Girl Turns Heartbreak into Action - Making Lemonade From Lemons

Kalie takes her heartbreak and passion for disrupting online identity fraud to entrepreneur and investor Jaqi Saleem, CEO of Qualified Digital.  Jaqi thinks she knows just how to bring her idea to life... 

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To find out more about my online presence monitoring solution Fuzzy Watchdog, go to Fuzzywatchdog.com.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, guys. I'm Kaylee Nitsche, and this is Just Looking Out. So excited to have my dear friend and business advisor slash investor on with us, Jackie Salim. Super excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. I just, I couldn't imagine not doing a segment with you based off of everything that's kind of happened. But I do want to start from the beginning of you and I, which was, I can't believe it, but six years ago, December 2019, Las Vegas, Nevada. Okay. So we've been working together five years and essentially like I sell the Adobe software. I'm at Adobe. And then we work very closely with your company, which is called?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Qualified Digital. Yeah. We're a full service customer experience company and we implement on Adobe software, but our big thing is strategy and helping businesses to achieve their big business goals online. And both of us work a lot in the healthcare space, which is one of my favorite areas because it's

SPEAKER_01 1:00

It's a greater cause. Yeah. You know, like we're not just like booking online airline tickets or helping people go to the movie theater. Like what it feels like, especially with our latest customer that we're working on, you know, one of probably the number one most academically acclaimed provider in the entire world. Like that's really cool to like work on those kinds of projects together. And I would also say your agency has been like such a saving partner because we've been involved in other projects where we've had other implementation partners completely not do so well, right? Whether that was making the customer upset, not listening to the business goals, but you guys come in and you're modern and you're flexible and you're super intelligent and you understand the business case really quickly. So I feel like you're so agile and able to get the value of what I'm selling out to market so much quicker. So you make my job so much

SPEAKER_00 1:59

easier. Thank you. When I talk to about the business and our relationship with Adobe, a lot of people ask how we got into it because it's obviously not the easiest space. And I refer to us as the fixers, is generally we're not the first place, and now we are, which is super exciting, where we're starting the work. But our history and kind of like walk towards success was that we would come in and fix what other people had done wrong. And really because people, and you know this, they come in and they're looking at themselves as an implementation partner. And we look at implementation as being the means to an end when it comes to like executing against a business strategy.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Well, you like from like a CEO perspective, you're running the business so like a well-oiled machine. But I also want to like everybody to understand the people aspect of Qualified Digital and who Jackie is because it's humans that you want to work with. Yes, cutie, you guys do a great job in terms of being a business partner. But having a good human to work with is so important to me and my customers And I'm only going to bring in the good folks. And I really get that from everybody that you've employed. It's such a testament to you, the people that you've hired and the people that you surround yourself with. And I'd love to know more about how you've developed such a skill and picking the right talent and understanding humans and kind of that psychological aspect behind it.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

When I started the company about seven years ago, I really built it around what I got to see other successful companies that look like ours doing. And so, you know, what we recently went through is a transaction of taking on private equity to help us scale out our business. So as I was building it throughout this entire time, we've been thinking about building out a model that scales. And so just recently, we've gotten to a place where, you know, what I refer to as just add water. Water being money. Dollar bills, y'all. It was definitely one of the hardest Oh, I saw

SPEAKER_01 4:02

it. I look up to you so much. You have paved a way for like what women can do. And I feel so empowered by what I'm doing now on my side of the business because I just see that you can do it. I'm like, okay, you know, Jackie's here. She's done this before. You have experience and you can take that experience and help us grow, which I'm so excited about.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

It's been so cool doing this too because sometimes you just don't know what to do. don't realize how much you've grown or how much you know until you start like helping someone else working through their business and of course like super exciting for me another powerhouse you know female CEO coming on scene and you know really just like as we've gotten into it it's felt so natural to know what to do and like just culminating all of this like experience that I had the timing is kind of crazy that I just went through this process of taking on private equity and talking to like probably dozens and dozens of like potential partners and understanding what everybody cares about, what they want to hear, what they don't want to hear. And as we're going through this process of thinking about what are we going to do, what are we going to build, like knowing again, like building with the end in mind of what is it that's going to matter to people has just been, it's been really interesting to realize what you know. I

