The battle is on. It’s time to pick a winner.
We met one-on-one with the top 6 to hear their pitch for the top spot.
Naveen Nand, founder of WalletCard, has built a digital platform for effectively tracking and managing workplace safety & certification requirements for regulatory compliance. We recently caught up with Naveen to learn more about his inspiration behind the idea, his experience as an entrepreneur and his plans to go the distance.
What problem were you trying to solve when you started WalletCard?
One night, a friend of mine pulled out a wallet that looked like it belonged to George Costanza. There were a bunch of different things in there, but the biggest shock was the 10 different workplace certificates he had. That night I went on a quest to find a solution to his wallet problem in a way that allowed employers to verify workplace credentials digitally.
Why should people be excited about WalletCard?
One of our missions is to reduce workplace injuries and fatalities, and another is to create a system of continuous training. There is a lot of data demonstrating how retraining can lower injury rates by 42%. That’s a pretty drastic reduction when you consider that North American employers spend over $250 billion in injury costs. Using paper-based or spreadsheet-based systems are why they typically don’t find expired certificates until it’s too late.
Tell us about the success you’ve found already
We started this quest by releasing an MVP to see if there was any usage. In May 2018, we had 1,000 certificates and now we have a 27,000. We went from managing 100 employers to over 1,000. WalletCard is also a part of our client’s day-to-day practices, particularly by our training partners who are managing certificates with their customers.
What kind of expertise is your team bringing to WalletCard?
Michael, our Chief Growth Officer and co-founder, comes from an operations background for some of the top restaurant brands in western Canada. Quinn, our CTO and co-founder, is a self-taught developer—he’s the type of personality that knows he can do anything he puts his mind to. For myself, I’ve spent over 15 years in occupational health and safety, including co-founding a North American safety training company.
How do you see your company growing?
We want to be seeing 3 million in revenue in 2 years. By 2024, we want to be at 48 million in revenue. I do see the potential to be a market leader and a billion-dollar company. Safety tech is an emerging industry for tech and investing.
What would the $155K investment mean for your company?
This would be part of a larger round we’re raising. The use of those funds would be to scale our marketing and onboarding teams. That will allow us to accelerate our growth. We got to 27,000 certificates with only a team of 3. By adding a few more team members over the next two years, those numbers will significantly increase.
What has this experience taught you about the entrepreneurial journey?
Through Innovate BC and their Venture Accelerator Program, I learned about customer discovery. If you told me about customer discovery 5 years ago, I wouldn’t know what you were talking about. As silly as it might sound, it would have saved us the $40,000 we invested in our minimum viable product. As soon as we launched that MVP and heard from our customers, it sent us in a whole new direction.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who want to participate next year?
If a company has made it to the Top 24, make sure you know your sh*t. I practiced my 10-minute pitch a lot and still made some mistakes. But it would have been worse if I didn’t practice the cadence, rhythm, speed and timing makes sure it fit within the time limit. The last thing you want is to be clapped off stage.
Connect with Naveen. Learn more about WalletCard.
Follow along on our blog as we count down to the March 12th finale.
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