Creating the Human API With Marco Magallon of Swoopin, Inc.

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Startempire Wire
Startempire Wire
Creating the Human API With Marco Magallon of Swoopin, Inc.
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Show Notes

In this episode of the Founder’s Podcast we sit down with Marco by Galan and talk about his startup SwoopIn. We go through the beginning of his journey, arrive at where he’s at today and lots more. If you are interested in learning more about his startup contact him directly. Stay tuned in to Startempire Wire for more episodes of the Founder’s Podcast.

0:00 – Podcast Preamble
1:50 – Podcast Intro
2:18 – Podcast starts
3:09 – Marco Introduction
12:02 – How Social Media Affected the Idea of Swoopin
23:28 – What need does your Startup meet?
34:25 – The Growth of Your Startup
48:32 – Current Needs of Your Startup
58:38 – Short term goals of your Startup
1:02:52 – Future goals of your Startup
1:13:10 – Info about you & your startup online

Startup Profile  & Transcript

Verious Smith III: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Startempire Wire Founder’s Podcast, where we make entreprenurial founders, a top priority. Each episode features risk-takers business builders, community shapers, institutional, and government supporters, in our local startup ecosystem tune weekly to hear all about what’s happening with the movers and the shakers of Southern California’s inland empire and beyond.

All right, everybody. This is Verious Smith the third and welcome to the official first Startempire Wire, I guess you would say interview. Yeah, this is, this is the main segment of our podcast. We got a few other segments. That we’re working on like the Weekly Wire Roundup, but this is the first one of the interviews interviewing founders, finding out all of those people who are in the startup community, who are important contributors.

[00:01:00] Um, I like to call them leaders and feeders and the entrepreneurs in the startup community are the leaders. That’s a reference from the book Startup Communities. So check that out. Um, today we have Marco Magallon, who is founder of SwoopIn. I’m going to let Marco introduce himself, go ahead and take it away Marco,

Marco Magallon: Thank you Verious for having me on, uh, I appreciate that. Um, you know, we’ve had, uh, several meetings now in person and digitally, and so I’ve gotten to know a lot about you and, and understand that I’m speaking to a fellow entrepreneur. And so I have a lot of deep respect for someone that understands, uh, you’re building something from nothing and all the hustle that takes.

So, uh, and, and we’ll get. My story too. And why I sympathize but I think your story is fascinating too. So where to begin. Do you want me to begin?

Verious Smith III: Yeah,

so, yeah, so, I mean, I guess just tell us, you know, a little bit about like [00:02:00] maybe who are you, Marco, uh, as a person, like give us a personal introduction. Like, where’d you grow up?

You know, what, what led you? What led you kind of like what I just shared before we started this, you know, maybe not as long, maybe a quick five minute, like into to you,

Marco Magallon: way, way back machine,

Yeah, a little timeline.

So myself, I’m originally a Cali boy. I was born in Pomona, raised in Corona, then Rancho Cucamonga by two parents, a first-generation Hispanic from Mexico.

And. Growing up in California was, was a really blessed experience because I got to experience so much diversity from an early age, uh, diversity in terms of different communities of people from different places. There’s a lot of people here that are not originally from here. It’s so Cal and it’s this place is a cultural magnet for like a little slice of pretty much [00:03:00] anywhere else in the world.

So I really liked growing up with that, but up until, um, when I was 17 and it was time to look at, you know, my higher education, even though I applied to a lot of great schools in California, I saw a great opportunity to go beyond, and I knew that if I’d stayed in California for college as well, that I’d be, I’d become kind of spoiled by the weather.

And I would all always kind of be thinking like, well, this was life, but I’m like, certainly it’d be a good idea to go to somewhere different and see a different kind of culture or different kind of speed of life, weather, biome and, um, college presented that opportunity. So I ended up matriculating at the university of Notre Dame

Verious Smith III: Matriculating

Marco Magallon: where there’s a word of the day. Um, I couldn’t have picked a school [00:04:00] that was in so many ways more polar opposite (than socal). I mean, the weather for starters. Uh, I remember my freshman year, all the upperclassmen would torment the people from warm states like Florida and Texas or, Cali, the stories of what our first winter would do to us.

And the first w the first snow, uh, came on my birthday my freshman year. And, um, and yeah, I, you know, most of the year it’s covered in snow, but weather aside, I mean, culturally Notre Dame is pretty different when you have, uh, you know, it’s a religious institution and you have a lot of people that went to single-sex small graduating class, uh, private schools.

And then all of a sudden they get dropped into, what’s essentially a small city of mostly other folks like them. But also a lot of folks like me that, you know, came from a public school background. And, you know, weren’t raised by [00:05:00] really conservative values, which a Notre Dame, especially now is much more diverse and it’s, um, and just the ideas that, that live around campus.

So, and that’s great, you know, diversity of thought is important for a university, but, um, But I definitely got to see a different, a world view through the friends I became close with. And, and so I think that was a very useful thing for me, because especially in these politically sensitive days, I feel like I have a wider breadth of perspective, which has been useful.

But the other thing that was interesting about when I went to school was that Facebook had just started becoming a thing and Facebook had just arrived on campus like a year before I did. And I remember the freshmen, uh, summer before freshman orientation that I’m like, well, I’m making an account because I want to connect with people at my dorm and just started, you know, you know, introducing myself [00:06:00] and basically arrive on campus already knowing some people.

And, and I quickly got to see how. My college experience actually could have been better if Facebook hadn’t existed. Because what I got to see was kind of the beginning of tribalism amongst different friend groups. That it was really hard. Um, because so many of the social activities were organized through the dorms.

Like you couldn’t really branch out beyond that. People became very married to their identity of their dorm and the associated group that, that had on Facebook. So I got to see that, uh, you know, people, uh, weren’t getting as much as they could out of their college experience because of things like Facebook.

So that was interesting to see. But after, um,

my undergrad,

Verious Smith III: wait, sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt that just really, I’d never thought of it that way. How, how Facebook does, um, divide and [00:07:00] create tribes? I never thought that it could be like per dorm. It’s crazy.

Marco Magallon: Well, let me give you another example. All right. You Notre Dame was doing much better than it ever had before in terms of like ethnic diversity. Um, but I, you know, I felt so much pressure, you know, and, and the Facebook groups, one of the ways I felt this pressure to just join like the. Groups student groups on campus. And I said, you know, I, I don’t really want to, because I want to just keep myself open to everything.

And what I could see is that again, these groups became pretty tribal. Um, and, and you could even see this in the dining hall, you know, there’d be different tables, like, oh, here’s the table with all the Hispanics, here’s the table, all that Asians, here’s the table with, you know, so forth. Right. And, uh, and so I, I didn’t see Facebook help at all with that.

I saw Facebook only make that worse because it gave people a digital [00:08:00] way to silo themselves. So, but, but there was, it was very necessary to have a presence on Facebook. Cause I remember otherwise people thought you were kind of a psycho. If you … What are you hiding? If, you don’t have any pictures you don’t have a profile. But the other thing that grinded my gears, um, with Facebook, um, was the relationship status.

You know, college, uh, has this kind of chance to discover who you are as a sexual being. I feel like the relationship status on Facebook really, really put a damper on that because when you were at a really conservative school, like Notre Dame, a lot of people took the relationship status to be emblematic like a digital wedding band.

Verious Smith III: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Marco Magallon: You’d start seeing someone and then the question would pop up like, oh, so when are we gonna become Facebook official and you would, and then all the same people, the same friends you had of that same, you know, opposite gender. Um, they would just stop talking to you and.

