From Electrical Engineer to Real Estate Tech CEO | Woo Kim’s Journey

Woo Kim (00:00)
when I first started the company to bring in sales,

I literally started door knocking because I like, how do I sell?

So I just started going to go to Google maps, put down a list of all the real estate brokerages near me. And every day I printed out a sheet of paper with like 10 or 15 brokerages. I drove there, knocked on their door and I said, Hey, I have this. You want to buy it? And they’re like, what are you doing? so luckily, luckily some people felt bad about me and they were like,

Dylan Silver (00:29)
That’s great.

Woo Kim (00:33)
You know, this is cool. Why don’t you come speak during our team meeting,

And I ended up going into a sales meeting. I presented, Hey, this is what I do. I didn’t have a presentation or anything. I just had myself, my phone and my card.

Dylan Silver (02:17)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Orange County, California, background in electrical engineering. founded LynkMe Cards in his senior year of school and is now helping real estate agents modernize their brand. Please welcome Woo Kim. Woo, welcome to the show.

Woo Kim (02:40)
Thank you, Dylan. I’m honored to be on this show.

Dylan Silver (02:45)
I mentioned this before hopping on here, but you found it in 2022, right?

Woo Kim (02:50)
Yes, sir, we did.

Dylan Silver (02:51)
I said you’re doing every electrical engineer student’s dream, which is final year project and then it becomes the real deal. It becomes a company and you’re able to do this full time. Did you know that you were onto something when you came up with the idea?

Woo Kim (03:09)
You know, frankly, Dylan, I had no idea that it will work out to be a business. In fact, the only reason why I created this product back while was in college is because I was sick of carrying resume, like paper resumes. Every time I went to like a trade show or a conventions looking for jobs. And I thought, is there a cooler way to give people my resume? So I put my resume in this electronic card that the NFC tap to.

a tap to pay card essentially, but with your resume. So I would just tap my card to their phone and they would get my resume. So I thought that was really cool. And yeah, I’ve been, created it for myself and my professor at the time I remember came to me in engineering department and he told me, you know, you should do a fast pitch on this, like elevator pitch and on the entrepreneurship department at our college, which is Cal State University, California State University Fullerton. And

They ended up liking the idea. I ended up scoring a second place in the Titan Fast Pitch competition, which they give you like $2,000 to start the company with some guidance. And yeah, that’s what started it all. And to answer your question, Dylan, I had no idea this would amount to anything, but it did. So I’m very happy with that.

Dylan Silver (04:28)
have some questions which forgive me for my ignorance in this field. know a little bit about the NFC. It’s NFC, right? Near field. What is it? Near field. What’s the C? I know a little bit about this because of what Apple pay and the cards and all this. There’s a couple, I’d say a couple different companies doing a similar thing. Is that correct? With the cards that tap. Is this, I was thinking like, man, how come there’s multiple?

Woo Kim (04:36)
near field communication.

is correct. ⁓

Dylan Silver (04:55)
Is it not patentable? Explain this to me, how come I see multiple people doing a similar thing?

Woo Kim (05:00)
That is a fantastic question. And it’s the question that I wondered ⁓ myself when I first started the company. And the idea is the technology NFC ⁓ is not patentable because it was already patented in the 10 year past, which became public to all ⁓ everybody. that technology has been out there for a very, very long time. I think it’s been there for about 20 years now. And so things you can patent are.

the ways you use that technology, but not the technology itself. anybody that means anybody can create a card with the NFC technology in it. That’s why Apple has it. Androids has it. Google has it. Pixel has it. And all these digital business cards companies that you see, they can all use that technology without having having a patent. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (06:36)
It’s interesting, right, Woo, because you being in this space will certainly be the first to understand this. But I remember, I don’t know what year it was. I want to say it must have been somewhere in the 2000, late 2010s, closer to 2020 timeframe, where I was seeing at cash registers, all of these looked like plastic pieces with the NFC logo above the cash register, but no one was using it. And I was like, huh.

weird like I guess maybe at some point in time these will become useful and then slowly you started to see it and now it’s like everywhere everywhere I mean you can go vending machines with the NFC and actually people love those vending machines if you’ve been to the gyms where they have those it’s everywhere right

Woo Kim (07:22)
I think you’re exactly right. think the trend has been not carrying your wallet with physical cards. Everybody nowadays, I don’t want to say everybody, but most people nowadays has their credit card on their phone, right? Whether it’s Apple pay or Google pay. yeah, NFC really made it easy and convenient for people to be able to pay for stuff, which we love.

