, more in these wallets.

Speaker B: So when you set up Badge, what was the problem, though, that you identified? Was it just that if you were, um, a brand, it was hard to develop these wallet capabilities and then do it in Apple, do it in Google, do it in Samsung. Was that the core piece that you were really identifying when you set this up?

Speaker A: Yes. It's fragmented.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So I think one interesting thing is most people, they just use one phone.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: They're either an Apple user or an Android user. They live inside that one operation, so they don't even know how the other wallet works. And I think most people assume that Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are the same just in different operating systems, and that's not true. Google Wallet and Apple Wallet are quite different. They do a lot of the same things, but they have different from, uh, a development standpoint. They have different APIs, they have different schemas, they have different features and functionality that companies can take advantage of. And that's all kind of based on where Apple and Google go as a company and who they are as companies. Right. Apple is predominantly a hardware company, and privacy and security is very important to them. Um, Google is a software company predominantly. They've made their fortune on data and ads. And so I think the wallets tend to reflect the larger organizations. And it becomes a tall task to develop across two ecosystems. You want to add Samsung in there, that's three ecosystems you have to develop into. So it's a big engineering task to even set up the pass or the ticket to begin with or the card, and then you have to manage those integrations ongoing. So that's why most teams, most companies stop at basic issuance of a card or a pass, and they don't actually, um, use a lot of these engagement and marketing features that Apple and Google have built into the wallet. Um, you know, just to give you an idea of how hard this is, you know, there's one company that I think, from a loyalty standpoint, has really nailed Apple Wallet, and that's square.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you've ever been to a coffee shop and you just paid with Apple Pay and you get a notification, uh, that says, hey, would you like to join the coffee shop loyalty program? That notification pops up on your phone from making the payment. Right. And so it's very streamlined and square built that, but it took them three years and they still only support Apple Wallet. They don't support that for Google Wallet from a loyalty perspective. So, you know, Square is a fantastic engineering team. And if it takes them that long, the idea that a sports team or a retailer who are typically strapped for engineering resources, it's just out of the question for actually building something that's engaging in the wallets.

Speaker B: So for most people, I think they think of the wallet as something that's know you have your, your tickets in. So I'm flying tomorrow. I've already got my boarding pass in my, in my Apple Wallet. I've got football tickets, I've got, uh, other things in there. But what, what are people, when they're just thinking of as a ticketing piece, what are they missing? What's the, the bells and whistles that the wallet brings that most people necessarily don't even think about?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's three main types of cards you can mark. Google calls them wallet objects. Three main buckets of things you can build in the wallets. Payment cards. So that's credit, debit, prepaid, Visa. There's this middle kind of nebulous, uh, world of what Apple calls passes, or Google calls Google Objects. And that could be a ticket, a loyalty card, a gift card, a, uh, boarding pass, insurance card. And then there's this new third bucket that's kind, uh, of interesting and that's access passes. So this actually allows you to program the secure chip in a phone. And so let's say you're Marriott and you want to stop issuing plastic room keys, you can move that to Apple and Google Wallet. But you know what happens if your guest is out late and their phone dies? How do they get into the room? Well, with this access pass, it actually can program the secure element in the phone which allows you to wave your dead phone in front of the door and it'll still open it.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: So anyways, that middle bucket, going back to your question, passes our wallet objects. That is where a lot of the marketing functionality lives within the wallet today. Now, um, that could change in the future. But if, you know, when you think about a loyalty card or a gift card or a ticket, those are very interactive experiences.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And so Apple and Google have created ways where if you have a loyalty card, they can push you a Coupon, they can trigger a push notification to the lock screen of the phone, which is, uh, an OS behavior that's typically only reserved for apps. But now in the wallet, since it technically is an app, you can actually trigger a push notification. So if you have a ticket to a sporting event, they can remind you you have it. They can set a geofence through the wallet around the gates of the stadium. So right when you walk into the gate, it pops up and says, hey, don't forget you have this ticket, right? Airlines do that for, for the airport because it helps people move faster through security, helps people move faster into the sporting event. But you can also use that functionality for promotional aspects. Um, maybe you have an FL team has a sponsor that they want to feature to that customer as they walk through the gate. So they're thinking, hey, Bud Light sounds pretty nice. I just got an offer for a Bud Light. I'm just going to go to concession and I'm going to tap my phone to redeem it right at concession. So a lot of that functionality people don't even know exist. And that's what our platform does really well, is we open that up and make it really easy to, um, leverage and to measure.

