Story behind the app
Neil Issa founded Contact Mesh, LLC in 2016 to disrupt how we manage contacts on our phones. Rather than manage tens or hundreds of other people's information, he set out to develop a solution where you manage only one contact card... your own. With over 500 contacts himself, he realized that people input hundreds of inconsistent copies of his contact information in their phones. He wanted to a more efficient way to control which phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, and social media links he shared with others, without making each person input it.
The magnitude of this problem became evident when looking at sharing contact information between group members which ContactMesh handles. Even a small group, such as a company with 25 employees, would require each person to add 24 of their coworkers in each phone. That means 600 manual contact entries have to be made to "fully mesh" those coworkers! The resulting inefficiency was a staggering observation which drove him to relentlessly pursue the development of the ContactMesh app.
ContactMesh was designed from the start to make paper business cards obsolete. Every time Neil attended a networking event, he was surprised that for at least a decade everyone commented that "someday we'll stop handing out paper business cards". He even ran across several people that had even tried to solve the contact card challenge themselves, and he analyzed why their ideas were insufficient to gain popularlity. While he designed ContactMesh to handle the obvious "friending" of someone in a two-way exchange, he also addressed the fact that business cards are often a one-way exchange. Frequently, someone hands you a business card, or you pick one up from a business card holder without returning any information. This functionality became a critical component of the app allowing home, retail, and office-based businesses to "pin" their virtual business card holder to a specific geolocated address and allow other users to discover nearby cards to pick up.
After nearly a year of 100-120 hour work weeks building his vision, Neil turned his sights to launching the app in a big way, with a target market of 6.1B smart phones by 2020, or 5 times the size of Facebook's user base. Although he architected the app to run on serverless, planet-scale platforms including Microsoft's Azure Cosmos DB, he realized he will quickly need access to top-level expertise and resources to scale. To accomplish Neil's aggressive vision for ContactMesh, he applied and was accepted as an exhibitor to TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Alley where he will announce the app launch on September 18, 2017 in San Francisco! Story to be continued...