And [00:09:00] then you’d break up and then relationships that included, they would start talking to you again, and like inviting you to lunch. And I was like, well, this is very disingenuous. And, and also it’s college. Like, uh, I know there’s a lot of pressures to like get married by the time you’re coming out of, uh, you know, the program because the idea for, you know, someone raised Catholic is that this is going to be where I have the greatest odds of. Meeting someone that shares my beliefs and not taking into account that, you know, we’re, we’re very on the young side, we haven’t really lived in the real world yet. So no,

Verious Smith III: yes, no, it’s really fascinating though. Like I, I think, you know, the studies that will come out in the future to just… I, I, I know there are already studies that talk about how social media has changed our brains and it’s really affected the way we live or the way we experience, like being a human, [00:10:00] um, nowadays and we’re in a completely different, uh, dimension of things like, as compared to our grandparents.

So one thing I want to, I want to kind of like segue into is like, How did your experience with that, affect the origin of your startup? Like how did that, how did that affect

it? Yeah,

Marco Magallon: I’m, I’m a very, very narrative driven person. So I haven’t even started talking about super right at me. I just kind of tell you my story.

And I was like, well, here’s something interesting to kind of unpack, which is going to be very important later in my life. Right. Is throughout my entire undergrad. I still had no idea that I was going to go even into software engineering at all. You know, or much less, you know, make something that you could potentially one day steal market share from Facebook.

Right. And that’s not to bash entirely on Facebook. Facebook is just the example is the name that everyone recognized. But before that, of course it was [00:11:00] Myspace and, you know, people of a certain age and beyond know all too well with my space was, and really a lot of the same elements, um, were present there.

But for me, you know, being in the ecosystem of the university and seeing how these network effects network technologies were playing out, it was fascinating because it did plant a seed for wanting things to be different and, and thinking, why can’t they be a different why do they have to be like this because this just doesn’t seem, it seems like we should hope for more and, and something that would actually enable a genuine new human connections

so after my undergrad, which was in pre-medicine in business, I had a foundation in business and how to think through an idea and break it up into the pieces that were all very important to making a company to produce something that could change the world. And I became more excited about the business side than I was the medical side, because I [00:12:00] realized, you know, the world is in so many ways, very sick, just the same way that a person can get sick with illness and how many people are out there, you know, with genuine intentions, trying to hear these social ills and like if I’m seeing problems that other people aren’t, you know, at the time even talking about.

yet, then that’s probably what I should go and do and, you know, and let other people be doctors. Although, funny enough, once I got into startups later, my mom would be like, what you’re doing. Sounds exciting. Very interesting, but like a lot of work, really challenging. Why don’t you just go to med school? As if med school isn’t challenging, of coursemed-school is challenging, but, but of course,

Verious Smith III: mama mama always concerned.

Marco Magallon: Yeah. You’re wanting your son, uh, you know, to quit being a useless entrepreneur, right? Um, it’s uh, yeah, it’s, it’s been a long road, but as things have built up, she, she has understood more and more what I’m doing and she sees other people believe in it. And that obviously helps her [00:13:00] get off.

Verious Smith III: Uh, well I can relate to that because I told you a little bit of my story, that, that period where I was laid off and like, like looking, deciding whether or not I was going to go back and my mom was always like, my mom was always like, yeah, you need to go get a job. Okay. Anyway…

Marco Magallon: We’ve trekked, exactly the same ground because when I finished my undergrad, um, you know, I was taking the M cast. I was aiming in med school, but then I heard about this program also at Notre Dame, which was kind of a new program, something, um, it was borrowing some concepts from a stem / business program at Stanford university.

And so they were adapting it to Notre Dame and really, it was like an MBA for people with a stem background. And I said, you know, this program is just a one-year commitment. And for me, it sounded really cool to have the opportunity to kind of bridge the two halves of my undergrad. Cause I had like a hybrid major, right.

[00:14:00] Pre-med and business. And I was like really bringing them together, you know, pick something technology oriented and really focus on, on the business commercialization of it. And so I did the one-year master’s program, which is called the engineering and science technology masters program. And they called it ESTEEM, which sounded like a self-help group.

Verious Smith III: Right.

Marco Magallon: But it was basically like a science focused MBA. And that was such a great program for helping me reinforce the business foundations. It was very empowering and I also formed a really close relationship with some classmates through, they would have startup weekends where you love those. And Notre Dame provided a Chipotle, a pizza alcohol soda, and it was amazing.

So I enjoyed those. And out of one of those, the idea was birthed for a nonprofit consulting group and even a [00:15:00] mayor. Pete Buttigieg, who later ran for president gave a really nice endorsement letter and connected us with a lot of leaders in the community of south bend Indiana. To get this a nonprofit consulting platform started with a lot of different stakeholders in this city.

We had, um, you know, wealthy investors, uh, people, uh, phone data centers, people who ran the regional hospitals, uh, people in the school system. And then, uh, we also got the public transportation agency onboard transpose. So I actually became the client lead for the public transportation. And that’s where another seed was planted which is the seed of knowing what technology can do to drastically transform our society, uh, in terms of location sensitive technologies. So I was working on, for [00:16:00] example, uh, looking at different solutions for fleet management, for tracking the bus systems live and in real time. And, and for me that was so exciting because it was kind of like a video game for real life, you know, like a real time strategy game, like command and conquer, and you have your buses, you’re tracking them on this satellite view.

And then you’re literally clicking around the map and you’re creating, uh, alerts, you’re creating way points. And, and I thought that was fascinating. So that was the, uh, that was another seed for SwoopIn. When I finished my one year commitment to the startup, I was like, I really need to go somewhere else and not just be stuck here.

Uh, in the Midwest, I was always kind of like a, like a pickup and move. And now, now get myself in an unfamiliar setting again. I really, you know, I thrived in chaos, I guess you could say. And, um, and so after finishing that in, um, in [00:17:00] 2013, I was really left off the rails in terms of like, well, what do I do with my life now? I did this consulting startup. I don’t want to continue to do more consulting. Like, you know, my colleagues, they pretty much all continued either with the same program or went to different consulting groups.

Verious Smith III: Right.

Marco Magallon: And I said, you know, I want to take some time to travel. I want to kind of have like a couple months sabbatical. So I went to Brazil time. And when I came back to California thinking like, all right, we we’ve had some fun. Now it’s time to think about what we’re going to do actually do with our life and focus on for a couple of years. Next. I. Was playing Grand Theft Auto Five, because I did that while I was in Brazil.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: And in playing that game, I’m like, how am I so engaged by this video game? I I’d been a gamer, you know, before. Not with the same time that I had at that point in time, you know, no job, no continuing [00:18:00] school. And I was like, I’m just going to read the books and play the video games. I haven’t had time for, for a long time.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: My mom is going to ask me how many jobs I applied for on a daily basis. And I’ll find some here and there, but really, I just kinda like, my curiosity was so driven by man. Like how, how, how far have video games come and in playing grand theft auto five. I was like, I mean, like, this is, Hey, you know, you’ve got a fully virtually realized digital environment.

I’ve got my avatar running around, uh, completing the story quest. But as a player, I feel so engaged with this story even more than I do with real life. What, why is that? And one day. My mom tells me, you know, why don’t you make yourself useful? We have a lot of recycling bottles and cans in the house, go and sell them, you know, and have some money to put it in your pocket.

And I said, what if I had an app that had a map [00:19:00] and I could drop a pin on the map, creating this kind of quest that people in the area could see, and then it’s a mission for them to do. And they come pick up the recycling, go take care of that chore for me. And then I was like, what if there’s other chores that these people could do for me?

