
Turning Banking Apps Into Billboards? The Buzz Pivot

Turning Banking Apps Into Billboards? The Buzz Pivot
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Guest: Joshua Lim, Co-Founder, Buzz, Joel Lim, Co-Founder, Buzz
In 2022, brothers Joshua and Joel Lim set out to eliminate single-use plastics with BeeBag, a gamified reusable bag venture. But after facing a hard truth, that corporates viewed sustainability merely as a "marketing initiative" rather than a necessity, they made the difficult decision to pivot, swapping sustainability for scalability.
Rebranding as Buzz, they are now turning financial apps like Touch 'n Go eWallet into hyper-targeted commerce media networks, acquiring 230,000 users in just 100 days.
The co-founders join us to discuss the journey from "Saving the Planet" to "Saving Brands Money." We explore the "new math" of leveraging item-level data, the economics of behavior-modifying cashbacks, and why they believe banking apps are about to become the next big billboard.
We discuss:
The "Kill Signal": How the founders recognised the lack of Product-Market Fit in BeeBag despite early funding, and the difficult conversation that led to abandoning their original green tech vision.
The "Item-Level" Holy Grail: Why FMCG brands should care more about what you bought (Item Data) than where you shopped (Merchant Data), and how Buzz bridges this gap.
The Receipt Loophole: How Buzz bypasses the nightmare of integrating with thousands of Point-of-Sale (POS) systems by simply paying users to snap photos of their receipts.
Commerce Media 101: The shift from social media ads (based on likes) to financial app ads (based on transaction history), and why banks are positioned to be the publishers of the future.
Lean Economics: How they avoided the notorious "cash burn" of B2C loyalty apps by piggybacking on existing platforms (B2B2C) like Touch 'n Go to acquire users for free.
The Exit Strategy: The roadmap to a $400,000 raise and regional expansion by 2027, with the ultimate goal of an M&A exit via a fintech or media giant.
Presenter: Roshan Kanesan
Producer: Roshan Kanesan, Kishan Sivaswamy
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