Boston • New York • Detroit
Boston • New York • Detroit
iMSGer held five patents covering the use of QR codes and the aggregation of QR code scans into a single location. Strong intellectual property, and no consumer product built on top of it.
That’s a harder problem than it sounds. QR codes were already everywhere and used for almost everything, which meant the patents protected a mechanism rather than a market. A defensible mechanism with no product around it generates licensing arguments, not customers.
The question wasn’t what the patents allowed. It was what a person would actually want a QR wallet to do for them.
Aggregation was the part of the portfolio that described something a person actually experiences. People scan QR codes constantly and then lose whatever they got. The offer sits in a browser tab, a screenshot, or nowhere. The gap between scanning and remembering was the product.
We invented the Cacheit Wallet: a digital wallet that collects promotions from QR codes found in everyday life and keeps them in one place on the phone. Users scan codes around a neighbourhood to unlock offers relevant to where they are. Promotions stay active in the wallet rather than expiring into a tab nobody reopens, so new offers surface over time.
A consumer wallet only works if businesses fill it. For local retailers, the wallet turned QR promotions into something manageable, actionable, and measurable, a way to reach someone who had already walked past the store, and to reach them again afterwards rather than once.
iMSGer went from a patent portfolio to a defined consumer product. The Cacheit Wallet gave the intellectual property a shape a user could hold, a reason for a retailer to participate, and a story that could be told to an investor or a partner, none of which existed when the engagement started.
That’s the work: Taking protected technology that solved a problem nobody had articulated, and finding the version of it that a person would want on their phone.
Thirty minutes. Bring the business. Leave with the one thing worth building everything else around.
Find your Right Angle