Dylan Silver (07:46)
Now, I want to get a little granular, but maybe don’t give away all the gold. ⁓ And let’s try to have it so that people who may be on my level can understand a little bit here. when people have the card, right, the card is not necessarily doing computation on the spot, but it’s different from the phone, because the phone can have multiple cards stored, so to speak. So how is this possible? If I have the physical card,

which I would tap and that works, or I have the phone where you can toggle between cards, break down the technology for me.

Woo Kim (08:23)
Yeah, so are you asking about how you’re able to host multiple cars on like Apple wallet? For example?

Dylan Silver (08:29)
Right, your one card, well your credit

card for instance is just one, and it knows that one and not five different ones. it’s not, people, I don’t know, but I’ve not heard of people changing their card for a different card.

Woo Kim (08:44)
Yeah. So that’s a great question. So I will stick to my personal expertise on the card, physical card itself, because you know, Apple wallet, Google wallet, that’s not my cup of tea. So I could be wrong, but on the physical card, if you have a credit card that has a tap to pay enabled, which means you have a little NFC logo on it. You can tap it to pay. So how that works is inside the car. I know it’s a super thin plastic card, right? But there is a chip, microchip, and that’s as thin as a sticker.

So how these cards are made is they have plastics and in between the plastic there’s a paper thinned, sticker thinned chip that has been pressed in between the card. So that’s what allows, and there’s no batteries. So that’s what allows for wireless communication between what the card has, the information your credit card has and the receiver, the cashier register has. And what’s really awesome is there’s no battery and although it’s a chip, but there’s no battery.

Dylan Silver (09:39)
Yeah.

Woo Kim (09:41)
So how it works is through electromagnetic induction, electromagnetic radiation, when you tap your card to a device, so let’s just say your cell phone. Your cell phone is actually the device that’s powering the credit card that you have, which is really cool.

So with your cell phone’s radiating, emitting electromagnetic waves, and as well as a cash register, and when your card detects the waves, it actually powers up the card.

and it emits the information that’s stored in your card. Which is awesome. So you’ll notice a lot of people nowadays carry what’s called RFID protection wallet. So I can’t just take my phone and tap it to your phone and charge your credit card. Take my phone and put it next to your wallet and charge your credit card. And that RFID blocker wallet has been really popular. And so, yeah, it’s a cool little tag.

Dylan Silver (11:14)
It is some amazing, amazing tech. mean, one of the things that, and I know little bit two different worlds, right? The phone versus the physical cards, but I mean, you can just have your whole everything. You can board a plane with your phone. You can pay for gas with your phone. You can get in and out of like concerts using your phone. I guess if you are driving and you get pulled over, you need to have your physical driver’s license, but we may see some type of,

NFC wallet type of license as well. So the only thing that you need is your phone. I want to pivot a bit here, Woo, and ask you about kind of the adoption of this kind of tech in the real estate space. I like to say that, boy, is real estate on the cutting edge of AI, of tech, it seems like. I’m actually in a software engineering boot camp, like a year long course. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that within the timeframe of the boot camp,

AI has improved so much that much of what we’re doing is now like obsolete. But then also in the real estate space, the adoption is almost greater than in any other space that I personally have seen. And so have you seen that? Have you seen real estate agents and the like people involved in the space just be super gung ho about what you’re doing?

Woo Kim (12:36)
Yeah. So I would say from my experience alone, there are really two types of agents, right? Agents who understand tech and agents who do not. And the challenge that we had is, okay, how do we make a technology that makes agents lives easy and actually have them implemented in your, in their business? And the adoption rate that I saw was younger agents. And I want to say up to 55 ish age.

or had no problem adopting to the tech and relative less relative to older agents had a little hesitation when it comes to adopting technology. So for example, they didn’t like the idea of tapping a card to a phone, ⁓ because they maybe thought, you know, the information that being stolen or whatever the case may be. And so I think it definitely has to do with the geographical area and also the age and demographics. I want to say.

