>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California,
in the heart of Silicon Valley.
It's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016.
(techno music)
Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls.
>> Well welcome back to San Jose, along with Jeff Frick,
I'm John Walls, you're watching this here on theCUBE.
Glad to have you along for the ride as we continue our
coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016.
We've talked a lot about passion here, we've talked a lot
about energy and belief and vitality.
And our next guest, I think embodies all of those qualities.
Nick Hoffman, who's the owner and founder of Share a Refund,
who was a big award winner here yesterday
in the App Showdown.
Nick, glad to have you on theCUBE, and looking forward
to learning more about the product.
Good to see you, sir. >> Thank you gentlemen.
>> Yeah, so Share a Refund.
>> Let's talk about Share a Refund first,
and then we'll get into the competition and what happened.
So tell us about what you do first.
>> Right, so Share a Refund is a shipment auditing platform.
You can think of us like auto correct for your
FedEx or UPS invoices, so we're looking for late shipments,
billing mistakes, any overcharges in general that you're
paying for as a customer.
And so we'll audit each shipment on your invoice,
looking for these charges, and automatically file claims
on your behalf to get refunds when you're paying too much.
And our work is done 100% on a performance basis,
in that there's no upfront or ongoing fees.
It's just a split of the savings that we deliver.
So we use the moniker Found Money,
Because it's all upside, there's no risk.
It's just a complete win for businesses.
>> So, what-- >> So, I make money,
or you make money that if I get a 1000 dollars back in
shipping you get a cut of that.
>> Nick: Right.
>> Because of what you did for me.
>> Nick: And we split it 50/50.
>> But how much money is there?
I mean, FedEx is known right when it absolutely,
positively has to be there overnight.
I mean, you think of those guys as just
rock solid in their process and delivery.
Sounds like there's a little bit of less than perfection
that you can take advantage of.
>> I have tons of respect for FedEx and UPS.
When you think about the logistics networks that they've
built it is absolutely impressive.
The truth is, these delivery guarantees,
even one minute late, it happens.
And on average, 4.5% of all the shipments
that we look at, we get refunds on.
So that's a heuristic into the savings that we deliver back
to customers, so they can expect to see somewhere in the
range of two to 4% real savings on each shipping invoice.
>> And are you pulling the, because the good news
about those guys is they scan everything
every step of the way.
So I imagine you're tapping into that network, where
you're getting real-time data as to what actually happened.
>> Correct, so tracking events are in our system
and available throughout all the interfaces
that we built into Share a Refund.
>> John: Alright so the reason why you're here,
is that not only because you had a great idea, but there's
several competitions that are based here at the show.
One of them is the Apps Showdown.
And Nick's company was one about I think 70 or 80 it was,
who developed apps over a certain timeframe,
so about an eight month window.
Submitted them to a judges' panel review, and you guys got
to the ten finalists and then were selected after a
two minute quick pitch, as the winner and the recipient of
$100,000 yesterday >> Woo-hoo!
>> And so show us your reaction when you went up on stage.
(hosts chuckling)
Yeah. (laughing) >> Rocky!
>> I felt like we were watching Rocky!
You know, when you got the award from Scott Cook.
So, tell us about the thrill of that moment
and being announced the winner
with some really, really good competitors.
>> Unbelievable, and the confetti was a surprise,
so I didn't anticipate that.
But you know really, it's just validation.
It was several years of hard work in the making to build
Share a Refund, so outside of market success,
which we're seeing, to really be recognized
by such a great tech company is just a tremendous honor.
>> So tell us about being part of the ecosystem.
Because part of the requirement for the contest was you
could not have submitted your app before, I think it was
January of this year, so it sounds like you guys had this
application outside of the QuickBooks ecosystem, now you're
in the QuickBooks ecosystem.
How does that impact your guys' customer base,
your go-to-market, and what is it like
to partner with QuickBooks and be part of this ecosystem?
>> Right, so when we originally developed Share a Refund,
I didn't think of Intuit as a partner initially.
And trying to figure out okay, how do I scale this business,
how do I break through obscurity.
I looked for support.
And in doing so, recognized QuickBooks,
and all of the customers that they have on QuickBooks
as potential candidates to benefit from shipment auditing
as a performance based service.
So I got in contact with the developer relations team at
Intuit, who by the way, is absolutely wonderful.
Every person on that team is extremely nurturing,
which is a breath of fresh air I think.
Dealing with large companies sometimes you get a different
persona out of those companies, but with Intuit,
everyone's very down to earth and welcoming and supportive.
And so, working with that team and the community of
developers like myself,
collaborating around the Intuit network,
I was able to build Share a Refund as a QuickBooks app.
And ever since then, we've been able to get more exposure
through QuickBooks for our app,
and grow our customer base, and just provide a great service
to more customers in general.
>> Now, do you have it in other
kind of app ecosystems as well?
I would imagine like just jumps in my head, AWS
obviously would be a potential partner.
Because this is something that could be used across a
wide spectrum of potential ecosystems.
And if so, that's great and then how does the Intuit
ecosystem and support from a developer point of view,
because everybody wants you.
Everybody wants developers
building stuff in their ecosystem.
So how do they compare with some of these other
experiences that you've had?
>> Sure, and there's a lot in there
so I'll parse it as best as I can remember it.
But in terms of AWS I'm drinking the Kool-Aid.
So I'm a systems architecture guy.
I went to all the developer coaching seminars, etc.
for Amazon, and that's part of the genius
behind Share a Refund, in how we provide a lot
of our real-time services is through the services of AWS.
So in general, Amazon's a great partner to Share a Refund.
Not so much from a channel for bringing us new customers,
but more from an infrastructure perspective.
