 Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Wall. Come back to San Jose, along with Jeff Frick. I'm John Walls, you're watching us here on theCUBE. Glad to have you along for the ride as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connects or QuickBooks Connect 2016. We've talked a lot about passion here. We've talked a lot about energy and belief and vitality. And our next guest, I think, embodies all those qualities. Nick Hoffman, who's the owner and founder of Share ReFund, who was a big award winner here yesterday in the App Showdown. Nick, glad to have you on theCUBE and looking forward to learning more about the product. Good to see you, sir. Thank you, gentlemen. Yeah, so Share ReFund. Let's talk about Share ReFund first and then we'll get into the competition and what happens. So tell us about what you do first. Right, so Share ReFund is a shipment auditing platform. You can think of us like auto correct for your FedEx and UPS invoices. So we're looking for late shipments, billing mistakes, any overcharges in general that you're paying for as a customer. And so we'll audit each shipment on your invoice looking for these charges and automatically file claims on your behalf to get refunds when you're paying too much. And our work has done 100% on a performance basis in that there's no upfront or ongoing fees. It's just a split of the savings that we deliver. So we use the moniker found money because it's all upside. There's no risk. It's just a complete win for businesses. So I make money or you make money that if I get $1,000 back in shipping you get a cut of that. Right. Because of what you did for me. And we split it 50-50. But how much money is there? I mean FedEx is known, right? When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. I mean you think of those guys as just rock solid in their process and delivery. Sounds like there's a little bit of not less than perfection that you could take advantage of. I have tons of respect for FedEx and UPS. When you think about the logistics networks that they've built it is absolutely impressive. The truth is is these delivery guarantees even one minute late it happens. And on average 4.5% of all the shipments that we look at we get refunds on. So that's a heuristic into the savings that we deliver back to customers. So they can expect to see somewhere in the range of two to 4% real savings on each shipping invoice. And are you pulling, cause the good news about those guys is they scan everything every step of the way. So I imagine you're tapping into that network where you're getting real time data as to what actually happened. Correct, so tracking events are in our system and available throughout all the interfaces that we've built them to share refund. All right, so the reason why you're here is that not only because you had a great idea but there's several competitions that are based here at the show. One of them is the apps showdown. And Nick's company was one of about, I think 70 or 80 it was, who developed apps over a certain timeframe. So about an eight month window submitted them to a judges panel review. And you guys got to the 10 finalists and then were selected after a two minute quick pitch as the winner and the recipient of $100,000 a day. And so show us your reaction when you went up on stage. Yeah, I felt like we were watching Rocky. You know, when you got the award from Scott Cook. So tell us about the thrill of that moment and being announced the winner and some really, really good competitors. Unbelievable, and the confetti was a surprise so I didn't anticipate that. But you know, really it's just validation. It was several years of hard work in the making to build share refund. So outside of market success, which we're seeing to really be recognized by such a great tech company is just a tremendous honor. So tell us about being part of the ecosystem because part of the requirement for the contest was you could not have submitted your app before I think it was January of this year. So it sounds like you guys had this application outside of the QuickBooks ecosystem. Now you're in the QuickBooks ecosystem. How does that impact your guys' customer base? You're going to market? And what is it like to partner with QuickBooks and be part of this ecosystem? Right, so when we originally developed share refund, I didn't think of Intuit as a partner initially. And trying to figure out, okay, how do I scale this business? How do I break through obscurity? I looked for support. And in doing so, recognize QuickBooks and all of the customers that they have on QuickBooks as potential candidates to benefit from shipment auditing as a performance-based service. So I got in contact with the developer relations team at Intuit, who by the way is absolutely wonderful. Every person on that team is extremely nurturing, which is a breath of fresh air. I think dealing with large companies, sometimes you get a different persona out of those companies. But with Intuit, it's everyone's very down to earth and welcoming and supportive. And so working with that team and the community of developers like myself, collaborating around the Intuit network, I was able to build share refund as a QuickBooks app. And ever since then, we've been able to get more exposure through QuickBooks for our app and grow our customer base and just provide a great service to more customers in general. Now, do you have it in other kind of app ecosystems as well? I would imagine like just jumps in on my head, AWS obviously would be a potential partner because this is something that could be used across a wide spectrum of potential ecosystems. And if so, that's great. And then how does the Intuit ecosystem and support from a developer point of view? Because everybody wants you. Everybody wants developers building stuff in their ecosystem. So how do they compare with some of these other experiences that you've had? Sure, there's a lot in there. So I'll parse it as best as I can remember it. But in terms of AWS, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. So I'm a systems architecture guy. I went to all the developer coaching seminars, et cetera for Amazon. And that's part of the genius behind share refund in how we provide a lot of our real-time services is through the services of AWS. So in general, Amazon's a great partner to share refund. Not so much from a channel for bringing us new customers, but more from an infrastructure perspective. And