SPEAKER_01 5:25

think it's, worth mentioning like we've gravitated towards health care because you know we kind of talked about it like it's helping people at the end of the day and it's so cool to be working with you outside of our traditional partnership in this new adventure together where again the focus is around helping people like we've got your back it's that innate instinct you know that that gut check that we're giving somebody that they didn't necessarily have before because the information wasn't available and they couldn't make an informed decision first of all because because we're friends. And I was finally ready to start opening up and telling people about what had happened. Like the shame had worn off and I was so gung-ho and like mission-driven to like channel my newfound energy and like ability to move on from like that crazy ass story to like focusing on like the business challenge to make sure it doesn't happen to other people. I was extremely nervous to talk to you. One, I was being vulnerable. It was vulnerable from a personal perspective, but it was also really vulnerable for me from a professional perspective because I didn't really know what I was going to ask for. I just knew that the close was you becoming involved in the project. That's all I really wanted out of the conversation, but I did know you were super busy. So I'm like, okay, this is going to have to be good because this woman's a boss and she's so busy and travels all the time. Like it has to be worth her time and energy.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, I remember thinking it's Kaylee, so of course she's going to be successful, but also product is really hard and you know, am I going to have the time and the energy to be able to do it? And usually when people pitch me product, I'm always like, ideas are the easiest thing. But like since the day you brought it up, it's just been like brainstorming nonstop and new ideas and just it's been fun. And it's like a real problem. So let's actually talk about the real problem. So we go to this like little Italian restaurant in Vegas and we're sitting in this little booth and Kaylee like opens a laptop and starts telling me this story, this really, really personal story with like a picture up of the people on the team that she's already gotten together. And she's like, so here's what happened to me two months ago. And it was still very raw, but it was like, you were like, here's the thing that happened. And now I'm moving on and I have this idea and I'm going to take you through a pitch deck and I'm I'm like, wait, Kaylee, pause. What happened? What in the actual? Yes. Yes. To the business part. But like, can we slow down for a minute and hear like, this is really big. That's crazy what happened to you. Obviously, being your friend and honestly, just another woman, like hearing that story was just gutting. And it's just been so interesting because every single person that I've brought on to my team has had the same response too especially because a lot of them know you

SPEAKER_01 8:31

sure everything from based off of what I went through which is a wild story but at the end of the day I didn't lose any money my kid is healthy as can be and she's none the wiser we're happy we've moved on I wasn't physically hurt so just when I started to dig into like the metrics behind like I'm not the only one that this has happened to obviously I knew it happened to Jess because I knew about her right but it was shocking to me to understand like this This is a real problem, and there's no solution out there right now.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

And understanding the problem has been such a slow burn for me, too. Like, just the magnitude of it has just, like, over time just become more and more real. Even from that, like, first meeting where you took me through, and I was like— You didn't even know about Are We Dating the Same Guy. It was so, like, fascinating to me that people have to have these, like, social groups that they're building themselves to try to protect each other from, like, these predators. Like, totally, like— grassroots, like women banding together. When you were telling me about this, I was like, wow, I had no idea this is like a thing that is happening. And like from that dinner table to now, I mean, I started with like, yeah, I'll invest some and I'll give you like some of my time to, holy.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Wait, which by the way, I'll invest some was everything to me, guys, because I didn't, again, I didn't have an ask. I didn't really know exactly what I wanted out of you. I just wanted to would be involved. And I surely wanted qualified digital to be involved. I needed your strategy mind and your ability to solve problems. And then, of course, be able to bridge that to building out a technology. That's where I really have the gap. I understand the business problem. I'm good with people, but I don't know anything about coding or bringing in data sources. And I was like, Jackie is the person for this. You can put a big red bow on all of this. So when you initially said, I'm going to commit to this much money, I bawled my eyes out on the airplane. Aw. I never heard that side of the story either. I called my mom. I was so proud of myself. And I mean, I've had other like career accomplishments, but like this like for me was so much because as me going out on my own, like I'm starting this from scratch. It was my idea. And you believed in me. And that was so amazing. And guys, I just want to say a similar story that I just saw and witnessed the other day because we got more money, which is awesome. Commitment for more.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Yes. So crazy.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Jackie goes, hey, I think we have a commitment for more money. And I'm like, that's incredible. This was just 72 hours ago. Yeah. And she gets him on the phone and they've been, you know, very good professional friends for a long time. And he's like, yeah, I'm good. Yeah, he like was with you during your huge transaction. So he's seen you in action. He's seen how wonderful you are. And you guys, you'll die. He commits a very sizable, nice amount of money to help us keep and run right into 2025. And Jackie goes, well, don't you want to know what it's for? No, he goes, you're going to have to tell me a little bit about this product. And I said, do you really want to know right now? And he thinks about it. You guys, this guy said, no, not really. Doesn't care about a contract. Didn't care to even hear the idea. He cared that you were involved and that you had believed in it so much that you were investing that that was good enough for him. That to me was one of the most inspiring business moments I've ever had. I want to get to the point where someone believes in me so much that I can make a phone call and they're ready to invest just because I think it's a good idea because they've seen what I've done. That is a testament to you being a boss bitch. That was cool.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

