blockchain
Joe Vezzani – LunarCRUSH Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy 0:01
Okay, today we’re talking to Jove a Zani. He is the CEO and founder of lunar crush, which is right now the app that I have the biggest crush on for the crypto world. I’m really, really excited to talk to him about that. So, welcome to the show. Joe, how are you today?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:18
I’m doing well. Rob, thank you so much for having me.
Rob McNealy 0:22
Well, I appreciate taking time. You know, as someone who’s been in the crypto space for a little while, I always like to see the people doing something different in the space. And the other thing that’s really interesting about what I what you’re doing here is that you kind of care about UI and UX, which seems to be the wall in the crypto sphere. So before we jump in, why don’t we just go and you know, let’s learn a little bit about you. How Who are you? How’d you get into this space?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:51
Yeah, for sure. You know, got started pretty similarly. I feel like to a lot of other people that I hear you You know, talk about crypto is, you know, at some point, you know, someone that you know, or, you know, you kind of just run across Bitcoin. And, you know, I was at the time it was, you know, probably like late 2014, early 2015, and my now co founder, john, as he just kind of came up to me and we were working together at the time, he’s like, hey, do you know what Bitcoin is? And I was like, I don’t know. And it was like, his eyes lit up, like he got to tell someone new and learned a little bit about Bitcoin. And, you know, for me, you know, kind of coming out of school with a finance degree, worked in technology and startups before it was kind of this intersection of finance and tech that I was just like, I need to be a part of this somehow. And then, you know, started looking a little bit more at everything else, and you start to kind of go down the ladder a little bit and you’re like, you know, at the time, it was just mostly just Bitcoin. That was some other stuff. But you start to figure out like, what’s this ethereal thing and Litecoin and you start to learn a little bit more and you’re like, Wow, there. There is a lot down this rabbit hole, and I need to learn more about it. And so, at that time, we were just kind of going back and forth. And you know, we were the people that everyone was like, you know, hey, what do I buy? What’s the next hot tip? And what do I do next? And, you know, just kind of got deeper and deeper from there.
Rob McNealy 2:17
Well, I think that’s a lot how a lot of us kind of get started with this. I actually haven’t been in crypto that long. And people always like how long you been in here? Like two years, two and a half years or like, well, how long is your old your project? Two years. So we kind of just like jumped right in. But one of the things that I kind of interesting is your app. And I have been like glued to this thing, like every day, like I used to go to like coin market cap and coin Gecko and keep hitting refresh and refresh. And I don’t even go there anymore. I go to lunar crush. So let’s talk about lunar crash. What is lunar crash and why am I personally so addicted to it?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 3:01
Well, first off, thank you, that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that. And you know that, you know, the kind of the addictiveness a little bit is is the way we kind of design this and the way we think about, you know, experience and people coming onto our site and looking at everything is we’re very focused on that design and, and getting people to understand what’s happening very easily, even for people that aren’t into the crypto space yet, but are kind of, you know, like, we’d like to say crypto curious. And they’re starting to dive in, we wanted it to be simple. And inherently the market is our market in this space is very community driven. And a lot of these projects that, you know, especially in the all coin, they’re very, it’s kind of tribal, and people out there posting and they’re talking about what’s happening in the community. And, you know, we capture that, you know, and we’re looking at across the entire market, we’re looking at things like Twitter, Reddit, any sort of news URL that’s out there any link and we’re pulling all that together, and so your You’re really feeling what’s happening in real time when you’re when you’re on our site and you’re in your understanding, not just Bitcoin but everything else and what the community is saying at this exact moment. And so it’s a really amazing kind of feeling to get out there and really kind of see the heart and the pulse of the market. And I think it’s what people have kind of been waiting for it for a while.
Rob McNealy 4:21
Well, I agree with that. And not only do you have like, you know, normal, you know, statistics about and, you know, measurements about what a coin might be doing from a price perspective and things like that. But you’re pulling in all these measurements about in metrics about what the community is saying almost like sentiment and engagement, that kind of monitoring and And to me, that’s pretty fascinating. What what what made you think to do that, no one else is doing it that I’m seeing out there. So yeah, why go there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 4:54
Well, you know, we look at when you look at kind of the stock markets, and you look at equities, and you Look at what drives value and the prices of these of these things. It’s it’s really earnings. You know, obviously there’s speculative, you know, you can look at Tesla and what’s happening right now. And, you know, as we record this February 4 2020, it’s kind of parabolic right now, and it’s moving. And that’s, that’s speculation, and it’s, it’s about the future growth of that company. And that’s what’s driving the value. And, but when you’re looking at the broader when we’re talking stock market, its earnings. I mean, it’s literally earnings beats over time is really what pushes these stocks up over time. And that’s why those big companies are so focused on that, where crypto is, is not like that. Its supply and demand driven. What is the social discourse that’s happening? Who’s talking about it? How are the communities being grown, it’s very different. And so you know, when we’re, we wanted to look at what the community is saying we wanted to see it in real time, and we wanted to put it, you know, over time, and you kind of see it on our site as more of a graphical time series representation and so you’re really seen it One place, you know, how is how did the, you know, the tehsils community do over the last two months? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? You know, when you’re looking at maybe some projects that are a little bit smaller that are up and coming, and you get a tip from a friend and you’re like, hey, check this project out, you know, you’re going to know real fast, whether or not that’s kind of a viable project? Or is it kind of the beginning or the end of it? By looking at our site?
Rob McNealy 6:24
So how did you come up with some of these algorithms are the best guests or did you benchmark against something? Because you got some interesting, you know, analysis that you have that, you know, these algorithms that are built into it? Where did that come from?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:38
Which ones are you talking about specifically?
Rob McNealy 6:42
I don’t have it up in front of me now. See, now you’re catching me off guard. I’m gonna have to like look it up. Like…
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:48
Like, so we have a couple of proprietary metrics that we’ve designed. One’s called the galaxy score, and the other one’s called vault rank.
Rob McNealy 6:54
That’s it right there. See you called it that was the one I didn’t know the name of it. So yes, that’s The Galaxy score that was it was on the top of my, my, my tongue there.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 7:05
Yeah, we’ve got a very space themed over here. But so galaxy score I can start with first and, you know, we wanted to kind of create a metric and it’s it’s a real time metric and we’re looking at things that are coming in constantly we’re not, you know, we’re not Moody’s you know, or s&p out here and saying that, you know, it’s a by rating or, you know, it’s a, you know, from a B to A B plus, or whatever it is, and, you know, over the next couple of months, this is what’s going to happen, we, you know, crypto moves too quick for that. And so, with galaxy score, we’re looking at each individual project, and we’re looking at it’s a performance against itself over time. And so we’re looking at things like we’re doing some technical analysis and some price, you know, analysis on each project, but then we’re also incorporating that projects community and the social that has happened around that project and how quickly it’s happening. And so, galaxy score, you know, like, I like to say it’s kind of like coffee. More advanced traders only where, you know, that’s going to move pretty rapidly. And so we’ve got people like, you know, bot traders, and we’ve got, you know, professional traders and people that are using that to look in real time at what’s happening. And so it’s, you know, zero to 100 score and you know, 100 would be the best. And so it means that there’s a lot of kind of social that’s happening at that moment, along with Bryce. And then the other one is called alt rank. And so alt rank is looking at a project’s performance against the rest of the market. And so it’s ranking everything from a one to you know, I think, right now, we’ve got about 1700 that we’re looking at across the entire market. And so we’re pulling in and saying, hey, what is, you know, a theory of price versus something like Bitcoin over time? And is it beating that is it losing against that? And then what is the kind of the social that’s happening at the same time, and so when you kind of put all that in correlate it together, you really get this kind of cool understanding of the market and so at any given time, time if you’re looking at lunar crash and you go to our markets page, and you’re seeing things, you know, ranked one to 25 that means that something’s happening right now. Prices moving, socialist moving, things are happening, volume is high market volume is high. And it’s somewhere as a trader or someone that’s looking at the market, you should really be paying attention to that.
Rob McNealy 9:18
So I’m looking at the you know, I’m bias. I’m looking at the Tusk page on lunar crash. So my Galaxy score for our project went down since yesterday. It was in the 50s yesterday, which said neutral but now it’s down and it says bearish. So what did we do that went from neutral yesterday to bearish today on the galaxy’s score for task.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 9:38
I’m not looking at it right here. But, you know, my guess would be that, you know, if there was a decline in market volume, or if there was a decline in price, correlated with also some social volume that’s going down then, at least at this moment, you know, in the galaxy scores updating continuously, that it’s a little bit lower now. You know, if there’s some buys that come through at the Some social action that happens if things start to kind of move, that galaxy score is going to jump pretty quickly. And so, you know, a move from something like in the 40s to something in the 80s, per se is gonna, that should be a blip on the radar to say that something’s happening with with Tusk.
Rob McNealy 10:15
Gotcha. So and I know, we didn’t have any volume yesterday, because we’re still new, and we’re only on one exchange, and, but I’m just curious on how, you know, I’m looking at my own stuff. So, but are all drank here says we’re 864 out of 2046. So, it’s got a little trophy thing, what does that mean?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 10:33
So 864 I mean, you know, again, this is this is looking at test performance against Bitcoin. So if it’s underperforming against something like Bitcoin, and then also, you know, maybe social volume or social engagement is is lower than the alt rank is going to kind of rank there but, you know, hey, 864 to 2000 you know, you’re still better than than 50%. But, you know, if if test starts to outperform bit coin and there starts to be some social that’s happening in real time, then you would see that rank move up really quickly. And, you know, I just want to caveat that we also put we as also assign an alt rank to Bitcoin. And the way that you could kind of look at that, look at that is if Bitcoin is rallying and is the number one all coin, our alt rank and lunar garage, it means that you know, you you might want to be in Bitcoin right now, because there’s rally happening, things are moving.
Rob McNealy 11:27
So there’s another section that says about the task. It’s over on the right side where it’s about the Messari. The Messari section, sorry.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:39
Yep.
Rob McNealy 11:40
So with is that section, we don’t have anything there. How would I get stuff there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:44
So we, you know, we’re focused at Luna crush on all the social and the real time data, and then we’re partnering and we utilize miscarries data for some of the more about section I think mizar does an amazing job of kind of aggregating kind of the you know, more long Form kind of project oriented data around the why and what’s happening. And so, you know, they we pull in some of their data to kind of showcase on our site, if people want to kind of dive more into the, you know, who are the some of the founders of the project, you know, what is the, you know, what’s the blockchain? Like? What’s the out of their algorithm? Like, how is it working? And so they’re, they’re kind of focused on that. And so we pull in the data from there to, to kind of showcase on our site because they do such a good job.