Speaker B: And then how much are you linking into? For example, let's take the football club, so you're going into the stadium, how much are you linking into the database about the fans? So knowing that, you know, how much credit do I have on my, in my fan points or how often do I go to games, or what time do I get into the stadiums, can you start to actually then tailor some of those experiences based on that? So I'm thinking I go into the game, they give me an extra £5 on my fan points and I go, I use that to redeem a beer before the game.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So I think there's two, two sides of that question. Number one, the way that data on the pass or inside the wallet updates is virtually instantly. Um, and so if you want to update your iOS app, you have to go through an approval process, right? But through Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, you can make changes to any data on the pass. When we say data, that could be just a little field up in the right hand corner of the pass that says balance. Right. We want that to be a real time balance that's updated when you're making, you're making payments. For example, the COVID image on the pass, that can change. So maybe you want a fan, a team wants to feature a different sponsor for every game. Um, if the fan gets A reward or an offer, a barcode can appear, right, that you can redeem it at pos and that's kind of how the pass is architected. And so all of those different fields can be connected into different data sources. So, sure, we're definitely connecting the wallet and the pass into CRM. So we're pulling personal information from your fan database into the wallet to make it a personalized experience. If you have some kind of, uh, closed loop, you know, currency or a balance, you know, Yankees bucks or whatever that you can spend at the ballpark, that real time balance is being pulled in from another data source. And then of course, we connect into POS companies like we work with Shift4, who powers POS for a lot of the stadiums in the United States. Uh, and so we can close the loop on the redemption of offers in the wallet. And we know who received one, who redeemed it, how much money did they spend?

Speaker B: Wow, that's getting pretty granular. Now you mentioned, um, sort of comparison to apps. Now there are so many teams who are out there who spent a lot of money, um, invested a lot of time in building very new and quite impressive apps. Are people looking at the wallet as an alternative to that app, or are they looking at it as a complementary source? Or is it just different and for different use cases?

Speaker A: I think it's, you know, when we started this business, people were asking this question a lot, you know, like, hey, well, I just spent all this money on an app. Is this going to cannibalize my app? And when we said, well, does your app cannibalize your website? Right? You know, like, we don't live in a vacuum. We live in a world where technology all connects as an ecosystem. And I think smart business owners know they have to meet customers or meet fans where they are, right? And that's why companies have an Instagram strategy. That's why Companies have a TikTok strategy, right? Customers are already there. You got to be there. And what we're saying is more people are using the wallet today than TikTok. Why don't you have a wallet strategy? But what's nice about the wallet is any wallet pass can be deep linked to an app. And so they can kind of play off of each other, right? So if you're in, if you're in a busy stadium, sometimes you don't have service, cell service, right? And you may not be able to load the app, but the wallet is available online and offline, so you can always load the wallet. You can use the wallet for certain things that are, you know, a little bit more top of mind, you just are, you know, double clicking the side, for example, and then you can deep link people into the app for, you know, deeper fan experiences. So, um, you know, going back to the boarding pass example, airlines have been doing this for years, right? Airlines, every single airline has an add to wallet functionality for the boarding pass. All of those airlines also have mobile apps. Right. So it's just a new part of the digital ecosystem, but it's going to be here for a long time to come. But retailers, for example, every single retailer wants you to download their app. People don't want to do that. There is app fatigue. And so I think it depends on who you are and how strong your app penetration is. But the wallet is always going to be a lighter weight interface than the app because it's pre installed and it's one click to adopt a card or a pass or a ticket versus sending someone to the app store, making them download an app, log in, set up an account, share data with you. So I think you just got to use them for different purposes and they need to be connected.

Speaker B: So within the sports world, can you give us an example who's using Badge today and what sort of the strongest use cases that you're seeing coming out of their usage?

