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Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine Transcript

December 26, 2019 robmcnealy Audio Podcasts 0:00 Comments Off on Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine Transcript

Vinny Riley, Co-Founder & VP of Gokhshtein Magazine

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Today I’m talking to Vinne Riley. He is one of the co founders of Gosh, Time magazine out of New York. Vinnie, how are you today, sir?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I’m doing well, man. I’m doing well. It’s, you know, it’s kind of a rainy day here in New York. But you know, it’s it’s a beautiful day, man in crypto always.

Rob McNealy
Yeah, I think people that bought two years ago might disagree with that.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I honestly, I was one of the people that bought two years ago. And the guy you’re the guy, I’m one of the guys Honestly, I’m one of the guys that bought two years ago and I’m still here. You know, tail between the legs a little bit, you know, for not selling at the peak. But, you know, that’s, that’s part of its part of my experience man. And you know, I think it’s it’s made me a better overall trader but overall gained so much experience over the last two years as far as when the next bull market comes because inevitably it will come and when it does, I’ll be better prepared for it. At least for me, you know, I’m excited, you know, I bought then I continue to buy and you know, I just dcaa on a weekly basis and you know, I’m just ready for for takeoff man.

Rob McNealy
Well, I I think that’s a really good attitude to have because I know a lot of people just cried and in their milk and laughed and got depressed and started doing a lot of drugs. So hey, you got a really good attitude about it, and it’s good. And you know, I’ll be honest, I don’t consider myself a trader and The only reason I did not like cut my wrists you know and get all depressed is because I actually got some dumb Lux trades at close to the peak and made it all the difference for us. So, you know, I’m not going to be too miserable but I don’t consider myself a trader. I don’t know the first thing about trading.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Gotcha. Yeah, I’m not big into it either. Honestly, I have a few close friends and stuff I really listened to as far as their advice, but the end of the day it comes down to like my decision. So I like to compare a few people and if both of them have a similar analysis, you know, I tend to run with it. Um, what I noticed too is well what I like to look at to like for me is I like to look at the percentage versus Long’s versus shorts. And like me, my friend was talking about it earlier today and I think it was like 5% people short game or something and like the rest were all Long’s and we’re like, you know, it’s gonna dumb. It’s gonna dump and, you know, hopefully we could be wrong. We could be wrong, but it’s just, you know, History at least from what I’ve noticed over the last, you know, two three years is it you know, big money always makes money

Rob McNealy
Well, it’s certainly easier to make money if you already have money,

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
you know, any Rob I need some?

Rob McNealy
What do I have money? You know, I I’m just I’m just a middle class guy man. So, you know I’m just kind of out there hustling trying to do my day to day you know if I was some big money guy in crypto I wouldn’t have a still have a day job right. But But the thing is like with our project anyways, everybody’s got a day job. There is no employees of task and there’s no full time developers and you know, we all are truly you know, the personification of what a community project is because we all have day jobs and we all haven’t scrubbed our LinkedIn. Right. So. So tell me a little bit about gosta magazine.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
It’s a project me and David. You know, we started about a little over a year ago, um, you know, previously, I was working on a different magazine previously to, you know, the creation of Ghajini magazine. And, you know, everything was going great. We had a great product and, you know, majority of the team that, you know, I was working with then we did bring over to gashi magazine. And, you know, our previous experience, you know, the CEO as far as who we were working with it, just it just wasn’t going anywhere. It just wasn’t going anywhere. The CEO was just non existent non around. And, you know, me David been friends for a long time. We’ve been friends for, you know, over three years now. And I was like, yo, hey, D, listen, you know, I got an amazing staff. You know, I’ve been doing this for x amount of time. And I think we can really do something special with this. And he was like, oh, cool, man. He’s like, yeah, I checked you guys out before and he’s like, this is something I want to do and you No I don’t want to just be a magazine I want to build a media company and you know so that’s where it really like the snowball began and then it just started rolling and growing and you know, here we are today we’re about you know, six seven issues in and you know we have another one dropping in about you know less than two weeks it will be up before Christmas time and then it’s just really exciting man as far as all you know, the conferences we got to travel to and you know, all the great people we got to meet I got to meet Charles Hoskinson. I got to meet Charlie Lee, I got to meet you know, Derek capital from you know, token pay. But aside from that, all the great people that come on to our magazine that we got to feature you know, like Justin sun, we interviewed Craig right. You know, previously we just had, you know, Justin sun rock, the lead developer for verge. So it’s, it’s, it’s really interesting. It’s something that we enjoy doing. But also at the same time, it’s like we get to meet passionate people that are doing something for the space at the same time, so it’s kind of Like a win win.

Rob McNealy
So why I’m print magazine you know, everybody in crypto seems to be all about the digital and moving from paper to digital, yet you guys are doing kind of a, you know, a paper thing. Do you think that’s the is that a strategic direction do you think that’s the best direction to go?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
For right now honestly, the majority of our stuff is all digital. We do offer print solution and the print solution really is only for when we attend like major conferences. So like the previous one, we were at like WCC, and you know, a futurist and stuff like that that’s where we’ll bring some physical copies. But for the majority, you know, we are looking at as far as partnering with another blockchain you know, magazine that has a print solution what it’s so expensive and the logistics behind it it’s just it’s not it’s not even sure if it’ll make financially sense. You know, I like how like Kindle came over. Sounded like, you know, Barnes and Noble like everything when you know, just everything geared towards internet and E reading and everything like that. So and as far as from like a numbers standpoint, you know, the amount of digital downloads that we get as opposed to the amount of like physical hard copies we sell is just outweighs it. But at the end of the day, still people like at a conference or something still like it’s still like, you know, kind of like Sylvania or something that take home. So that’s why we try to bring you know, a little both offer both experiences.

Rob McNealy
What would you say your, your kind of your angle that you approach crypto with with your publication?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine e
The main difference between us and I would say the majority of any other publication is, is everybody else is just geared on just crypto crypto crypto, you know, which is great. That’s why we’re here you know, that’s, that’s our main love. That’s our baby. Yeah, obviously, crypto blockchain adoption. I’m all for it, but I didn’t want to just quarter ourselves into that niche market. You know, like, granted, yes, crypto is, you know, multi billion dollar industry. Sure, no problem. But at the same time, people don’t want to just read about crypto, you know, that’s why we try to incorporate lifestyle. We try to incorporate travel, we try to incorporate art and fashion to as well. So that I don’t see anybody else really doing that, at all. At least from my experience, at least I haven’t noticed it.

Rob McNealy
So beyond the actual magazine publication, you mentioned that you want to develop a full media company, what all is on your roadmap and horizon with your project?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Well, for right now, we offer as you know, as encompassing a full media company as opposed to just offering you know, ad solutions as far as within our magazine. We have we’re looking into doing events, hosting events, hosting parties. But also making these events and meetups something different, something unique, you know, from my experience of traveling to all these, you know, crypto events and everything like that. And so very beautiful. Some of them are lavish, and all that is great. But when you get there, you’ll do a walk around, you know, you’ll check out all the booths and everything. And then usually there’s an awesome after party at the end. But while I’m there, like I go ahead and I do my walk around and everything I check out everybody, I get 113 business cards that I put in my pocket, but I’m like, you know what’s next? I’m like, Where’s the bar? You know, because I want to have fun. I want to have fun when I’m there. So like my idea of what I would like to do as far as from like, an event standpoint is like, Listen, you want to come to my event. Yeah, we’re gonna have all that. But you know what, I’m gonna have a bouncy castle over there. You know, I’m going to have face painting over here so you could bring your kids whole bunch of different stuff with We also want to incorporate education to as well. So, you know, a lot of people in the industry at least, you know, what I’ve noticed is everybody wants to be the most intelligent. Nobody wants to look silly. Everybody wants to seem the most brightest and whatnot. But everybody is a little taken aback to say, Hey, listen, I’m not sure what that means. I don’t know what that means. We plan on doing a little bit of education as as opposed if we’re you know, teaching blockchain to a five year old and kind of like dumbing it down but also having you know, big speakers come in like say possibly Justin sort of Tron or something you know speak about Tron like what is Tron? Tron is great we know Tron Tron Tron because Justin, you know, promoted he’s a phenomenal marketer. What going dead Tell me about Tron Tell me what the transactions per second mean? Like what what is this going to do? How is this going to change the game and I think the more knowledge People have about it. And the more it’s broken down and simplified, I think that makes it easier to spread adoption. Because if your normal Joe person comes to their conference, and you know, sometimes it can be overwhelming, but if you’re able to teach them something, and they’re able to leave with more knowledge than they got there with and change their perspective a little bit, they’re going to go home and tell somebody about it. And that’s how that whole ripple wave, you know, starts. That’s how adoption spreads. We need the people to do it. So I’m looking at an angle is where we can make that happen, but also make it fun for everybody.

Rob McNealy
I think that’s a really healthy attitude. So let me talk a little bit about you know, crypto in general, as far as your how your magazine views it. crypto seems to be very tribal. Yeah, Bitcoin maximalists out there and things of that nature and, and a lot of publications are also kind of biased One way or the other? Are you guys more Bitcoin focused in and or do you really look at all coins and the greater blockchain community and all the different types of projects that are out there?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
No, we try to offer you know, we’re definitely not maximalist. That’s That’s for sure. You know, my opinion, yes, Bitcoin is king will always be king. But I would be naive, in my opinion, to say that, like, that’s it, that’s the end all be all. Like, there’s hundreds and hundreds of great community projects, like for yours example is the wonderful project, you know, I mean, and it’s going to be a great blockchain. But why not give opportunity and shed light to these wonderful community driven projects that deserve exposure? You know, why limit ourselves to just talk about Bitcoin? aetherium Litecoin. Why it makes it makes no sense. At the same time, all of these other these other projects, too, as well. They have the community behind it, you know, sure. Bitcoin everybody loves Bitcoin. But everybody likes to like everybody likes to rock their favorite sporting team to as well and like that’s what I noticed too as well as like how you said like crypto is a bit of tribalism. What it’s become also too is like you rooting for your favorite sports team as far as like your favorite crypto that you’re backing? So we try to give and share the love to everybody.

Rob McNealy
So, you know, I always wonder Then why aren’t people rocking their Visa and MasterCard t shirts?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
See that? Exactly. I got my Bitcoin t shirt right, my Bitcoin hoodie right here, man.

Rob McNealy
No, I just meant from the standpoint that you don’t see that.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
You know, you don’t see that at all. Never.