Rob McNealy 12:27
So we need to get on their radar, if we want that box filled. So it also says here that our social sentiment is 60% of 3.3%, then bullish, so that’s a good thing right? Under the alt right box.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:43
Social sentiment, you’re saying?
Rob McNealy 12:45
Yeah, that’s right under the alt rank box,
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:48
Yep. Yep. So social sentiment, anything that is, you know, probably over 50%, we start to kind of categorize as more of a bullish and so we’re looking at some of the some of the data that’s out there, and You know, we’ve actually trained our own machine learning to look at, specifically crypto language out there in the web. And so, you know, when people talk about different projects in our space, you know, they, they speak about it differently, you know, when someone says, whether they’re right or wrong, that you know, monero is going to the moon. That’s a bullish sentiment. But, you know, a traditionally trained library is not going to pick that up. And so we’ve actually gone in and as the data comes in, we’re training it and we’re looking at it specifically and kind of hand tailoring all the data to understand, you know, what is the sentiment across some of this?
Rob McNealy 13:37
So it’s not just hashtags, you’re looking at the whole key words and different terms and how they’re used in conjunction with other maybe adjectives or things like that.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 13:47
Yeah, I mean, we’re looking at you know, any news that’s out there or any, any social that’s out there, and if there’s links that are posted within that, we’re kind of going in spidering that and looking at the different articles and trying to figure out, you know, was this was this meant to be Something that was a more positive or more as more of a negative occurrence.
Rob McNealy 14:05
So where do you see this would apply to other assets? Perhaps even like So you mentioned earlier with like Tesla, it seems like it’d be really interesting now to see some of the sentiment around Tesla, because everybody seems to be phone via phone going around it right now. Do you think this would apply in the same way to traditional assets like that?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 14:26
Man, I mean, the FOMO is so high in Tesla, I don’t think you even need ludicrous to identify the sentiment on that one. But yes, I mean, in in a short answer would be that, yes, absolutely. We can take in and pull in kind of traditional asset classes and look at it, our focus has, you know, we’re passionate about the crypto space and we want it to grow and we’re very focused on it. And so our, you know, our roadmap right now, at least for the foreseeable future is focused on cryptocurrency and we want to see this space grow and we want to see the you know, the people and the projects and the company’s growing So we’re completely focused on growing and, and maintain our space here.
Rob McNealy 15:05
So how are you guys funded? How did you guys? Are you bootstrapping this? Or did you get some VC money?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:11
We we originally bootstrapped this thing from the beginning. You know, we were, you know, like, like anyone else you want to build something from scratch and you want it, want it to be yours, and so we bootstrapped it. We did. In 2019. We joined a tech stars program, so I’m not sure if any of your listeners know but tech stars is, you know, one of the you know, best accelerator startup accelerator.
Rob McNealy 15:36
David Cohen.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:37
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So tech stars. We joined the LA program here and did that from July to October. And then we have, you know, some other some other partnerships with some local venture capitalists here in in Los Angeles. One is Draper Goran home. So they just founded new venture firm called Jake record home, which is Tim Draper, along Goran and Joseph home here who are kind of local, well known kind of entrepreneurs in the blockchain space.
Rob McNealy 16:11
So what is your revenue model? How you gonna make money with this?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 16:16
Well, right now we’re just growing our business and getting as many people to use it as humanly possible. We’re focused on user growth and and getting this out to the community. Right now. It’s free to get into lunar crash login and kind of see what’s happening on there. We also have an API and and we’re very shortly going to be coming out with a real time API. So anyone that’s, you know, a traitor, anyone that’s a little bit more advanced quant funds that are out there. We’re excited to partner with them and see kind of how they want to utilize some of the data. And so we’re just trying to understand the marketplace right now and kind of be out there and see where we have the where we have the best fit.
Rob McNealy 16:55
I think that’s really good, the way you’re kind of pulling the data together in a very visual way. And I think with crypto, that’s been such a problem. And I think it’s, I think it’s part of the the fact that so much of crypto is just developer LED and which is, you know, a hardcore command line kind of community, right. And so I think a lot of these guys out there and what as far as the developers go, they just don’t really think of UI and graphical user interfaces of things that important sometimes, or at least they, you know, underscore or plug down play. You know how important that is. But the one thing that I like what you’re doing, because I’m a very visual person, but visual representations of data can present patterns, that in trends that you cannot see with just normal tablature type of data scenarios. And I think that’s why you’re going to be successful with this because you’re lightyears ahead on your UI UX, compared to anything else that I’m seeing in crypto right now. And I’m excited It about where this is going. Because to me, this is how you get to adoption in because you’re recognizing, at least it seems like you’re recognizing how the design element is important here.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 18:12
Appreciate that, yeah, we spend a lot of time and, you know, a lot of thought and strategy and, you know, just going through and trying to put ourselves in our users shoes. And, you know, we, you know, I think it’s like when we went to one of those kind of first block stack summits at like, the Computer History Museum a couple years ago, and, you know, we were looking around at some of the different projects and we just kind of said to ourselves, it was like, you know, we need to focus on design and we need to focus on usability. You know, and it’s such a, you know, a slight usability change in any industry can have a profound effect. You know, look at look at Uber, you know, taxis existed, and, you know, people didn’t take them and it was because they didn’t want to call didn’t know who to call, they didn’t want to pay, they didn’t have cash. And so they felt bad to get into a cab and not pay and they get yelled at. And, you know, the simple, you know, design change of, you know, now I just put my credit card in and it shows up and I can, it’s really cool, I see it coming on this little map. That’s a, that’s an extremely, you know, amazing design disruption. And it’s simple. And so I think with the crypto, it’s the same thing where, you know, you’ve got these, these blockchains, and you’ve got these projects out there. And, you know, I think coin base has done an amazing job, you know, kind of building that first kind of use use case out and that on ramp that she had on ramp especially in the US. And now it’s kind of opening the door to these other tools that are out there and getting people deeper. And now it’s not just a professional trader that’s going to be on here. It’s going to be people that are a little bit more novice that don’t want to be intimidated. And so if you’re not focused on you know, helping people understand very simply how some of this stuff works, then it’s Not gonna it’s not going to work. And, you know, even when we originally started, it was, you know, we had 40 different charts on a page. And it was, you know, infinite scroll, and it just kept going and going, and it wasn’t working. And it’s not until you kind of simplify things and make it make it easy it is to where people start actually using it and understanding.
Rob McNealy 20:19
Well, it’s kind of funny the way even web design has changed over the past, you know, five years, 10 years ago, you’re trying to keep everything above the fold. And then I don’t know what happened because I stopped doing web development A long time ago, and then all of a sudden, now everything’s infinite scroll. And I’m like, didn’t we try to keep everything above the fold for a reason where people didn’t have to scroll for usability. So I don’t know what changed there. But it seems to me that usability is still important and you want to make people have to work the least amount when they’re using your site to get around. And I think you do that and I really do like the fact that you spent so much time in design and I think that is going to make this very Very useful. And it can’t believe that, you know, some of the big players as far as the trackers go, how awful their UI czar or how primitive they are. From the design standpoint, considering how much some of these trackers are bringing in revenue, you think they could bring in some design folks and fix that, but maybe they need to bring you in to fix it for them. Joe, where can people find out more about your project?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:28
Linda crush calm is the easiest way. You can also find us on Twitter, we’re really active on Twitter. It’s just at Luna crush. We’re posting you know, all sorts of insights all day, we have a coin of the day that we post on each day. And that’s kind of our way to get people in and get people understanding the data for free. So that I would say go to Luna crush calm or just follow us at at Luna crush.
Rob McNealy 21:52
So thank you so much. And I do appreciate you coming on the show today. And I wish you all the luck in the future.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:58
And thank you my man. Appreciate it.
Episode Links
Michael Hiles – CEO of 10XTS
Micheal Hiles, CEO of 10XTS, talks with Rob McNealy about blockchain, cryptocurrency, gun rights, political organizing, and entrepreneurship.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today we’re talking to mark Wittenberg. He’s with the core team of verge currency project out of Canada A. So I just want to welcome him to the show and let’s see what they’re doing up north in snow Mexico. Mark, how you doing today?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Um, it’s very snowy, and it’s about minus 18 Celsius. I think right now, I’m literally looking out my window and can’t see a car because all I see is white.
Rob McNealy
You know, that’s how it is in June, typically in Canada. That’s how I first see it, or I can imagine it happening. I actually grew up in the Detroit area up in Michigan. And so I spent a lot of time in Canada when I was growing up. A lot of people don’t know that Canada has a lower drinking age than the United States. It’s 19. And so a lot of people in the United States at least it used to be this way. It’s a little harder now. I think. Now you need a an actual passport. Go to Canada. But when I was growing up and just in my late teens, you just needed a driver’s license to go across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, and go drink at 19 versus 21. So it’s like in Michigan like I when I was growing up, you went from 19 to 21. You spent every weekend in Canada party and then drinking away and stuff. So I don’t know if it’s quite that way now, but that’s how it was.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
It’s like, it’s still 18 in Alberta here. So I mean, I remember like, you could actually smoke a cigarette. I think it’s 16 way back in a day. But yeah, it’s 18 to drink in Alberta. So a lot of people even from BC and East they come here to drink. So that’s that’s kind of funny,
Rob McNealy
It’s like, you know? Yeah. You guys are just different up there. But I guess it’s colder, so you need to warm up more. I don’t understand.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
That’s right.
Rob McNealy
So Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into the crypto space? What was kind of your idea was like to know, I want to know what people’s you know what brought them to the crypto world?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
It’s I think my family was in crypto. I think they got into bitcoin at like 2010 or something at eight cents or something I don’t know. But that’s when I first learn to vote and then fast forward I think I opened up my first exchange account in like January of 2016. I think I think I can’t really remember anything like when I was like $3 and something I don’t know. But I’ve been following kind of ever since and it out just following online and was following it kind of moving forward and then I really jumped in and boat the middle of 2017 is when I really jumped in. And then when we had that false Bull Run, I was all the way in and I picked up on the verge currency as a project and thought it really fit Kind of who I am as a person as far as the privacy aspect goes. So, I mean for me my everyday life is pretty private. My everyday business is based on you know, privacy and stuff like that. So I think for me it really verge currency really, really fit who I am as a person. And of course the non Ico non pre mine, all volunteer aspect, definitely fit with who I am. You know, I always figured if, if, as a project, if your non Ico non pre mind volunteer, you know, in your privacy focused, then everybody’s going to work hard. There’s no there’s no personal gain right from from being you know, what people call a staff member, which we’re not that there’s no personal gain from it. We’re going to get out what we put in so and I noticed the community at that time was really large too. So I thought you know what, like this projects great and I started talking into some of the core members online and that’s kind of where it went. So I think I became part of core and beginning of maybe April or March or April 2018 is when I officially became core member to help try to drive verge currency forward. So, yeah, so
Rob McNealy
So, verge is a fork of Bitcoin, right?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Yeah. Dogecoin Dark. Yeah, it’s it’s bit core, but Dogecoin dark. It’s a phone. Yeah, it’s a it’s a fork of Dogecoin dark.