It's also a testament to how much I believe in what you're doing because the backstory of like how that even happened was I'm on the phone with him and he's talking about building a fund and he's going to invest in these things. And I was like, one of these days you're going to have to listen about this fuzzy project that we're working on. And he was like, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, no, listen to me. Have I ever said to you that I believed in something that was not successful? And he paused for a minute and he's like, you really believe in this? And I'm like, more than I ever believed in qualified digital from the start. Absolutely. This thing is certain to be successful because there is a real problem that we're solving and people are always trying to find a problem to solve and people are screaming about this problem and no one's solving it it's

SPEAKER_01 13:06

so exciting I mean we have so much momentum it seems to be right time right place right I just feel like more than seems

SPEAKER_00 13:14

to be it's like ever since the day you told me about it I see it everywhere I still remember you just telling me about this man who you won't even like say his name he does I just remember some of those moments of like you just giving me this information. You meet this guy on a dating app. He meets your daughter. He's sending you these blue hearts saying that he wants to have kids with you. He's Dating these other women who look creepishly like you. And he is really engaged and talking to you all of the time and, like, very loving. Oh, Jackie,

SPEAKER_01 14:02

he's, like, coming to, like, the Fourth of July barbecue party as, like, my new man. You know, like, we had plans for a future together. I

SPEAKER_00 14:11

thought this was it. I've never known you to date. You know, hearing about this guy, I'm like, this guy's got to be pretty good because you're a picky person. I think that is like a call

SPEAKER_01 14:22

out, right? Because I've been single for four years and you knew me at the end of my marriage. But I never bought up any of the dudes that I had like, you know, gone on first dates with or anything. It wasn't worth really noting. I

SPEAKER_00 14:32

think I remember you telling me that like you barely ever went on a second date. So this, I mean, obviously this guy passed the, you know, a bar. Yeah, he turned the shit out of me. Yeah. Yeah. Just to have him violate you, the fact that he's like in your home, in your heart, like the fact obviously that he met your daughter, but like also that you met his daughters when his daughters have also met his current wife. Like what a wild story. I mean, you almost like it's crazier than fiction. Like it's absolutely wild. I also like to take a little power away from him by saying he's a statistic the story doesn't get told enough but there's like crazy numbers of how many people are out there catfishing and pulling people in under these false pretenses like what he's doing is like just normal sure but also like hearing this moment of the fact that like these two women that you were being the other women to each other but I know it's tough.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

this or experiences. And the three of us were like, absolutely not. You know, and we only gave each other the support and love that the other person was needing in that moment. Like we had, I had moments of weakness where I wanted to reach back out. I still don't understand why he did half the things that he did. Right. But I mean, we have so much power between the three of us that we like keep each other going. I mean, now we're all like kind of like doing our own thing. He has good taste.

UNKNOWN 16:43

Steve.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

A bit of a type, but and meanwhile, there's no way. I mean, it just felt like there should have been a way, right? Like for you guys to have caught this before your hearts got

SPEAKER_01 16:58

broken. And I mean, honestly, I came up with the idea on an airplane. I'm coming back from, I think, a meeting that you were at with me in New York. I'm like, if I only would have just known that this dude was married, I would have never, ever agreed. Feels knowable, right? The first knowable thing. And then I got to thinking, well, he lied about a lot of things that are public knowledge, right? He doesn't have the degree he says he does. He's not the profession that he claims to be. His actual name is not his name. So I'm like, these are very easy searchable things that are actually rather difficult to get in terms of getting the results, finding them in a place that's reputable and accurate. And so the wheels just got to turning. I went to Mexico with my mom over New Year's. So I spent four days in Mexico. My mom would go read a book and I would go by the pool and I just learned a lot about dating apps and statistics. And if there was technology out there that would provide me away. At first, I'm only looking at it from my vantage point, right? Like, okay, I'm going to get back on the apps at some point. What can I use? Is there anything? And there's not. And

SPEAKER_00 18:23

you also don't want to be creepy, right? Like, you don't want to be doing a full background check on somebody before you go on a date with them.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