Rob McNealy
So what are the kinds of projects are you associated with besides the magazine itself?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Myself personally, I’m also a community manager for Telcoin. What Telcoin is is basically it’s going to be the new Western Union as simplified enough. What tell coin is doing is disrupting the mobile money industry but also the remittance industry at the same exact time. So what is allowing people to do is allowing people from say Point A to Point B to send funds back home to to their loved ones for significant discounted rate for example, I believe the Western Union charges somewhere between five and 10%. Tell coin will be able to do that same exact transaction as opposed to having to have somebody go to a local Western Union require bank account, wait five to 10 days for that transaction. Tell coin aims to do it with about anywhere between one to 2% for the whole transaction. The beautiful thing about it too, as well is it’s instantaneously sentell point two to my art director on the opposite side of the world. I live in New York. He lives in Sydney, Australia. It took about 15 seconds. And I need even need to do it through the Ethereum blockchain, which Yes, tell us a utility token built on. You know, it’s an ERC 20 token. But I didn’t send it through the blockchain. I had the option where if I want to, I can send it through the blockchain. But I sent it right directly to his phone number. So the way they’re they’re doing this, they’re leveraging your mobile network operators. So for instance, United States, the big companies are your Verizon or at&t s and whatnot. But where they’re targeting is, you know, the big populated areas where predominantly the most money is remitted to annually. So that’s where they’re honing in on their business model. And then they’re jumping from, from that big area from A to B to C. What they’re leveraging the moment network operator and I say it twice. I mean to be repetitive, but it’s so important because these people in these other countries like Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, all these places, a lot of these people don’t have smartphones, even though some of them are very up and coming. But a lot of these people still don’t know about cryptocurrency either. And the beautiful thing is, is that they don’t even need to, they don’t need, they won’t even essentially need to know that they’re using tell coin. Because it’s going to be a service that’s offered by say your Verizon you’re at and see somebody you already trust somebody you’ve been paying a bill to, for the last 1015 years. Now they’re going to say, Hey, we have this option, where instead of you going over here and using company X, Y and Z, we can just do it for you and we can save you, you know, 75% of your fees. And then you have the option to either use it for mobile money top ups, or you can have it you know, the agent Integrated a partnership with you know, Jeremiah, which is basically the Amazon of Africa. So they’re building this whole ecosystem. So its utility token made for remittances. But it just doesn’t stop there.

Rob McNealy
It sounds an awful lot like CoinText on the BCH blockchain.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I’ve never, never heard of them to be honest. Are they leveraging mobile network operators though?

Rob McNealy
It’s all every it’s all designed to work on dumb phones. And so the phone number becomes the wall. It’s kind of an interesting technology, but it’s Bitcoin Cash based not Ethereum based.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Gotcha. And do they have regulations as far as because that’s where I see like tell being being at the forefront of this is they have their MSP their money service business license from Canada. They have their VC from in Singapore so they have the blessing by all these financial sectors and these governments that which allow them to do it, but allow them to operate and do it legally without having to worry about being shut down in a week or so.

Rob McNealy
Very cool. Yeah, I haven’t reached into, you know, how compliant they are aren’t but I know they do serve, you know, all over Europe in the United States. So, but I haven’t dug into what their compliance is not my project. But I just think it’s interesting. And I think that eventually, you know, one of those types of products will be beneficial. I think with like all crypto, there’s lots of great ideas. But we’re seem to be lacking the ability a lot of products seem to be lacking and like I would go to market strategy and marketing strategy in general. So it’s just going to be interesting in my mind to see where these products kind of end you know, where it all kind of shakes out. But I think, you know, I believe in the future that the most successful crypto products will be the best one marketed crypto projects. And right now even if you go to the top hundred coin market cap, very few of them are actually even being marketed. And so I think that I think the future is uncertain. You know, when people say, Bitcoin will always be king, I don’t necessarily agree with that, because we haven’t they don’t have adoption yet. No crypto products have adoption. All these crypto products have investors. But as far as adoption, none of them do. Nobody’s using crypto for buying and selling goods and services at this point pretty much anywhere in any kind of real numbers. And so I think until that actually happens, I think the the opportunities in the field are still wide open.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I definitely understand I get that point and it and it makes 100% sense. I guess like when I say like Bitcoin is king. I mean, it’s just it’s just a granddaddy for me as far as what brings every what uh, what brought everything Else to the field? You know? Sure. At the same time, I think it’s like the AOL. It’s a little old, it’s outdated, you know, but without that we wouldn’t have all these, you know, amazing projects, you know, being born today from it.

Rob McNealy
Oh, no doubt, it’s an amazing proof of concept. That’s not what I’m getting at. And I am a holder of Bitcoin. So I’m not anti Bitcoin by any stretch. I just think that as far as if you have to look five years out, and you had to say right now, what are going to be the top kryptos in five years? I don’t think there’s a safe bet to say any of them that are on the top 100 right now, I think that the market could be vastly disrupted in different in five years than it is right now.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Absolutely. See it. That brings me to another point. Like I think the most successful projects that will be going forward as you as you say, I do agree with you, the ones that will be most marketed to as well but I believe in the ones that actually We’ll have a real use case to as well. And there are very few projects that are actually being used or piloted are in beta. You know, kind of up until this point, it’s kind of been a little bit of like smoking mirrors a little bit like, and I’m kinda like, you know, waiting for it to clear and like, you know, what’s behind the curtain. And there’s, there’s really not many that I can I can really name that have that use case and you know, and like I can’t share, you know, my experience, you know, you know what’s helpful and has as far as in the making, but aside from that, the only other project that I see that has an actual real working product is is te food. That’s the only other product that I see project that I see that has a real viable working product product. It was a real company before it switched over to blockchain. People probably most people probably haven’t even heard of it, but I believe is the top five blockchains as far as the amount of number of transactions, and if you look at their partnerships, and I’m not trying to show this, but I’m trying more so saying that, hey, you other companies, you guys can talk a big game, but like, at the end of the day, what why p at least for me why I’m going to buy your token or why I’m going to invest in it into it is I need to see application I need I need to have a reason why and not only how am I going to use it, but how is the mess in general public going to be used for

Rob McNealy
I’m kind of a heretic when it comes to crypto in general. And I’m not shy about that. I have a lot of different opinions because I don’t believe in groupthink. And I’m not full of hope Iam, but I don’t think of crypto projects in the same way. As far as the wording people use around them the vocabulary like use case, I can think of all sorts of use cases, meaning that something that crypto can fix or some kind of problem kryptos can solve. But I think looking forward, and which I don’t hear out pretty much anywhere in the spaces, who are the customers? Who are the people that are using these products and services, and are willing to pay for them? And that’s what I always kind of come back to who are the customers for the project? And how do you get your project in front of those customers. And to me, that goes back to just business. And to me, even though kryptos is some of them are decentralized and things of that nature. That doesn’t mean they’re not subject to the laws of the market. And to me, it doesn’t matter how great your technology is, it doesn’t matter how many features your technology even has. What matters is how does your product solve a problem for people People, and how are you as someone on a team putting out a project, whether it’s community based or an actual company? Or it’s a dow or what have you? What is your strategy to get your solution into the hands of the people who have a problem? And when I asked these questions, I get the funniest looks from lots of projects. And and it’s kind of a troll, though, because a lot of Unfortunately, most crypto projects are led by development teams. They’re not led by entrepreneurs or sales or marketing people. And so their worldview isn’t really focused on those things. And and I don’t have an issue with that. I mean, it’s just understanding how engineers think versus how business people think versus how sales and marketing people think. And unfortunately, for a successful project, I believe you need to have all of those attributes kind of combined into the project. And right now, most of the the major projects out there are just led by developers, they don’t have well balanced teams, and most of them don’t actually have Have market segmentation. They don’t have marketing strategy and they don’t really have salespeople. So to me, understanding how business works and having launch products and companies into the market, those are some of the most important things you need think about and when major products don’t even think about those things. That’s why I’m very bearish on a lot of major products that other people are very bullish on. It’s not that I’m anti the product, or the project is just means that they haven’t explained who their customer is, let alone how they’re going to get in front of them. What do you think?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I think we were talking about that the other day, like I don’t I’m not sure if I was talking with you, but I was talking about it with somebody else. But like, at the end of the day, like I agree with you, you don’t you mean like I think the most valid point you made was is that okay? We need to find a solution for a problem. That everyday people are facing, but then present them with the solution but then actual, like, there needs to be a benefit. It can’t just be like that, like people need to need to use your product but also solve, be solving a real real problem at the same exact time. You know, I mean, like, we can create something like, like, if there’s a cure for cancer, you know, and we put it on the blockchain, is that really going to do anything? No, like, you know what I mean? Like, that’s what medicines for that’s a whole different thing. But if you can solve like, like what you guys are doing, like, I don’t mean to be bringing it back to you. It’s just this is what I think about is because of the conversations that we had. And as far as when we talked about Tosca and what they were doing, or what you guys are planning to do and as far as how you guys your approach, and as far as how, what you guys are focusing on and how you broke down your business plan. To me was was, I was blown away. I really was. And I noticed that in, like how you were saying all these other projects, all these top top top projects, great. You have the marketing, you have the numbers, you have the market cap, but who’s using it? And why are people going to use it is the question. I still I still haven’t been presented with that answer. You know, so there’s very few maybe, aside from maybe Litecoin that’s the only one that I’ve seen maybe that has adoption, maybe from like the Miami Dolphins and as far as, you know, the use cases where you can use on that new app or whatever it is that that they’re using. I don’t know I’m lost.

Rob McNealy
Well, I appreciate you know, your pimpin, or you know mentioned our project because we have worked really hard to and we’ve worked really hard over the last year and a half to get to where we are and we do think about these things. A lot. But to me, I have a lot of history working with startups, and I’m a serial entrepreneur. And, and the first thing I asked a new entrepreneur, like someone who hasn’t been an entrepreneur, and you can always tell a new entrepreneur, that they’re green, and that they’re going to struggle by asking a few simple questions. And I went through this twice in Las Vegas the other day when I was down there for another conference. And I was introduced some to some new entrepreneurs that are trying to come up with some projects and different in different industries. And the first thing I asked is, who is your market? And they look at me like what do you mean? And I, I’d like to see a very specific answer. And when you ever hear an entrepreneur or someone who wants to be an entrepreneur said, anybody in the world that does this, that and that tells me right off the bat that they probably have no clue who they’re going customer is, and they’re probably not going to be successful. And, and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. But yeah, if I said my cryptocurrency could be used by anyone who doesn’t like fiato, or you know, some nonsense, generalized statement like that, that doesn’t tell me that you’ve thought about this, because let’s, you know, I know from a marketing and business standpoint, that Yeah, big markets are great to go after. But unless you even if you have the giant marketing budget, it’s very challenging to go after every single industry on the planet that could use your features and benefits with your project. You need to be focused and you need to be laser focused on where you think you can get the best traction the fastest, and where you have the most success converting people over to using your product or service and you need to be very, very, very, very specific about that, especially in a big market because most people don’t have unlimited marketing budgets or unlimited amounts of time to educate people. And so It’s interesting when you go and talk to engineers and leading certain crypto projects, you get the same kind of responses. Well, anybody who blank, you know, or every person in the world that could, you know, doesn’t like banks or whatever. And you know, that’s nonsense. Those aren’t those aren’t actual people that think about an understand sales and marketing and product launches. Now doesn’t mean that they can’t learn. They certainly can. But if that’s their generic statement, I would tell you that they have a really difficult time. They’re going to have a really difficult time being successful with that. And that’s just my my experience. But what backs me up is how angel investors and VCs ask the same questions and they’ll excoriate a startup entrepreneur who can’t nail down exactly who their customers exactly what their customer looks like, and can articulate a strategy to put their product or service in the hands of that potential user. And unless you can do that very clearly and clearly articulate it. I believe they’re going to struggle with And unfortunately with the crypto space, that’s more, that’s more often than not the cases what I’ve seen.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I agree. And I hate circle back, just you brought, you brought up a word as far as like VC and venture capitalism as far as exactly what they look for and whatnot like recently, as far as with telco, and they are, they’re partnered with one of the largest VC firms, East ventures in Asia, and they just double down on telecoil. The reason why is obviously, they see something they’re able to, you know, meet or achieve all those targets they previously had previously, and then hopefully, going forward, they’ve set new ones, you know, they’ve they’ve, they’ve obviously given them a little, you know, bigger piece of the equity or whatnot. But I don’t see other people i don’t i don’t see other people being able to answer those questions, you know, at least the way I don’t I don’t I don’t think anybody would be able to answer it or articulate themselves as well as you just did for nine let me