Rob McNealy
You guys have been around for four or five years that I think so you guys are almost like oh gee, in this space as far as crypto projects go. But you know, I always joke around as a I bet in the space as a project, not even two years and like I bet I’m like an old dog. Now. You know, in crypto because crypto such a young industry, right. It’s like everybody is new. And you know, there’s not like experts in this Space is as far as I see it. And I think people that put them out put themselves out there as experts are just kind of nonsense, you know. But, you know, it’s like, it’s funny, like you go on like some of these people’s LinkedIn. And like they have they’re like 40 years old, and they got like three years of experience. And it only goes it’s only goes back three years and it’s only crypto related. And you’re like, Okay, you scrubbed your LinkedIn, you didn’t do anything for the last 30 years. You know, and I always joke around like my LinkedIn looks like pretty schizo frightening because I didn’t delete anything out, you know, it’s got you can see where I’ve been my whole life. I’m old, you know, I would expect someone who’s 45 or 50 to have a pretty extensive LinkedIn, you know, but you guys started a while ago and so tell me what’s different about verge currency say than, you know, dose or you know, Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I mean, as far as Bitcoin goes, we’re more scalable. I think, you know, Bitcoin per Suddenly I see Bitcoin is a store of value, possibly. It’s not scalable. It’s not quick. It’s not cheap. No, it’s not cheap. And, you know, verjus based on transaction speed, I don’t know what the exact speed is. But we’re quick. We’re quick. And you know, we’ve got the privacy option where we’re kind of branding towards the whole digital payment arena now. So yeah, we are crypto, but I kind of like to refer to us as a digital payment option. Because I think generationally, I think people will get that a whole lot more than crypto. So when I when I look at us, I kind of I speak to our potential partners that you know, like we’re a digital payment option for sure. But yeah, definitely quick, definitely quick and cheap. So that’s a big benefit to us.
Rob McNealy
I think that’s a good point is that, you know, crypto right now has like, you know, a really bad stigma out there. Thanks to the news media and thanks to all the scammers. In the space, you know, they they really have a lot of ways a lot of crypto people have brought it on themselves, you know, especially some of these toxic maximalists that are out there that are really, really negative and hostile to anybody that they feel is competition to their, whatever their favorite project is. But I think that’s smart to like, you know, explain it like, we’re just a payment system. We’re not, you know, you don’t risk pipe the crypto piece, whereas I think a lot of maximalists really want to push the crypto piece not realizing how the general population seems to see it at this point.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I totally agree. And I mean, I, I don’t, I’m not that guy to get along with maximalists. I don’t go to a lot of local meetups here just for that reason. I know there’s a couple of G maximalists in Canada here that I don’t, I don’t typically talk to you know, when you look at the whole market, you know, when you take the whole population of the world and say 3% is aware or 3% is has heard of cryptocurrency or Bitcoin? And then you get the maximum was what percent are they know? So who are they marketing to? You know, it’s i, i don’t i don’t agree with a max list, maximalist way of thinking I really don’t i don’t i don’t understand it. And I don’t know why they just can’t embrace these people that think that Bitcoin is going to be the only one.
Rob McNealy
It’s kind of like religion, you know, I mean, and I’ve seen this with like any political activism out there, I’ve been a political activist, good chunk of my life as well. And I think the problem is, is that so many people that are really tie up their identity with something you know, they they you know, it’s like the Bitcoin activists that have been around who have been pushing for 567 years Bitcoin this Bitcoin that and for a long time, Bitcoin didn’t have any competitors. There wasn’t really substitutes for a long time. And then what happens is, as When these guys put, you know, they put their ego out there. And they’re the ones that say, Bitcoin will take over the world. They make these crazy, you know, proclamations, and then they have to dig themselves in. And then when things change, they they just dig in further, instead of recognizing maybe they were a little wrong, or maybe they weren’t 100%. Right, or, you know, what have you. And I think part of that’s just ego, I mean, more than anything, they’ve tied their, their identity to this one prediction, or this one way of things that they want it to be this one way. And then I think when they get challenged on that, they get really defensive. I mean, to me, that’s what it is. And it’s like, the problem is that they’re going to lose out if they continue down that track. You know, I’m an entrepreneur, you know, I am not a developer, our projects a little you know, we’re a developer or non developer, but we’re an entrepreneur led team. So we have multiple entrepreneurs on the team, and we view it as a product, even though we’re decentralized project we also we feel crypto is a project. It’s a product that needs to be marketed. And it’s a it’s a product that needs to be, you know, you got to view the competitors to your product, you know, the people that are currently the substitute systems that are in place. So to me, Well, I give a great job last night, I was actually filling out an application to get list asked on an exchange. Right? And one of the questions is it says, Who are your competitors? And they wanted us to put like, what other crypto is our competitors and I said, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, are our competitors because that is who our competitors are, and how we view it and it’s just our perspective on things and I think the maximalist out there you know, they’ll overlook things that are just ridiculous. You know, you know, I take it like the people that still think that you know, I still believed in the original Bitcoin white paper where it is supposed to be digital cash, but the biggest core team, you know, they veered from that they they went down one track, they their community said, you know, they dropped the pretense of being digital cash, because they, they, I think they recognize that the scalability issues are insurmountable at this point for their project. I think it’s more politics than anything. But I think what’s happened now their store value, but to me, the killer app for crypto is payments, that is the killer app. That’s the thing, you have the biggest market for people who use digital payments. And to me, you know, trying to focus on d phi or whatever some of the other products are out there. I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, you have to look at the the market size. You know, I think this is one of the things that a lot of it just outside of crypto, too, is that one of the big reasons businesses fail is that there’s not a big enough market for the idea. Right, you know, and that’s a lot of that and entrepreneurs think like this developers don’t, right, yeah, and just because it’s a cool idea or the technology is neat doesn’t mean that it’s a sustainably sized market. And the unicorns you know businesses and startups like the Amazon comes they look at the biggest how big the market is for that product or service and then they start looking and doing analysis and can they reach them and how much of a you know share can they take out of that market? And so we always looked at if you’re going to do a crypto project payments is the number one biggest market right and and so to me to veer away from that and go to store value because Think of it this way, like store value, right? What’s a current what’s the currently the store value in the world?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
What is the store gold?
Rob McNealy
Yeah, right. It is. That’s the biggest, most widely accepted store of value in the planet right now. And how many everyday people care about gold. Now, I like golden silver. I still I’m not as a as a crypto guy. I still think I like all asset class. I like real estate. I like art. I like startups. I like precious metals. So I’m not anti precious metals either. But the question is how many people out there care about precious metals right now? Um, you know, everyday person on the street? Not very few. Very right. So to me, goes back to the size of the market, what’s a bigger market a store of value market? Right? Or the the market that is for payments, and me goes back to market size there, the store value markets, a very small community, and if you’re basically trying to argue with, you know, student, you know, gold bugs, and there’s not, I mean, obviously, there’s still millions of those around the planet. But yeah, gold bugs are also very tangible, oriented, they like they’re very tactile, they want to feel something and I know a lot of gold bugs. And the gold bugs that I know don’t like anything digital. They don’t like cashless society. So I don’t understand it. So to me strategically, I don’t know where bitcoins going to end up. But I think the store of valued direction is not a good direction for the project. I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not making predictions on that. But I just say, from a market size and and I just don’t like it. I just don’t think it’s a great market size to go after. And I think it was an admitted an admission of failure from their original, you know, kind of killer app, the original, you know, mission of Bitcoin was to be peer to peer digital cash and store value is not that. So you guys have been around for a while you guys are a community based project. So what is verge done up today? What is what is what would you say verjus niche market or where are they trying to position themselves in the whole space these days?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I think for me, personally, and I can’t speak to the other core team members because we’re all we’re all independent. There, there is no market for myself, as far as I’m concerned with virtual currency. So we should be accepted as a currency whether it’s mine geek, one of our partners accepting us for their online platform and and, you know in their live streams and stuff like that or whether it’s the Manny Pacquiao foundation accepting verge you know for donation Avenue were currency so the way I look at verge is if I if I have fi out if I have a $20 bill in my pocket and I can spend that anywhere, then I should be able to spend virge anywhere as well. And that benefit does is you know, everything is our market. So you know I’ll touch every industry because we want to be in every industry. You look at the way cashless payments are going now with I think even the the next Olympics are trying to reduce their cash. I think they’re trying to reduce their cash like 40% or something so they’re going cashless everything. is going cashless you go, especially in Canada here, everything’s tap, tap, go tap, tap, go tap this tap that tap everything it’s like, this is this is absolutely the perfect direction for a project like ours and to be quite frank, it’s it’s perfect for many projects, but you know, 26 or 2700 or 2800 projects out there, it’s going to consolidate for sure. You know, there’s going to be a lot of these projects that had Icos there. Maybe they’re not going to be around anymore. Maybe they went dry. Maybe they spent all their money, maybe they bought whatever they bought it because they thought they’re going somewhere different, I don’t know. But being a community based project, I think we’re, you know, maybe I’m a bit wrong, but I think we’re about 800,000. Now supporters worldwide, and our reach is huge. And you look at other projects, and again, there’s other projects that have great communities too, and they’ll be there. First to say, Did you bite has another great community? You know, and they’re, they’re in the same space we are. But back to your question, what have we done up to now? I mean, we’ve partnered with mine geek we’ve partnered with the Manny Pacquiao foundation so we can offer donations he can accept donations and virge and of course Bitcoin and Litecoin and aetherium you know, for Manny Pacquiao to go out and build some homes for the less fortunate out in the Philippines and hopefully worldwide you know, where else are we accepted Excel trip pay sent like there’s, there’s not an industry that we shouldn’t touch. It doesn’t matter what that industry is. Again, when you take your $20 bill or your credit card or whatever you’re going to do and you some guy wants to go buy a gun with his money, he’s going to go buy a gun with his money if he wants to go buy adult content. He’s gonna go buy adult content with his feet so fat so if virge wants to be a replacement or run alongside or like a rail to fat, then we should be accepted in every industry.