So I was thinking, you know, around like, you know, on demand, like help with tasks, but then I thought there’s a social element here because you getting neighbors in the community to interface with each other. And so you’re getting connections to foreign. You’re getting people to do things and get out of the house and go to new places, meet new people, do new things, yada, yada, that

Verious Smith III: no, that, that completely segues right into the next question. You’re right. So like the, you know, SwoopIn, inspired by Grand Theft Auto Five and real life tasks. So tell us a little bit, like in depth, like what is like the [00:20:00] needs that swoop in is meeting and you know, this virtual, um, this virtual way to interact with people, uh, tell us about it. And are there any others who are out there doing something similar to this?

Marco Magallon: The need is one of the most universal human needs and probably a need that other organisms, uh, behind you mature as well need is situational awareness. And that sounds like a very technical tactical, almost military term, but it’s actually a very broad, a term of, you need to know what’s happening around you.

You need to know the context for, you know, in relation to where you are in the world, where different things are. And we have been lacking that context for so long because the context isn’t just knowing where businesses are located, it isn’t just knowing, you know, where [00:21:00] your friends are. It’s, it’s a bit of all those elements, but it’s also the element of knowing what’s happening at a particular place at a particular time.

So it’s like events driven, and this is a need that goes back to our prehistoric origins and really explains why, why SwoopIn as an interface really works and is different to so many things out there because before humans even had a language. They were communicating these location-based opportunities and threats on, on maps, except these maps were painted by hand, uh, using like the blood of an animal or juice from a piece of, uh, plant or a fruit on a cave wall on rock.

Right? But this, this existed even before language. And, you know, you could go into Google or watch a national geographic show, which just how old these are, and eventually led the way to hieroglpyphs. But, you know, humans have been making maps to [00:22:00] communicate for such a long time and in the world that we live in today, where, you know, we’ve long since left small villages. And now we live in huge societies, very dense societies. The needs are constantly changing around us in real time, but how do you communicate them? Well, other apps that do something similar to SwoopIn they tend to focus on a particular slice and to really do that well with the opportunities for synergy that I envisioned from the start with SwoopIn, they’re not there yet because take Uber, for example, that’s one app we’ll talk about. Uber focuses on the slice of ride-sharing. And, and what’s funny is when I first had the idea for SwoopIn, I didn’t even know about Uber at the time. That’s how long I’ve been on this journey.

Verious Smith III: That’s awesome.

Marco Magallon: And I thought ride sharing is a really useful application, you know, finding people to carpool with it, et cetera. [00:23:00] But Uber has really focused on that and they’ve transformed how we think of taxis. And, um, and I’m very intimately familiar with Uber from both sides, both as a rider and as a driver, because I knew that I just, I had to, I had to try being a driver. I had to learn this technology and see how can this transform the future of jobs? How does this change the way I look at my neighborhood and the greater region and strangers, right? It really transformed the concept I have of all those things. And, and now let’s go to another location based platform example, let’s talk about Tinder

Tinder. I remember, uh, around the time of first came out maybe a year or two into it, I’d already had the idea for SwoopIn again and I said, well, what are other examples of location-based platforms where strangers are meeting up strangers, uh, and Tinder [00:24:00] came up and I said, well, yeah, of course, that makes sense. It’s dating. Dating is where people. Uh, of course they keep their guard up because it’s strangers. But at the same time, you are very open to meeting with strangers because you don’t necessarily, um, a lot of people don’t necessarily want to just date within their friend group.

And so that’s where you need to intelligently connect with strangers. Right. And then make not strangers as the mutual interest progresses. So I got on Tinder and I got on it during it’s a

Verious Smith III: Haven’t, haven’t we all haven’t we all got on Tinder?

Marco Magallon: Well, I, I had a work excuse I had, I was on there for research purposes. I mean, of course I do

Verious Smith III: Reasearch…

Marco Magallon: Love what you do to love what you do. And so when I say the heyday, I mean, really the heyday, like gender today, isn’t what Tinder was, uh,

Verious Smith III: Right, right..

Marco Magallon: Four or five years ago. Uh, w which, which is kind of sad because you see other apps [00:25:00] every day coming up, trying to pick up that mantle and it’s just like. why can’t it just be Tinder still and, uh, um, but you know, humans are complicated and they tend to complicate the things that they get on.

So I mean it, perhaps the natural progression, but yes, I put forth Tinder as another example of a location based, um, you know, social application, of course. Yes. And of course there’s others, you know, I found out about next door, uh, which is essentially micro Facebook for neighborhood communities. Um, I found out about Meetup

meetups a huge one, especially in LA still. Right. And so meetup is one, I’ll talk a little bit more at length of, and then start drawing comparisons because, you know, they’re very established, at least in certain regions like big cities and definitely LA I think is one of the big bastions for meetup there’s meetups for all sorts of things.

Um, uh, business networking, [00:26:00] um, more specifically like tech business networking as well. There’s meetups for hiking. I’ve been on a ton of those for dating Meetups for foodies meetups, you know, for,

Verious Smith III: and you know, the great thing about Meetup. And I’ll just show this in there. The great thing about meet up is like you can meet people who are. You know, like you don’t know them and, you know, excuse me. Yeah. You don’t, you don’t know them. You just like encounter different people. And so like, yeah. I’m in like just recreational groups, we every now and then, like, if I want to get out and meet new people, I’m like, I’m going to go to this recreational group you know, we’re going to grab sushi together. It’s just a group of people in their twenties and thirties, you know, which, you know, I’m like in the later, the later edge of thirties, but yeah, it’s, it’s really amazing.

Marco Magallon: Yeah, no, it is. And you know, it provides something accessible for people to get out and build a [00:27:00] community, which gets really hard once you get out of college, you know, uh, to, to meet strangers that, you know, are for no specific purpose, right?

Because the problem with, uh, for example, dating apps is people get on there with very specific intentions and sometimes those intentions don’t match up. Right? Some people really are there just to meet friends and that’s totally valid. And that’s also sometimes, you know, my, my perspective and it’s most of the time, because I think that’s like the foundation for any kind of relationship, whether for business or, um, you know, Intimate.

I getting friendship needs to be that, that common foundation to all of them. And so meetup is great because you do get to grow those around a common interest. But the thing about meetup is that it’s a web first application that got founded in the early two thousands. So it’s, you know, 5, 5, 20 years old at this point. And even on mobile, you can tell it’s not built for mobile and..

Verious Smith III: It’s not,

Marco Magallon: [00:28:00] it’s not…

It’s been needing a ground-up rethinking also the business model where the managers of a group have to, uh, have to pay the subscription. Like if they kind of chose the most straightforward route to monetization. And I think it’s one that creates a difficult barriers that you know, wouldn’t be there if they had a different interface that allowed different kinds of monetization.

Verious Smith III: Yeah. I think, I think if they, I mean the monetization on meetup and after this, we’ll get to the next question, but the monetization I’ll meet up just, it makes it, um, yeah, like you said, it makes it hard if they did it like per person or ticketed, you know, monetization. I don’t know. It’d be, it’d be interesting.

Marco Magallon: Yeah, but meetup meetup is a, is a great platform for today. It’s just difficulty scaling into the future. And, and we with SwoopIn, we are perhaps taking [00:29:00] a lot of the same, like target market and market space but it’s with a very different interface built for mobile first in a very different business model where we’re actually a software as a service for the businesses and the large event organizers.