Rob McNealy
Let me explain another way and I’m not going to pick on anyone project but I will little bit a theorem. Go ahead who is Ethereum’s intended customer? Yeah, we I think we talked about a little bit I go but who’s Ethereum’s customer?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine – Gokhshtein Magazine
Right, but but to me I think of a smart contracts platform in a certain way. Yeah, it does a certain thing. It’s for people that want to have some, you know, utility from a blockchain but don’t want to build their own. To me, that’s what a smart contracts platform more or less is. Now to me, there’s all sorts of potential customers that might be interested in such a product or service. However, if you go and talk to any of the major smart contracts, platforms, teams and ask them Who their customers or their intended market is for their smart contract platform? They can’t give you an answer. They can’t say, Oh, it’s major corporations above $300 million that are focused in this sector, that sector, or maybe it could be large, contract, programming, comm software development companies that want to build semi walled permissionless blockchains for other customers, you know, I would love to hear that kind of response to that question. But you don’t you always get anybody who needs a smart contract, blah, blah, blah, which again, that tells me two things. One, they really haven’t thought about who their customer is, and to they have no plan on how to put their product in the market. Because if you can’t clearly define and clearly articulate who your exact intended customer is, you can’t develop a go to market strategy to get in front of them. Because you don’t know who they are.

It makes all the sense in the world.

Rob McNealy
I’m not picking on Vitalik. I’m not picking on any of these platforms, I’m just saying is, you know, the companies that are out there are the products that have multi billion dollar market caps. Because sure is how hire a couple VP of marketing or marketing consultants to come help sort that stuff out. And they would probably tell vitalik or people from the certain like maybe the theorem Foundation, maybe you need to go to industry conferences. In the space you’re looking at providing services to I don’t believe a decentralized project is immune from the laws of marketing, sales and business development. Even it’s just an ownership difference. I tell people, when I’m talking to non technical non blockchain people, when I’m talking about what a decentralized product project is, I said, and because they don’t get it, they don’t understand the decentralized minimum. People can’t grasp the concept of a know company. Right? They can’t figure it out. It’s just a new thing. It’s really abstract. So you still have to figure out a way to talk to those people and communicate the ideas, even though it’s an abstraction. So, for instance, I’ll tell people, well, we’re decentralized project, it’s kind of like a nonprofit thing. Okay. And technically, you know, a Dao or decentralized project is a nonprofit. But when you say it like that, where the focus of the project isn’t on make, you know, because even tous where focus is not making profit or you know, empowering CEOs and all that kind of stuff. That’s what we’re doing. We’re like a nonprofit. And if you say in an articulated like that, it makes sense to people. Yeah. You know, and you gotta, you gotta communicate with people in a way that makes sense to them. But I think that in right now, until the major projects out there, kind of really focus and doubled down on who they are, and who their customers are, and then figure out a way to get in front of them. I believe that the market is completely wide open from an opportunity standpoint. And I do believe the projects and I’m not saying it’s going to be tossed, but it can be any projects that really have the go to market strategy, the go to market definitions, the market segmentation, and all those ducks lined up and around. And those products once they start getting out there are going to be very, very, very successful in this space because I do absolutely see lots and lots of problems that crypto and blockchain can solve. But I don’t see the folks in the industry actually trying to actually make the connection for end users that way. It seems that too many of the blockchain and crypto products are really just focused on market cap and, you know, improving the the number of people investing in their projects, rather than the number of users using their products. You know, for instance, We’re focused on the gun industry. And I go to lots and lots of gun related events. I talked to lots and lots of influencers and lots of people in the industry, and nobody, and I’ve talked to hundreds of people in this space. No one has ever been in contact with someone from a project in crypto besides us before us. None of them. They’ve heard of Bitcoin. And I haven’t everybody’s heard the word Bitcoin. Yeah, two years ago, the big pump. Everybody’s heard the word Bitcoin, it usually has a negative stigma attached to it. No one really understands what it is and no one’s met anybody from the Bitcoin project. That’s what I see out there. And I go to industry conferences. So I have like one foot in the industry and one foot in the crypto space. And when I go to industry stuff, I’m the only guy out there they’re talking to them. I’m the only one that’s interested in expressing an interest in trying to hold their hand and provide customer support through our project, which is kind of how We’re trying to go to market. And to me, that makes no sense, especially with the massive amount of resources. Some of these, you know, top 10, top 20 crypto foundations have available that at this point, they’re still not putting people in charge of business development and marketing in any routine way.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
If I had their money, I’d burn money. I’ll put it to you that way. If I had their money, I’d burn mine. But you said how do you have you not put something in place? How do you if you don’t want to do it, you guys have the capital to hire probably some of the best and brightest minds in the world.

Rob McNealy
That’s what I don’t understand. So think of it this way. Even if this is my take, even if there’s no company and you just have a foundation and let’s just say pick, let’s just say Bitcoin, right? Let’s just say Bitcoin doesn’t have a foundation. It doesn’t have a marketing team. But let’s just say you’re a bag holder, a Bitcoin, right? You’re one of these infamous Bitcoin billionaires that are running around right? You’re telling me these guys go pay a couple guys 150 K a year to blow up their project and get out there and really find use cases just out of their own pocket if you’re a billionaire and you’re and you love this this crypto products so much or let’s just say you’re worth a couple hundred million dollars from the investment side of rock Why aren’t you personally just going and hiring salespeople to go and market it?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine – Gokhshtein Magazine
I know I would be because I know if I don’t know once you get past that threshold of where you have that kind of like excuse my language fuck you money like I’m gonna do everything I damn well possibly sure to make sure that investment that nest egg I have just continually grows and in this world you need to spend money to make money. Like why not? I don’t see anybody do doing it. The only person like I made me see doing is maybe like john McAfee. But who else who else Like you don’t even mean like john McAfee was running for president. Like, yeah, it may be a little bit, you know, an ego trip or whatever it is, and his his ploy against, you know, getting back at the US government. But at the end of the day, his promotion is all about adoption. Like, you know, that’s what he wants, because it’s gonna help him, you know, help him in his pockets. But he also knows that if he can get on a bigger, louder stage, he’s going to be able to speak and reach to a bigger audience. And that’s the same thing that David David is trying to that David is doing David’s running for Congress, not because he wants to win. It’s not because of anything like that at all. But it’s to give the people you know, of New York that hadn’t heard of crypto before, you know, it opens their ear. And if he does win, you know, what do you think is it his thing is going to be it’s going to be on regulation, how it was built 75 million years ago and how nothing is change. We’re behind, and how all these products and all these bright and brilliant minds that we have from MIT, these business majors from Stanford and everybody else, they’re leaving to go work on these blockchain projects overseas. Like, why not keep them and let’s work on something where we can create something in the country and let it stay? I don’t know. That’s that’s just that’s just my, my opinion. Sorry for going on a little right there.

Rob McNealy
You know, I think we’re both ranting at this point, but because we’re passionate and, you know, you and I, I think you and I both agree and we see the value in the fact that you know, getting mass adoption is going to require a whole other level of customer support and marketing and sales and product launches and developments and basically some business acumen. Now, and it’s frustrating to least me and probably you that you got the big dogs in the space that want to tell everybody else how to do crypto and you got these maximals telling people How they should do crypto and whether you’re doing it right or wrong, or how what’s a fair launch or what’s pre might, you know, all these different, like laws that they’ve dictated about the industry, yet the same cats and got these massively full bags because they just got in early, won’t open those bags up to actually go and do the little bit of work to make it happen. Yeah. And, and that’s frustrating to a guy like me who really does want to see decentralization, I didn’t have any plan to like start a project. You know, it took it took some time for me to like really understand the space when I started really evaluating the crypto space and started looking at where can I use crypto? How are people and to me, how are people these projects running these products getting in front of people, and you don’t see it happening and we didn’t see it happening? And once we decided to, you know, solve a problem with crypto, we got out there and it’s funny because you get nothing but hate from the maxies out there and you’re saying look, if you were doing this we wouldn’t need to.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
But it’s so counterproductive it’s mind boggling to me like I like I’m all for it you know be a maximalists everything like you know just Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin but like it goes back to our point like what what how is Bitcoin being used like you like you said it I still believe the doors open for you know a project to come in to be actually use and for transactions and all this like like let’s let’s be real Bitcoin slow, you know it’s slow it’s not going to be that end all be all so why just have that closed mindedness and say this is it this is that’s it like if we’re all praying and preaching for adoption, we should be rooting for everybody you know besides the people that are bleeding of the scammers, but anybody that’s trying to be an entrepreneur in the space or anybody that that wants to do something is helping the overall take a I just don’t get it like, you know, mean, and I don’t like the bullying that I see sometimes to, you know, like, you know, putting people down or it’s like, you know, my sports team is better than yours. So you know what your stinks? Like? No, like, yeah, be passionate about the one you like, but there’s no reason to not give credit where credit’s due or at least applaud people for trying. Like, I don’t know, that’s at least where we’re wellies. Where I come from and that standpoint, um.

Rob McNealy
Well, I think it makes sense, right? I mean, I was kind of joking about it earlier says people aren’t wearing visa shirts and arguing visas better than MasterCard on the street, right? And there’s a reason for that because no one gives a show because they’re just utilitarian kind of payment networks and people don’t get excited or polarized over it. Whereas crypto in many respects is very religious people have wrapped and I think what happens people’s wrap their own Identity around, you know, being an evangelist for a specific product, or project. And they do that for so long that they kind of, from an ego standpoint, kind of sell themselves into a corner. And then if someone says their baby’s ugly, or maybe another project comes along, that’s a little better or a little different, that might be more successful. Instead of saying, Yeah, you’re right, this part of my baby’s kind of ugly, they say, No, your baby’s ugly. And since I was here, first, ours is better than yours. And I think that’s inherently. I think it’s very narrow minded, but I think it holds back crypto. And I use an example of someone recently that says, let’s just say you’re a retailer and you have some interest in accepting a major crypto project. But it’s a decentralized project with no you know, no customer support, no tech team to call no phone number to call if you get a problem, but you still want to Use it. So where do you go? You go on to forums and you go into crypto Twitter? And let’s just say you’re interested in Bitcoin, right? And I like to use Bitcoin because it’s got the biggest communities out there. But now you’re saying, well, I need something that’s fast and I need something that’s, you know, consistent and pretty cheap and, and then they look at, you know, a different fork of Bitcoin. And if they mentioned that, they’ll be excoriated, what do you think that retailers going to do? He’s gonna run away. So and, and to me, I believe that maximalism and toxic maximalists actually are holding back the adoption of crypto for that reason.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
I agree. I really do. I wanted to close with this. I want to give your audience something I want to share with you guys something that we haven’t shared hasn’t been out on Twitter yet. It’s a partnership that we just landed a few days ago that we’re solidifying or having my graph designer make it up right now currently. But before I get to that I wanted to offer we have we have a partnership with major gaming one of the best, you know, Gears of War teams out there a gaming gaming team. And we are currently about to build three new teams on three different games. Best thing in Europe. I want to offer to whatever it is we offer as far as up to 25% off discount on that 50% off any company interesting looking to offer in our magazine, but also if this YouTube, if this podcast right here gets over 100 retweets, I will randomly pick somebody and they can pick any project they want and we will give them a free interview or a free write up about their whole entire project to as well. Now the partnership that we just struck with is travel by bit. So travel by bit is powered by binance. So travel by It will be our traveling partner. And all funds will be paid via BMB. For Gosh, team, the next event that we’re heading to is we’re heading to the Washington elite down to Miami. And then I’m going to be staying there for the week and going to be attending the North American Bitcoin conference. So I extend the invitation to you, I would love for you to come if it’s possible.