Rob McNealy
Totally agree. So as you guys get you guys are also a decentralized project. How do you guys I mean, just on the I’m always curious how the projects kind of work day to day, you know, how do you guys deal with partnerships to do have a foundation? That’s kind of doing the outreach for that, or how do you guys structured as far as managing your projects?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Oh, boy, that’s a great question. Um, we have a very large core team. And we also have community outreach team. So we have different layers, I guess you could say, of, of outreach. So you know, typical day to day I mean, I’m known in our in our core team to talk a lot so guys like to put me on mute because I I’m usually in every channel all the time but so that’s just Say we have 2025 core members. We’ve got a dev team and an outreach team. We’ve got a graphics team, we’ve got a video team. As far as outreach goes, we’re all because we’re decentralized. We’re all kind of working on our own thing on our own time. Some some guys going to have one hour a week, some guys going to have 20 hours a week, some guys going to have 60 hours a week. It’s all going to be different. So when we get into these layers, we have our group chat and discord. And then we have, you know, like an admin mod group and Facebook chat. So, you know, that’s another layer as well, where we, we can talk to our admins and mods of like Facebook, Twitter stuff, like you know, of our different online platforms and relay stuff that way. So, you know, right now, we have I think 11 different Facebook’s that I’m managing worldwide. So when we push to our main one, I’ll push to I think, maybe about nine 910 or 11 different Facebook’s that I’ll push you then we have Instagram then we have Twitter. Main Twitter accounts and then we block folio, stuff like that. So and then we have another aspect to verge as well which is fueled by verge. So that’s when we’re bringing on say somebody with some talent that wants to support us like Gil. He’s a NASCAR driver. he’s a he’s a really big first currency supporter. So we have that fueled by virge aspect. Especially Danny. He’s our little 10 year old MX moto MX racer, so he’ll go to the US or to Canada and do a bunch of races there and he’ll spread the word about verge currency as well but through a different you know, as a through 10 year old and be through moto Moto X. So we have that aspect and we do eSports as well and Adam night shadow, he he typically does this esport stuff. So a typical day to day with us. I mean, it’s it’s craziness. It’s full on craziness, it’s everybody’s working on different stuff. We got different opinions in our core team, and we’re not all going Get along at all times. And it’s it’s, it’s, you know, I guess you want to say in a we’re in a bear market right now whatever you somebody wants to call it you know if you’re if you’re focused on price alone I guess you can say we’re in a bear market, but we’re working harder right now. Then I think we were when when the coin was or when the currency was pumping I think we are certainly working harder now. We’re more focused now then then we are so than we were when it was pumping.
Rob McNealy
So where are you guys right now in your roadmap? What would be the next thing you guys are trying to accomplish with your project?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Um, I think more collaborations, more partnerships. Awareness is key for me. So we were fortunate enough to join a telegram group. I’m in a telegram group with change Angel. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with change Angel, but lots of people are so they’ve brought in a whole bunch of different communities projects. into one telegram chat. And man that that is like that’s one of the best ideas that space could ever come up with is somebody to take the reins, and bring 10 or 11 different projects into one telegram chat where we’re all pushing each other for awareness. So for me, it’s going to be about awareness of digital payments. That’s, that’s what’s next for myself. Anyway, I know the dev team, Justin, Mark and swen and manual, they’re working on their respective wallets right now. So you know, I just let them be I’m not a deaf guy. So I try not to get involved too much in the deaf talk or outside. It won’t let me focus on what I’m doing. But moving forward, I’m just trying to bring awareness to this space in general and I think it’s important that for me, I bring awareness to to to Bitcoin as well, because this is what people are going to know. In fact, they may know a theorem they may know like coin as well for me. It’s been bringing awareness to the space in general. And then also bringing awareness diverge currency while I’m bringing awareness to the space.
Rob McNealy
So when you’re talking to say retailers, what’s your pitch? What do you guys say? You guys should accept Verge why?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Oh, my pitch, I just jam a pamphlet down on their table and say, let’s go. No, I mean, they’re, they’re accepting digital anyway. So these retailers are already accepting digital. They’re accepting tap, they’re accepting NFC Apple Pay, we pay whatever pay, they’re doing Google pay credit, they’re already accepting digital. So all it is is is trying to find the right avenue to accept something like verge into their system. Now retailers is a whole different game because of course there’s so much with settlement and they’ve got to have the right the retailers have to have the right partnership. Well, it’s not just, hey, walk in the door, and these guys are going to be like, hey, there’s verge. Yeah, let’s just accept it, I’ll hook up tomorrow. There’s partnerships that they have, they have to have dealer agreements with the settlement company, they’ve got to have retailer agreements with whatever POS terminal they’re using. And then that POS terminal, wherever they’re getting it from, they have to have an agreement with the app that they’re downloading. So it’s not just as simple as saying except for its currency because we a, we need an off ramp, we need to sell it, we need to have a settlement company on our end to that’s going to be able to handle the liquidity and settle with us real time. So and that’s still a challenge in this space as well. So as far as a pitch to the retailer, I think for now, it’s about awareness that when I sit and talk to people, it’s right now it’s about awareness until the space grows.
Rob McNealy
My I definitely think that’s a huge part of it. And you know, it’s interesting because I actually spend more time talking to retailers then I have spent trying to talk to end users because To me that that is the the main place to start and you know down here in the states you know the the biggest concerns that you know I’m seeing from retailers besides once you get past like the stigma and the potential legal ramifications because some people think crypto is a legal it’s it’s interesting when I’m but one of the things that here and I don’t know how it’s handled. You guys are Canadian based though right your project is most of your core team is in Canada, am I correct?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
No, incorrect so we have two core members in Canada, myself and Harry. Harry is in. He’s in BC, so he concentrates on some other stuff that he concentrates on for verge currency, which, you know, really get into that but he’s he’s, he’s deep into what he’s concentrating on. But we have core members worldwide. I mean, we’ve got core members in Australia, US, Asia. European countries. I mean, we’re everywhere. Now, the founder, Justin, he was he’s originally from Florida. But based out of his, I mean, we’re not based out of anywhere because we’re feel like we’re sorry, we’re we’re a digital payment option. So we’re not based out of anywhere. I just happen to be in Canada.
Rob McNealy
Gotcha. I always ask, you know, but down here talking to retailers and and I think this is going to be more of a problem as adoption starts to occur. Is that the way the least the United States that’s those are the retailers are mostly focused on right now or American retailers. And most of the problem is that I see going forward the biggest impediment regulatory wise to crypto adoption by retailers is how the IRS the Internal Revenue Service in the United States treats crypto transactions and and they treat it as property and so the accounting piece for a retailer is a huge challenge. And I’ve told this to People that most people in crypto that I talked to even activists, they don’t even seem to understand this now I actually have my, as an entrepreneur, I’ve actually owned a retail store. And so I know a lot about point of sale and I know a lot about the accounting and and running a retail business. And I can tell you unless someone gave me a super compelling sales pitch and solve some problem, I think I wouldn’t probably accept crypto as a retailer if I didn’t have a recognized problem with other systems. And and so and I think that going forward, that’s going to have to change for retail adoption to really happen, at least in the States. And why I think that you’re not hearing about that right now, is because people really aren’t using crypto down here in the states for buying and selling goods and services yet, you know that it’s a small amount of transactions out there and they’re usually experimental or one offs, but there’s no serious industry that’s adopted crypto yet, and I think that That’s going to be a problem and you’re going to hear about probably over the next couple years is people got to start adopting crypto, because that will be the biggest pain point for retailers accepting it, but no one talks about that. And I’m like, Dude, this is the problem that we need to be focusing on, not the SEC. We need to be focusing on the IRS. I don’t know does Canada have similar? I don’t know how Canada treats you know, crypto as far as you know, taxes and stuff. But is it similar to the US or do they just deal with it differently?
I think we’re yeah, I think you nailed it. We’re pretty close to the same I mean, Canada, the government here. I think they implemented something like a questionnaire or something where they’re asking people if they own digital currency, digital currency, or cryptocurrency or whatever, but they’re not. I think it’s still a volunteer thing now but I believe regulations are coming in in June or July or something. I think there’s some bigger regulations coming into play but in June or July up here in Canada, but you absolutely nailed it with The retailer in two things as well with POS and stuff like that we we see videos on Twitter of you know like this store accepts XYZ cryptocurrency now and this furniture store accepts this and this restaurant accepts XYZ cryptocurrency now it’s like they may accept it but it’s like how many transactions a year are going to happen on cryptocurrency right now very little worldwide very very less unless you get into some of these other countries Venezuela Argentina I believe Philippines is probably pretty big on cryptocurrency now. But But you nailed it the we can go out there and send videos out on Twitter all we want about signing up some 25 seat restaurant that now accepts crypto but the only transaction they’re going to get in a whole year is going to be that guy that signed them up I’m thinking.
Well and you know another Lot of axes we really pissy about us pointing that out. But I agree. And I think the the bottom line is, is that a lot of crypto projects do a really poor job of stimulating demand for people, you know, to create the reason for retailer to do it now. I mean, we have our own strategy with how we’re, you know, positioning us to do exactly that. Because I do believe that’s an issue and and they’ll change over time. It’s just I think, you know, I’m always trying to think three four steps ahead. I you know, I’m not just looking at I’ll sign up this one Uber driver for this one video for this one tip I’m giving him and now he is a Bitcoin lover and it’s like, okay, that’s that’s not really, you know, in my mind, that’s not how you seriously get substitution and create a paradigm shift you you have to solve a problem for a lot of people and and you need to be able to have a plan to get your solution to somebody’s problem in front of a group of people. And to me that that’s that’s basically business and marketing and market segmentation and things like that. But hey, this is uh, this has been a really good chat. I mean, I don’t know enough about verge and so I’m glad you took the time to come on the show today and tell me a little about and you know it and and educate me about the project because I like to hear more about these community projects that are doing things behind, you know, behind the scenes and actually growing right now and it’s not all about the hype and clear pricing things. Where can people find out more about Verge.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
VirgeCurrency.com that’s going to have everything probably you know, that you need on that website, of course, follow our main handle on Twitter, we’re releasing medium articles. I think we do a dev update on medium every couple of weeks and then an outreach or a marketing update every couple of weeks. But you know, I again, for us, it’s all about it’s about awareness. And I want to point out really quickly that you know, it’s not all about when moon when moon when moon when moon you know for us to get serious in this space and for To get serious with digital payments and you know I’ll say for myself too we need to mature up you know this whole space the whole people following it we need we need to add a little bit more maturity to this space. Get the bear market is hurting a lot of people, it’s hurting myself too. But we’ve got to push past that work as work as digital payments together. Let’s not work on Hey, I’m number one. I’m number one. I’m number one and I’m the best because I know more people than you. But let’s let’s work on the best out of each project push together as one space. Let’s get it to that point where were the awareness and the adoption is there and then and then focus and fine tune our projects, you know has verge had its problems? Absolutely. It has. But I don’t know when business out there and you’re you’re an entrepreneur, I don’t know one business out there that hasn’t had problems. It’s bring, have a problem. Bring a solution. That’s what it’s about recognizing a problem. How do we push past this problem? How do we move forward? So that problem doesn’t happen again. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about the problem that happened. It’s about how do we not have that problem happen again? Take every cryptocurrency project out there. I think every single one of us had problems. So let’s not focus on the negative. Let’s focus on the positive because the true people in the cryptocurrency space are going to focus on the positive.