That want to have channels and certain kinds of additional functionality to what a user gets on the SwoopIn app. And one important thing is that a SwoopIn you don’t have to first join a group in order to start seeing things that you can go and do

Verious Smith III: Oh that’s cool

Marco Magallon: we’re mobile and spontaneous where your community is changing on the fly based on where you are and when you’re there.

So it’s, it’s more dynamic.

Verious Smith III: Okay, I love that

meet meetup is a way towards that, but it’s really, you know, we’re, we’re much more dynamic. Um, but meetup is the established power and actually it’s funny. Um, I went to Tinder meetups or, um, You know, while they had them awhile back and it was at the Tinder [00:30:00] headquarters,

Yeah, those were real popular, those were real popular

Marco Magallon: talking with engineers, actually for Tinder and learn about how they tackle certain scaling problems for their platform, for millions of users, uh, problems. We are aiming to certainly have one day.

Verious Smith III: Yeah, absolutely.

Marco Magallon: And, but they stopped doing those. And the group was large. The group is large, like 750 people. And then, um, meet have started sending me emails. Like this group is going to get shut down and they haven’t had any events. Now I’m in team the subscription and you want to take over it. You could

Verious Smith III: wait,

Marco Magallon: re-brand it…

Did you.. Did you take over that group? Did you take over that group?.

Yeah, you’re looking at the, uh.

Verious Smith III: Awesome. We got to co… We got to connect on that level one of these days. I gotta, I gotta chat with you about that

Marco Magallon: Get in the group, get in the meetup group.

Verious Smith III: Alright, okay, so next question, really next question. Alright, so the growth of your startup, tell us about the growth. You know, where did you know from the beginning til this point, [00:31:00] like what, you know, what’s been some of those pains, like the growing pains that you experienced, and you had to overcome at this point?,

Marco Magallon: Tremendous question, um, full of so many, uh, worms in this can, you know, in a worms.

But, uh, so after I, you know, I had the vision, had the idea, it was, I knew it was going to be tough to figure out exactly where to start what the next one step was going to be. So what I did is I packed up my bags and I said I’m gonna leave California, go to Notre Dame. And I was thinking at first it was going to be maybe a week or two, and I’m going to meet with my mentors there because I want to, I had an outline of the business.

At that point. I had some mock-ups of screenshots for the interface and I was like, I really want to meet with them and have them. Do they think this has legs? And then what they recommended as far as next steps and so on, because I was thinking, you know, [00:32:00] it could be connections to sources of capital to get money together and then get developers together and, you know, build the damn thing.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: And the feedback that I got, uh, from again, mentors who I really trust that, you know, had been my teachers who had been mentors for the first startup I did and leaders in the community was you really should learn how to build the MVP first, because it’s going to teach you some of the skills that you will need to evaluate who your co-founding team is going to be.

Verious Smith III: Ooh

Marco Magallon: it’s also going to allow you to really gauge and create metrics around market potential and that’s going to help you when the time is right. Raise capital.

Verious Smith III: Yes.

Marco Magallon: So I followed that advice and since my ticket to Southbend had been one-way I actually ended up now returning to California for two and a half years.

Over those two and a half years, I taught myself software engineering and I learned. YouTube was my [00:33:00] classroom Stackoverflow was my office hours.

Verious Smith III: I love it. I love it.

Marco Magallon: Yeah. And then. I also, um, I got connected to some early capital and like small amounts of money that would basically just cover personal expenses and some like business development expenses, like having an event here and there to do an MVP.

Uh, I got connected with a lot of people at the university of Notre Dame. The law school, uh, had a clinic. It still has a clinic where students interested in, uh, IP and corporate law can help small businesses with their legal needs, trademark filing and so forth. So I got that.

Verious Smith III: Ahh, that is So cool.

Marco Magallon: I got the logo for SwoopIn. I, I had a lot of, uh, good relationships. Uh, the university, since I came from a master’s program that was in technology commercialization. That’s actually how I tapped into the student body. They were looking for real world [00:34:00] projects to assign teams of students on grad students to do things like, uh, customer validation, MVP in business model generation.

So I say, well, SwoopIn is a broad concept to help me narrow it down, to help me gauge some of the interests. And so that’s how I got some students involved. And then when the school year, uh, was formerly a swing, cause this was a summer program, they’re like, we want to stay involved. And we also want to get some of the other, uh, students that we know on campus.

Some undergrads for example, we want to get them involved too, because we think that this has a lot of exciting applications within our own college environment. And I said, well, that sounds awesome. And you know, I’m happy to be a mentor and also be mentored by people that were actually taking classes in computer engineering.

Yeah, formal classes, uh, people, uh, you know, studying graphic design. So it was really two way mentorship street. And for me, I was able [00:35:00] to more quickly get to an MVP. And for them it was a chance to very early on in their academic career start using the skills they were learning in the classroom. And pretty much all of the students that were, that got amazing jobs out of graduation.

I certainly was in no position yet to like hire them. Uh, we will still, we were still figuring out a lot of the basics of swiping and, and what I began to see was Notre Dame while a great place to run some experiments. It wasn’t really a place to scale.Because It’s small on the side of, you know, universities that people recognize.

And also the surrounding community is also small, low density.

Verious Smith III: Oh.

Marco Magallon: And me being from you know California close to LA I’m like LA was always really exciting to go back home because, Hey, I miss

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: home and also because I’m like there there’s a whole food truck scene. There’s a festival [00:36:00] scene.

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: There’s a real famous. Uh, nightclub entertainment industry scene, all LA really I felt was You know the place to be doing things on a new scale and it really figure out how to build a platform to scale because that’s, that’s been a big challenge for swooping is it’s such a broad application that where exactly do you start, right?

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: And I’ve been building it to be universal the same way that people look at an app like Google maps as universal. I should look at SwoopIn as even more universal because now it’s not just for navigation, right?

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: It’s really for planning out your, day, filling up the blank spots on your calendar.

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: it’s a very broad day to day. need and, um, so that, that starts to get into some of the challenges, of course, having no capital. I had to do other jobs along the way to sustain myself. So I chose jobs that were going to [00:37:00] ultimately help the SwoopIn mission. Right? So I’ve built apps for other people. I was a freelance app developer.

Verious Smith III: Nice!

Marco Magallon: I knew both iOS and Android development and in that you know was was paying good money, helping people. Essentially as a one man software development firm,

Verious Smith III: Yes

Marco Magallon: I could advise on all aspects of the concept and then actually build out the app to natives.

Verious Smith III: Right.

Marco Magallon: And that was helping me tremendously because as I started to formerly recruit people later on, once I came back to Southern California, I was able to really, um, be very specific in how I managed and also lead by example by, you know, not being someone afraid or unable to roll up my sleeves and get in there and write code, get in there and fix the bug.

Verious Smith III: Okay! Let me, let me put, let me put this, like this little abbreviation, our ISS at this point to what you’re saying, because I can relate to you on that level. Um, if you’re going to manage [00:38:00] somebody, you need to atleast know a little bit about what they’re doing and if you like, you know, like me, I’m a web developer, you know, I can hire web developers very easily because I understand the code.

And so that, that is the truth. 100%. Yeah,

Marco Magallon: yeah, yeah, exactly. You, you can craft expectations as to how long it’s going to take. You could, of course provide. You know, suggestions and, and sometimes that’s useful just a different perspective, you know, when you’re

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: coding and with features too, what I’ve found has really helped is that when I’m thinking of features, I can be realistic and I can MVP specific features. and, and this is part of why, why SwoopIn is an app that does so many things while still dealing in a very user-friendly it’s because I was able to really map out the feature with enough specificity that for the developer, it was straightforward, what the implementation plan was. And the design was something that I was able to really think through, really [00:39:00] chew through the bone and talk about with other people

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: to figure out well, what is a way that this feature becomes a scalable, universal feature that can improve SwoopIn across all our verticals?