Rob McNealy
I’m already going

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Are do you? Look, did we just become best friends Damn, and we’re going to meet up down there.

Rob McNealy
It’s going to be a good time. I’m going to all those events as well. So I gotta represent. But hey, you know, what we’ll do is we’ll put all those details in the blog post that accompanies this podcast so people can access it. So if they want to check it out, it just go to Rob McNealy calm and you’ll be able to find all the details about what’s going on with your promo. So, Mr. Riley Vinnie, where can people find out more about all the various things that you’re doing?

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
You can go ahead and follow us on Twitter, @Gokhshtein. You can follow us on our website Gokhshtein.com. You can check us out. We have a Discord. We have a Twitter, we have a telegram. My personal Twitter handle is @RileyVinnie. But that’s really it, man. That’s it.

Rob McNealy
And we not had a really good time today and you are always welcome to come back on the show when you got any updates or some cool stuff happening. So make sure you keep me in the loop on all the stuff you’re doing.

Vinny Riley – Gokhshtein Magazine
Absolutely. Absolutely. Rob, thank you so much for inviting me on it was absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Rob McNealy
Anytime Vinnie. And make sure you hit that subscribe button this Rob McNealy, check us out of the web of RobMcNealy. com.

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Jason Brown, Komodo Atomic Dex Video

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Joe Mcgill – CyChain on Crypto Risks

December 16, 2019 30:12 0 Comments

Joe McGill, Founder of CyChain, discusses crypto and blockchain threat intelligence, investigations and recovery, and operational security.

Joe McGill – CyChain Video

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Jason Fishman – Digital Niche Agency Transcript

December 15, 2019 robmcnealy Crypto, Transcripts 0:00 Comments Off on Jason Fishman – Digital Niche Agency Transcript

Jason Fishman - CoFounder of Digital Niche Agency (DNA)

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Today I am excited because I am talking to Jason Fishman. He is with a digital niche agency, a digital marketing agency based out of California specializing in the blockchain space. We met a few weeks ago at World crypto con, and I had a really good time hanging out with them. So welcome to the show. Jason, how are you?

Jason Fishman
Good. Thanks for having me. Rob. Excited to be on and chatting in front of your audience.

Rob McNealy
Well, I appreciate it. So what’s been going on? What are you been working on lately?

Jason Fishman
Sure. Sure. is in the conference schedule. Going to Australia in a couple weeks right before I saw in Vegas, was at Paris blockchain summit on a marketing channel and CC forum London on an investor panel. So always busy with Thought Leadership type activations, have a article come out in Forbes tomorrow, excited to be on the podcast today. That’s where a lot of the focuses are during this time of year. In the same breath, I could go into my history. also working on some private rounds campaigns as well as blockchain user acquisition campaigns. So you know, I always say, if I’m not busy, something feels off. I like balance. We’re running an agency. We’re working on 15 to 30 projects at a time. So gives you a lot of different things to be creative about, and anything less than that. Yeah, feels like under you there.

Rob McNealy
So what’s your background? How did you get into the marketing world?

Jason Fishman
Sure, sure. So, to go all the way back. About 12 years ago, I started in marketing as an action sports consultant. I grew up snowboarding skiing, Surfing here in California, have a lot of friends in those industries and started as an agency working on some of the biggest brands for their accounts, and getting into the world of top, specifically around video sharing platforms. One of my projects was then acquired based on the success in marketing launches, and I quickly started building my portfolio with accounts and other verticals including music, fashion, telecom travel, eventually moved over to a different agency and led the new business team and being part of the whole pitch process and coming up with these creative ideas before going in house and played a role at a social gaming company here in Santa Monica, raised 3 million in seed capital. And as part of that initiative from the timeline is an idea on a whiteboard all the way through funding into branded licensed entertainment games. That’s where I really learned user acquisition models. average revenue per user, essentially arbitrage traffic and buying traffic lower than the cost that you’re selling it really ins and outs of the whole digital marketing landscape before getting into the world of ad tech. And that was through a partnership that we had at the social gaming company was able to work with a lot of top 100 advertisers in that period of time, and oversaw Product Marketing, as well as sales. So I got to sit with publishers figure out the best ways to engage and monetize their audience, to then take those ad units over to advertisers and find rollouts for these different pieces of inventory that we’re going to hit their goals hit their deliverables. My overall focus has always been business growth, being able to leverage marketing, to do so and algorithmically at that was very exciting to me with that, at this point in depth, record and success without the partner in this company, digital media agency DNA marketing DNA since January of 2014, since we’ve worked with over 300 clients, startups to product launches of larger brands as well too, but generally building a community and pushing them through a funnel to hit initial milestones, and then scaling from it. In doing so, working with startups, we found fundraising to be a common theme, a common initiative, whether it was working on pitch materials for enrolling investor meetings, working on the marketing sections and business plan or even more so the revenue sections of a business plan to show which channels we’re going to drive each different metric in their projections, eventually into equity crowdfunding and still in 2014. Here, I was bringing third party data of accredited investors, user investors with over a million dollars net worth outside of their primary home or significant income over the past three years. And bringing them to offering cages using third party data we were hitting surpassing some of the biggest agencies in the industry. And therefore we’re getting a lot of calls from portals from platforms. And we’re running these type of campaigns from websites. Think of it as an exchange, but just around the sale and purchasing of that private equity, not in the trade of it quite yet. But when the industry is limited at that point, and the laws opened up more in 2016, as acknowledged by the SEC for us to use different filings, and raised from both accredited and unaccredited investors. That’s when this really became the biggest part of our client list. We saw those type of inquiries change to initial coin offerings in 2017. And particularly with the momentum in that year that became our sole focus. So you know whether they were international or equity crowdfunding campaigns with a token offerings with a token component to it. Some cases being voted to tokens. We were working on investor acquisition. And we invested into the development of our own first party data. So data that we then tested out for our clients and soft performance, and at this point have records of investors who participate in private sale investors which participate in public sales on the equity crowdfunding side to throw a bunch of acronyms but reg, CF reg, a reg D, all the different filings we have investors specific to those restrictions, have it broken down by geo targets to markets, essentially records of millions of investors and we then find audiences to a B and D test against each other for these campaigns, and can measure depending on how we’re tracking and depending on the actual campaign setup, the cost per acquisition of each and every 30 return on adspend and essentially provide opportunities for our clients to scale. Beyond fundraising, as mentioned, as well, as we’ve seen, things evolved from my field as to some ideas this year. We’re also doing a lot of blockchain user acquisition campaigns, whether that’s wallets or different types of apps or software, even some projects on the business to business side of things, finding ways to provide company’s value and, you know, continue to build up their user base.

Rob McNealy
So of all the different projects that you’ve helped, you know, do raises What was your biggest success story look like?

Jason Fishman
Sure. So we have published case studies, and I could speak to a few of those. We also have white label relationships were more in the background and more restricted contracts, where we’re bar in the background so longer than I can’t share, but I What I plan, there is a $50 million raise project for a hybrid exchange that we worked out a few years back. Some of the team members were very public figures. They’ve since been acquired and shaded. But hybrid block was a campaign where we had worked on user acquisition for their telegram, community audience most focused on their their public sale. So yeah, it’s in very large metrics there. Beyond that have worked on over 100 fundraising projects, majority of which blockchain and in a full spectrum from, you know, green energy to mining to exchanges, to various markets, specific currencies. Again, really a full spectrum of different projects. And you can buy them even more than the ones that we activate directly to.

Rob McNealy
So what do you see yourself The challenges of fundraising for you know, these different types of crowdsource, you know, kind of projects. What do you see is not only what are some of the challenges, but do you see the biggest mistakes people are making when they’re trying to raise money?

Jason Fishman
Sure, sure. So raise money can be very broad. You know, we’ve seen companies raise money by having a few conversations with people in their network and be able to close everything out from there. We’ve then been part of very visible public sale campaigns with high volumes of investors. So and everything in between, of course, so there can be a lot of different variables for any of those. timeline is something that I often see projected off by projects where they think they’re going to be able to raise funds very quickly. channels in which they’re going to do so whether it’s their personal network, whether that’s through specific capital groups will keep it product capital groups, but through specific Venture Partners, broker dealers, in regards to marketing, we’ve seen groups think that they’re going to place a token sale page, do a couple paid article placements, and you have a telegram channel have some type of community channel, given the point in time that they’re out, and they’re just going to be able to, you know, close out the round very quickly. I’ve certainly seen that happen. We’ve certainly been part of that happening, and oftentimes reflecting market conditions. But for me, it’s all about creating a well oiled machine of a marketing funnel. And to take it back even further than that, to have a resorting an algorithmic strategy, where it’s showing me exactly which channels are going to use what you’re anticipating the channels can produce in terms of its digital impressions, clicks and conversions, and some offline metrics for direct outreach, such as responses meetings, and you know, different types of written verification that you want to track all the way through to complete it investment, the only way to measure anything is with numbers. So without having that type of strategy, without having that type of plan, there’s no way in which that you’re gonna be able to tell what’s really working, what’s not working, or to be able to effectively optimize if if the channels not working for you. Again, if that’s a broker dealer relationship, or if that’s paid advertising, you won’t be able to tell where in that algorithm, you’re not getting the right traction, and therefore to be able to focus on improving things there. And you can say statements like, oh, broker dealers didn’t work for us. Advertising didn’t work for us, you can completely missed the mark on these tools that are stepped into other groups.

Rob McNealy
So speaking of tools, you know, kind of being in the crypto space it you know, a lot of the normal channels that, you know, a company or a project might use to market would be things like Facebook and Google and Twitter. And a lot of these platforms have, you know, outright ban crypto related kind of content and advertising. What kind of challenge does that pose to you and how do you deal with it?

