Updates

Hi everyone!

Once a week for the last 3 months, I find myself in a meeting that is the new most important meeting of Walt’s short life. And this last week topped them all. Walt had its most critical reviews throughout the week in meetings with “the schemes” (they won’t let me officially name them outside of their own press). In each of these meetings I needed to convince the schemes that Walt had a legitimate market, that it was good for the world, and that the new architectural model that Walt relies on for onboarding banks is a sound one. Failing to do so would have been catastrophic. Had either of the schemes rejected Walt, it likely would have been the end of the line.

But the meetings were astounding in their success. Walt now has a solid foundation to move forward with approvals in place.

They did, however, introduce the need to set up internal projects and run additional internal audits against Walt including on the codebase. In the long term, this is good. Walt having an official audit that people trust and that it can present to you all as credibility is a very good thing. But unfortunately, it does mean that my intended Q3 beta release is now delayed to Q4. I also had to prioritize these conversations this month, so contract negotiations with the appropriate partners are still midway. This means I won’t be able to reveal the Availability Map for another month. To me, these feel like small concessions in a much larger successful month. I am terrifically happy with getting these checkmarks behind me.

In other news, more people continue to discover Walt and post about it on Reddit (examples here and here). I also wrote to the community about my own experience building Walt so far and the untested market that it is entering. With all this Reddit activity, the waitlist has skyrocketed. The community is extremely curious and excited.

So I’d like to try an experiment this week. On Thursday, Apr. 23 at 16.00 CET, I’ll be hosting Walt Office Hours. Find the link to the Proton Meeting here. If you have any questions about Walt, please join at any point between 16.00 and 16.30 CET. Examples of questions you might be curious about: “Will Walt work on Graphene?”, “Why are you charging people for Walt?”, “What target markets will be first to launch?” etc. I also think it’s important to introduce myself to anyone who would like to meet me. In the end, Walt will be a wallet that your card details must be typed into. Being accessible to the humans on the other side of the app, I hope, will help us establish some trust.

Hi everyone!

Walt’s waitlist is now several thousand people. That’s wild. What a ride it’s been so far and it’s only just beginning. I expect that a year from now, the active user count on Walt is going to be 100 times today’s waitlist, the people supporting the product and users will be a fully fledged Walt team, and the giants that we are fighting will know our name.

It’s a good time, I think, to introduce myself.

My name is Cole. I’m originally from the US, a farm in Kansas specifically although the most common animals on the farm were the packs of raccoons. I moved to Denmark about 7 years ago and am madly in love with Copenhagen. It’s small and humble and it’s aspirations are inline with the way I wish the world would move. I hope to soon be a Danish citizen. In school, I specialized in mechanical engineering, doing stints at oil refiners and Exxon (wow, how things change). But most of my career is in software in fintech companies like Funding Circle and Pleo.

I’ve built small things that I never dreamed of taking to market. And that’s largely how Walt started. I just intended to build a replacement to Google Wallet for myself to use.

I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to build for you all. Thank you all for supporting Walt so far, even if by just lending your email to the waitlist.

Hi everyone!

Riding the Walt entrepreneurship tide is a crazy experience. For the most part, these highs are the biggest of my career. The lows are also rough! But things are going extremely well- so well that it feels a bit blinding in a way. What potential dangers lurk on the outskirts, that can’t be seen yet.

First, some updates on the go-to-market progress.

As an engineer, I didn’t really know what go-to-market meant. This was obvious in the early days of Walt. I had a fully functional app downloaded on my phone before I even thought about revenue! I was just building for me, and thinking there might be some other people like me out there with my needs.

So it was pretty shellshocking when, on day 1 at Copenhagen Fintech’s incubation program, the mentorship team broke my brain by saying my pitch deck was just basically slides about how cool and simple the app was. It was one of those moments that founders talk about where I had to kill my darlings and admit that I actually had no idea how to build a business.

I, and Walt, have grown up a bit.

For the last month, all of my focus has been on understanding the players in the area, blockers, potential partnerships, etc. It’s been a completely new language, but a fun one. I can say that it has been absolutely exhilarating to be in potential partnership calls, pitching Walt to banking infrastructure providers, or to Visa, and finding that the world is genuinely interested in this. And what’s more, this has created unexpected traction and interest.

I decided from the beginning that Walt was built for humans. Walt is a B2C product, where the C’s are the entire motivation. The C’s are the people like me, who want a thing to exist that doesn’t exist. Once I’ve built the thing to the needs of the C’s, stop building. That’s the simplicity of the product- enable tap-to-pay with your phone anywhere in the world, with the same user experience that people are used to with Google Wallet. No crypto, no AI, no bloated feature set or premium subscription model.

Initially, our target was Android- build the app that helps people save their data where data needs saving most. As a C myself, I have personally not thought about Apple too much. I’m more satisfied with how they treat our data with respect.

But the more I talked to banks, payment infrastructure companies, the networks, and processors, the more I realized that Apple is doing some shady stuff too. Apple has always been famous in software developer world for being “difficult”, but I never bothered to dive deeply into how. In understanding the market, I get it now.

The most important discovery is that, whenever someone uses Apple Pay, Apple charges the customer’s bank. And given that there were €700B in tap-to-pay transactions in Europe last year, this took a toll on our banks (who eventually must pass this expense on to customers). European banks paid €500M to Apple last year. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t do this at all. Using Google Wallet is free to the issuing banks. This is a uniquely Apple fee. Moreover, now that the engineering is largely complete for the Walt Android application, I can say that this is not complicated technology. NFC technology like Apple Pay and Google Wallet is not rocket science.