The thing that’s really powerful about SwoopIn is we haven’t built it for any one specific vertical. It’s also a bit of the curse because people, these days they’re used to specialized apps, they’re used to very clear directed, um, you know, marketing messages and we’re marketing something broad.

Verious Smith III: Right.

Marco Magallon: And, and so with that, it’s also, you know, it’s kinda hard to, to get a Niche excited when you’re like, well, we’re not an app just for you know

Verious Smith III: to me, To me, it sounds like you’re, you’re on the road to becoming a platform like that.

Marco Magallon: It is

Verious Smith III: Like that’s what it, that’s what it sounds like because you know, Facebook was not a platform initially, and then they, they built in the API and they built that, uh, layer [00:40:00] to make it a platform where other people could build apps on top of it.

You’re exactly right. and that’s one of the big challenges with Facebook. And I got to see how this has happened over time,

Yeah

Marco Magallon: if it went from being something simple to being something so complex, that it has so many issues in terms of, um, like I’ll talk about privacy. For example, privacy is a huge one. Everybody

Verious Smith III: Yup

Marco Magallon: has an issue with Facebook, with house handled privacy. And I don’t think that that necessarily just comes from them, you know, being greedy, wanting to sell people’s data. I think a lot of that comes from how the platform, the user interface, the scale to the fact that if you go into Facebook settings or even Instagram settings today, you see that these things have gotten so complex and these features have so much redundancy and aren’t really categorized well.

And they, you see that for a human, you know, It’s tough to know what these things do because so much has [00:41:00] been tacked onto them over time and

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: see that happening with Instagram now, too, especially as Facebook tries to them, bring itself closer to Instagram and have more integrations. It confuses a lot of people and you see that, well, you know, Instagram is, is one day going to have a reset where perhaps a competitor, most likely a competitor is going to come across and do it pretty much exactly what Instagram does, but they’re going to start from a simpler, cleaner template.

That’s also going to have new technologies built in you, New bells and whistles that are just gonna be just scaled better because

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: I’m already has a massive scaling problem. Like it’s not,

Verious Smith III: Instagram was never meant to be, uh, like a smorgasbord of things either. Basically

Marco Magallon: Exactly!

Verious Smith III: Facebook has like morphed it into something that it originally what people, what drew people to the platform was, you know, the ability to, you [00:42:00] know, take those photos, make them look really professional and display themselves, you know? And now they’re trying to put Tik Tok to Instagram.

Marco Magallon: Oh yeah. I thought they already did.

Verious Smith III: Hahahaha!

Marco Magallon: Um, you know, the funny thing too, it’s very relevant, uh, to bring up here. It’s that, um, as these platforms become bloated,

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: you know, they, um, they become harder to maintain, uh, for the user. It becomes more difficult to customize it, especially when it comes to security, privacy preferences, and also, um, for the market.

I think it becomes harder to understand what, what is the most specialized, what is the efficient purpose of a platform like Instagram or Facebook, or even Google has this problem where kind of like its core competencies get buried under so many [00:43:00] features. And me as a startup, I’ll tell you, um, there yearly on.

I was like, what, why are you doing this? I mean, there’s Facebook events, so why do we need SwoopIn? Like, and, and, and sometimes they met, well, like they’re wanting me to defend my position. I’m like, well, it’s a great question. It’s a very fair question. Facebook does have the events and I’d have to get into, well, Facebook may have events and may have a lot of other things under the sun.

But the thing about Facebook events, the big difference would be that you’re really planning things more longer term. It’s not spontaneous.

Verious Smith III: hm,

Marco Magallon: if you don’t have a network to propagate this, uh, event with like an established group who is going to see it. And all these issues, right? And I’m like, you know, Facebook is greater what it does, but when it comes to events and more specifically the micro events and on demand activities as designing SwoopIn for I’m like, you’re really [00:44:00] making a horse swim.

If you thrust Facebook into that arena.

Verious Smith III: Hmm

Marco Magallon: And I always said, you know, There could come a time where Facebook would try and copy what we’re doing just as they’ve copied Snapchatted. So many others. What the thing is that because it’s Facebook, even if they do exactly what I’m doing, it will inherently be different because it’s facebook.

Verious Smith III: What if they try buy you out? What are you gonna do?

And that’s, that’s, that’s again, another, uh, scenario that gets raised. Well, I think, you know, you look at every deal when you get it and whether you take the deal or not, you know, being offered a buyout. I mean, that’s, that’s a great thing. I mean, that’s

Oh yeah!

Marco Magallon: Certainly a milestone, right.

But, and this segues into the project for stupid, you know, five, 10 years from now, which is,

Verious Smith III: well, before we get there, tell us about your current needs. Cause then we’re going to go over to that as well. So yeah.

Marco Magallon: sure, certainly!

Verious Smith III: Tell us about what are your current needs for [00:45:00] SwoopIn, like right now in this stage?

Okay. Well right now we’re at a great stage where if you’re an iPhone user, you need to download the app

hahahaha

Marco Magallon: hahaha and, uh, you need to download the app and start using it, uh, on iOS.

We’re pretty well featured. We’re also, if you’re in so-called. We’re curating a lot of great stuff from other platforms like Eventbrite meetup and Facebook just curating. And so that everyday, you know, we have, you know, 10 or more things in, in an area that you can drive to or Uber to.

Verious Smith III: Nice

Marco Magallon: There’s just cool things that are happening, you know, to get people out of the house safely.

To a public venue where there’s perhaps a really good deal being offered, like a really awesome happy hour, there’s live music or a free show, or, you know, free business networking or anything like that. Right. Um, so I’d say iOS users, especially it’s so [00:46:00] Cal download the app, if you notice So-Cal and you’re curious, of course, download the app.

Anyways, SwoopIn works anywhere in the world, except maybe China. I haven’t tested it in China. Uh, I know they have a full restricted, but it works both 90% of the world. And, um, and you can start using it with your friends or your clubs or other organizations. So users, because users will help us test users will help.

Uh, they can certainly recommend features. I love it when someone recommends a feature, even if it’s something I’ve already heard before, having the same idea recommended over and over again is also for letting you know what a priorities.

Verious Smith III: Know, what’s what everybody wants.

Marco Magallon: Yeah. And also it’s, it’s people to help also find cool things going on, put them on the map because Hey, maybe it’s something I wanna go to.

Right. I’m always, uh, if I got some free time, you know, choosing that out of the house to go do something and then the second need, you know, very quickly talk about capital, but that’s, um, [00:47:00] you know, most, any startup can think of a need or a use for capital. We can think of a mailing uses for capital. Uh, we are bootstrapped even though we’ve had small investors in the past, uh, that money has long been applied and value is generated, but, you know, we are now especially looking at larger fundraises, uh, but even, even folks with, um, with small amounts, you know, seeing enough interests there could motivate us to start a crowdfunding campaign for example.

Verious Smith III: Can I ask you, have you guys received any seed funding? Um,

Marco Magallon: No. We’re, we’re in the pre-seed stage and that’s actually what, right now we’re doing the corporate audit, uh, internal corporate audit to,

Verious Smith III: okay

Marco Magallon: uh, you know, figure out why it needs to change in the organization to be able to do a very new kind of investment brown than any.