Jason Fishman
Sure, sure. So, we get blanket statements all the time, such as, Hey, I heard we can’t advertise on Facebook. I heard we can’t do anything on Google. And when I look at how I grade A good marketer, I’m looking at their problem solving abilities. Anyone can set up a marketing campaign, as followed by a template or an approach. Anyone can use creative that’s been supplied by the clients or Very basic creative that is reflecting competitors. But simply seeing success out of the gate doesn’t make a marketer effective. What I like to see is their problem solving abilities, what do they do when things are not working. And now that’s where you can gauge true tower. Because campaigns are going to fluctuate, it could be the biggest brand in the world or a new startup, you will not see the same level of success day in day out year after year. It just doesn’t occur like that you have to be able to effectively optimize. So when I look at any of these channels and the restrictions, the same thing for me, it’s how do we problem solve here? How do we get something approved? When speaking was reps at these platforms? and ask them how do we do this compliantly they tell us what gets campaigns blocked certain rewards can ticker currency can’t say Ico. However, you can say distributed ledger technology, you can talk about the function of the technology, you can give out info that serves an educational purpose without using those words. And therefore taking audience down a funnel, where eventually they have an opportunity to directly participate in a security token offering as an example. So it’s all about how you use these channels. You can create a Facebook page, advertisements, a landing page, or mentioned URL and that landing page as well to that all do not use bands, trigger words. But meanwhile, speak to your target audience and convey the value of your offering. And after that next landing page, be able to take them down a funnel that would be tougher to get approved. This is true was very categories. A few other examples, go all the way to financial advising supplements, but include CBD, firearms, various types of verticals, where if you bring an audience in to more of a homepage, or something that can get approved and doesn’t talk about anything that’s a little more gray. You know, use the sporting goods store example and a firearms are sold at that sporting goods store and someone clicks through to it, it’s not going to be banned. If it’s not mentioned in the advertisement in the land engage yet audiences could store and purchase purchasing an item or participating let’s say an investment deal that if it was blatantly listed in the advertisement or landing page could be looked at as restricted. So by building funnels, we’ve been able to leverage this challenge and we’ve had to do so because those channels perform Over 40 million cryptocurrency and fuzziness that I can access with Facebook’s third party data. It’s a combination of their first party and third party data support pages that they like and data partners that they have that have identified audiences with an affinity for digital assets. And bye bye by looking at their ad placement by looking at the click through rates, which are about 10 times higher than a standard banner ad click through rate by looking at the sheer conversion nature with by catching someone in their social advertising in their social media experience. It’s something that can’t be ignored, even if it’s nothing else than the targeting. And they have Facebook, Instagram, the audience network, the audience network hasover it has a high volume of top tier sites, we can continue to retarget you can continue to reach a user again and again and again. So I wouldn’t look at these platforms and say look them Or blanket statements such as my audience isn’t on Google, they’re not on facebook, facebook has over a billion users a day. And again, through their their reach new can touch people essentially everywhere they go online, I would look at how I can use them. And then my whole philosophy towards marketing as a whole, which again, is a utility for business growth beyond just created my whole summary. My tagline, if you will, for marketing is summarized in three words, test, optimize scale. So I’m not saying use all of these channels, new them forever. More importantly, find some channels to test figure out as I mentioned, in regards to the plan, what audiences you want to go after their what creative that you want to use their the projections for full algorithm of performance metrics all the way through, and then optimize to improve performance and then scale the channels that are working best. That that’s been my approach to it. It’s been different in terms of the top dragging channel campaign to campaign. But there’s definitely ways to leverage these platforms for what you’re trying to do.

Rob McNealy
So a lot of the crypto world says, you know, rightfully drawn arrows from pay to play problem, you know, a lot of influencer marketing, advertising that comes off as journalism, but it’s actually advertising. It’s all paid for. I know, that was really important back, you know, a year and a half, two years ago. Is that still important now? Is it is there a really an ROI on doing those types of, you know, paid campaigns, um, you know, when we were initially, you know, launching our token two years ago, I had people that had like, 1000 people or 1000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, and they wanted $10,000 you know, in some cases to come and just get an interview. So, yeah, and, and I always looked at it like, I just don’t see how the There’s a return on that investment, you know, from the marketing side of it. What’s your take on that?

Jason Fishman
Question? You know, the overarching statement would still be test, optimize scale, look at the ones you want to test out. But I’ll tell you why it matters why it’s still good to consider these opportunities. Not just roll them out. People don’t trust what they see online. Social Proof third party validation is a big part of a successful marketing campaign. And if you’re able to leverage the right media publishers, the right influencers, the right communities, the right you know, organizations of various types to validate what you’re doing, refer them to your your pages to your assets. It can really go a long way. They can make the entire difference. It’s hit or miss. We’ve seen anything answers with very large audiences perform marginally at best we’ve seen them perform in zero metrics that we could measure. We’ve then seen influencers with you know, under 10,000 or 1000. In some cases, that the moment they talked about a campaign everything you know, Spike. So you know, it is a matter of testing it out. We still do straight influencer marketing campaigns now we call them outreach because of the way the influencer world has changed and the ways to interact with influencers. But essentially, when you’re running an influencer campaign, you’d want to test 310 30 different influencers depending on their size, and all in slightly different disciplines, slightly different audiences is a good way to look at it. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket, going back to some of the shortcomings, I’ve seen groups hit in the past. And I thought, Hey, we’re going to have this one guy posts about us. And we’re going to close that around in a few hours. And since he didn’t occur like that, I going to have seen ones that that has happened. But best practices would be more to diversify. So let’s try a few different publishers. Let’s try a few different influencers, if it’s paid advertising, which could speak at length about as well here too. Let’s try a few different ad placements, few different data sets, and different creatives, you want to have something to compare something to again, a and b test. But yes, it still plays a role. The pay to play sponsored content prices are going down. There was a point there in 2017, first half 2018 where everything was expensive and everyone wanted to be opportunistic, regardless of the effectiveness of their their media and More speaking to their own revenue model and what they thought that it should it should be valued at. So, you know, there’s a lot of ways you can work with an agency or third party, even over a phone call not even a formal engagement, where they can give you a few tips on how to structure these conversations. with publishers, with influencers with any type of paid opportunity, there tends to always be some level of wiggle room. If you’re speaking, managed service. If you’re talking to another human. I can give you a few ideas on how to do it if it doesn’t seem like that avenues available. But I would definitely evaluate them. They definitely still serve a purpose. And we’ve seen it be very effective for clients.

Rob McNealy
How do you see marketing in the crypto space changing over the next year to three years?

Jason Fishman
Yeah, yeah. So I want to want to be able to have a strong prediction here. So marketing is obviously changed as the industry has over the past two years. past two months, you know, campaigns in September of 2019 look different from December. We’re planning and activating this week in in 2019. And when it comes to investment opportunities, we’re seeing a lot more attention around private rounds, which means longer sales cycles, smaller investment amounts, and, in many cases, offline touch points in person meetings with investors, which groups projects looked at as not as necessary, two years ago, marketing plays a large role in that. When we’re looking at digital marketing, seven touch points are more on average are required for conversion. And if we’re Reaching that audience with the same creative, same messaging, same channel every time, it’s going to have that fatigue, where if we’re building a content marketing funnel, and showcasing momentum, giving investors the feel that, hey, this is moving shifts going in this direction. And I want to be part of that. It’s much different than if it’s a stagnant conversation with a lot of repetition. So, you know, being able to have more good fundamental marketing, best practices implemented into these types of campaigns, which again, groups did with very little digital marketing couple years back. Now I’m going to go out and say that’s going to be more of a best practice of having more of that. I don’t want to say corporate, the more professional look and feel of a larger organization, I think is going to be true for brands and if nothing else, to convey trust. And seeing the groups who have surpassed the crypto winter and overall thinning of groups in the industry, the groups that are surviving that are structured well. And they have, you know, good operating procedures and all air in many areas of the business, including marketing. So going more to what does a brand look like? How should a company be operating? How should the decentralized organization be operating and what should look and feel be both on the platform and marketing off to attract more mass adoption? I think mass adoption is really the game moving forward here. And some of the biggest thought leaders speakers in the space I’ve seen moved from pointing at smaller projects to change the world to even saying things like, hey, it’s gonna be the enterprise level businesses that are going to change the world. Going to be them that are going to drive mass adoption of cryptocurrency mass adoption of blockchain. Massive name any group specifically because I’m still filling things out in the direction of where those organizations, sure initiatives. At the same time, when you look at groups of over a billion users and how they can bring that type of adoption to this technology, very exciting. And what’s the follow through Maryland, you know, look at the chess game. And you know, strategies were five moves deep, where the audience is going to be a lot of possibilities open up. So even if it’s not enterprise appearing enterprise is going to be a big part of marketing strategies moving forward, I believe.

Rob McNealy
So last question, what does your ideal client look like?

Jason Fishman
So our values as an agency is being able to work with Which means not limited to just one client, communicate early and answer with algorithms. It’s how we approach this. I say it because it’s important and marketing conversations, regardless of the dynamic, and, you know, to that extent and so for we are we look for situations we could provide value. In some cases, it’s a quick advertising engagement or at the last part of their campaigns, bringing traffic from our audiences and showing the very strong return. You know, more of our standard models, starting with the marketing strategy, getting into the content marketing stages, driving traffic into that funnel, paid ads, while doing direct outreach to those four areas. But for me, it’s looking to align with projects that can have a you know, I don’t say disruption or anything like that, but a very measurable impact in their vertical To be able to align ourselves with projects that could leave that type of positive change, to be able to have case studies that showcased numerical results for those launches and how we play the role and we’re part of it was working while it wasn’t being able to scale from there is our ultimate goal. So anything that’s new or different, I like talking with them. I work with a welcome to warm marketing conversation anytime. And, you know, I’ve seen so many amazing ideas over the years and dating back to, you know, the first agencies and telecom projects have gotten, you know, just amazing technology that never saw the light of day, or that, you know, had a very, very low awareness level. Marketing for me is the answer. That’s why I focus on this I can get millions of people, all types of top groups, or in some cases, it’s very specific individuals to look at our clients, what they’re doing the ultimate goal that they have around it. And the effect is going to have on all of their users and how that translates out not to sound too idealistic, the killer world. That that’s really what’s exciting about we do about what we do. So anywhere where we can really serve in that type of role to amplify and scale the right problems.

Rob McNealy
You know, that’s actually good answer. Jason, where can people find out more?

Jason Fishman
Sure. So I’m accessible through LinkedIn. Jason Fishman. Our website Digital Niche Agency. So DNA stands for DigitalNicheAgency.com. And like I mentioned, I was happy to provide insights, packages recommendations for ya, whether we have the opportunity to collaborate or not. So yeah, feel free to reach out Listen company, feel free to reach out to me individually. always like to connect.

Rob McNealy
Jason, thanks so much for being on the show.

Jason Fishman
All right. Thanks for having me, Rob.

Episode Links

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Interview Transcript

Jason Fishman – Digital Niche Agency

December 15, 2019 30:38 0 Comments

Jason Fishman, Co-Founder of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), discusses startup fundraising and the challenges of crypto and blockchain project marketing.

Truth Raider Bitcoin Interview Transcript

December 12, 2019 robmcnealy Crypto, Transcripts 0:00 Comments Off on Truth Raider Bitcoin Interview Transcript

Truth Raider, Bitcoin Community Influencer

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Today I have the excitement because I’m talking to truth Raider. He is a pretty big Bitcoin advocate and influencer in the crypto space. So I’d like to welcome to the show. How are you today? Truth Raider?

Truth Raider
Hey, doing pretty good, Rob.

Rob McNealy
Well, good. Well, I really do appreciate your time and coming out with us. I know you’re really busy. I was having some illness this week. So it kind of was a little hard to get everything scheduled out. But so. So for some of our audience, which is not 100% crypto focused. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you kind of came into the crypto space.

