Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How a Rejected Business Card Built a 35M Networking Platform
Transcript
- Lucas: So, you know how we've talked about rejection as a catalyst for so many businesses on this show. But today's story starts with something almost comically small — a rejected business card. Luna: A business card? In 2020? That feels almost retro. Lucas: Right. But that's exactly the point. Mia Torres was laid off from her marketing job in May of 2020 — classic pandemic layoff story. She starts freelancing, and she wants a business card that actually makes people stop scrolling. So she designs this card that's essentially a QR code surrounded by a tiny video thumbnail — it's an interactive card, but it's still a physical object. Luna: Wait, so it's physical but also digital? How does that work? Lucas: The QR code links to a mini portfolio page with a video intro, her calendar, some testimonials. She takes the design to a local print shop and they literally refuse to print it. Said it was 'too unconventional' and would confuse people. They actually rejected her order. Luna: Wow. I can imagine that stings — especially when you're already in a vulnerable spot. Lucas: She told me she sat in her car and cried for about ten minutes. Then she got mad. And that anger turned into: 'Fine, I'll make it digital-only.' She spent the next weekend building a simple web app where you could create a digital business card that looks like a card but is actually a mini landing page — with video, links, a booking widget, all of it. Luna: So she went from rejected physical product to a full digital platform in one weekend? That's fast. Lucas: It was a prototype. Bare bones. But she showed it to three fellow freelancers in a Slack group she was in — and all three asked if they could use it. That was her first signal. She didn't even have a name yet. She called it 'Cardly' for about a week before realising that name was taken by a greeting card company. Luna: Classic. So she pivoted the name, too. What did she land on? Lucas: ConnectCard. Which, honestly, isn't the most creative name, but it's clear. And clarity matters when you're asking someone to replace a fifty-year-old habit. The real magic was in how she validated demand without spending a dime. Luna: Tell me about that — because most founders I talk to think validation requires at least a few thousand dollars for ads or a landing page tool. Lucas: Torres did something smarter. She went on LinkedIn and offered to create free digital business cards for anyone who agreed to a fifteen-minute feedback call. She did fifty of those calls in two weeks. Every single call taught her something — what features people actually wanted, what they were confused by, what they'd pay for. Luna: Fifty calls in two weeks is intense. But I bet she got way richer data than any survey would give her. Lucas: Exactly. And the key insight from those calls was that people didn't just want a digital version of a paper card. They wanted something that could update in real time — like if they changed jobs, the card would automatically reflect that. Nobody was doing that in 2020. The big players like About.me or LinkedIn were static or too broad. Luna: So dynamic updating became the wedge. That's smart. How did she build that without funding? Lucas: She was a decent front-end developer from her marketing days, so she built the MVP herself using no-code tools — Webflow for the landing page, Airtable as the backend, Zapier for the automation. It was held together with digital duct tape. But it worked. Within three months she had two thousand users — all organic, all from those initial calls and word of mouth. Luna: So at what point did she start charging? Lucas: That's the fascinating part. She was terrified to charge. She thought freelancers wouldn't pay. But on call number forty-seven — she remembers the exact number — a user said: 'I would pay ten dollars a month for this if you added calendar sync.' That one sentence unlocked the whole business model. Luna: Forty-seventh call. That's such a founder moment. One piece of feedback that changes everything. Lucas: She launched a freemium model: free tier with one card and basic info, paid tier at nine dollars a month for unlimited cards, custom domains, analytics, and calendar sync. That was June 2021. By December, she had three thousand paying subscribers. Revenue hit about thirty thousand dollars a month — and she was still a solo founder working from her apartment. Luna: That's impressive growth. But didn't she have competition? There were other digital card startups popping up around then. Lucas: Oh, plenty. HiHello, L-Card, even some big companies like Adobe were experimenting. But Torres had a few things going for her. First, she was obsessively focused on a specific niche — freelancers and solopreneurs. She didn't try to sell to enterprise sales teams. Second, her dynamic update feature was genuinely hard to copy because it required integrations with LinkedIn, Twitter, and personal websites — and she built those integrations one by one based on user requests. Luna: So she was building what people actually asked for, not what she guessed they wanted. That's the difference between a product and a feature. Lucas: Exactly. And the turning point came in early 2022. A venture capitalist reached out — someone who'd seen a ConnectCard from a founder they invested in. They offered her a term sheet for two million dollars at a ten million valuation. But Torres said no. Luna: She turned down VC money? That's bold. Why? Lucas: She told me she looked at the term sheet and realised the VC wanted her to grow fast — hire a sales team, go after enterprise clients, hit a hundred million in revenue in three years. But her users were freelancers. They didn't want enterprise features. She'd have to build a completely different product. And the growth metrics she had — thirty thousand dollars a month with no funding — were already sustainable. She was profitable. Luna: So she chose control over scale. That's a rare decision, especially when someone's waving a two-million-dollar check. Lucas: It is rare. And honestly, it's a risky one. But for Torres, it worked. She kept bootstrapping, hired her first employee in March 2022 — a part-time customer support person. Then a second employee in June, a developer. By the end of 2022, she had a team of five and revenue was at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a month. Luna: That's a four-times increase in a year. Without venture capital. What was driving that growth? Lucas: Word of mouth, mostly. But also a clever referral program: every user who referred a friend got a month of premium free. That's not unique, but Torres made it work because the product itself was inherently social — you share your card, someone clicks it, they see how good it is, they want one. It's a natural viral loop. Luna: Right. The card is the marketing. So where is ConnectCard now? Mid-2026 — what's the state of the business? Lucas: Today, ConnectCard has about two hundred thousand active users, with roughly fifteen thousand on the paid tier. Revenue is running at about three and a half million dollars annually. Torres still owns eighty percent of the company — she gave some equity to her first two employees. They've never raised outside capital. And they've expanded beyond freelancers — small businesses are now about forty percent of their user base. Luna: And the valuation? If someone were to buy it today, what would it be worth? Lucas: Based on comparable deals in the digital tools space — think about five to eight times revenue — you're looking at somewhere between seventeen and twenty-eight million dollars. But Torres told me she's not interested in selling. She's having too much fun building features her users actually ask for. Luna: I love that. It's such a counter-narrative to the 'grow at all costs' startup culture. Lucas: It really is. And I think the lesson here is not that you should always reject VC money — for some businesses, it's the right call. But Torres's story shows that rejection, even a small one like a print shop saying no, can force you to think differently. If they'd printed her card, she might have just handed out fifty of them and moved on. Luna: Instead, she built a thirty-five-million-dollar company. All because someone told her her business card was too weird to print. Lucas: That's the beauty of this show — we keep finding these stories. And honestly, putting episodes like this together is one of the reasons we love doing this. Luna: Absolutely. And it's only possible because of listeners who chip in. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, a handful of listeners already support us monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's what keeps this going ad-free. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small group, but it makes a huge difference. And we're grateful for every single one. Anyway, back to Torres — one last thing I found striking. She said the rejection from the print shop was the best thing that ever happened to her career, because it forced her to stop thinking about a product and start thinking about a platform. Luna: That's a great line. And a good reminder that sometimes the obstacle is the way. Lucas: Exactly. For ConnectCard, a rejected business card became a thirty-five-million-dollar networking platform. So next time someone says no to your idea, maybe ask yourself: what if they're accidentally pointing you toward something bigger?