Speaker A: Yeah. So sports is interesting because our business, we serve, we sell directly to brands, banks, retail, retailers and then we will sell into platforms as well. And so sometimes we'll look at an industry that we want to serve like sports, and say, well, what's the fastest way to go to market here? And one thing that is difficult about sports and sports teams is they don't have a lot of development resources. So we chose to go to market in the United States through a partnership with Shift4. Shift4 is the POS system for I would say most of venues and professional teams across the four major leagues and the ncaa. And so that gives us a footprint in those stadiums and with those teams out of the box. And it makes Badge no code for these teams out of the box. We have several teams piloting now across the NFL and mls. Um, don't want to name them today because we are going to do a formal announcement soon. But you know, but, but it's going well and, and you know, where we started with some of these teams and leagues is loyalty and membership. Right. Um, which is such an interesting concept for sports and fandom because it is so, uh, it's so much more wrapped around identity. Right. Like the way it kind of works Is you, if you're a season ticket holder, you have certain benefits at, as a season ticket holder, we extend those benefits into Apple Wallet, into Google Wallet, make them easy to use, easy to redeem. That could be an evergreen discount at concessions, that could be access to field passes, access, uh, to meeting up with the players after the game, stuff like that. So all of that, all those benefits can be delivered in a contextual and timely way to the wallet and all

Speaker B: the other things that sort of use cases that are emerging as, as the teams use it more and more that you didn't expect. Um, other, like there's some stuff that you would expect that they would use around loyalty or purchases and stuff. But are you seeing particular ones that are just developing that you know, you never thought of?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, well, I think one that is you mentioned already briefly, but it is becoming something that we hear from companies and teams more and more is identity. What can we learn about these fans? How can we use the wallet as a new surface to collect new data and pull that data back into the data warehouse to inform some of the decisions they make as an organization? So I think rather than just this being about loyalty, it's really the loyalty card is almost always connected to some kind of fan ID or customer id. And I think that's been an important one for the teams we've worked with, uh, recently.

Speaker B: And you mentioned that badge is being used in other verticals. So retail and financial services, what's the differences you're seeing between those verticals and say the sports industry and are there things that you think the sports industry could learn in their adoption of wallet technology that they could learn from the financial services and the retailers?

Speaker A: One of the interesting things that we're seeing in financial services is this idea of card linked offers. As a, as a credit card holder, you are able to make payments with that credit card, but you also have other cardholder benefits.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You get points presumably that accrue when you, when you spend more money. And many people don't even know these exist. But if you log into your bank portal and you scroll down, you'll see all these offers from household name brands, you know, 10% off and 15% off here. And we see this concept of offers, uh, you need to claim across multiple industries. You see it in grocery with the CPGs and you know, coupons and coupon clipping. We see it in financial services with card linked offers connected to a credit card. And these are mature ecosystems, right. The offers all live in a repository. They can be pulled into Our system via API. Um, and it becomes programmatic, where you can surface personalized offers to Charlie or to Eric based on the data you have about them. So I think that's something the sports industry can definitely learn. Uh, the sports industry has their own version of this with sponsorships. And I think what's interesting about grocery, for example, like we know grocery margins are so small, razor thin margins. And so they rely on these CPGs to fund a lot of these offers that the consumer sees. And I think the sports, sports teams have the opportunity to do the same thing. Right? And it can start with just, you know, putting a, uh, sponsor's logo in the wallet. Right? You're now you have your beer sponsor or your, your insurance sponsor at the top of the wallet. You hear this concept a lot. And so those eyeballs are important. And then, you know, again, you can use some of these marketing functionalities to deliver timely offers to a consumer while they're in stadium or while they're outside of stadium.

Speaker B: So from a sports perspective, if you could have a dream client, who would it be?

Speaker A: Wow. Maybe Ticketmaster. Right? I mean, that would give us a lot of breadth. You know, like I said, we do work with platforms and we also work directly with the teams and the brands. But, um, yeah, I mean, I think any of these big ticketing companies are really interesting. AEG Ticketing, Ticketmaster, and then, you know, just personally from up in Louisville, Kentucky. So we don't have professional sports, but everyone follows Lamar Jackson. And so he, uh, was the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback at the University of Louisville. And so somehow, some way, the Baltimore Ravens have become my team. And I would love to work with them because I'd love to, to go, go down there and see a game and see Lamar and see our software running inside the stadium.