Rob McNealy
I couldn’t agree more mark, for coming on the show today.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Yeah, awesome, Rob. I really appreciate the opportunity. I really want to learn more about your project as well and I hope we can chat again soon.
Rob McNealy
Anytime.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
All right.
Episode Links
Audio Interview
Video Interview
Interview Transcript
Latter Interview
Lea Thompson – Girl Gone Crypto Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I’m talking to Leah Thompson. And she is also known on the web as a Girl Gone crypto, you know, and every time I say that, I get this vision of Girl Gone Wild, which was those videos back in like the late 90s, early 2000s. And I’m like, I mean, and I said this, my wife, and I said, I’m interviewing That Girl Gone crypto, she’s like, don’t say something stupid. And I’m like, and I said, you know, I’m going to say something stupid. So I’m just going to get out of the way because I’m going to accidentally call her Girl Gone Wild, and then it’s just going to look stupid. So I said, I get that out of the way. So how are you?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I’m good. Thanks so much for having me on Rob. I know it’s kind of a catchy play of words there. You know, that’s kind of what I was going for. But I know I apologize for all the people that trip over my my channel name.
Rob McNealy
Oh, you know, when I was going back through and and I’ve been on Twitter a long time, and people always ask, well, how do you get this following because I’m like, I was like number 62 in the world by followers at my peak, because I came in so early, I came up, I got my Twitter account just after they started. And so it’s like, and I just named it my name. I never like made a handle or you know, and I’m just always stuck with that. And I was like, maybe I need to do something interesting, but it just kind of stuck. And then I got people like, well, you should worry about your personal brand. So I’m like, okay, that’s my personal brand. My name makes it easy. But then there’s like, you know, there’s a Rob McNealy, who’s like this really successful British like motorcycle racer. So like, I have to compete with a British motorcycle racer for SEO on my own name, which is kind of funny.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Which actually that’s kind of part of why I went was something else because SEO on my name Lea Thompson. It’s spelled exactly the same as the Back to the Future actress. And so I was like that is a hopeless case. I am never going to win that SEO battle.
Rob McNealy
But at least you think about that in SEO is a thing. And it seems like crypto people don’t get SEO, and you lots of other things they don’t get as far as marketing. So anyways, I digress. Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into crypto?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, so my kind of crypto journey I mean, I heard about Bitcoin back. I don’t I don’t know I want to say like 1415 but it’s just more than I’d heard about it. Like some people that I knew were mining it. But I didn’t really ask more questions. I didn’t really look into it too much. But then in kind of early 17, I stumbled across a blogging platform called steam it I don’t know if you are familiar yet okay. Most people in the crypto space are but you know, and I, I hadn’t really made content before. But I was like, well, this looks kind of fun. Maybe I’ll you know, I play some a couple different instruments. And I was like, maybe I’ll just make a little ukulele cover and post that and kind of see, see what happens. And, you know, it made like $100 or something. And I was like, Whoa, what is this?
Rob McNealy
What did you cover with your little ukulele?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
My first cover was creep. Actually, so nice. Yeah. And I, oh, gosh, I should dig up the photo. I tried to look creepy in the photo. I thought that’d be funny. So that was just kind of that got me down the rabbit hole because I was like, well, where did this money come from? And how is it created? Like what now? What do I do with it? What is this thing called an exchange and so it just kind of once I started actually contributing regularly on the steam blockchain and, and posting content, often I was like, Okay, I need to actually learn about this stuff. Like how does any of this work? So That’s kind of what you know got me going down the rabbit hole of crypto and just been kind of, I would say growing my knowledge ever since I’ve been on the steam blockchain for a few years now like I said posting content and I kept getting requests to speak at different crypto conferences because people were following me on Steam and even though I wasn’t even making crypto content, I was just doing like ukuleles and random things. I was like, you know, maybe I should actually dig into this a little bit more and start making crypto content. So that’s when gergan crypto was born probably about four or five months ago. So that channel and brand is pretty new, but it’s been just so much fun. I’m so glad that I did. So is crypto and content creation your full time occupation right now or is this just like a side hustle at this point? Right now it’s just a side hustle. I’m kind of intentionally I don’t wanna say growing slow because it’s that’s not necessarily accurate, but I’m trying to be really intentional about how I monetize is what I’m trying to say like, for me, I, I’m like, you know, I can manage doing this on the side, with my day job, I’ve got a great job that I you know that I enjoy. That gives me a lot of flexibility. So I’m like, as long as I can, I kind of feel like when you get desperate for money, that’s when you start making poor choices, you know, in terms of accepting sponsorships or doing things that maybe aren’t totally in line with your audience. And so for me, I would just way rather kind of hold off on not doing that much monetization at first and just kind of build my content and fill out my audience and kind of see, see where things go first. So yeah, just doing this on the side for now. So you don’t have the doctor stop. But what kind of work do you do for your day job? Don’t name the company, but when I would feel there you’re working in? Yeah, so I work in like sales and account management for a tech company. And so yeah, so I manage a lot of our big client relationships and partnerships. And so I’ve been doing that for about seven or eight years.
Rob McNealy
Very cool. So the ukulele saying Do you take requests like do you do? Do you do crypto ukulele songs? Yeah.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
You know, I’ve dabbled a little bit here and there and I actually, I’m working on at this moment a little fun Christmas Carol, kind of crypto spoof. So by the time this interview comes out of the past Christmas, you guys be able to go find it on my channel, but I’m actually planning to record it tonight. Well, if you want to say really nice, I’ll make sure I get this edited out by Tuesday. Oh, alright.
Rob McNealy
So you know, I always kind of joke around in that in crypto, there’s a lot of really cringe worthy kind of like crypto songs out there. But I said I was talking to crypto Euclid I don’t know if you know who he is but crypto Euclid and mystical oaks and they do some weird numbers and I said, you know, you haven’t made it as a crypto project until somebody has done like a really cringe worthy crypto song to your chain. So somebody needs to do an elephant themed crypto song at some point and then once we’ve done that then I’ll know that we’ve made it in arrived.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
All right, well, I might have to be that person that does it for you guys. We’ll see I’ll make it as cringy as I can I promise.
Rob McNealy
But you have but you have to have elephant special effects in the song if you’re going to do it. So you have to get some kind of like elephant like, I don’t know what do they call it when an elephant makes a noise? It’s not like a roar elephant roar is it? I don’t think elephant roar was a thing.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I’ll look it up and I’ll include it somehow in the song I promise.
Rob McNealy
You make that you know, I’m pretty sure we can get we can put in a worker proposal fund and compensate you can make but i think i think it’s pretty interesting. So content creation and blockchain You know, that’s very interesting. It seems like everybody’s got a podcast now. And I’m wondering if there’s almost too many. Pretty much and with like, what this podcast You know, I’m not just doing crypto, I do small business stuff and I do shooting and gun stuff, baby. Basically, I’m interviewing the people I want to interview, because I find them interesting. And so I’m not just doing, you know, crypto is the one topic because I think it’s being over killed personally. And I think that’s going to change over time. I’m old enough that I went through the whole social media phrase or our phase from 10 years ago. And I used to do a radio show about small business back then and started, you know, podcasting and taking my radio shows that were over the air and putting them through. And so I was actually podcasting 10 years ago, and that that’s originally how I built a lot of my following because I had a radio show and I was always pimping out Twitter because Twitter was so new. So I was like a real early adopter of Twitter and Facebook for that matter of fact, and now and then I stopped because I just got busy actually running my business for a bunch of years. And then when we decided to get into doing crypto a couple years ago, I noticed Well, hold on, that crypto thing is really on Twitter, so maybe I should like unmothball my Twitter account and which that’s what I did. And and like, it’s funny because people like, you got fake followers. I’m like no, no been here a long time been here since you were in junior high, but thanks for playing. But it’s interesting how like, you know, crypto is actually evolved a lot there. And I’m sorry. But Twitter and Social Media have evolved a lot in that time. And there’s all these like little like all these little vertical communities now, like crypto, Twitter’s a thing. My wife’s a trained medical doctor, there’s medical Twitter, there’s lawyer Twitter, it’s just kind of interesting how Twitter has all these little pockets now of little communities inside of them. It’s kind of funny to me. So what do you find? As far as content creation goes, What do you find are some of the things that are being done right in crypto, and what are some of the things that you think are being done incorrectly or poorly in crypto?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Ooh, okay. I think that in terms of content itself, I mean, I think that depends on how you classify content, right? Like, to me a piece of content can be a tweet, it can be a full YouTube video, it can be, you know, a podcast episode, it can be such a variety of different things. One area that I think, is I don’t see a lot of other people doing as much as they could in crypto Twitter specifically, is posting shorter native videos like to me, that is where I get the most amount of engagement. And it’s just really because it is engaging, it’s fun, like I’ll maybe take an interview that I did with someone, and I will clip out, you know, a minute or a minute and a half little section and kind of edited into something that I post on Twitter. And so that kind of helps drive traffic to the full YouTube video. But it also is just a more consumable little piece of content that gives people kind of a little taste of what they might get if they do want to go watch the whole thing. So in terms of something that I think seems to be working well that people could probably do more of is more short kind of native content. And so I guess I kind of answered what’s going well, and what could be better kind of in the same punch? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think even like an A and another level of like, what’s not going well as I mean, I think that, and I kind of touched on this earlier when I was talking about not wanting to like kind of over show is I feel like that is a real thing that happens in the Twitter or in the crypto content creation space is people kind of like overextending the use of their audience and kind of over shilling and that it can be that can be a really tricky balance, I think of monetizing your content, but then also being like just really authentic and open with your audience about that.