Truth Raider
So I’ve been in I’ve only been in Bitcoin and crypto for about three years. I’ve kind of followed the evolution of it although with the dark web and deep web and I’ve followed peer to peer networks. Everything from back in the day with Napster and limewire for us wire I mean, peer to peer is something that’s not new. And I think a lot of people that have been kind of messing around with this technology Bitcoin was kind of a natural evolution. And so that’s kind of how I I knew about Bitcoin since its inception but really never got into it till about 2017 and now I’m here for the ride.

Rob McNealy
Well, it’s kind of funny you must be close to my age when you start using words like Napster I think a lot of these young guys at a millennial type so talking but I do so just you don’t have to doctor yourself or whatever but what what can what’s your your main type of occupation?

Truth Raider
So right now working on a basically, I’m working with a company here at a mining store. It may not have it’s a Bitcoin mining company, based out of Houston, Texas, and then we’re basically partnered with them, and our company based out of Pittsburgh. And right now our big focus area is we’re working on bringing foreign miners into the states, essentially, that’s kind of mine and my partner’s big play right now is trying to get a lot of the foreign mining into the United States, because right now our we only have about 5% of that entire market in the world. So it’s, it’s kind of that’s kind of the focus for me and the company I work for, essentially.

Rob McNealy
So, how is a minor? Say, I’m a minor and I’m in a foreign country, why would I want to come to the United States to mine? You know, from what I understand, it seems like, you know, other places like China, it’s a lot cheaper to get the electricity. What would be the appeal of being a minor in the United States?

Truth Raider
So there’s a lot of reasons why. It kind of covers the gamut. So you’ve got regulations are becoming more friendly. Because of the so you, you kind of got like this, this merging of. So the reason why Texas makes so much sense is because of the oil and natural gas industry. So you’ve already got this infrastructure in place, and certain places like Texas or Pennsylvania, where we’re at more New York, Washington state, where you’ve got everything from hydro electricity to natural gas to existing factories that can scale and do industrial scale Bitcoin mining. Solar is becoming a new play, a wind is becoming a play. And so you have you already have the companies that basically can go from doing what they do naturally, and just saying, hey, we’ll also do Bitcoin mining, or will do or will provide energy for your Bitcoin miners, so it’s kind Like it’s almost like a natural transition for a lot of these energy companies and US based companies to just say, Hey, we’re open to providing you lower costs, and using our infrastructure to just mine. So that’s why you’re seeing like, right now, you’re not seeing a lot of it in the news. But for example, yesterday, it was in the news of a one gigawatt facilities opening in Texas. You know, it’s going to be the largest one in North America. It’s opening, you know, they just started literally 24 hours ago. And then you’ve got company. Yeah, one gigawatt, which is massive, you know.

Rob McNealy
Like a nuclear power plant?

Truth Raider
Yeah, it’s essentially this scale. That’s why basically they took over an old plant that was already being used for within the oil and natural gas industry and just are converting it essentially to new Bitcoin mining, you know, and that’s, that’s one way that it’s going to scale in the US. But additionally, you’ve got companies moving into Texas and Arizona and different places in California even, they’re going to do solar and wind. And then hydro is also going to start growing. So people think that energy is really expensive in the United States, but it really isn’t. When you think about the fact that we already have the infrastructure, it’s just a matter of the old school miner, or the old school energy guys saying, Yeah, we’ll do Bitcoin too. And that’s slowly starting to happen. It’s kind of an education thing.

Rob McNealy
You know, have you looked at anything up in like, Gillette, Wyoming, and, you know, wyotech mines that are up there, by chance as a possible location. I think Peabody Energy is one of the big energy companies up there.

Truth Raider
Not Wyoming. We’ve got a couple places in Iowa, North Dakota. Like I mentioned, Pennsylvania, Maine, New York. There’s A few places that we’re looking to set up shop. But right now, those are usually a little bit smaller in scale, whereas in Texas you have the access, potentially to an unbelievable amount of energy to produce, you know, for these for these foreign miners and so most people just they’re not paying most people right now, like if you look at the Bitcoin or crypto space, what is everybody looking at today? On November, whatever Today is November 21. What do people give a shit about right now today? know the price of bitcoin? That’s it. That’s it, right? Like I’d say 99% of the people in the space. All they do is follow charts and pay attention to what the price is doing. You know, meanwhile, the 1% which is the people like the article I mentioned today, which was, you know, companies dropping 150 million dollar investment into Texas to build a warranty. gigawatt a Bitcoin mining farm, you know, so on on a day where the or the bitcoin price dumped? I don’t even know what it dumped 5% 6% Today, I’m not sure but it wasn’t a good day. However, people that have basically vision are saying, you know, what, who cares about short term price points, let’s let’s look at this as an industry and, and I think most of the crypto space is missing the big moves, you know.

Rob McNealy
So the, you know, when it comes down to mining with a six the two bottlenecks that you know, keep a lot of people out or, you know, one access to, you know, affordable energy that make it, you know, profitable but the other part is the hardware of the miners. And it seems like right now, that so much of the that equipment is just, you know, kind of, you know, made by, you know, one or two companies. What do you think that effect is on the mining industry Do you think that’s going to like There’s gonna be more opportunities for manufacturers to, you know, create more competition to bring the price those basic type processors down.

Truth Raider
So I don’t. So what you’re going to have right now, what’s going on right now and the mining equipment sphere is so everybody in the United States essentially is using at minor s nines, you know, so that that’s kind of what the big, you know, the the most popular minor out there. But once the happening happens and kind of what’s happening right now, is everybody’s transitioning from the s nine to the 17th or Canaan’s got some new ones coming out or what’s minor, where you’re talking anywhere from 50 6070. Tara hash, you know, which is just dwarfs the S nine. So what you’re going to end up seeing is you’re going to see an unbelievable amount of s nines on the market that are basically not even useful to mind with. And so the basically the moral of this story is 2019 and early 2022, mid 2020 is going to wash out most of the the private personal miners. Most of these guys are going to get washed out because of energy prices as well as hash rate increases with the within these pools. And so profits are going to go down. So really what you’re going to see is like, like what I just told you, a one gigawatt mining farm opening with an ungodly amount of miners, you know, that are going to go into that facility. You’re going to see more of that in the States, you’re going to probably every couple weeks, or if not every month or so you’re going to see a story that says, hey, we just built a 500 megawatt facility. Here’s a gigawatt facility. You know, here’s some major companies that are coming in. So what you’re saying is all These small scale miners are going to get washed out. And it’s going to be an into institutional and a corporate play when it comes to Bitcoin mining. I think that’s what I see.

Rob McNealy
Do you think that’s a good thing for Bitcoin? I think, from a centralization kind of point of view,

Truth Raider
I think it. I mean, if you’re talking, I think it is potentially, if the you if us in North American companies, get on board, you know, if it’s just Chinese miners moving to the United States, then it’s really it’s a centralized play, you know, because what they’re doing is just gaining more access to cheap energy. But if you start seeing European and American companies and North American companies saying, Hey, this is a smart idea, why don’t we set up shop and do our own thing? Then I think it’s a good thing in a decentralizes the mining space, but there’s a The problem is that China makes 100% of hardware right now. Right? That’s, that’s the, that’s the issue that the overarching issue is, we really need like a Germany or somebody who’s really good at technical manufacturing, you know, at an industrial scale, we need like a Germany to come online and makes a version of a six miners or, you know, or or some other country to make hardware. That’s what we need.

Rob McNealy
You know, that’s one thing I haven’t figured out is, is, you know, I can see, you know, power plants would that have excess capacity and things, you know, you go talk to the guys with the tall hats and and you just give them a spreadsheet and the chart and they can they can make the they can make the connections right and see the opportunity. It doesn’t make sense to me. Yes. I don’t understand enough about chip manufacturing. It seems like there should be a lot of opportunity in the hardware space that other companies popped up to do that. And you know, is it just that the the chip manufacturers that there’s no is there nobody in the United States can even make a chip? Is that kind of the issue with that right now?

Truth Raider
I think it’s, um, it’s a matter of scale. So there’s a city in China called shins in. And I probably put I probably butchered the name

Rob McNealy
sounds good to me.

Truth Raider
So, basically, this city is a very good example of the way China does business is they’re just they’re out to just mass produce everything. In at scale, so for example, bit main is like everybody knows bit means like, big player, right? Well, I’m a competitor that’s up and coming is a company called Canaan, right? Who they just did an IPO for like 100 plus million dollars in the States. But they’re going to compete very, very heavily with bit main, but the thing is, Kanan has the Same business model is bit me. It’s just mass produce just mass produced in mass mind, Bitcoin. It’s a very simple model. It’s not a very innovative model, as far as the industry goes, but that’s why you don’t see American or European companies competing with them is, for example, like, like I said, with the ant miners, you know, like they had the S nine. Now they’re going to have the 17. They’re just looking for new ways to increase the hash rate for mining. And basically what it does is they’re able to mass produce those devices, those that hardware, and no American or European company can keep up with the pace. That’s that’s the overarching issue. And I don’t see it changing. To be perfectly honest, you know, on the hardware front, on the mining front, I think we can catch up. Or we can bridge the gap. We can’t catch up but we can we can We can close the gap.

Rob McNealy
For that you that location down in Texas, how many you know how many actual miners are going to be running in a facility like that with a gigawatt of power?

Truth Raider
I’m not sure like, I mean, you look at, for example, we’re working with a company that’s trying to they’re trying to fulfill its I think it’s 4000 t 17 miners, and that’s about 10 megawatts, you know, so for about 4000. So, I mean, we’ll do the math on, you know, on what it takes to get you to a gigawatt. It’s a shitload of miners, you know, like, it’s a lot so.

Rob McNealy
So, I was at World Crypto Con in Vegas a couple weeks ago and they had, you know, the whole mining area down there and there’s some innovating stuff, innovative stuff from the standpoint of cooling and and, you know, keeping the, you know, the packs of miners, the racks like really more tight together. So they figured out different ways of cooling and there’s Seems to be there are some interesting efficiencies that they could probably gain, you know, with the cooling side of things as well. So the question I have the havening that, you know, you’re hearing about this a lot, and, you know, everybody’s got a different opinion about it, what it’s going to do to the price. And my concern is Ben, you know, you know, you can’t necessarily say that Bitcoin is going to do what it did four years ago because the entire crypto universe is very, very different now. The markets very different now. regulations are very different now. There’s thousands of new projects that came and went and are still in operation now. So you know, past performance is not always indicative of future you know, results but the question is, a lot of people do think that bitcoins gonna pump and everybody’s going to get excited about the halvening I mean, what’s your take on that? Do you think people are gonna is it gonna pump or do you think it’s just gonna happen?

Truth Raider
I’ve my personal opinion is that I talked to a lot of people on Twitter just going back and forth on predictions and stuff. So, like, for me, I, I think Bitcoin at $10,000 is an amazing price. Like it’s a it’s a stable price, whether it goes from 10,000 to 100,000, or 50, or whatever the number is 10,000 is a psychological number. When people you know, that are out there in the space, say, you know, how much is Bitcoin, right? And you tell them it’s 10 K, they’re just like, what? It just it blows their mind they don’t understand that like it because what’s the price of a physical, you know, of gold, the gold spot price, you know, it’s it’s nothing. So I think it’s a it’s a psychological game. So when the when the block happening, happens and it goes down to 6.25. Essentially, I don’t think that’s going to create a bull run. I think we’re still going to be in a bear market until probably the end of 2020 2021 maybe somewhere in there. I mean, We may go up, you know, we made two or three x the price, but I don’t think the real I personally don’t think the real bull market starts until you have things like ETFs that are that are open, you know, like, you’ve got a multiple ETFs out there, you’ve got multiple institutions that are trading. They’re using Bitcoin openly. And I think that I think we’re still we’re still like two years away from even the beginning of that, from my opinion. So that’s why I think end of 2021 probably is more realistic for a lot of these companies to onboard into bitcoin right now, nobody knows about Bitcoin, you ask 10 people, if you go in the street or to university and you ask 10 people what is Bitcoin? What does it do? You’re going to get 10 probably nine out of 10 people are going to stare at you like you’re crazy.