I want additional assist, a technological smart assist to say, hey, this person is who they're claiming to be. Feel comfortable in knowing. Have a A little bit of outside perspective. No, I mean, it sounds

SPEAKER_00 19:26

like, smells like a lot of stuff that we already

SPEAKER_01 19:37

do. additional resource that someone can use to validate that someone is who they claim to be. And it was like at once only a dating app thing, right? Because I was looking at it from that lens and you really were the one that was like, hold on here. I would use it for X, Y, and Z and I'm not even on the apps. Absolutely. I mean,

SPEAKER_00 20:01

we were even talking like we would want to go like before a meeting and check somebody and just see like what their story is or whatever. But yeah, like what a wild opportunity that we came into. And I want to talk a little bit too about like what the process looked like from there. Because, you know, for me, obviously, I like I have to do things in bursts because I'm running a business. And like we flew together for this brainstorming session. And I remember at the very beginning of it, we were like, OK, the most important thing that we need to do right now because we don't want to lose our compass is like, what are we and what aren't we and how important it is to write that stuff down, that, like, it's about helping people. It's not about making money. It's about being available to everybody. It's not about being exclusive. Those exclusive apps exist. This is about, like— Inclusivity. Yeah, and really, like—and also, we're not a dating app. At all. We're— I think that's so

SPEAKER_01 21:05

important. Like, we're not a dating app.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

People are doing great at dating apps. They have built incredible tools out there. This is like a friend, a partner, a collaborator who's making it possible. I mean, this story is like obviously not the most positive thing on earth, but like at the end of the day, we're optimistic. After looking at all these statistics of how often this is happening, that like we haven't even talked about the violence side of this stuff, but like just you read all these crazy statistics about how much people are luring people out, how much fraud is getting committed, all this stuff. And then at the end of it, it's like, but 85% of people find love. How about if there wasn't so much pain in between, you know, just to get to that end point and just being able to be part of a solution that doesn't have to gut somebody in order to get to the other side to find that love or, you Because they don't have to feel so vulnerable in the bad sense, but get to be vulnerable in the good sense, you know?

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Yeah. And I think that's why ultimately you and I agreed that even though the company name is Safer, which it really started out as being like a safety assist to the dating apps, because I realized like, this is very unsafe. And it was like in that last encounter with that I was like, this actually might lead to a physical altercation or somebody that really is mentally unstable that could hurt somebody or harm somebody. I had like absolutely no... Zero empathy.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

No feeling about it whatsoever for you. And

SPEAKER_01 22:49

it was scary to the point of like I was like, whoa,

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I should leave. He was just immediately feeling bad for himself.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

So it was initially like a safety verification became actually... That plus so much more, which is like, let's shine a light on good humans and prop the ones that are authentic and genuine and give those people a leg up to be their authentic selves. And for other people to say, hey, that person is who they say they are. I can feel comfortable in meeting them out or having them over at my house if I need some sort of a task done or something. Please help me with my lawn. Like, I mean, no, seriously, please help me with my lawn. You know, like there's just so many moments as we think about the evolution of digital and how basically everything is online. I'm ordering food online. I'm getting cars online. I'm renting homes online. I mean, our whole life is this digital online footprint. And Fuzzy is going to be the way in which that we can have like that conduit safety net for people to put it, you know, go and verify that someone is who they say they are.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

First of all, I would just say Fuzzy is a friend who's just looking out for you. It is a gut check. It's not a background check. It is a tool really that is able to vet information that someone gave you against information that is searchable and findable and being used in different instances. And ultimately, it's an aggregator of all this information that exists out there. There's a database of whether or not someone went to the school they said they went to and you know this this person said they went to a certain school sure whether or not they had a certain degree this person said they had a degree they didn't have this person's likeness on an image we can do facial recognition and reverse image search and say is this image associated with more than one name yeah like completely different names all all things that by the way would have sent off a flag sure for you had i

SPEAKER_01 24:58

had that marriage certificate, that would have been really nice, right? But that's really hard to find as just me at my home computer trying to do some sleuthing. There's 3,500 counties in the United States. How am I going to go through all of them and look for said certificate that I didn't even know exists?