>> Jeff: Okay.
>> And that said, I'd love to talk to Amazon venture guys,
to sit down and chat with them about how we can maybe scale
Share a Refund even further than our reach is now.
Back to your second question, about what other app stores
are you integrated with?
So we just finished an integration with Oracle.
A similar experience there, wonderful team,
worked with the sales team there to get our app launched.
In addition to that, just rifling off the list, I'm probably
going to forget a few, but BigCommerce, Shopify is a good
partner of ours, 3dcart, a lot of marketplaces that,
ShipStation we're dealing with.
So there's a lot of guys out there that you know, have a
potential to offer a value added service to their customers
and they recognize Share a Refund as being nothing but a win
for everybody involved.
>> It's just a classic case of kind of the new age
application development.
Where you basically found a problem, you found money,
there's found money and by assembling data that's already
out there with a little bit of your own secret sauce,
API's and cloud package up a brand new offering
that can start delivering
value to the marketplace. >> Well said, 100%.
>> Jeff: Love it.
>> John: He can join the team if you want.
(laughs)
>> I'm going to go back and check my ship notices.
>> And which we all should do, right?
I mean because everyone,
you do lose things. >> Who's got time, right?
>> Of course we're not shipping like you know, en masse,
but anyway, so but this is just one thing that you're doing
which I found interesting,
we're going to talk a little bit about
really I think it blends into that spirit that we've talked
a lot about here.
So you've got Share a Refund, very successful experiment
as you say, that's gone well.
But you've got another pet project you've been working on
for an extended period of time,
I have some pictures here, actually on Nick's smartphone,
that I'm going to share with you.
But tell us about this, the world's smallest, cheapest,
and smartest street light.
>> Right.
>> So what are you up to with that?
And while you're doing that, I'm going to turn this around
and we'll get a shot of it on your phone.
>> Yeah, so the venture that I really want to do in life is
called Absolumen, it's the name of the product,
and what we're trying to build is a streetlight
about the size of a Pringles can, and sell that to
municipalities at a good rate.
And so in the past five years,
myself and my partner, Usan Uda,
we've built what is Absolumen.
And we're ready to launch that Q1 of next year.
>> And the trick here, is it's a 100 watt bulb,
as opposed to the 250s that usually are used.
And we have some befores and afters
here if I can get to them.
I think I have to go back one more swipe.
So this is the before shot >> Right.
>> That you have of your product, as you can see its rather
dark, (chuckles) not much going on there.
And then, the after. >> That's it, you got it.
>> I don't know if that comes out quite as well on camera
as it would like, but it's a stark contrast
and I would think that you've got a pretty good
market for this thing,
so tell us about where are you going to go with this
and what do you think the future holds?
>> Right, so that replaces a standard 250 watt high pressure
sodium bulb, and it consumes two-fifths of the energy.
And just like Share a Refund how we are finding money,
there's found money in providing a better light on the end
of every light pole.
So, with that in mind, we built the hardware
to make the LED go and then we build
a control board to go on the back.
So it's going to have GPS, it has a long range radio in it,
so it can go 16km point of sight through a company called
Symtech, who makes great technology.
And we also have a wifi stack in it for
commissioning and controls on location.
All of that is of course going to be integrated into AWSIOT,
and we'll give field workers an app on their phone,
that they can go and administrate the infrastructure from.
You look at L.A., you know there's 220,000
street lights in L.A. and there's 200 plus different brands.
I mean, talk about a mess, they've got maps the size of this
table, and when a lights out, they're like,
okay what is that pole?
One, two, three, four on what like 1625 Main Street?
So they show up to the street, they know a
pole is out, but they're all off because it's daytime.
So now, they have to flick them on and off
one at a time to see which one is broken,
send a man up in a boom, the thing weighs 40 lbs.,
its just totally inefficient and the whole process could be
streamlined, and that's what I intend to do.
>> And is this retro-fittable?
I mean, that's probably not the right word,
but you've got these long standing,
these legacy light posts up there.
I mean, how does this thing fit into that?
>> Right, so, they have a standard two and three-eighths inch
what we call a slip fitter, so it's just a pipe, and this
slides right over the top and then there's one finger screw
that puts it on. >> So it will work.
>> Yep. >> Great.
>> Five minute install, no big deal.
>> Great ideas, which again I think is really the inspiration
of this show, so we thank you for sharing that.
>> A little extra capital in the pocket to help develop.
>> That's right so a hundred grand on that.
But more importantly congratulations on winning
the contest, the Apps Showdown.
And we do wish you the best of luck because I think the
lights on and Nick's home. (laughs)
So, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE.
>> Yeah, and I just wanted to leave with a special thanks
to the Intuit developer relations team,
for putting on a great contest,
and being so inspiring and nurturing
to the developer community.
And I would say to any developer that wants to build an app
right now, that QuickBooks is the best place to look
to make your app a success.
Based off of the potential in the market and also the
support you're going to get from that team.
And then also, anybody that's trying to build an app,
just make sure that you're focused on solving
real problems with that app.
And when you go about building that app,
it has to be easy for people to use.
Nobody wants an extra interface anymore,
nobody wants a lengthy sign-up process,
and they don't want to talk on the phone
with anybody about coaching. (laughs)
So you better make it fast, you better make it easy,
and make it simple to use.
>> I think you just made it for Jeff and me. (laughs)
Spoken like a $100,000 winner.
Nick, thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thanks.
>> Great advice, great insight.
Nick Hoffman, the owner and
founder of Share a Refund, the winner of the $100,000
Apps Showdown here at QuickBooks Connect 2016.
Back with more on theCUBE, from San Jose in just a bit.
(upbeat music)