Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeff Swartz.
Hi Jeff, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My journey into founding Qujam really started with a clear observation of a glaring problem in the digital advertising space. For years, geofencing and location-based marketing were treated like some kind of exclusive, high-level sorcery. If a business wanted to serve digital ads to people that were physically at a specific car dealership, a retail footprint, a precise event venue, etc… they had to go through traditional ad agencies/vendors with high markups and middle-men or meet a minimum spend.
That meant facing unreasonable budget minimums, long contract commitments, and opaque reporting dashboards. I saw firsthand how smaller brands, local businesses, and independent/small marketers were locked out of using one of the most powerful targeting tools available.
I knew there had to be a better way. I wanted to take that elite, hyper-specific technology and put it directly into the hands of small and medium size businesses and agencies.
The vision for Qujam was simple: democratize hyper-location-based advertising. We set out to build a platform that stripped away the gatekeepers and the complexity.
Total Control: We wanted a user to be able to sit down, upload a CSV list or literally draw a digital boundary around a target zone themselves.
I wanted to remove hidden fees and smoke and mirrors. Just a clean, intuitive, self-serve dashboard where you can see exactly where your spend is going and how your campaigns are performing in real time.
Getting from that initial concept to a fully functioning SaaS platform took an incredible amount of grit, engineering refinement, and a relentless focus on the user experience. We had to make something incredibly complex behind the scenes look clean, visual, and effortless on the front end.
Today, Qujam is doing exactly what we set out to achieve and have an exciting and growing future. We are empowering everyone from local retail shops and automotive dealers to massive political campaigns and regional home service brands to deploy hyper-targeted digital ad campaigns on their own terms.
We’ve proved that you don’t need a massive budget to run sophisticated, location-targeted campaigns. By focusing on a clean visual interface and true self-serve flexibility, we aren’t just helping businesses run ads—we’re helping them level the playing field. And honestly, we are just getting started.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When you’ve spent over 20 years in the marketing and entrepreneurial trenches, you quickly learn that a smooth road is a myth. Honestly, if you aren’t hitting bumps and making mistakes, you aren’t moving fast enough to grow and learn. The friction is where the improvement happens.
1. Shifting from ‘Doer’ to ‘Leader’
Looking back, my greatest personal hurdle was learning how to be a great leader and owner rather than just a great “doer.” In the early days of building my first business (Ethic Advertising Agency which I ran for 10 year and successfully sold), my initial instinct was to roll up your sleeves and be part of every moving part. Learning to step back, master the art of delegation, and surround myself with good people who are smarter than me was an invaluable lesson. You can’t scale a vision if you’re stuck doing all the heavy lifting yourself.
2. The Blank Canvas Post-Exit
My most recent struggle was a classic identity shift. After selling my advertising agency, I suddenly found myself with freedom and an open, blank canvas. Having multiple options is a fantastic problem to have, but navigating that transitional weight and figuring out what came next took some real soul-searching.
Channeling that experience into going all in onto Qujam, stepping into teaching at the college level, authoring a book, and investing in new endeavors has been an incredibly rewarding chapter to write. It turns out, creating a platform to democratize the very industry I spent decades in was exactly the challenge I was looking for.
As you know, we’re big fans of Qujam. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Qujam is a self-serve digital advertising platform built to completely democratize hyper-location-based marketing, specifically geofencing and addressable geofencing. We specialize in putting elite, industry leading targeting technology directly into the hands of everyday marketers and brand that wants it. Our platform allows users to effortlessly draw precise digital boundaries around targeted physical locations—whether that is a competitor’s auto dealership, a busy retail storefront, an office building, a residential property line, or a specific crowd event. From a brand and user-experience perspective, we are best known for transforming a historically complex, opaque process into an intuitive, highly visual experience where clients can easily upload custom address lists and track live campaign performance on a clean, transparent dashboard.
What truly sets Qujam apart is our commitment to autonomy: we have eliminated traditional gatekeepers, hidden fees, high budget minimums, and rigid long-term contracts. Brand-wise, we are most proud of leveling the playing field for businesses of all sizes, matching that disruptive, modern energy with our vibrant corporate identity. We want your readers to know that sophisticated, hyper-targeted digital advertising is no longer an exclusive luxury reserved for massive corporations with endless budgets. With Qujam, any business has the exact same precision tools to target, deploy, and dominate their local market on their own terms. In fact, any one that emails info@qujam.com and mentioned this article can ask for a special discount to their first Qujam campaign.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I think persistence towards a goal will naturally uncover good and bad luck. I think the important thing is appreciating and capitalizing the good luck and leveraging the bad luck to increase your learning, resolve, and treat it like a challenge to change.
Pricing:
- Qujam’s platform is 100% free. Only spend money when you spend on ads.
- We offer creative development support.
- We are launching direct mail companion campaigns for our geofencing.
- We will have a pro/white label option rolling out by the end of the year.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://qujam.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/qujamgeofencing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/QujamGeofencing
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreymswartz/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@QujamGeofencing
- Other: https://intentionalleap.com/