Speaker B: Well, maybe we make sure to get somebody from the Ravens. Listen to this and see if we can make that happen. Now one of the things that has amazed me with wallet technology is actually just the sheer adoption. You talked before about the number of people with wallet, um, the wallet on their phone, you know, more than TikTok. How are you seeing consumers expectations of what they can do with their wallet change from the clients that you're working with? And just talking to people generally within the industry around it, I think that

Speaker A: is the word, is expectation. Consumers now expect businesses to be in the wallet. And there's been a couple companies that have held out for different reasons. Walmart is one of them. If you go to Walmart, to my knowledge, and I used to Live in Bentonville. So I know this firsthand. You can't use Apple Pay, they have um, Walmart pay. And the reason for that is they want to get around the economics of Apple. But I think it frustrates customers that they can't just double click and pay or use their watch to pay, you know what I mean? So there is an expectation, it's coming from the ubiquity of the wallet. It was a great user acquisition story for Apple and Google and Samsung to be able to just ship these phones with the wallet pre installed. And it's actually a really interesting history of the wallet. Um, a lot of people think Apple Wallet came first but it didn't. Google Wallet came first which makes sense because Google is a prolific software developing uh, company. But Google um, I think this was over 10 years ago they didn't have known a device and so they couldn't distribute the wallet. So they had to go out and they had to do a deal with the carriers. So it was a rare deal where I think Verizon T Mobile, Sprint, they were all going to work with Google in this JV to distribute Google Wallet through the phones. And then the carriers got smart and they said you know what, we're going to build our own wallet. And they told Google no and that blocked Google Wallet. And so then the carriers spent I think three years trying to develop their own wallet across all three, you know three or four carriers trying to co develop this wallet that would be pre installed on floor the phone and they couldn't do was such a bad piece of technology that I don't even know if they ever shipped it. And then they called Google back up and they said well I think we'll do a deal now, we'll help you guys get in the wallet. And by that time Apple had already jumped on it. So I think you know we've had wallets are not new, they've been in phones for a long time. There's a couple things that have accelerated wallets recently and I think number one on the heels of the pandemic we moved to contactless payments.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It was something we, you know, we saw QR codes at every table and so that I think accelerated things. I think the airlines helping drive adoption. Uh, and from a payments perspective you're just seeing this be the predominant way people pay now, especially the younger demographic. And so I think that is has now opened the door for all these other use cases to go into the wallet. So we've reached this point of ubiquity. It was a bumpy road, um, and it took a long time, but we're there. And the other thing is Apple and Google Wallet are localized out of the box for 100 countries. So it's truly a global technology.

Speaker B: Now. You're a product guy, right? I mean, you are absolutely a product builder. Um, you can see it the way that you talk about products, the way you talk about development, but how do you approach product development? What's the mix between building features that, you know, meet needs that you know about, versus actually envisaging product features that you think need to be developed, but necessarily the clients can't even think about yet, but you're just that step ahead. How do you sort of balance those sort of different approaches to product development?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think where we started was we knew we needed to develop a number of features too, provide this service at a rudimentary level, right. And so we kind of put all of those features in a bucket and said, let's just start knocking these out because this, these are things we need to build to even be, to even be serviceable. And then you, you go out, you, you know, you try to get your first few customers on board and you try to get your first couple deals done. And all of this is evolving in real time on the pricing and, you know, go to market side too. But in the early days, you're just, you're trying to build anything that somebody wants, right? That's like the, the core concept of product market fit. Building something that the market wants and the market will accept. And so getting those first customers on board and proving that you can drive some value early on is super important. At the same time, your product development switches a little bit at that point in time from where we know we need to build all these features to, hey, let's learn a little bit, let's add, ask some questions to our quest, our customers. Let's look at the data, let's see how people are using it. Let's see where they get stuck. Let's see how this connects into their systems and where the bottlenecks are. And I think you run a risk at that point in time of getting too much data from too few customers. And so at the same time, you're trying to still make some bets on things that you think your ICP will need. But, you know, it is kind, uh, of a push and pull sometimes with customer feedback and what you think the market needs. I think now we're at this point in time where we, our platform is very polished and building things for some of our largest clients that didn't exist in the wallet before. So we're kind of, we're in discovery, uh, mode a little bit now.