SPEAKER_00 25:14

It's really about putting them together in different ways. That is what a patent is. But just the ability to go out and say, that information is collected. People are checking people's education. It's called It's public

SPEAKER_01 25:30

information. We are not doing anything nefarious or going behind and doing private investigating work. This is all stuff that we can find on

SPEAKER_00 25:40

somebody. It's just difficult. We're using the same sources. We're just not sharing the information. And to be very clear, we're not sharing all the information. We're not saying where someone lives. We're saying whether or not where someone said they lived is where they live or if there's information out there that potentially has a discrepancy from that. And so... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because what we don't want it to be is the opposite of what we intend and to allow people to like start looking people up and get information they shouldn't have about them. Because that is not who we are. We're not unsafe, right? No, we're not unsafe and we're not exposing people. But at the end of the day, what we want people to do is be able to pull up a barcode on their phone that only they can have that we generate in real time that sits behind this person has validated who they are with a government ID. And we've checked it against their face and that like we know that this person is the real version of themselves because had that been the case, like had this verification process existed, you would have known that he wasn't who he said he was. You would have known that he was married. Sure. It sounds complicated. In general, I'll just say our job is to take something very, very complicated and make it not the user's problem. So from the What the experience is for an end user is you go to the app store, you download the app, you use some sort of social login or Apple login, and immediately you're inside the app and you're able to search what we're referring to as a subject. In this case, it would have been the person you were dating, right? Within two quick steps, you upload a photo or a couple photos of this person. Maybe it's a screenshot from one of the dating apps and we're parsing it like you do when you take a picture of a credit card. You can see the credit card number and the expiration date and it knows where to look. And it's pulling out basic information. If you do not have a screenshot from the dating app because, you know, maybe you met a human in real life, then you go into the next step, which is to put in just some basic fields of information. Do you have this person's name? Do you have this person's location? Do you have this person's age? Most common things that you're going to learn from somebody right away on a dating app. Sure. Or at least you're going to learn what they tell you. Or What

SPEAKER_01 28:29

they don't tell you, right? Because I'm going to go in there putting... there's nothing going to be populating it.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

That's a red flag. Yeah. Oh, well, and some people just use a letter, right? But we can go in the background, we're searching, we're taking all these different data systems and appending it. And as the end user, what you get back is in like three to five seconds, a check of all of these different attributes or pieces of information about somebody and whether or not they're true or false, or if there's some sort of like indicator, if somebody has 17 Instagram accounts using the same image, there's probably something weird going on, right? So providing the end user with information to go ask additional questions. Absolutely. Or make their own decisions based on what it is that they've learned. And, you know, it doesn't have a perspective, right? It doesn't say, well, this person is married and that's a red flag. It just says this person's married. And that may be something that they're open about. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Maybe they're separated or whatever. But it gives you information to inquire and really find out the truth about where someone is in their life.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

this process of going and meeting somebody I've never met before and let's put that and put that person on notice and say it's traceable, it's trackable.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Okay. And then I just want to talk really quickly about like what does this mean in terms of growth and opportunity to scale and become really something that people are looking to and counting on as like a verification tool for things basically that have any sort of online digital footprint. Think of

SPEAKER_00 30:32

it this way. you always have to start with a use case. This use case is obviously dating, but people telling you something, I mean, really anything, think about having somebody watching your kids. Think about having somebody coming into your home to like fix your sink. I mean, people are coming into your home. Wouldn't it be great if you could vet or verify who that person is before they come into your house?

SPEAKER_01 30:56

And like empowerment here is so important, right? We're giving you key information, but you're the, at the end of day making the decision in the call. Absolutely. Like you are responsible for your own safety in life, but now you have the information to make that decision. You have some information. Because before you were kind of going in with a blind

SPEAKER_00 31:11

sight, right? You're knowing what's knowable. But, you know, I think one thing that's really important and we're going to keep driving this home is that like absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because someone hasn't committed or been convicted of a crime yet doesn't mean that they're not going to commit a future crime. We're not going to put out there that somebody is unsafe So in three

SPEAKER_01 31:45

words, how would you describe what Fuzzy aims to do? Just looking out. Just looking out. Perfect answer. And with that, so glad that we got this time together. Thank you for being on the show. I hope everybody found this as interesting as I did. Thank you for being a part of it and thank you for being my friend. It's so amazing to me that this is our job and that we get to build this together. It's going to be

SPEAKER_00 32:15

a wild ride. This will be our jobs. Maybe someday.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

We get to be on this journey together and that's so incredible. I look forward to all the fun times ahead and I know there's going to be a I'm so confident in you and you're so confident in me that we're going to get through those times and just continue to bust walls. We're going to solve this problem. Keep people safe. Thank you so much for listening. Can't wait to have you again. And like always, I'm just looking out. This is Kaylee Nitsche.