We have had the smart, because the, the amounts that have been fundraised have been small amounts over a long [00:48:00] stretch of time. And now that we have a team and we have so much potential. Things that we are almost ready to execute on. We want to have the capital lined up and it’s, it’s going to be serious capital.

So at the pre-seed round, it’s, you know, we’re, we’re talking $500,000 for the pre-seed round. And that round being structured to springboard us into the proper seed round, you know, where it’s some multimillion dollar raise, you know, perhaps 3 million and above. And that gives you your two year runway to have a full-time team have a significant marketing budget and really blow things up, right?

Verious Smith III: Yeah. Yeah.

Marco Magallon: Especially today, you know, marketing, messaging, it all costs money marketing. It has been monetized to hell and back.

Verious Smith III: Absolutely and w while we’re talking about capitalization, or capital, um, and fundraising and all that great stuff, um, the Riverside angel summit did you even, did you apply or no.

Marco Magallon: Oh I did apply. And

Verious Smith III: okay.

Marco Magallon: [00:49:00] Regardless of what happens, whether we’re the right fit or at the right stage or not, um, you know, because the, the term angel I’ve seen how the term angel has changed haha over time, very synonymous with VC.

But with there are still a lot of folks with capital out there who don’t know what to do with it, who maybe for lack of a better idea, or just putting it into doge coin,

Verious Smith III: (cough)

Marco Magallon: it’s just like, well, let’s get in front of those people so they could see that we have something . Serious. Now we’re super serious about it.

And that, um, in that we’re, we’re at a very critical stage where things could really explodes. So Uh, I definitely apply, you know, Scott was, was very welcoming to apply there because even if, um, you know, we don’t get anywhere in the formal round, you’re still getting in front of people. You’re

Verious Smith III: Yes

Marco Magallon: seeing where your materials can be improved and who knows.

There could be some kind of like sideline deal that happens, right. Because you’re just getting in front of um high net worth individuals. [00:50:00] So the

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: it’s absolutely worth my time to be able to look out for opportunities like that and apply.

Verious Smith III: Yeah That’s, that’s a goal like literally here on Startempire Wire. We’re trying to get the word out about startups like you to, you know, get in front of maybe a bigger network, you know?

And so, yeah,

Marco Magallon: absolutely. And this is where I see tremendous value in this, where even if Startempire Wire is new. It’s like, I get the honor of being the first podcast. So that’s super exciting.

Verious Smith III: That’s true

Marco Magallon: That like for posterity. Like people will be looking back on this right. As you build your brand. So I’m

Verious Smith III: You know

Marco Magallon: glad I could be a part of that,

Verious Smith III: you know, they say the internet is forever. hahahaha,

Marco Magallon: Yeah. Yeah.

Which is why I’m like let’s see how this first podcast goes because I haven’t done one

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: and well, let’s see. See, so

Verious Smith III: go ahead, go ahead. Go

Marco Magallon: ahead.

Beyond just users, I’m looking to connect with community [00:51:00] stakeholders

Verious Smith III: aah!

Marco Magallon: Who have communities of potential users who have an audience and that they want to augment the way that they engage with them, because we can provide that real time real life aspects.

Yes. So this can be anything from festival organizers, people and very active chambers of commerce. People were very, uh, active, you know, student organizations or clubs at universities, um, and so on. And you can think of many other examples. These continuities are very important for me to get connected with.

Verious Smith III: Okay

Marco Magallon: They help, uh, they could be potential seeds for the platform. And

Verious Smith III: would that be like user basis as well? Like possible, you know,

Marco Magallon: Absolutely absolutely

Verious Smith III: Yeah

Marco Magallon: content basis and user basis.

Verious Smith III: okay okay

Marco Magallon: because The way I look at community is if you look at so Cal you can break it up into several concentric circles. My CMO likes to use this term concentric circles.[00:52:00]

Verious Smith III: Okay.

Marco Magallon: Like any geographical areas, say for example, Westwood, uh, uh, that area doesn’t just have one community. It’s not just the UCLA community. That’s the biggest, most well defined one but then you’ve got the surrounding Westwood, like that has a chamber of commerce, for example,

Verious Smith III: yes

Marco Magallon: and you have a worst part of the greater LA cocentric circle.

Verious Smith III: Right!

Marco Magallon: Um, that’s how I look at communities in any one of those layers is important to talk to and the sooner the better, so,

Verious Smith III: okay.

Marco Magallon: Become real partners in how this platform, this community of communities take shape.

Verious Smith III: I love it, man. And I see the value of, of where, you know, this will augment community, you know, to allow it, to grow, give you that more interaction.

Yeah. That’s, you know, I just can’t wait till you get on the Android ban hahahaha

Marco Magallon: and it’s a tough priority. I’m directly, personally [00:53:00] involved. You know, I have an Android lead.

Verious Smith III: yes

Marco Magallon: We made the tough decision of it . it wasn’t, it wasn’t so tough when you figure it out that inevitably we were going to wanna rebuild with what we had, because believe it or not is actually the first version of Superman we had.

But then iOS became the priority. Mostly because of the specific markets we were looking at, like Notre Dame being 90%, you know,

Verious Smith III: I’ve told. yeah

Marco Magallon: Um, and, and, um, for a lot of the time, pretty much when I was transitioning from south bend, Indiana to Southern California, I was a one man show. And so I was like, I’m realistically gonna be able to keep up with one platform.

So, uh,

Verious Smith III: yeah, that’s valuable

Marco Magallon: iOS, uh, uh, because it was further along, based on the work at Notre Dame and it was a great, it was a great model, right. But,

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: uh, Android is extremely important because for the world at large Android is the majority. Um,

Verious Smith III: yes

Marco Magallon: there’s a lot of great manufacturers making great devices. So it’s only gaining

yeah

more market share. And, and so it’s important for me [00:54:00] too, that with Android, we not only meets the goals set by iOS, which is a moving target because ofcourse we continue to improve iOS, but that we exceed that because, um, we get to start with like a fresh zero technical debt platform.

Verious Smith III: hmm

Marco Magallon: And then we get to take lessons learned from iOS and more quickly. Redevelop them in, in our ideal way in,

Verious Smith III: yeah, it’s always good to start without technical debt because you know, that takes time to get over.

Marco Magallon: Well, we spent the pandemic, the pandemic provided a very strategic opportunity to actually redo our entire backend.

Verious Smith III: Oh wow.

Marco Magallon: We do from scratch our entire API. And so that was many months of work, um, by our CTO.

Um, but it was work that needed to be done so that we could sleep at night.

Verious Smith III: Thats, That’s great. No, that’s awesome. Um, and so let’s, let’s [00:55:00] move into that final question. I’m gonna combine these two questions. What, What are your immediate short-term goals? And then like, you know, what are you focused on for that? And then three, five and 10 years.

What are those goals? So

Marco Magallon: yeah

Verious Smith III: immediate three, five, and 10.

Marco Magallon: Great, great. And now talking about the future, it’s been a lot of history up to this point, but now getting into the future, the most immediate goal, obviously get Android done. My brother uses Android.

Verious Smith III: Oh Nice haha,

Marco Magallon: My dad uses Android. We need Android yesterday. And let me tell you where Android are at like. We’ve got the map working, we’ve got the user authentication creation. We got a really like the hard stuff.

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: And I know this may not sound like the hard stuff, cause there’s obviously all the UI UX work died. I mean, to do, to do still. But

Verious Smith III: right

Marco Magallon: the thing is like, you know, getting that first network call, you know, to work and getting that first notification to send that’s always hard.