Speaker B: Last year you came over to London, you presented at the sportsoft events. How are you thinking about international expansion? So obviously you've got a lot of US clients. You were very well received when you came over to London. Where does international expansion sit in your priority list? And also what differences are you seeing between markets such as the UK versus the US in terms of the way the customers are thinking about things and also the way that consumers are different as well?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, part of the challenge at an early stage of business is prioritization, um, just because you can build all of the, these different things, right. We're just talking, we've talked a lot about loyalty and membership and ticketing and gift cards. But you can build Passports and student IDs and insurance cards and transit cards and all these different things in the wallet and you can do it in a hundred countries. And so where do you start? And you know, how can you come up with a framework that helps you reduce time to value? And again, you have limited Runway to do it right. And so when we took a look at, and we, we learned this the hard way, you know, I think in the early days we were just trying to throw paint at the wall and see what sticks and see where we could drive some value. But from a GEO perspective, there are certain, there are really two factors we look at. We look at wallet adoption, right? So give you an example. The United States or North America has extremely high wallet adoption. Not as high as the uk. The uk, um, more people use the wallet in more ways than in the United States right now. So we look at adoption, we look at the sheer number of people there, you know, for our total addressable market. And then, you know, so I'll give you another example. India, Tons of people in India. Apple Wallet's not even there yet, Right. Or it's just launching. I think they announced it in the, in the news that this week that Apple Pay would be in India soon. So it doesn't make sense for us. Even though there's a ton of people, you know, we feel like we wouldn't have high adoption there. The second one we look at is go to market complexity. So Europe also has high adoption, but there are compliance hurdles with GDPR that make things a little bit less straightforward from a go to market than the United States States or the uk. And so we look at, you know, wallet adoption Go to market complexity and what is the total size of the opportunity within our icp, which is largely enterprise businesses.

Speaker B: Now you've talked a lot about sort of different areas that you could go into and growth and expansion. Now a lot of that's obviously helped by fundraising. And you're just coming off a announcement of, uh, having done a, I think it was a $13.8 million Series A, having previously raised just over 3 million, uh, dollars before. Talk to us a little about the fundraising round, the process of fundraising, you know, what did you learn about the company through going through that process and you know, how did you approach it all?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, it started with, you know, um, Infinity Ventures in qed. Uh, and QED gave us the first term sheet. They co led our seed round at the bottom of the market. And so it was not a great time to be fundraising. But you know, when you're dealing with a pre seed round, which can be, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for some companies, you don't have a choice. You just got to go out there and you got to give it a go. Otherwise, you know, you're not going to get paid, you're not going to be able to feed your family and uh, the business might have to shutter. Right, so, so we were lucky to find two incredible seed investors. And I called them incredible because they're very well established. The Infinity guys were all on the M and a team at PayPal before they started Infinity Ventures. And then QED is kind of known in the industry as the godfather of fintech investing. Right. And so we were lucky to have this really well established large fintech fund that typically doesn't do seed rounds, write us a term sheet. And I think that was a great signal to the market. And, and then we were able to have this team of former employees of PayPal who saw a ton of different deals come across their desk with great networks that can help us validate things really early on. So I think that was huge. We got really, really lucky with our seed investors and they helped us help us grow early on, helped us introduce us to some of our first customers and when we started to make a name for ourselves a little bit, you know, the Valley is very small and so there were a lot of people that were reaching out to us and we didn't feel like it was time to fundraise and so we kind of just kept them in a list and said, hey, we'll reach out to you when it's time. However, there were there always, there's always a Couple funds that you just always take their call, right? And you know, certain VCs that if, if they send you an email, you respond. And so one of those was a fund called ttb. And the reason that we were so high on them is they had just added a new partner over there named Lynn Lobby. And Lynn is a new vc, but she is a very seasoned, very experienced operator. And she had taken a company called Cardlytics for from 0 to 350 million or whatever and IPO'd it. And there's a lot of similarities in the business that she built, in the business we're building today. And so, yeah, we developed a relationship with her over a couple months and I think she could kind of sense that we were getting closer, we would share some numbers with her and stuff like that. She could feel that we were getting ready to go out for a fundraise and she called us and said, hey, why don't we just do a deal now? And um, so she preempted the Series A and we were able to kind of arrive on a valuation that we thought was mutually disagreeable. And it was a great deal for us. And it saved me a bunch of time from going out and doing, you know, a full fundraise and meeting with 50, 70, 100 funds. And um, we really felt like she was the right partner for us at this phase because of her operating experience and, um, building something similar.

Speaker B: Now, bradj is what, three years old, four years old? As a company, what's been your biggest learning so far? Whether it's about you, whether it's about the team, whether it's about the market, what's the thing that you feel has been the biggest learning in that time?