Rob McNealy
You know, I’ve kind of struggled with that myself. And, for instance, as podcasts, you know, the only reason I started podcasting, again, like a year ago, is that when we first launched two years ago it’s changed a lot since then. But we couldn’t get interviewed on any podcasts in the crypto space because we didn’t have the money. And all these influencers, even really small influencers, were literally charging astronomical sums of money to go on a podcast with like, 100 followers or whatever, you know, it was ridiculous. But since we hadn’t we didn’t do an Ico we were literally the this, like the whole stereotypical community project. Everybody’s got a full time day job. And we don’t hide that fact. But we didn’t have the money to pay influencers and I and I told the team I go, I got a pretty decent sized Twitter following. I’m gonna have to like revamp the audience because my audience wasn’t a Twitter audience or I’m sorry, my Twitter. You know, followers weren’t like a crypto like following so I have been going through like a metamorphosis with it, which is interesting, like people a lot of people don’t like the new type of content and lot of insight, get new followers and old followers. It’s leaving all times. It’s interesting to see how they work. Balance. But I think when we started doing this, I said, I almost have to just become a content creator to promote my own project. And so because of that, I don’t charge like even You, you, you can attest, I didn’t say, Hey, come on my show, right. And I interview other projects that some people might even consider potentially a competitor to task. And I said, Look, I’m in here for the space. And I want to talk to interesting people. And you know, there’s a lot of interesting people working on projects that aren’t mine. So I want to talk to those people. And I don’t charge I’ve never charged a dime for anybody and how I monetize, monetize, quote, unquote, the project is I run a commercial for tusken front of the end, I just run an ad for us. And it’s like an in kind. I don’t take money from people. And it’s funny because I hit I’m starting to get people wanting to pay me to come on, which is interesting. I’ve had a couple people say, Hey, can you tweet us out and pimp this and and I’m like, nope, nope. Cash but how they could but I said to one guy, there’s literally two days ago, I said said, Why don’t you just tell me about what you’re doing and asked to come on the show? If it’s something interesting, I’ll shill it, or at least you know, talk to you about it. Because it might be interesting. But if it’s just kind of like, you know, some kind of like weird scamming kind of play, I’m not just gonna pimp for that. But, but I think that’s one of the things that has been interesting. From the content creation side, we got into it out of desperation. I didn’t want to be a podcast. But what I found is that I really started liking talking to people, because I like to talk I like to type to talk to smart people. And I can always learn something and I’ve already learned something from you. You already give me an a new idea, my little brains kind of working on this thing. One of the things that I’ll give you something that I see that I think is a mistake with a lot of crypto products, but one Muslim, don’t do marketing, let’s number one, but the ones that are doing marketing. I do believe that hosting your own content as much as possible is important, because it drives value to your own domain. And unfortunately, when you host all your content and other people’s platforms, you don’t control that and ultimately, you become dependent on them if they decide to change their algorithms or their terms of service or what have you, boom, you’re gone. And so I’ll give a great example of this now I think mediums an interesting platform. And I leverage medium to drive traffic to other I basically like to drive links back to content that’s already on our existing sites. But I don’t like it when people blog on medium only. And I think that’s a mistake. Because you see a lot of people in in crypto where they’re like, dude, WordPress is free. blog and host your content. Even if you’re a decentralized project, if you got a website, you can put a blog on it. Put the content on your blog, so you can control that content, and drive inbound links to your website. And then what you can do is then link to that content on medium to an excerpt. And then you get that traffic push backwards. From medium medium, and I’ve been testing this I like to test things when it comes to content. Medium Google scans Medium about I found about every half hour, it gets updated that quickly. And I don’t know if you know, but you train Google on how basically Google kind of alters their frequency of crawling based on your traffic and your size but medium is such a big site that once you want to if you want to like get content backlinks now they’re not going to do follow links. But if you want still want links back to your site, and you want them quickly, medium is a great way but post back to content from medium let you already have a hosting on your site. So like I like your idea about you know, doing like a little edited short, almost tik tok kind of length video on Twitter to get people to drive traffic to your YouTube. Well, maybe you put that also that little video of that little on medium and then link back to the full version on YouTube. And I think that would be good SEO. But I don’t see anybody doing that. No, I think that’s that’s great. And, man, I like so many things.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I want to say about what you just said. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of like you said, Oh, you could post it on Twitter and medium like, that’s actually a huge part of my content strategy is putting things on is re utilizing content and taking one piece of content, maybe it’s my YouTube video, and turning it into all of these other pieces of content. So maybe I clip three different short videos, and I put that on Twitter and LinkedIn, and, you know, Instagram and like all these different places. But then maybe I take a quote, and then I turn it into a graphic and I share that out to and so you don’t have to always constantly be coming up with all of these ideas for content. You can take the content you’re already making and piece that out into more micro pieces of content. And it helps you to have a really active social platform at that point. And, and the other thing that I wanted to touch on that you said was about backing up your own content. I think that’s so smart. Because you’re right, what if YouTube all of a sudden is like, Oh, we just deleted that video and you didn’t have a backup of it or the Like you said that blog post I mean, it’s not that hard to back it up. And I, I say that I don’t actually like a my websites just coming live here in a little bit. But I do back things up to the steam blockchain actually, you know I mentioned earlier how that’s how I got started. And so the content even though I don’t personally like own the domain of that it’s on the blockchain and it can’t be deleted. And so I know that that’s going to be there. So that’s been kind of my backup to this point, which probably isn’t quite as good as, you know, having your own website, but it’s another good option as well, I think.
Rob McNealy
Yeah. And I think ultimately, it’s about, you know, driving traffic back to content that you can monetize other ways. So one of the things that I’m going to be doing is I’m going to take all my old audio podcast content, and I started looking it up because I’ve done multiple content. I’ve done multiple podcasts over the years, and I have almost 200 shows almost two hours of content that’s just sitting on my server. It’s not hosted anywhere right now. So what I’ve decided to do is I’m going to actually put them in, I’m going to put all that old content, I’m going to update it all in the SEO and all this and it’s gonna take me six months to do it, I already know what. But it’ll end up driving the size of this podcast. By mid summer, I’ll have probably 300 posts on this on this feed. And, and I make a video out of each one of them. But the thing is, a lot of the people I interviewed are still actually actually way more famous now than when I interviewed them before. So they have their own names have good SEO associated with them. And I think that’s important. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to make my my feed, you know, stale. I’m going to mix it in and I’m going to list it as an archive show or what have you. But it’s about building up the size of you know, the actual the RSS feed the number of videos, and it shows a bigger about it’s a more representative of the body of the work that I’ve done. As a content creator. It’s just I got it. I just Got a package and I got to repackage it. And that’s going to take a long time. Because the way I do pod like, and I don’t mind talking SEO stuff. But what I do with SEO with this podcast, I do three blog posts for every show and a medium post and foremost, and they get cross posted to six different social media sites. And so it’s a lot of work the posting and just cross posting takes a couple hours for every show. It’s not just the show editing. But all that cross linking will turn this it’ll turn it into a pretty big I think it’ll be a pretty big show here in the next couple months. It just takes time, hard card eskie SEO, I mean, it’s an it’s an investment of time. But if you do that correctly, and you have like a central hub where all that SEO and all that all that inbound link juice goes, you then can rank for anything you want to rank for. And then that’s that’s pretty good tool if you want as a content creator. The idea is that you create enough content, but you bring it back I like it. I liken it to like a hub and spoke system. You want that hub and the hub is I like the hub to be something I control. And then all those other extraneous social media platforms, sites, help content go out, but they also link back into your own content which drives up your SEO from the search engines.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Now, that’s amazing. And, you know, SEO is something that I’m, I’m still kind of even learning about because it’s I realized how powerful it is. I’m like, Okay, I gotta dig into this more. But it’s, it’s true, you know, when you actually when you’re not just throwing up content for the sake of content, and you that’s kind of an area where I think a lot of crypto companies maybe go a little bit wrong as they’re like, I don’t know, I need to tweet I guess. So they like throw stuff up. You have more like research behind why you are saying what you’re saying why you’re doing what you’re doing and you’re actually bringing some intention to it. That’s when you can really see some dynamic growth because you’re not just kind of running in circles. You’re actually you you know, the reason why you’re doing certain things.
Rob McNealy
But absolutely. It was interesting like on our main TUSC website, there’s that there was going to be a lot of sub domains for things like our gooey wallet and the block explorer and our forums, we have all that stuff being built out or is built out at this point. And if you put something on a subdomain, it the Google and other search engines treat things on a subdomain as a different website. And so whatever goodwill, as I call it, or our SEO juice that your main website has doesn’t necessarily be pushed down to the sub domain. So we actually move some things that are that we’re going to be in subdomains and we moved him into directories, because it’s much better for SEO and our developers, like why are we spending all this time doing this? A lot of work and I’m like, trust me, it’s going to be a big deal because I know when on the TUSC website will do all the trackers and all the exchanges live link to it. Well, the link to your block, explore the link to your forum, and I go those are going to be the sites that All the big sites in crypto will be linking to those sites. And we want all that inbound link juice going to the main website, not a sub domain. And so that’s somehow I think about SEO is that we we structure our whole project around how some of the SEO stuffs going to work out knowing how these things work. And I think that a lot of crypto project will be better off starting to get some marketers on their team, so they can figure that stuff out too.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Hmm, absolutely. No, it’s so true. And I think that as the as the space continues to evolve, you know, we’ll see more companies have that marketing budget to right because I think that might be part of it. A lot of it is they, they it’s the developers is the people running it or, you know, the the nerds behind the project, right, that actually are building it and making it work. And so they’re going to need that help that marketing that, you know, kind of personal touch that like how, how that stuff works as they continue to grow. But yeah, so I think that maybe that’s just kind of the phases. We’re in as a just in general as a space, you know, as we’re maturing. We’ll see more of that come up, I hope.
Rob McNealy
I think so. It was interesting and our we’re-our project’s focused on the gun industry. And that’s one of the our little niches that we’re we’re just kind of focused on that space. And it’s interesting. You mentioned earlier if the terms of services of these platforms change what so it’s interesting you may not know this, but I don’t you don’t look like a hardcore gun guy. But did you know that in the gun world is one of the biggest communities on Instagram right now?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I did not. That is interesting. And I do own a few guns by the way. So I do shoot sometimes. Yeah.