that said, I'd love to talk to Amazon Venture guys to sit down and chat with them about how we can maybe scale share refund even further than our reaches now. Back to your second question about what other app stores are you integrated with? So we just finished an integration with Oracle. A similar experience there, wonderful team, worked with the sales team there to get our app launched. In addition to that, just rifling off the list, I'm probably going to forget a few, but BigCommerce, Shopify is a good partner of ours, 3D cart, a lot of marketplaces that ShipStation we're dealing with. So there's a lot of guys out there that have a potential to offer a value-add service to their customers and they recognize share refund as being nothing but a win for everybody involved. It's just a classic case of the new age application development where you basically found a problem, you found money, there's found money, and by assembling data that's already out there with a little bit of your own secret sauce, APIs and cloud package up a brand new offering that can start delivering value to the marketplace. 100%. Love it. He could join the team if you like. I'm going to go back and check my ship notices. Which we all should do, right? I mean, because everyone, you do lose things. We've got time, right? We're not shipping like mass, but anyway. So, but this is just one thing that you're doing, which I found interesting. We're going to talk a little bit about, really, I think it blends into that spirit that we've talked a lot about here about. So you've got share refund, very successful experiment as you say, that's gone well, but you have another pet project you've been working on for an extended period of time. I have some pictures here, actually on Nick's smartphone that I'm going to share with you, but tell us about this. The world's smallest, cheapest, and smartest streetlight. So what are you up to with that? And while you're doing that, I'm going to turn this around and we'll get a shot of it on your phone. Yeah, so the venture that I really want to do in life is called Absolumen. That's the name of the product. And what we're trying to do is build a streetlight about the size of a Pringles can, and sell that to municipalities at a good rate. And so in the past five years, myself and my partner, Usan Uda, we've built what is Absolumen and we're ready to launch that Q1 of next year. And the trick here is that it's a 100 watt bulb, as opposed to the 250s that usually are used. And we have some befores and afters here. If I can get to them, I think I've got to go back one more slide. So this is the before shot that you had of your product. You see, it's rather dark, not much going on there. And then the, oops, I know the right way after, I don't know if that comes out quite as well on cameras as they would like, but it's a stark contrast. And I would think that you've got a pretty good market for this thing. So tell us about, where are you going to go with this and what do you think the future holds? Right, so that replaces a standard 250 watt high pressure sodium bulb and it consumes two-fifths of the energy. And just like Cherifa and how we're finding money, there's found money in providing a better light on the end of every light pole. So with that in mind, we built the hardware to make the LED go and then we built a control board to go on the back. So it's going to have GPS. It has a long range radio in it so it can go 16 kilometers point of sight through a company called SimTech who makes great technology. And we also have a Wi-Fi stack in it for commissioning and controls on location. All of that, of course, is going to be integrated into AWS IoT and we'll give field workers an app on their phone that they can go and administrate the infrastructure from. You look at LA, you know, there's 220,000 street lights in LA and there's 200 plus different brands. I mean, talk about a mess. They've got maps the size of this table and when a light's out, they're like, okay, what is that pole, one, two, three, four on what? Like 1625 Main Street? So they show up to the street, they know a pole's out, but they're all off because it's daytime. So now they have to flick them on and off one at a time to see which one's broken. Send them in up in a boom. The thing weighs 40 pounds. It's just totally inefficient and the whole process could be streamlined and that's what I intend to do. And is this retro-fittable? I mean, that's probably not the right word, but you've got these long standing of these legacy light posts up there. I mean, how does this thing fit into that? Right, so they have a standard two and three-eighths inch, they call it slip-fitter, so it's just a pipe and this slides right over the top and then there's one finger screw that puts it on. So it'll work. Yep. It's a combined install, no big deal. Great ideas, which again, I think is really the inspiration of this show. So we thank you for sharing that. And a little extra capital in the pocket to help develop it. That's right, so a hundred grand on that. But yeah, more importantly, congratulations on winning the contest, the app showdown. And we do wish you the best of luck because I think the light's on and Nick's home. So thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Yeah, and I just wanted to leave with a special thanks to the Intuit Developer Relations Team for putting on a great contest and being so inspiring and nurturing to the developer community. And I would say to any developer that wants to build an app, right now, QuickBooks is the best place to look to make your app a success based off of the potential in the market and also the support you're going to get from that team. And then also anybody that's trying to build an app, just make sure that you're focused on solving real problems with that app. And when you go about building that app, it has to be easy for people to use. Nobody wants an extra interface anymore. Nobody wants a lengthy signup process and they don't want to talk on the phone with anybody about coaching. So you better make it fast, you better make it easy and make it simple to use. I think you just made it for Jeff and me. I'm spoken like a $100,000 winner. Nick, thanks for joining us. Thank you gentlemen. Great advice, great insight. Nick Hoffman, the owner and founder of Share or Refund, the winner of the $100,000 app showdown here at QuickBooks Connect 2016. Back with more on theCUBE from San Jose in just a bit.