Turning Banking Apps Into Billboards? The Buzz Pivot

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.

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