Rob McNealy
So but, but so it’s interesting because the way the gun world is locked out, not only does the gun world have a lot of problems with payments and financing, they can’t get bank accounts. They can’t use PayPal, square stripe, they can use any of those payment systems. And our our theory and thesis about how we launched TUSC was that if you’re going to get mass adoption, you need to start with people that have industries that have a recognized problem with traditional payment methods. If you’re just trying to sell grandma on crypto, you’re not solving a problem for grandma, you’re creating work for grandma. That’s not a good way to get adoption. So we so we focus we’re focusing on the gun industry. And we used to have a business in that space. So and I’m a gun guy. So it just kind of is awesome. But the but because of marketing, like the gun space is interesting, because not only that problem with payments, but they have problems with marketing on top of that, because they’re not allowed to do pay per click on most major platforms. Google doesn’t allow you can’t sell guns on you can’t sell and market guns on Google. You can’t do any kind you can’t buy it. Facebook and Twitter and most of the social platforms want to live by ads. And now in so what was happening is the gun world has created all these By the way, this could be a good option for you. All the influencers and all you have to do is be a girl and hold a gun and take a picture and then big companies will pay you lots of money for that I didn’t have a ton of those my goodness I miss it out so and but here’s the thing Facebook said two days ago they’re going to fire the gun influencers off their platform. So they’re banning gun influencers now, that just happened. So this we have it has they said in the upcoming weeks that’s gonna it’s gonna go down that road and and I was talking to someone in the gun space who’s very influential the other day and we were talking about it he says it’s going to happen because he He’s the owner of gun industry marketplace and we were talking about this and his name is Owen York, and I just put that out today, I think. But we had a good conversation offline about this and he’s like, they’re gonna go they’re gonna fire those guys too. And he called it he totally nailed it. And and so it’s interesting this goes back to but now if you’re an influencer and you built your business and your income now around being like an Instagram influencer in the gun space, you are now finding yourself you don’t have a job and or you probably won’t have a job pretty soon. And it’s just interesting kind of seeing a now if you’re an influencer and you’re only did Instagram, it’s great, I would say what you should have been doing the whole time is hosting all those pictures on your own website and cross linking them from Instagram. So now you’re still placed so people can go and your content is there because now they don’t have all that link juice if you think about if so if you’ve been building up this following for you know, potentially years right, you know, you’re not you haven’t and you haven’t been driving all this traffic back to your own personal website. Where do you do now? You’ve lost all that time, all that content now maybe scrubbed, maybe you can download it, I think but but all that goodwill and all the time people only know how to get to your main, you know, Instagram account. They probably don’t use probably not even ranking in Google. And so that to me is what as far as I see a lot of these influencers just not understanding that the game can play or change. I’m sorry, if you’re playing the game, it can change very quickly and you have no control over that. So you should always be thinking about in the back of your mind if I’m going to make a living as an influencer. For instance, what if and this has happened a couple times the last few years where Twitter wouldn’t allow crypto ads and Facebook still won’t allow crypto ads, and unless you know somebody, because we’ve tried. And so the question is, what if you’re a crypto influencer and now crypto Twitter decides to call you?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, that would hurt. It would hurt but if you’re driving all your content back to your own website, and that’s your focus is pushing people to your website that you do control. I think to me, that’s the smarter way to go. And and I don’t know the best way to do it. I mean, obviously, we’re all doing cross platform stuff, and I do a ton of Twitter. I do a ton of all the social media stuff too. But most of what I do is drive people back to my website. For instance, I have a YouTube channel right but I don’t link to my YouTube channel. What I do is I actually embed my YouTube videos in a blog post for every show and and i SEO that blog post it just says so and so interview video so guess what, if I lose my youtube channel I can re upload all that content to another video player and put it back and I maintain the SEO I just need to change the embed I need to start doing that with my YouTube videos I part of like what you’re talking about with not being so dependent on particular platforms is actually why I’m just building a website right now and I’m really close to launching it’s going to be Leah loves crypto calm because gergan crypto.com was apparently taken but it was I think by some guys got in trouble for it but that’s a different. And so but part of it is because I want to start actually building an email list and like you said, building those those backlinks because then I actually have away to contact and connect with people that like my content. If something happens if suddenly, you mean crypto especially crypto is something that I think the market is still kind of figuring out the, you know, governments, these big centralized social media sites are still figuring out what they think about. And like you said, they might be like, Oh, well, we don’t want to see crypto ads anymore. And so that’s certainly a possibility. And so I think it’s super smart what you guys are doing and that’s such a good idea with the YouTube videos and definitely excited to write a blog post to go with my YouTube videos almost any way, you know.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, and I’m not saying a corporation would ever do anything wrong, but you can’t tell me that. Well, let’s put in perspective right? You You got Twitter with you know, they’re pushing Bitcoin and some of their own little weird social media, things that they’re doing and I don’t trust jack any more than anybody else. But then what happens if Facebook launches Libra? You don’t think they’re not going to do something to drive people to Libra at the expense of other kinds of projects? Absolutely. And how does that look for not only, you know, banning ads, but are they going to add the content to? Are they going to bear? Or maybe they just bury the content? You know, oh, yeah, you can post this button, but we’re going to shadow band so no one can see it. And to me, I expect that to happen. You know, and, you know, and I work backwards from there. Because I don’t trust these guys. I mean, you know, if, if jack wanted to be open and not worry about censorship, he could make that happen time crypto, but he’s like, No, we want to make our own standard. There’s already open social media standards out there, though, you know, it’s, you know, web three stuffs already working on that. You don’t need to create a new consortium board of advisors to tweak Twitter, you could just adopt this standard exist, but they’re not going to do what they they’re not going to do something that they don’t control. And that’s what it comes down to. Because you know, especially with the Silicon Valley the way it is it’s about control to monetize, and there’s power in that and they’re not going to give up that power. Regardless of the stuff they say I don’t trust I don’t trust companies I don’t trust governments just like I and I don’t trust big corporate media guys whenever they talk about free and open anything Devil’s always in the details. Now I sound like a ranting lunatic but it happens from time to time. But so where do you think things are going to be in crypto here in the next year or two? You know, I’m not looking for like a hardcore money prediction. But where do you think it’s going to happen to the content creators in this space?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
I think it is going to be a wild ride because and you look at the content creators that were here in 17 before the big bull run, I mean, they got massive followings, really, because they were creating content during that Bull Run. So all of a sudden, all these people are like, googling things and looking things up and trying to find YouTube videos about Bitcoin and they’re on Twitter looking for questions. And so I think that a lot of those creators really kind of like swept up but you know, a big they’re following probably in that, like, you know, however many months period. And so I think that’ll happen again in the next bull run because again, they’ll be people that aren’t usually really consuming a lot of crypto content that are all of a sudden, really interested because maybe they bought a little bit of Bitcoin, like a long time ago, and they’re like, wait, now it’s worth how much What do I do or the you know, get the FOMO? And they’re like, do I need to buy now? What do I do? So I think that, in addition to, you know, kind of media mentions of the news and different people talking about crypto the next time I have a big bull run, you know, I think that just the general population looking for content is going to massively increase than the current amount that we have right now.
Rob McNealy
I think that makes a lot of sense. So I guess I need to get all my content out there for the next Bull Run. So I can ride that wave. Right. But I think you’re right, I think I think crypto is dead right now. And a lot of people I don’t have hope em by the way, I’m not one of those guys. I’m not injecting like, Oh, it’s gonna go to a billion not like now. I’m very cognizant, and I’m a heretic and that’s why I piss people off. But, you know, I mean, I think it’s possible that the price of bitcoin is $7,000 and maybe that’s what the actual market price of it should be. I don’t know that it’s going to go crazy at any one point. And and I’m open to that, because nobody knows everybody’s just guessing right now, but, but I can tell you even dislike the community right now. I mean, we just had to do our swap and, and, you know, it’s interesting, like how many people are diving in like, Oh, you guys swap like, yeah, we swapped three months ago. Thanks for thanks for playing, you know, because and I think that’s what’s happened. I think crypto got boring six months into 2018. For bigger, boring starting about a year and a half ago after the market tanked. People just went away. And it’s funny because even maybe within a you know, a year ago, it’s like the number of scammers just kind of faded away too. It’s like the scammers got bored. Like, they’re like, Oh, I feel bad for you. Okay, I’m a scammer, but I’ll give you some money because you’re down on your lock raid. So I definitely see that I think the market got really quiet and even the community is quiet. And I think I think you’re right. I think when when the numbers start going crazy, whenever that happens, again, I think you know, people get a little excited and start doing the research. So that’s a good note, I think. I think it’s a good time to build. I think even if you’re a content creator in this space, it is an excellent time to build. But I think you need to keep your content and your own stuff too, or at least have that reserve that you’re always kind of building yourself up. I think that’s important. I also notice I and I am I’m a big believer in personal branding now too. And I think that we had a good I went through the social media wave back 10 years ago when social media became a thing. And it’s interesting because all the big people that were big, I’m big Twitter, you know, I’m a social media guru. Kind of It’s like these crypto gurus, right? In fact, there’s a couple big crypto gurus that were social media gurus and now they’re crypto gurus. It’s kind of funny. But I think what happened is if they don’t do something else, besides just kind of try to ride that latest wave and be relevant in this latest wave, but I think people need to go through and build themselves into something. Out of that social media expert guru wave, there was hardly any of them that are relevant today. I think one of the biggest ones that is is Gary Vaynerchuk. I don’t know if he is a love him. Yeah. So I actually interviewed him a while back and Gary. Wow. Yeah. And Gary came out of the social media world, and then he parlayed it into a lot of other things. And I he’s one of the few that cross that chasm when like being a social like social media is just media and everybody does it now. But 10 years ago, no one was doing it. I mean, it was all brand new. And so, but there was all these other people that were trying to, you know, pimp themselves out is the latest, greatest so media marketing guru expert, right? And I kind of liken them to all these like traders, right? These crypto traders, I’m like, you’ve never traded a stock in your life. But now you’re like this excellent super duper trader on crypto and you got like some avatar dog. Yeah, no. But his, but his avatar dog gonna be there in five years? Are they going to be relevant in five years? And I don’t think they will be I just don’t see that. Because they’re not building anything. They’re not building anything back to a real website. They’re not building themselves back into a person, like their personal identity. If you’re if your identity is this random cartoon thing, but you won’t Dr. yourself for whatever reason, I don’t think you’re getting the benefit of all the content you’re really creating. What do you think?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. I mean, there’s certain waves that I think are kind of easier to jump on or maybe more profitable jump on than others. And you know, I definitely say that crypto trading tips and kind of daily charting and stuff like that. I’m like, you know, I am not an expert. I’m like, if I really You want on my channel to blow up I would start doing but I know that that’s not necessarily, you know, my kind of my niche, my passion my like where I feel like I kind of find a groove. And so I guess kind of a question I have back to you cuz I’m curious what you were something you were just talking about is like so if that kind of content, you know, is that dog whatever is that going to be around in five years like what kind of crypto content do you think is still going to be relevant five years from now? Or are you more just saying like, build your own personal brand and then you can evolve along with that as things change?