Speaker A: I think you're just gonna be wrong so much. You know, a lot of people that start companies, they have this big idea and they think it's going to go exactly how it's going to go. And I will take the field on that bet anytime because things change, markets change, technology changes, um, there's macro, um, issues with what's going on that you have to deal with that can affect supply chain or affect fundraising. And so you just got to be nimble and you just of kind got to be ready to wake up one day and for things to be a little different and for a bet that you made or an investment that you made to not pan out. And I think what I've learned is to just have a short memory, um, you know, ah. And I think that comes from my football days and playing defensive back you get burned a lot, right? You're facing up against a receiver that's faster than you, taller than you, and he knows where he's going. But you got to get back to the line of script image, uh, you know, on the next play. And I think that that lesson applies to startups is you're going to be wrong a lot. Things aren't going to work out, but you need to keep moving and you need to learn quickly. And the faster you can kind of go through those cycles, the faster the company will grow and the faster you'll start to formulate your opinion of the market and be able to kind of steer the company. So I think that's the biggest learning, is you're just going to be wrong and that's okay.

Speaker B: Now what's the biggest risk here? I mean, is there, you mentioned app fatigue before. Is there an element of wallet fatigue that can potentially come in? Is it that maybe there are some people who use your platform or use other people's, your competitors platforms and you know, they end up bombarding their customers with too many push notifications and then people just turn it all off? Where's the risk in this for?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think what you're talking about is the engagement part of the wallet and um, the messaging component of the wallet, and you're alluding to email marketing has become spammy and has reduced its efficacy, has been reduced over time. Um, and then this new world of SMS marketing kind of came to be and that meant it new unicorns along the way and that's been a little spammy as well. And I think you've seen Apple respond to that by uh, filtering text messages now. And Google responded very similar to email marketing with Gmail in the promotions tab. So I think what's different here is we work directly with Apple and Google, they own the wallets. We are the infrastructure around the wallet. And so there are guardrails already in place for number of messages you can send to a customer through the wallet. And I think we work with Apple and Google on strategies for preserving the integrity of the channel. And I think that over time will build a better consumer experience and lead to less deactivations, less people uninstalling wallet passes or the wallet altogether. And I think that's super important for both companies, especially for Apple because they're taking transaction fees they can't really afford for people to be uninstalling, uh, the wallet. So it is definitely a joint venture. But our business dies if the channel dies. Right. And if people stop using the Wallet. So we are very careful about that. We have built a few playbooks and best practices that we teach our customers when they come on board. I think most marketers that are using our platform are using the Wallet for a messaging surface. They understand that this is not the channel to run your email marketing strategy. It's more contextual, it's more timely, it's more intimate, and it shouldn't be abused.

Speaker B: So, final question then. What can we expect to see from Badge for the rest of 2026? What's your big focuses for this year?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think for us, we just doubled headcount in the past couple months and so we're starting to pick up speed and I think we'll hopefully add some more employees. But, um, we have these big partnerships. Shift 4 is one of them. Um, we're getting ready to announce an even bigger partnership than Shift four. And just because we have these massive partners doesn't mean that you can just turn, you know, turn it on for all of their downstream merchants or teams. So I think one of the big focuses for us is expansion and, you know, working with our partners to roll this out in an efficient way to all of the teams or merchants that they're working with. We started really in retail and commerce and sports and entertainment, and, you know, we're bringing on Stripe as an investor and Synchrony Financial as an investor. An investor. So definitely expanding into financial services this year. And then, I think, you know, we're going to continue to learn and see what the market does and see how consumers use the wallet. But, um, uh, I think, you know, the focus right now is really on.

Speaker B: Fantastic. And with that, I think it's time to wrap up. But, um, Eric, thank you so much for joining us on the Sportsloft podcast today. Huge congratulations on everything that you've built so far and obviously the fundraiser that you've recently announced. We're looking forward to seeing lots and lots of activations from different teams and sponsors and, uh, event owners using Badge. But thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker A: Thanks, Charlie. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: And big thank you to all our listeners. Thanks, Azeba, for joining us today. Do check us out on, uh, social, on LinkedIn especially, and we've got the new website coming soon as well, so that's something to look forward to. And, uh, for those of you who haven't yet, uh, got your tickets, make sure you check out the, uh, upcoming Sports Loft Summit as well, which is going to be in May this year in London, where we're going to have, uh, some more fantastic companies, just like, uh, Eric presented at last year, joining us at the Sports Loft Summit. So with that, thank you very much and see you next time in the Sports Loft sa.