Rob McNealy
You know, play that game, actually. And my results have been very different. Everybody I asked has heard the word Bitcoin They don’t get it. Like what it is they think that they understand internet money. And that’s about where the extent of it, but the name recognition I find is pretty, pretty prevalent among the people that I talked to. Now their opinion of it is they don’t understand it. Or there’s a negative connotation with the being scammy or rip off. That’s kind of what I’m seeing out there.

Truth Raider
I agree with you. I agree with you that they all have heard of it. But there’s a difference, I think between like I play poker with 12, my buddies, you know, I brought as an experiment, I asked him that question. Hey, guys, you guys know about Bitcoin? Like, yeah, we all heard about it, you know, we saw it on TV, you know, that’s a huge difference from I understand what it does, what the functionality of Bitcoin is, as well as how do you physically use it? Like, that is a huge educational gap for probably 95% of the people in the US. You know, I would say

Rob McNealy
Try explaining a decentralized organization to someone on the street that’s a little more complicated.

Truth Raider
Or even not even trying to explain the the core about Bitcoin, but just how do you physically use it? How do you physically transfer Bitcoin? Most people will look at you like you’re crazy. Just even if you just said what I just said, How do you transfer Bitcoin from one person to the next? Show me how to do it.

Rob McNealy
What I kind of tell people, you know, when it comes to crypto, I always kind of put myself in, you know, in the person’s mind, right? And with our project, I actually am out there talking and doing sales already with our project. And I’m in retail stores talking to retailers. In fact, we started talking to retailers before we coated anything because we built it for a purpose. And what I explain when it comes to crypto is like, it’s like it’s like cash app or Venmo. But it doesn’t use dollars as the underlying value. And they’re like, Oh, I get that. And then in them when I say, you know, there’s no Corporation. It’s the Z centralized project. What I have found is that if you say it’s kind of like a nonprofit that’s built to run this project, you know, project and people seem to could they can wrap their head around that. You know, now I don’t I know it’s not technically a nonprofit, because that’s a corporation too. But, but when if you say it like that, you know that there’s no Corporation, but it’s more like a nonprofit group that runs this. People can make they can make sense of that, I think. And that’s seems to work pretty well, when I talk to people.

Truth Raider
Well, if you try to break it down in its core, right, Bitcoin is software. Like if you just said, If you and how do you explain the fact that Bitcoin is software like that, literally, that’s what it is. I mean, it’s only money because we’ve monetized it. But essentially, is just a software that’s constantly running. And so nobody’s ever going to understand that, you know, like you because then you start getting deeper and deeper into how does it work, you know, and then you start talking about blocks. I mean, try explaining blocks to somebody on the street.

Rob McNealy
You know, I don’t know if I can explain to them myself half the time. But here’s the thing is that try to explain how settlement happens on swift with debit cards, nobody knows. They use the debit card, they know how it works, they know that it works, they trust that it works, they have faith that it will work. You know, I don’t think the average person you know, this is I think we’re you know, engineers kind of ruined everything you know, is that engineers the build it they will come mindset doesn’t work. And I’m not picking on engineer that worked around engineers my entire professional life. So I love engineers, but you don’t want the engineer in charge of marketing neither. But what you find is that people you know, engineer types really want to get their really excited and geek out about the technology or the features, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas people don’t care about features as much as they do about benefits. You know, if this solves a problem for me, show me how it solves my problem. And that’s all they care about, you know, when I started talking to retailers, and that’s my focus is talking to retailers and getting them on boarded into crypto, you know, they want to know, how do I deal with taxes? How does it integrate with my point of sale? And how easy is it to work? And is it safe? That’s what they want to know. They don’t care about servers and miners and block producers and whatever else, they don’t give a shit. And one day anymore? No, because it doesn’t matter to them. They want to know that they can cash out is there you know how valid they are. You know, a lot of the retailers I talked to they are concerned about volatility. Well, it goes up and down. Well, when you cash out quick, you just don’t sit on it if you don’t want. But I think that’s the thing. People get lost, they get lost in the technology and the average person, if you’re trying to say adoption won’t happen till the average person understands finance, economics, the Federal Reserve System, inflation and fiat money, and you have to educate the entire planet on those things. And that’s what adoption you’re never going to get Adoption will never happen. One, most people don’t give a shit. And people don’t give a shit until they have a problem, you know, a recognized problem. And I think that’s where that’s why I think like a lot of people, they’re struggling to get adoption because they still think like, oh, people need to come up in this level of knowledge. And I don’t think they do. I don’t think they need to come up with that for there to be adoption of crypto. I’m sorry.

Truth Raider
No, I agree completely. You’re 100% right. I mean, the problem that a lot of us get sucked into myself included is, you know, because the more I research it, Bitcoin, the more I study it the more I try to educate myself, you fall into a trap of over explaining the simplicity of it. It’s, it’s a natural thing, because you’re so interested in how it works. So you, you tend to oversee, you know, so here’s, I think, the way it works in a very simple manner is like to try to explain to somebody is I guess it’s like Western Union. PayPal without the third party involved. So you’re sending, you’re sending, you’re sending your currency to another person without the third party, but it’s very similar to PayPal, except for you don’t need a bank to settle the payment. It’s just a direct payment between you and another human being, you know, without that third party, and I think, because people know how PayPal works, you know, you got your email you sent to somebody else’s email. And somehow magically, the banking system settles, right. It’s the same as PayPal without the banking system, essentially.

Rob McNealy
And I think even going that deep is probably unnecessary. Interesting story. So my day job a long time ago, I used to be a contractor. And I don’t hide this, you know, I’m very public about my, my, you know, I have a real day job. I’m an entrepreneur and I have a day job and I have our crypto projects so i don’t i don’t hide it on my LinkedIn, whatever. I’m totally docs, but you know, I found when I was this is probably 15 years ago when I thought started getting into sales of I my business. I would try to educate my clients and everything they needed to know to make the best buying decision and my average sales time with these people are 45 minutes to an hour. And I call people back like a week later and they’re like all I want with somebody else but thank you I loved your presentation. What do you mean why didn’t you go with Well, they were cheaper than you. And what I found and and i over I was over explaining what I was doing. It was I was giving me I was doing my job and giving them everything they needed to know to make a really informed decision and be really smart about it because I wanted them to be smart. And what ended up happening is I wasn’t closing sales. So what I ended up doing I found out is I cut my sales pitch by pitch to half the time to a half hour and I doubled my sales in true story, true story and and it was hard for me to wrap my head around it because I was trying To educate people in a way that I wanted to be sold, right? Yeah, the problem is, most you know, and I find this, especially with guys like that are smart. And most the people that I know that are in crypto are smart. Okay. You know, they’re curious, they’re smart. They’re questioning, you know, I haven’t run into too many stupid people in crypto, at least that are working in crypto. And, and so, as smart people, we want to have respect for other people’s intelligence, I think where we’re like, Hey, I think you’re a good person. And I want to treat you with respect, and I want to value your intelligence. So You two must want to have this knowledge. But I don’t think the average person does. I think you lose them. I think it gets complicated. And I think if you know, you have to recognize that there are different people have different you know, they kind of perceive the world differently. They have the world and the average person has an average IQ. So right I mean, that’s not mean Yeah, it’s not mean. But that means but in the United States, right? The average IQ in the US is about 100. Okay, yeah, that means half the people you run into at Walmart or at the mall or at the bank, have below average IQ. That’s how averages work, you know? So you got to just You got it. I don’t mean to dumb it down, but you gotta, you gotta explain things in a way that makes sense to them. And you gotta always have it I always say, you know, you have to sell people in a way that they want to be sold. Don’t sell people on how you think you should be sold. And I found that that made a big difference in my success in business is that you just have to kind of evaluate who you’re dealing with and and make it make sense for them. And and that’s not insulting is just, you know, if you try anything with this way, right, you’re I can tell you’re a smart guy, and I read your Twitter so I know you’re a pretty smart guy. You know if you go in as a smart guy to Someone who maybe is just average. And you try to explain all this technical engineering kind of mumbo jumbo. How they might take that as you think you know it all right? I mean, that happens or if they’re a woman, maybe now you’re mansplaining. You know, there’s all these kind of an end as a smart guy, you’re like, No, I just I don’t think like that. I’m not mansplaining and I don’t think I’m the smartest guy in the room. I just know excited about this. And, and I think that’s where a lot of guys in crypto miss it, because they don’t have a hard time with that. And they do. I have a hard time with it too. But I think that, you know, as we’re trying to get adoption, we just need to be cognizant of the world is not who we are typically, you know, and we’re thought you know, with we’re pioneers right now, people like our thought leaders, they’re, they’re early adopters, early adopters are different than average people. Most people don’t early adopters are the early adopters won’t be a thing. Right?

Truth Raider
And I agree with everything you’re saying, Man, and like it’s hard for me. Like I said, I got it in 20 17 so it’s really hard for me to look at myself as an early adopter per se. I mean, because I’m, I came in years and years after all these guys. But then, like you said, like, I’m not an early adopter, but I got into it fairly early, you know, essentially, because when you talked to people about Bitcoin, they’re so lost, and just the basics of it. So yeah, I’m very new. I’ve only been at for three years, I’m fairly new. However, there’s a huge knowledge gap between somebody that’s never touched Bitcoin, and somebody that has been using it for a while. So when I was I was in Malta a couple of weeks ago, and I was doing I was on a panel for talking about Libra and lightning and da O’s and stuff. And I basically was defending lightning. And so I was looking back at some of the clips of when I was talking, and I was like, probably in that room in that conference room. There was probably like six dudes that understood what the hell I was talking about. The rest of them were all just like, yeah, lightning sounds like it’s a good thing. Because I was I was basically defending lightning because I’m a huge fan of lightning essentially. And, but at the end of the day, like you said, people just want to know that lightning either works, or it doesn’t work. That’s really the that’s the crux of it. And so, I think sometimes people like me and other people that really want to defend it. We get so caught up in the logistics of it all, you know, so.

Rob McNealy
Well, well, it’s interesting because, you know, I and I’m not here just push on what I’m doing. But you know, I’m not I’m working on a crypto project. That’s not Bitcoin. Yeah, and a lot of maximalists and I’m not a maxi though, just so for all transparency. Of the four main projects that I have personal investments in our Bitcoin, a theorem, Raven, and Tusk, which is my project, so I am an investor in all those projects. So understand I’m not here hating on anybody. But, you know, when we started our project two years ago, I mean, lightning was still you much earlier on. And you know, everybody’s like, because I get, I mean, as a project, I mean, you’re in the mining side, but you know, I’ve been in this project for a couple years, almost and you wouldn’t believe the hate that you get for being a project from the Maxis and the different communities it’s pretty awful at times. And one of the person said, Why don’t you just do what you’re doing on Bitcoin? And I said, well, bitcoins not designed for retail never was intended to block work.