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: and once you [00:56:00] kind of have like the main trunks of the application done and you’ve reached kind of like what the central, uh, in our case, the map screen is like the central screen, the home screen,

Verious Smith III: hmm hmm

Marco Magallon: once you’re there, everything else that remains to be done on the app. It’s like a branch, right? Like, uh, it branches out.

Verious Smith III: App yeah,

Marco Magallon: So at this point we can really effectively divide and conquer, uh, and, and that’s an exciting place to be getting close to because then we can be really quick about getting Android out the door onto the Google play store.

Verious Smith III: Are you, Are you projecting any date

Marco Magallon: right now? I’d say it’s an a month and a half to two month range.

So

Verious Smith III: we won’t hold you to it. We won’t hold you to it too much.

Marco Magallon: It’s good to have a goal and we

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: really are aiming at the holiday season being

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: like a fifteen off point,

Verious Smith III: okay

Marco Magallon: a lot of things, because there’s a lot of things that we don’t want to do when we’re just on iPhone, but

Verious Smith III: Right!

Marco Magallon: We really want to, as we do it, we want to be able to take full [00:57:00] advantage of potential network effects.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: and that’s when we really want to do really big, broad market messaging and a lot of crazy ideas that we have for marketing. I mean, SwoopIn with its vast array of applications. There’s so many ways to growth hack of this

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: excited. Uh, so, so Android getting ready as a huge party for that. And then we, um, we want to say,

Verious Smith III: Did you say a huge party,

Marco Magallon: a huge priority, but oh, to be able to show the huge party

We, we need to throw a lunch party

because well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have to throw thousands millions of lunch parties.

Verious Smith III: Right. there you go, there you go.

Marco Magallon: The way I envisioned launch for swooping is it’s gonna be like starting the engine on an old car, right? like You got to sometimes turn to Craig several times.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: We’re really ignites and it catches and then, you know, your engine’s on. That’s how I see launching SwoopIn is like starting like a series of explosions, virality [00:58:00] events. and I’m talking to the good kind of explosion, the good kind of round.

Verious Smith III: A good kind, yeah yeah hahaha

Marco Magallon: you have to caveat that these days. Right.

Verious Smith III: I know

Marco Magallon: But the reason why it’s, because I look at what we do as far as launching as really a model, as an example, for something that is ready-made out of the box, people can just pick up and do so many things with.

Verious Smith III: Yeah.

Marco Magallon: So it’s like uploading. A new Kind of program up to the human server, you know, our collective intelligence. So organizing parties under our brand, uh, that is a big part of it

Verious Smith III: hmm hmm

Marco Magallon: because that can generate the word of mouth buzz across established social media platforms, because we’re, we’re about getting people out.

We’re about

Verious Smith III: okay.

Marco Magallon: We’re about empowering everyone

Verious Smith III: okay

Marco Magallon: to be an organizer, even if you’re just trying to plan a [00:59:00] lunch together with your friends. Right.

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: So getting, getting these, these things right. Is, uh, it’s, it’s important.

Verious Smith III: Right? Right.

Marco Magallon: I think launching is, is gonna help with that figuring out things as well on the fly.

Verious Smith III: Right, right. Uh,

Marco Magallon: getting into

Verious Smith III: three years, three years

Marco Magallon: so the three years from now, I see as funded, uh, you know, seed or post seed, you know, it could be the first T um, series a probably realistically, I think that’s, that’s definitely a good goal. So I see us already having the existing team plus some additional heads on board, full time, some significant marketing budget to do some damage with.

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: I see it with a very good working model in LA

Verious Smith III: yes

Marco Magallon: showing we’ve been visioned inaction and a model beginning to be applied at other major cities around the us and even internationally. [01:00:00]

Verious Smith III: Okay.

Marco Magallon: And I see us, I see us already a story and already people being clear that this is the next big thing, because it is a paradigm shift.

It is a new way of looking at the Internet. and what it can do for humans. It’s the human API.

Verious Smith III: I want you to, I want you to get into that a little bit, just a little bit. Okay.

Marco Magallon: Yeah sure. Just a little bit the internet, as it was created, you know, by folks in the fifties sixties, you know, started as the government DARPA project.

Uh, but it was people at universities like Berkeley, MIT, uh, and others figuring out things like, you know, packet, routing, networking, they had so much vision for the potential of the internet. I don’t think they, they expected us for the most part to get stuck in a rut. Like we are today with political polarization, uh, invasion of privacy and, and all these other problems that [01:01:00] we see with the internet today.

I see what we’re doing with SwoopIn as a course, correction in really going back to what is the point of the internet? It is to augment humans. And this gets into a lot of why computers were created to, right.

Verious Smith III: hmm

Marco Magallon: Um, but really the point here is to augment humans and SwoopIn, brings to bear location-based technologies, smartphone technologies, uh, satellite technologies in a way that empowers the human at the center of it.

That’s really the big difference between us and other startups that are in a similar space. And certainly the established giants. When it comes to tech and this gets into,

Verious Smith III: well, what makes it, what makes it, what makes it, what makes it so much different in augmenting the human, its human or the humic? Are you saying it augments the human or the human experience?

Marco Magallon: Both. Both.

Verious Smith III: Both alright! [01:02:00]

Marco Magallon: Because augmenting the human creates the human experience.

Verious Smith III: Sure, sure

Marco Magallon: and if you augment the human, you are creating more human experience,

Verious Smith III: Right!

Marco Magallon: You’re not taking away. What makes them human. You’re not giving in some poor substitute. I feel like today in the world, we have a lot of substitutes for reality,

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: Substiutes for the human experience. You’ve got video games. Yeah.

Verious Smith III: That’s true.

Marco Magallon: Social media. You’ve got streaming your entertainment, um, through your shows and movies. And I feel like with so much of that, especially as we’ve been inundated through the pandemic, people will forget what base reality is. Maybe starting to sound a little bit like Elon Musk here.

Verious Smith III: Ahaan!

Marco Magallon: We are, we’re engaging with simulations within simulations. We need to come back to reality because it’s going to change. If we can better interface with the people that actually share our reality with our neighbours with [01:03:00] the people that live in our city, that we don’t even know, but that we should know, right.

That synchronicity is trying to bring us together. If we can better interface, I feel like humanity collectively is this computer.

Verious Smith III: Ahaan!

Marco Magallon: That’s where it’s potential to be unlocked. And you know, people talk about the singularity and they talk about artificial intelligence and they get real excited about that.

And I say, Something else is going to happen before that we may be the trigger to it. And that is singularity is a very human singularity where humans kind of realize that the better that we interface with those around us, the sooner we will unlock our own potential and each other’s potential and that drastic problems facing us in the world today, politically, economically ecologically, they will transform before our eyes.

If we change the way that we look at the building blocks of our society, which is the [01:04:00] individual. And if we can change the way that we network graph with each other. We will realize the true power that we have at scale, we cannot change the building block of a society and not have completely made the highest level of society unrecognizable.

And that will transform how we solve these seemingly impossible large a pop elliptic problems in front of us.

Verious Smith III: Well, I, I think we can go really deep into what you’re talking about. Cause like I have a lot of other like questions and, uh, you know, ideas that I can throw into this, but I definitely don’t want to like have our listeners going on too long because

Marco Magallon: no, I think i think

Verious Smith III: the log like argumentation and reality, I’m going to say augmented reality is something that, you know, um, it’s, you know, it came out with a lot of fanfare and, you know, you [01:05:00] know, Google glass and all this other stuff.

Um, you know, and like I, you know, I use AR apps on my phone and just like that, I don’t know.