Implementing tech in a real estate business has a huge time-saving component to it and efficiency component to it. ⁓ But some people choose to stay outdated, which is okay because they have a system that works for them. Some people try to implement as much tech into their business and they crush it. But other people crush it without using tech. So I think it really depends on how you do business and what feels comfortable to you and how you can maximize your input to get the greatest output. So.

Adoption rate really differs across ages and demographics.

Dylan Silver (14:11)
I wanna pivot a bit here and ask you about how you’re seeing maybe the next couple years maybe. You don’t have to give away all the gold here, but no one’s got a crystal ball. I like to say, know, it’s amazing when we see businesses pivot, and I feel like businesses have to pivot. They have no option. Every five years, practically, you’ve got to reinvent the wheel on some level, or you have to start doing something different. just…

spoke about this on a podcast I just had here today about how in Denton, Texas, which is north of Dallas, where I’m at, they have Walmart Wing. Have you heard about this Walmart Wing?

Woo Kim (14:50)
have not. What is it?

Dylan Silver (14:51)
It is crazy.

I don’t know if they do it in Orange County just yet. They may, but you can get, I guess, non perishable and maybe perishable. I don’t know, but non perishable items delivered to you by drone from Walmart, like from the store.

So I’ve seen I’ll pull up to a Walmart. There will be two antennas pointed towards the sky. Big antennas looking things on the ground. Then there’ll be an enclosed area where there’s a bunch of looks like.

big heavy industrial drones taking items to everywhere in the area. And I said, well, that’s a pivot. They’re trying to compete, right? You know what I mean? Like that’s, that’s aggressive. They’re, they’re, they’re getting after it. So in your, in your business, ⁓ there’s competition and then people are always looking for the cutting edge, maybe without giving away all the gold. How are you looking at maybe adapting towards the future or something that you’re keeping an eye on?

Woo Kim (16:03)
Hmm

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big thing that we’ve been working on. And I would love to give you a sexy answer on that Dylan. But in my experience, there hasn’t really been a sexy answer to like stay ahead of competition. So what I do is I try to hire the brightest talent that I can afford within my pay grade in terms of hiring software engineer interns from a recent college graduate or

college students that are still in college for software engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science and asking them, Hey, here are some of the feature goals that we have. Can you help us with this? Or do you, here are some of the new features and benefits that we want to bring and add on to our existing services. Can you do anything with this? So we actually have a couple of software engineering interns where their whole job is to create useful features and you know,

Dylan Silver (17:26)
That’s awesome.

Woo Kim (17:27)
I’ll tell you this Dylan, I coming from a tech background, I don’t really exercise my tech brain side of the brain as much anymore. Being a founder, kind of forced me to be in the marketing and the sales heavy positions. know what I mean? Because as a CEO, your job is to bring in sales. So in all honesty, I don’t do a lot of tech anymore. I leave that up to smart people, like actual engineers.

I would say I have, I don’t want to say graduated, but I don’t do a lot of tech things and engineering stuff anymore. I would say I do a lot more on marketing and sales because I’m on the front side of the business, of my business. And yeah, but to answer your question, Dylan, yeah, we try to hire brightest talents and have them kind of, you know, brainstorming, come up with ideas as to what we can add to our existing service or product.

Dylan Silver (18:23)
I have a general, ⁓ I guess this is interesting to me. Your electrical engineer background, but moved to the, you mentioned marketing and sales, right? Two totally different sides of the brain, right? Two totally different. I’d say, probably correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a lot of electrical engineers that say, I’m not gonna do sales, right? But you, this is your full time. Did you always know that you kind of had the ability to… ⁓

be a little bit amphibious, right, in both different worlds, or have you grown into that with time? What was it like going from the electrical engineering to marketing and sales and so on and so forth?

Woo Kim (19:02)
Yeah. wow. Nobody has ever asked me that question. ⁓ and you know, Dylan, I had,

I didn’t know anything about marketing and sales. As you can see, I was an engineer. knew how to do calculus. Right. And so when I first started the company to bring in sales, right. Cause sales is the oxygen of any business. I literally started door knocking because I like, how do I sell? Right. I didn’t know how to run social media ads or affiliate marketing or brand marketing sponsorship, any of that stuff.

