We were lucky to catch up with Nick Eischens recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Nick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
We’ve all met someone who’s drastically changed our life – that person who’s had a huge impact on our personal success. They’ve opened doors to countless opportunities and helped us grow into the person we are today.
Imagine how different your life would be if you never met that person…
Sadly, millions of missed connections happen everyday. People are losing out on countless opportunities to connect with more people who would have a positive impact on them, because they don’t have a way to quickly make connections in their fast-paced lives.
Our mission at Popl is to help you meet and connect with as many people as you can, because you never know who will change your life.
Nick, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m the COO and co-founder of Popl. My co-founder, Jason, and I met in college and we’ve been best friends for 7 years. While we were at UCLA, we shared a dream of starting a company together and we made that dream come to life shortly after graduating.
As Popl’s Chief Operating Officer, my role is to ensure everything in the business is operating effectively both internally with our employees and externally with our customers. People and culture is one of my highest priorities and I have frequent check-ins with all our employees to make sure we’re building the best culture. I also oversee our entire supply chain, from manufacturing new products to getting them in the hands of our customers. I love creating scalable systems that make everyone’s life easier as we grow from 25 to 100 to 1000+ employees.
About Popl:
Gone are the times of exchanging paper business cards. In 2022, we’re all connecting digitally. That’s where Popl comes in. Popl is the #1 Digital Business Card Platform for teams and individuals. Popl tap-to-share hardware products (cards, phone tags, wristbands, etc) combined with the Popl mobile app allow you to instantly share your personalized digital business card with anyone you meet.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
When we started Popl, we were 2 recent college grads working out of our apartment. We had no money and no traction, but we had a big vision. We had to do everything ourselves if we wanted to make this work, so we created a website to sell our first product – a cheap phone sticker stuck to an instruction card.
We didn’t have any money to invest in nicer materials or cool packaging. The first product didn’t have to be a beautiful, retail-ready product; it just needed to work.
We also didn’t have any money to spend on marketing, so we filmed our own videos and posted them on TikTok. Our goal was to film at least 3 videos every day. In a strike of good luck, one of our videos went super viral and our sales started to increase! Here’s that viral TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@popl/video/6791976659705728262?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7015440183621780998
We still didn’t have any money for a warehouse to ship orders, so I spent 3+ hours every night packing orders to drop off at the post office the next day.
After ~6 months of selling our products, we proved that we had a viable business! We were able to raise $50k from angel investors and we used the money to improve our products and get a warehouse to ship orders.
For the first year of business, every dollar we made went right back into the company.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Be scrappy. When you’re just getting started, do as much as you can with as little money as possible.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Every startup faces the major challenge of proving themselves as a legitimate business to their customers. People seem to be inherently doubtful of new ideas and new behaviors. Just because you have a product that works, doesn’t mean people are going to buy into it.
In the early days at Popl, different people told us why the business wasn’t going to work almost everyday. But that didn’t stop us. We knew it was going to work – we just had to keep working to make it work. One of the best things we learned at Y Combinator is the importance of talking to your customers. In talking to your customers, you learn the things they love and the things they hate about your product so you can make the necessary improvements and make something that people actually want.
I personally call our users every week, and we continue to build Popl’s value offering based on that feedback. Now we have a worldwide user base who evangelizes Popl and can’t live without it. We’re consistently focused on making our users’ lives better and because of that, we’ve built a great brand reputation.
KEY TAKEAWAY: The thing that builds your reputation in your market is consistency. You have to ignore all of the naysayers and focus on building something that people want. Talk to your customers every week and keep going.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://popl.co/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neisch_guy/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-eischens/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/neisch_guy
- Other: My Popl Profile: https://poplme.co/nick