At a time when BuyFromEU is becoming a major theme across all member states, we realized we needed to reclaim the respect we deserve from Apple, on behalf of our European banks.

I never thought I would be writing that I’m fighting for the rights of banks. But here we are.

What this means is that Walt is no longer just an Android application. Over the last month, on the side and in evenings, I’ve started and now finished a complete iOS application. I’m also evaluating the validity and the market for a Linux or Graphene based Walt app.

And with it comes Walt’s new mission-
Walt will reclaim tap-to-pay for Europe.

Hi everyone!

What an exciting update!

Today turns the page for Walt. For the last year, the founding team has been using their evenings and weekends working on Walt, building architecture and ensuring the core values of Walt’s privacy-first ethics are baked into the product. That was enormously successful, and the proof-of-concept that the team initially created is now alive in a beta offering in the Google Play store.

But today, something new begins - The team begins a 2 month, full-time intensive program at the Copenhagen Fintech incubator program!

The program goes through a thorough deep dive into all facets of the Walt offering. Branding, legal, engineering, marketing. All aspects of the company and the product will be analyzed and polished. This is TREMENDOUS news because, up until now, Walt has been entirely focused on the engineering side and making sure that the privacy goals were legitimately possible. Having some critical analysis on the branding, for instance, will likely yield some huge (and embarrassing) improvements. (For those of you who have noticed how amateur our design skills are, thank you for sticking around despite this). The team will be pitching Walt to some of the largest investors in Denmark and more importantly, to the largest banks in the Nordics. And while Walt’s aspirations are very much beyond just a product for the Nordics, starting locally and using Denmark as a testing ground is perfect, as 85% of in-store transactions in the Nordic region are with tap-to-pay. You can check out how we frame Walt to banks (and why banks also benefit from Walt’s success) in our pitch deck.

And more importantly, this is a mindset shift. Walt is no longer a hobby project that we’ve been building in our basement. While it’s true that’s how it started, it’s very clear from customer conversations, inbound investor messages, and the subscription waitlist that Walt has touched on a problem that has very solid grounding with people right now. For me, this means that I can no longer act like I have one foot in, one foot out. The commitment to working full time, without pay, on Walt means that I must take the problem and the potential customers of Walt seriously.

Things keep on keeping on!

January and February were HUGE months for Walt on an engineering side. Some of the biggest hurdles that Walt’s vision aimed for were within the engineering, and these challenges were successfully overcome. Now, Walt is moving into a different phase. Here are a couple updates on where we’re at!

Copenhagen Fintech

Walt and I have accepted an invitation from Copenhagen Fintech’s incubation program. This is an absolutely huge step for Walt! Copenhagen Fintech is the premier fintech accelerator in the Nordics and the most well-connected to banks and issuers, whom are the keys to accomplishing Walt’s vision. Getting warm introductions to issuers is the biggest need (even beyond funding) that Walt has right now.

Additionally, accelerator programs like Copenhagen Fintech focus on companies with hopes to become extremely profitable and make big investment requests. Walt does not fit this profile. Walt deliberately focuses on modesty and limited features. Additionally, and in contrast to the other companies in the cohort, Walt has no AI focus. Lastly, the founding team intends to ask for as little investment as possible if that need someday arises.

The fact that Copenhagen Fintech has accepted us into their incubation program despite these big differences from their standard acceptees is an extremely good sign.

Full-Time Focus

Accepting the invitation also comes with the need to devote more time and intention to overcoming the current hurdles Walt must overcome. That means that I (Cole) am moving to work full-time on Walt. This change is something that has been planned for months, and it’s very exciting!

Working on Walt has been incredibly exciting and fun so far. Most of the focus has been on something I was already well-versed in - the engineering build. But now that the proof-of-concept for building a completely private, compliant, tap-to-pay alternative to Google Wallet is complete, the challenges require me to develop new skills. The full-time move is a welcome change.

Hello Walt supporters!

What a 6 months it has been! The team hasn’t really left our computers since the company was formed! We’ve been (very) hard at work building. We’ve focused primarily on the engineering side so far, building out the secure, completely private Android wallet application.

And it’s gone SO GREAT!!! Besides the tremendous success of the engineering build, it’s also been the joy of a lifetime to build something that we really believe in, and that we truly believe benefits real humans. And that joy and passion has really come through in the way the application looks and feels.

Request for Intros!

But now that the engineering is largely completed, now begins the hard part - the partnerships phase.

Before Walt can be used by actual humans, “issuers” like banks and neo-banks have to approve Walt to be an acceptable app for their bank card to be loaded into. This sounds like a small task! They just need to click “OK” on their acceptance screen!

But it was well known before starting that this is the most difficult task for Walt and the team. Right now, most issuers across the globe have a list of just 2 accepted apps for their cards to be loaded into - Apple Pay and Google Wallet (and sometimes Samsung Pay, and very rarely Garmin Pay).

We’re making tremendous progress. We have very strong starts with two small issuers with relationships to the team. But we’ll need many, many more issuers to accept Walt if we’re ever going to allow the general population to begin using Walt.

So this is where we need your help, friendly supporters. If you have any personal connections with any issuers (e.g. a bank or fintech neo-bank), the team at Walt would love any warm intros.

Coming Up Next

We continue to update our roadmap on the walt.is website. The immediate next steps are to focus on onboarding our first issuer and then to test the end-to-end flow of add card → insert card details → start using tap-to-pay with Walt.

But beyond that, we have an exciting engineering update as well, that we’ll share soon!