Tara FinleyElliott Potter is quick.
Quick to learn, quick to share, he’s an entrepreneur who is doing cool stuff at the intersection of technology and networking, and making our lives all the easier for it.
To understand how his fast-thinking has benefited us today, you have to start at the beginning of his journey. He entered the tech world as a founding team member of Shipt, a personal shopping and delivery service that is available to 80% of households in the U.S. today.
While Shipt is a household name today, it was just starting out when Potter first got caught on their line.
“To put it succinctly, I was super hooked – immediately,” he laughs. “Start-ups are all about solving problems and collaboration. There’s no rules, there’s no playbook for how to start something brand new in most cases and I was addicted.”
“During my time there I did physical expansion and operational stuff. That got pretty time-consuming pretty quick and so I had to look for ways to automate things that I was doing so that led me down a software rabbit hole,” he continues. “Long story short, during my time at Shipt I went to Copenhagen Denmark for three months to study software engineering … then eventually built Linq to quickly share information about a side hustle that me and a guy named Riley and Patrick Sullivan started while we were at Shipt. And then I quit Shipt because Linq – which is how we were sharing that idea – people liked that more than the idea itself.”
Sharing secrets of success, Brian and Potter both agree that saying “yes” is key to getting where you want to be.
“The more you do that, the more opportunity you’re exposed to, the more options you have, and the more you can commit to,” advises Potter. “It’s this delicate balance, because a big part of being an entrepreneur is saying ‘no,’ but to get to a position where you can say ‘no’ a lot, you have to say ‘yes.’”
Photo courtesy of Elliott Potter
“We didn’t start Linq out of this grand thesis of bringing people together,” he shares honestly. “We were just kind of scratching our own itch. We needed a quick way of sharing all this information at once [that wasn’t business cards or never-ending website updates], so what we landed on was a QR code that we could quickly pull up from our Apple Wallet, have someone point their camera at it, and it would all show up in one place.”
“So that was kind of the genesis story of Linq, and like I alluded to, people were eventually more interested in that QR code thing,” he said of the founders realization of what the real product was.
They debuted their idea at a tech conference in Birmingham, Alabama with success, and the company grew from there.
“People were intrigued,” he remembers. “People were saying ‘hey, this actually added a lot of value to my day.’”
With those words of encouragement, the founders knew they had something good. They all quit their jobs and poured themselves into building Linq.
A contactless way to network, Linq provides the quickest way to share your information with someone. The team just launched the Linq Band for Apple Watch, a “smart” wristband for the Apple Watch that lets you share anything with just a tap. Their other products include the Linq Card, Linq Bracelet, Linq Tap and Linq Card Premium.
How does Linq work? You create your profile within the app, that you can share with anyone. No app is needed to share info, all you need is a Linq Card or product and a phone camera.
“Within our app, you build and configure your Linq profile that you’re sharing throughout these products. That can contain virtually anything, it can contain a bio section, it can contain embedded photos and videos, we have links to social media accounts like social media buttons, and obviously your contact card is there so someone can save you to their phone,” he explains. “We let you share whatever it is that is important to you with anyone you meet, the goal is to remove the friction out of networking and become the new standard of sharing who you are and what you do.”
They’re disrupting the business card, and they’re not sorry. Saving trees, removing unnecessary contact in a time of pandemic, and making the transfer of vital information instant – Linq couldn’t have come at a better time.
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