Dylan Silver (19:12)
Hey

Woo Kim (19:32)
So I just started going to go to Google maps, put down a list of all the real estate brokerages near me. And every day I printed out a sheet of paper with like 10 or 15 brokerages. I drove there, knocked on their door and I said, Hey, I have this. You want to buy it? And they’re like, what are you doing? so luckily, luckily some people felt bad about me and they were like,

Dylan Silver (19:55)
That’s great.

Woo Kim (19:58)
You know, this is cool. Why don’t you come speak during our team meeting, during our sales meeting? I didn’t know you guys did that. I didn’t know real estate brokerages did sales meetings, but that’s how I got to know. And I ended up going into a sales meeting. I presented, Hey, this is what I do. I didn’t have a presentation or anything. I just had myself, my phone and my card.

Dylan Silver (20:02)
Yeah.

Woo Kim (20:18)
And I was just going around the room, tapping my card and telling people, telling agents, Hey, imagine you can share your business card just by tapping.

a card to their, to your consumer’s phone, to client’s phone. And they’re like, ⁓ that’s cool. And I made sales like that in the very beginning. So that’s how I started. your question, man. I, was tough transitioning from engineering brain to a sales brain. But now. Yeah. I think I now know how to go about that in a different way, better way.

Dylan Silver (20:43)
It’s tough, right?

It’s almost like you have to cross a path in your head. Like when I’m sitting down to go through the software engineering boot camp, having to, I’m having to cross a bridge in my brain to like the engineering kind of thinking. I’m like, okay, okay, let’s lock in here. Let’s dial in, let’s dial in. And then it’s hard to go from that.

And it’s one of the things I’ve noticed, and this is so funny, I’ve never said this to anybody here, but it’s almost like a limitation of humanity. Like you have to be so locked in on one thing, and oftentimes it’s hard to go from both sides of the thing. And I need to be, for instance, in order to be a great podcast host, it helps to do a bunch of podcasts. Doesn’t make me any better at coding at all and vice versa. So for whatever reason, the neural connections don’t seem to translate there.

But I want to pivot a bit here and ask you about those early days, right? And those first sales and what was that like? And then also were people aware of this? Were there other competitors where maybe they’d seen something similar? Or were you right at the beginning where people had no idea that this was a technology that was out there?

Woo Kim (21:58)
You know, Dylan, that’s a fantastic question. Yet again, you’re asking great questions here, man. I would say it was about 85 % of the people who I presented our products to, like digital business card to, had no idea. But I knew there were at least 20 companies that are doing the same thing, at least in the beginning stage. So I remember thinking to myself, huh, as a founder all day, every day, what I think about is my service, digital business card. So I was aware of

everything and under digital business card, all my competitors, what other people are doing. But what turns out to be the truth was agents in their everyday business had no idea what a digital business card was. I was surprised by their reaction. Some people thought it was the coolest thing. Like they’ve never seen it before. At least when I first started back in 2022, 2023 ish. About 15 % of agents already knew and had digital business cards.

I would say those were kind of like the early adapters. ⁓ Over the past two years though, Dylan, what I noticed is it’s rare to find somebody who don’t know what a digital business card is. So I would say in the last two years, a lot has changed thanks to social media for both good and bad. ⁓ But yeah, that’s what surprised me in the early age.

Dylan Silver (23:23)
⁓ We are coming up on time here, Woo. Where can folks go if maybe they’d like to learn more about LynkMe cards or ⁓ if maybe they’re in Orange County and would like to reach out to you or get in contact with you?

Woo Kim (23:36)
Yep, absolutely. So the best way to get in contact with us is by going to Google or any major search platforms and just typing in LynkMe. That’s with Lynk with a Y L Y N K M E LynkMe cards. You’ll see ⁓ us that pop up and we’re actually doing a free trial. So anybody that goes to our website, you can grab your card for free. Try it out. No strings attached, no credit card needed or anything like that. And so yeah, try it out.

and it won’t make a difference in your business.

Dylan Silver (24:09)
Woo, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Woo Kim (24:13)
Thanks so much for having me, Dylan. I appreciate that.