Rob McNealy
I would ask if you went and looked at the the social media world of who is the social media expert on social media, and you probably can’t find that person anymore, or you probably don’t know them as like a household name brand. And and I would say is, it’s one thing to be an expert and using social media as a tool or any kind of marketing as a tool. But if you yourself are the as the content creator, I think you need to make yourself into something that allows flexibility for evolution going forward. So for instance, even name and I think about this even with projects and businesses and when we came up with the name the rebrand for us because we started as OCC in the beginning. And Tosca stands for the universal settlement coin. And, and it’s interesting because we also want to plan the elephant thing, because that’s our thing, right? Little elephant guy. So but TUSC, not to us, K. But what we said is we’re going to start off in this one industry, just kind of like Amazon was a bookstore for a long time. And but we’re not going to pigeonhole our branding around that one industry because that’s too limiting. And if we’re successful in one industry, we should be able to evolve and grow into others. And I think about personal branding the same way. If all you are is a crypto trader. Don’t Okay, make a lot of money. Great. I mean, I’m not dissing that and maybe you’re really good at trading. Thanks. You know, that’s great. But where does that take you? Where what are the options for you to evolve out of that? And ask, the question I would ask is, is how are you prepared to evolve when no one really cares about crypto trading tips anymore? Because at some point, it’s going to change, it’s not going to be as important out there. And what is your plan for evolving? And how does what you do with your brand now affect that in five years? And that’s that’s that’s just the question. I don’t know the you know, maybe I maybe you’re funny. Maybe you have a great personality, maybe you’re really smart about business on top of that. So you could talk about trading, but also business and that’s what I’m doing with this show. I’m not going to limit it to crypto stuff. Because it’s not one it’s not me, because I don’t just eat sleep and breathe crypto from the standpoint that that’s all there is my life. In fact, I have a lot of different interests. And I love small business and startups and I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and I’m going to cover that because that’s important to me. And that’s part of who I am. And so to me, I don’t want to limit myself to only talking about this one tiny subject that very few hundred thousand people in the world right now care about. I want to talk about it. Like I had a guy the other day and he pitched me I didn’t even know dinosaurs are fake guy and I love conspiracy theories. I’m not saying it believe them. But I love conspiracy theories and the guy pitch me and I’m like, that’s just funny. I’ve never heard this conspiracy so that you think like there’s a whole group of people out there think dinosaurs are fake. And there’s a big dinosaur industrial complex and museums are in on it. And I’m like, I know people that work in museums, I did not seem like in spirit they do not seem like there’s like a mafia, right. And so I’m like, I had them on the show, because it was interesting to me. And I wanted to learn about it. And so if I was just a strictly a crypto show, I couldn’t have that guy. And that wouldn’t be any fun.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Actually, I saw my list to watch that or listen to that episode. I saw that and I’m like, I need to listen to like seven here and more people talk about the dinosaur conspiracy. I’m like, What is this? I was like I’ve seen Land Before Time. Come on, dude, Don’t try to fool me.
Rob McNealy
Did I fly? No, you fall. My favorite. Yep, yep, yep. Yep.I still have that show on VHS somewhere I think you really do. But I don’t have a way to play it. Because I don’t have a VHS player.
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
But I think that’s that’s important is that if you’re going to be a content creator, be flexible, be flexible. And make sure you have some method where you can control it and drive that that content that’s somewhere that you can monetize in other ways. And like in just like I, you know, I live this, like, I still have all my old content. And I’m like, you know what, that would be good to build, you know, an extra 200 shows into my feed, and I have a goal I want to do like 100 to 150 interviews this this in 2020. That’s kind of my goal. I’m going to do probably three a week, but then you throw on another couple hundred shows in the mix. You know, by the end of the year, it’ll be a big show. And that’s important and it’s numbers and as inbound links and you know, maybe someone looks at an old show that I did was someone who has a big brand name I interviewed some big people before Like, CEO of Zappos, one of the former CEOs of Starbucks, the former governor of Colorado, I mean, lots of people a lot, I just call people up, like, come on my show, like, okay, that’s fine. But it’s good content and still recognized brand names. Then Gary Vaynerchuk, I interviewed him, you know, I interviewed lots of people. And so why not throw that content out there. And it’s interesting, isn’t it as an archive show, you can see how they’ve changed in time, and where they’re still the same. It’s kind of fun. So that’s what we’re going to be doing with this project. And to me, it’s all about, you know, meeting interesting people in the space. And I think with content creators, you got to be flexible, and you got to think about the future because if this is what you’re trying to do, and I’m not trying to do this as part of my job, or as my job, so and so I just preface this I, I would probably have to do things a little differently if I wanted to do as part of my job, but I’m not but I would say to people that are even you or people that are aspiring to be, you know, content creators for a living How are you leveraging that in back into yourself? And how are you monetizing that? Or what are you building that you can monetize over time. And to me, that would be important. Like, you know, if you’re really good at this, I mean, if you’re really a good brand ambassador, and you can build your own personal brand up by this one topic, I mean, that’s how you get picked up by like, you know, big companies to go around the world and be their brand ambassadors. And if you can generate an audience that way, there’s lots of opportunities there, if that’s something you desire to do, and you just got to be thinking about that the whole time on how do you establish yourself as being good at getting your own brand out there? And then how do you go through and you know, put that as a solution to like, say, a big corporation or something at some point later in life? Let’s just say this industry doesn’t need influencers anymore. What do you think?
Yeah, I know I think that being able to build a personal brand, being a Market understanding how to communicate with people and how to honestly how to be interesting. Does that make sense? Like, you know, to be like how do I’m screwed I’m screwed then. But just how to create things that people find entertaining educational, or in some way make their, their moment their day better when they come across it. I think that if you can kind of capture that skill, then you can translate that into so many different arenas, like you were talking about like and maybe it’s not even in the same industry like it could even be like Hey, so I I’m able to have this kind of engagement or this I have this kind of feeling or vibe with the audience says that I talked to and with my content, it you can take that really anywhere. So I think it’s almost like a good life skill just to kind of learn how to communicate online and how to create content that is interesting and engaging for people. And so in terms of like, you know, if the industry doesn’t need influencers anymore, like I personally think that I don’t really love the word influencer. But you know, I think that that industry is still growing and I think it is going to evolve and change. And honestly, I think that the crypto space is a little behind the game on certain trends and kind of the influencer marketing realm. You know, I think that a lot of people are just looking at your follower numbers and they’re not really looking at engagement and so much where I think in the rest of the world, you know, they’ve kind of moved on to be like, Okay, well, let’s, you know, let’s actually look at what people are really saying and how people are really interacting so I’m kind of excited to see the crypto space hopefully kind of come along that trend cuz I think you get more robust partnerships when you do that sort of thing. And now I’m starting to sound like a rambling fool I’m just going on about sounded great.
So with it, but I think you’re right i think it comes down to if you can build an audience and and a market let’s just say if you can build an audience about yourself and you do that really well. In a compelling way, that’s how you get a TV gig. That’s how you get hired to do other things for other people. So success breeds success. Ultimately, people want to work with people that have done it before. And and that’s how it is. So you got to understand. That’s why I like the personal brand. That’s why I like that’s why I like doing video on top of audio now. Because if you’re just like this crypto dog, or you know, whatever avatar it is out there, people don’t know who you are. It’s hard for them to kind of get a feel for who you are. And I find it’s interesting because with social media, when I used to go to like blog world and the affiliate summits and all these kind of related type of social media conferences back in the day, everybody just kind of used their own real name. So you can like Oh, you’re someone so Hey, nice to meet you. But now you’re like, and I feel like an idiot. Sometimes when I go to crypto conferences like, oh, you’re seeing your death, crypto and analyst or whatever, you know, it’s like oh, I just did it. Feel like a moron saying, Oh, you’re so and so right now. It’s like, I’m like, dude, I can’t take it seriously, I really can’t. It’s like, oh, you’re that taco dog or whatever. I’m just like, I’m just Rob. That’s just me. I am not that cool. I don’t have a cape, though. I probably it maybe that maybe, maybe I need a cape. Chris, should I get a cape? All right. Okay, the wife says, I can get a cape. So maybe I need a cape. That’ll be my thing. Oh, you’re wrong. But I think you’re right. I think people I think it’s important that people build their brand around themselves. And if they’re going to be in this space, and then they can leverage it and market in any way they want. If and I think that would be my thing. Now. You know, maybe these guys have some kind of, I always wonder if someone’s like an anon, I was wondering what they’re hiding. And I that’s what I think about like, right? It’s like, what do you Who are you afraid of? Why don’t you want people to know you’re doing this thing? Okay, and to me, I mean, and that’s, that’s what my own brain and maybe I get it because it’s like, it’s crypto. And I’m like, well, we’re not doing anything illegal. Why do you? Right? If you’re if you’re spending all this time and you’re really serious, like, you know, I just think it’s weird to me. But anyway,
I think kind of just to kind of offer like a little like Connor thought on that, like, I mean, I put my name out there too because I don’t you know, really care but the at least for me anyway, the reason I kind of went with a more like, you know, a curve on crypto, like, you know, more kind of funny, creative name is because I wanted people’s attention spans are about this big for those of you that are listening and not watching. It’s really small. And I think that when people see an account, and it’s like, you know, maybe so and so following this or something, someone retweeted it, if it just says Leah Thompson, then they don’t necessarily know like, oh, is what is that person about? But when they see something, it’s like crypto, they’re like, oh, that might be an account. I’m interested in So like for me, I kind of did that more as like a people can make that split second decision that they want to click on my name and check out my page. So anyway, just that’s kind of at least me where I was coming from.
Rob McNealy
You just need to put the word girl in crypto and then you’re good. You know, it’s funny. I see like these guys, I’m not picking out there’s this a lot of thirsty boys out there. And it’s like, you guys have a huge advantage. I’m you know, and it’s funny because even my wife, I mean, my wife has. She’s got a lot of followers on Twitter to like, 19,000 or something. And it’s funny because even I just mentioned her in there that I’m like, oh, and they’re like, follow, follow, follow. And I have to like, I’m losing followers every day, right? I’m like, I’m just trying to just keep my head above water. But she’s like, Oh, I got more followers. But, dude, you just breathe your girl and you get all right. I’m just picking. So Lea, where can people find out more about you?
Lea Thompson AKA Girl Gone Crypto
Yeah, so you can find me. You know, we’ve talked a lot about Twitter tonight. That’s probably where I Hang out the most online so you can find me Girl Gone Crypto, and also my youtube channel Girl Gone Crypto. I’m also on Instagram, you know, LinkedIn pretty much wherever people hang out. You can probably find me if you just search girl on crypto will thank you so much for coming on and I’ll try to get this edited before the holidays. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Rob is really fun hanging out with you.
Rob McNealy
Thank you so much. I’ll talk to you soon.
Episode Links
Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Vinny Riley of Gokhshtein Magazine, talks with Rob McNealy about Gokhshtein Magazine, crypto marketing, and the state of crypto.