Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second article in a series spotlighting the winners in the most recent “Boyd Venture Challenge” hosted by the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business. The first article spotlighted Allison Campbell and Fluffy Friends for Children with Chronic Conditions.) 

By Kailyn Lamb, Marketing Content Writer and Editor, PYA

As BusiCard gains traction and has started placing in local pitch competitions, Co-Founder Tiho Nikolic is hoping the app will help digitize the old-fashioned business card.

“We really think this could be the next generation of networking,” he said.

BusiCard is an app where people can upload and create business cards. Instead of leaving a card in a stack where it can get lost, people can upload the card of a potential contact where they can then categorize it any way they like. The app also keeps contacts organized by alphabetizing them automatically, and people can forward cards to friends or colleagues. It is available in both the Google and Apple app stores.

Nikolic and his Co-Founder Jonathan Henry came up with the concept after attending job fairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nikolic also said that one summer while he was interning at his uncle’s business, he saw how easy it was for business cards to get set to the side and forgotten. Weeks later, no one had reached out to that person.

“It’s really hard to keep up and manage all those contacts, especially as a young freshman,” he said. “I wasn’t really aware of all the tools and resources out there.”

In June 2020, Henry and Nikolic began to do customer research. They wanted to know what the best solution would be for keeping track of business cards.

Since then, Nikolic has participated in numerous pitch competitions such as the “Vol Court Speaker Series and Pitch Competition,” and won a $3,000 prize in the “Graves Business Plan Competition.” Read more from teknovation.biz on those recent competitions here and here. Most recently, Nikolic and Henry participated in the “Boyd Venture Challenge” and received a $5,000 prize.

These competitions have helped the Co-Founders gain confidence in their idea, but also to hammer it down to fine details. Learning how to pitch the idea to investors has been a crucial skill, Nikolic said.

“The ‘Graves Business Plan Competition’ specifically really made us sit down and set our goals and align our business model and cost structure,” he added. “It really makes you sit down and take all the steps you know you need to take, and it makes you do them in order.”

The Graves prize helped launch the development of BusiCard in January. Nikolic said their business model will be to have a free version where people can access one business card template and can create up to three categories to organize business cards. BusiCard+ is a paid version where the users can have unlimited access to card templates and categories. Users can also access data to see how often their card was viewed.

Now that BusiCard has also won the Boyd competition, Nikolic said they are looking to grow and get their name out there.

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