Marco Magallon: Yeah

Verious Smith III: Do you plan on using AR to some degree and you not?

Marco Magallon: Absolutely. Absolutely. and, and like long story short, because I do think that this is a great launching off point for a subsequent.

Verious Smith III: Yeah we have to do the another one

Marco Magallon: Oh, by the way, here, we’re talking 10 year plan stuff, right?

I mean

Verious Smith III: yeah yeah

Marco Magallon: the last question like this is really getting into 10 years stuff.

Verious Smith III: Yeah,

Marco Magallon: 10 years from now. I think it’ll be obvious what I’m describing to you right now. You’ll be like, you heard it first. You heard

Verious Smith III: heard it first here, haha

Marco Magallon: this isn’t stuff that I’m putting on the website or, um, even so much, you know, like, you know, an investor materials that perhaps I should definitely emphasize more

Verious Smith III: oh yeah yeah

Marco Magallon: is that this is how we altered the future.

Really this a platform like SwoopIn and I say might as well be SwoopIn right? Cause I got a million ideas for how to [01:06:00] alter the future. And so many possible destinations are better than the ones that we seem to be heading on today, which nobody seems to like, like

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: it towards like five different kinds of dystopia.

But, um, but long story short, um, I don’t believe to accomplish most of it. I don’t believe any further new technology is needed. I believe that with the technology that we have today, Like what I have access to, for example, as a developer,

Verious Smith III: right

Marco Magallon: there is so much there that people have just begun to scratch the surface of

Verious Smith III: You said, you talking about to accomplish what you want to do on your platform.

In 10 years, you don’t need more New . Technology

Marco Magallon: yeah. I’m saying you don’t even

Verious Smith III: okay

Marco Magallon: like fancy wearable, augmented reality tech

Verious Smith III: okay okay

Marco Magallon: that has the potential to lead us further down this rabbit hole that we’re on and become a distraction

Verious Smith III: dystopia. Okay.

Marco Magallon: Yeah. I I’m building for what we have today and certainly [01:07:00] thinking about how, what we are gonna have in the future built on top of that.

Verious Smith III: Right

Marco Magallon: But the patient we’re building for today is going to power an augmented reality interface because that does have an element. It has a use case.

Verious Smith III: Okay.

Marco Magallon: It has a feature space in what we’re building and it’s, it’s going to be more elegant than just, you know, another tab in another app or,

Verious Smith III: Right

Marco Magallon: you know, because other apps have done augmented reality layers to what they do, but it’s been like a feature berry.

Verious Smith III: Aight,

Marco Magallon: within its headings We have a way to bake it in, you know, from the foundation. Um,

Verious Smith III: Well, I can tell you that, like, as a, you know, just as an, as a technology enthusiasts, you know, I can see platforms who are rushing to, to, to augment humanity, um, like in different ways, like not all of those platforms or technologies, like, you know, personally, I would, I wouldn’t be involved with all of them, but there [01:08:00] are some very interesting things out there.

And, um, there’ll be platforms that, you know, are funded by billionaires. Like, you know, Neuralink, you know, Neuralink for instance,

Marco Magallon: Yeah

Verious Smith III: I mean, I don’t know if I want to, I don’t know if it’s a, I don’t, I, I’m not completely sure if it’s like a, you know, you have to get surgery to insert it as you heard or something like that.

I think that’s their test phase or something like that. But yeah,

Marco Magallon: I’m excited for the startups that are developing the new technology, because then by the time that we’re ready to incorporate those features and we’ve got our core robust,

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: we using it and loving it, but then we have these things ready, made that we can integrate and just kind of drop in. I’m excited for that.

Verious Smith III: Well they, they already have human brain computer interfaces that are pretty, pretty, um, pretty accurate. And I, I played around with some of those because, you know, I taught robotics for a while and, and like actually have a human brain computer interface here at my house, you know? I mean, [01:09:00] it’s pretty cool.

But anyway, all in San was that these sit, like you said, these technologies are here and, like Stuff that I’m being using. It’s like rudimentary compared to the stuff they have now, you know? Um, and like, I mean, I could see SwoopIn at any of these type of technologies being integrated into there. Uh, but I don’t want to get too far off topic.

Anyway.

Marco Magallon: Then

Verious Smith III: another day we need, need another, we need another day.

Marco Magallon: I thought an hour 20 an hour is a pretty good media introduction to

Verious Smith III: I love it man said you gave us your 10 year goal, your long-term vision, all of that stuff. Please tell us where people can find you info about you, Marco personal profiles, um, profiles for your app online, offline whatever.

Marco Magallon: Right. So, uh, first of all, SwoopIn the app, it can be found right here and you type that name, one words within, into the app [01:10:00] store. And you’ll see us there. You can download it, start playing around with it. And then we have the website at www dot Swoopin .net. If you’d like to follow us on social, we’re not marketing too much there yet, but you’ll start getting that a marketing message, you know, once we get there, you know, and have Android so forth, maybe even a bit before that, that is act SwoopIn

that’s pretty much our handle on all the major social platforms, Instagram, Twitter, and so forth. And my email [email protected]. If you want to blast me with anything, anything interesting questions, ideas, feedback. That’s a great place to reach me and, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for

Verious Smith III: What, what about your Tinder group?

Marco Magallon: Well, the Tinder group has not officially been, uh, branded yet and, uh, I wanted to wait.

I wanted to give a bit of time to the, uh, former organizer who I still kept his organizer in [01:11:00] case. Uh

Verious Smith III: okay. ‘

Marco Magallon: And they’re like, what are you doing? You’re taking our group. Although if we, as a group, would it would already not exist if I hadn’t accepted me to step up and take over the subscription fee.

Verious Smith III: Yeah, no dude, they can’t complain.

Marco Magallon: But uh, yeah. I mean, I mean, join that group. It’s not, it’s not doing anything yet, but the idea is that before it starts doing something, you know, cause it’s a, it’s a captive audience and people that are interested in location-based technologies,

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: which we are. And I think an evolution of dating is to be more broad.

Um, because like I said, people need more universal foundation of friendship to really come together and it doesn’t have to be just dating.

Verious Smith III: Right

Marco Magallon: So that’s a very powerful element of it. And we have a lot of features on the way that will kind of bring us more directly into that route to

Verious Smith III: you got to give us that on part two, bro hahaha.

Marco Magallon: Yeah, exactly. Another part two or part three.

Verious Smith III: Awesome. well Marco I really appreciate you for coming on to the [01:12:00] Startempirewire podcast. This is the first like, man, we need a round of applause, sound of effect in the background. hahaha Uh, but all right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in as well. Marco uh SwoopIn check out his, you know, platform, if you’re on iPhone, download it and be expecting Android coming sometime this year as well.

Uh, too much, he said, well, we’re, we’re gonna, we’re just gonna, you know, maybe hold his feet to the fire a little bit on that.

Marco Magallon: Do it do it do it

Verious Smith III: and, um, yes, and, and also come connect with, uh, connect with all of us at some of these local events that we’re doing. Um, startempirewire.com is where you can hear about these events, hear about these startups.

And, uh, thank you again, Marco, for coming on and thanks for tuning.

Marco Magallon: Thank you for having me verious this is

Verious Smith III: yeah

Marco Magallon: lot of fun, a lot of fun. It’s going to create an addiction. You know, I’m doing these,

Verious Smith III: I hope so. I hope so [01:13:00] and

Marco Magallon: For the speaker experience

Verious Smith III: thankyou

Peace out to the audience. See on next episode,

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