Truth Raider
And I agree, I agree the current format your.

Rob McNealy
You know, Bitcoin Cash, and again, I am not political, I’m not in any of those communities at all. But Bitcoin cash is actually more would be better for a retail environment than Bitcoin to court, just what is just not there. And so, but I said this, and someone said, What about lightning? And I said, well, and this is about eight weeks ago on the lightning Twitter long timeline, and this is just like eight weeks ago from now, right? They posted on on the lightning network Twitter, do not or I’m sorry, timeline on Twitter, do not put any more money into the lightning network and still software could be buggy and don’t put any more money into the lightning network that you’re not willing to lose. And that was on their own Twitter account. It’s still there. And, and and I pointed out to this guy, I go, Okay, well, if I’m going in and talking to a retailer and I’m trying to solve a problem with crypto, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I certainly can’t go and tell them to do Lightning when that’s what’s on Lightning’s Twitter timeline just a few weeks ago, that tells me that it’s not ready for it’s not ready for prime time even yet.

Truth Raider
And that was my argument in Malta. And I’ve never I argue this that that what you just said it’s still in beta, you know, it’s like it’s like an ever I argue that it’s that it can it can be something amazing. I don’t argue that it that it is exactly success experiments experimental right now,

Rob McNealy
You know, once you know crypto is experimental, and this is what I tell people, you know, and and, and I’m kind of agnostic. I know I I it’s funny because with this with even with my, you know, podcast here I interview all sorts of projects in crypto. And then it’s not even though I’m I got my own project, you know, I’m here I want to talk to other people because I, I’m excited about the space and in my happy world, I don’t believe there will be nor should there be just one crypto for the planet. I think that’s actually dangerous inherently centralizing. And to me, it’s like, there will be multiple kryptos and in fact, I would rather there be 200 dozen my own, you know, ideal place. There’s 200 really, really well designed communities around 200 different block chains that all seamlessly coexist and atomic swap between one another. To me, I think that’s actually much safer than having like, you know, fewer and fewer crypto projects that are more and more centralized behind them. And to me, I think that long term that would actually be better for society, because of the beauty of what I see as crypto is that You know, we talked about the honesty and the transparency and the scarcity and, you know, and inflation rates that are known in the open source nature of crypto makes them superior to Fiat. Right. They’re not necessarily subject to governments, politicians whims. But what I see is that the other benefit of kryptos is that you can tailor them and program them for specific purposes, regions, industries, companies, and we don’t talk about that enough that there could be a know maybe there should be a crypto for the shipping industry. Maybe there should be a crypto and you’re starting to see more of that. But I don’t think we talked about that enough. And because there’s so I think, I mean, you’re out there probably more than I am, but it seems like a lot of these projects are really trying to like, oh, our project is the greatest and you know, we hate that community over there and they fight and it’s all stupid, and I’m like, Look, there’s no reason why Bitcoin can’t do one be one thing and This other crypto projects do this other one thing, and they could work together on that. And to me, the ultimate goal is to decentralize and free people from the state as much as possible. What do you think about you know, the idea of that, you know, there can be kryptos for specific purposes and industries.

Truth Raider
Oh, I mean, I’m very extremely libertarian. So I mean, I’m all about the, the decentralized approach, but I don’t disagree and and I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. I’m a Bitcoin realist. Like I in the fact that I’m a firm supporter of Bitcoin, I will be now and I’ll probably be 20 years from now just because it has its place. However, I agree with you as a realist. Let’s say lightning becomes amazing. It’s the greatest thing ever. Okay, well, that probably only let’s say, let’s say it does just as a use case, that only that would only solve a problem of speed, right? Because what lightning promises millions if not billions of transactions and capability, okay? Let’s say that happens. Well, I guarantee if lightning can do that there will be 100 other kryptos that figure out how to do the exact same thing and to move really quick and move really secure. So I agree with you, there will probably a blockchain project that that does really well in the medical arena. You know, that’s really good with medical blockchain and a shipping blockchain and aviation blockchain. And a I mean, you name it, there’s probably going to be another blockchain That’s better. Even if lightning succeeds or fails, there will be something better that does a specific task retail manufacturing. In real estate, I mean, there’s probably going to be like you said, hundreds of them that are really good at doing something that’s very specified. And meanwhile, bitcoins going to be sitting on the shelf just saying, Hey, keep it out. Guys. Keep going, you know as a store of value and pop Possibly a transactional crypto with lightning. But I think even if lightning succeeds, we’re going to have everything you just mentioned, hundreds of blockchains with a purpose, you know?

Rob McNealy
And we really we already have an analogue for that. Right? If you think about it, I mean, pretty much every government has in the, in the world, every country, every government has its own fee, there’s 150, or whatever, how many countries there are. And they technically seamlessly swap between, you know, between one and are we already have an analogue for that. Yeah. And if you think about it, that makes sense, right? People are no, well, you know, so you can say, look, well, you know, the United States has a coin, right? Switzerland has their coin, or currency, and then they trade and you can go with any airport and swap between one now and you explain, oh, well, can that make sense? So I mean, there’s lots of ways that you know, when you’re talking to the average person, you can explain these concepts went away that they might be familiar with, you know, and say, Look, there’s you know, hundreds of currencies around the world. You know, and they all talk to each other, and really kryptos like that, but just more in the digital format. And you take out the middleman and like, oh, and, you know, and, and I think that that makes a lot of sense. And I like that future better. I think that, I think a lot of maximalists and, you know, especially the old school guys, and you know, I used to be very active, actual big l libertarian politics. And one of the things that I find with being an ancap or being a libertarian is that whenever you get around activists of any hilke they tend to be the roughest around the edges, you know, what I’m saying is the earliest activists, the ones that really are the ones that spend years getting the ball rolling and making stuff happen and promoting it. Those guys do necessary work, right? That’s that’s how they start. But is like as these movements change and get more mature, different people come in, and in some ways usually take over the ones that have better social skills. They They have the ability to see things through. And I think maximalists and a lot of cases tend to be those guys, the earliest activists. So, you know, there’s a, there’s a saying that I’ve heard that I like that says, you know, pioneers, take the arrows and settlers take the land you know? Yeah. And I think that’s, I think that’s pretty true with you know, all these, you know, you know, the cannabis industry is like that, too. It’s like I was, you know, I’m pretty, you know, involved in politics in Colorado, especially during, you know, 10 years ago when they were, you know, getting it law medical and then legal for recreational use. And it’s interesting because the earliest people that were pushing it were literally the stereotypical hippies dude all the free the weed those kind of guys. And now you go to Colorado and in that industry, and it’s funny, because the regulations and a lot of ways pushed all those guys out to anyways, you know, one of the interesting things in Colorado with that is that you couldn’t get a license to work in any marijuana or cannabis related business. If you’ve ever been busted for Drugs.

Truth Raider
Seriously?

Rob McNealy
Yeah. And so think about that, right. Everybody who was in that industry was busted for drugs. That’s why they’re in the industry.

Truth Raider
Yeah, that they got into it because they wanted to try to find a way to get legal after all the drama.

Rob McNealy
And so so it’s interesting but if you go to Colorado now it’s it’s it’s there’s it’s still kind of an edgy industry but it’s very it’s very much corporate that it’s gotten a lot more mature and you know, you’re dealing you know, you still edgy like coat you know, crypto still edgy even the guys that are corporate II, you know, that came out of you know, traditional finance, there’s still the edge lords of traditional finance that are kind of showing up at the conferences, right. You know, they’re the ones that are like, I’ll still wear suit, but I can not wear a tie that’s edgy for them. But, but I think that’s the good I think that’s going to happen in crypto too. And I think eventually, five years 10 years from now the no one’s gonna know who most of the maximalists are, they won’t remember them because they’re going to be so I this is just because I see this with other political other people. Political and in paradigm movements is that those early activist and generally get washed out in the noise once things take off. And so I try not to take those guys too seriously. But I think they still performed a really important thing. And I totally have kudos and shout outs and respects to those guys because they did something important. But they also can be their own worst enemy as well. You know, I always say, say your retail, and I always kind of looking at it from the retailer standpoint, and I own a retail store before so I know a lot about retail. And, you know, say, I want to accept Bitcoin into my, my business. Where do you start? crypto Twitter right? Now, if you’re, you know, the business owner, you’re not maybe super technical, but you want to try something new. you’re frustrated with, you know, VESA screw, and you’re over whatever. And you go land on crypto Twitter, or Bitcoin talk or somewhere else and you run into maximalists. And you have a question about all this. Ch looks interesting. It’s faster than Bitcoin Core or what do you think about that? What do you think the responses to that poor retailer trying to learn? And put all those questions and and they’re going to run away.

Truth Raider
They’re gonna get nuked by 100 trolls getting all this stuff that they’re talking about it, you know,

Rob McNealy
Yeah and and so, to me that is actually an in my opinion one of the impediments right now of crypto is that I think in some ways it’s its own worst enemy and, and I and the bums me out because I mean I sought to up and people like oh you’re gonna do this project I’m like, oh, you’re a scam? What? I didn’t sell anything I didn’t nicey Oh, how am I a scam? You know? I don’t hide who I am. But it’s pretty funny. So, you know you I follow your Twitter and that’s how I actually found out about you originally. And you got a pretty big following on Twitter. What do you How did you get such a big following?

Truth Raider
Would you do so I started doing Lot of like I said, I used to be big into libertarian type conversation. Back in the day and my account I started my account 2015 I used to do more libertarian political type, like I’m pro I’m a pro gun guy. I got a shitload of guns I used to I used to be an ffl dealer back in the day. Nice. So like I’ve, I, I kind of was on that, you know, on the, to a spectrum libertarian guy. That whole, you know, area in it kind of has his place in Twitter, and then it kind of 10 you know, that I kind of just moved into crypto because it was a natural progression. You know, I think there’s a lot of people like me in that in that way. You know, libertarian guys that were looking for something that it was part of that you know, it was I don’t know, it’s it’s, it fits into the mold, really well. The whole decentralized decentralization and libertarian kind of, if you believe in both of those, it kind of go together a little bit. I would say,

Rob McNealy
I it’s funny, they bring up the gun thing. So that’s our, I don’t know if you know what we’re doing with TUSC, but we are focused on the gun industry with our project and then so it’s funny because I, you know, I go I spend more time in gun related conferences than crypto conferences. And I’m the only guy there talking about crypto, because there’s no one from the Bitcoin company or the Bitcoin project at gun things. It’s kind of funny, but you would be surprised, you know, because the gun industry has a really big problem with payments. really recognize problem and I always say this is that for adoption to happen, you need to focus on industries that have recognized problems. If you try to tell Grandma that she needs to go use Bitcoin to buy something at JoAnn Fabrics. And then by the way, it’s going to take maybe an hour or two for that to confirm. Oh, by the way, it’s really complicated. Oh, it’s expensive to that makes zero sense that for Grandma to do that you’re creating a lot more work and trouble and you’re going to stress to your poor grandmother out. But on the other hand, if you go talk to a gun retailer who the fact is they’re completely barred because of politics from using PayPal Venmo cash app, coin payments, token pay bit payments, or any of the other type of digital payment processing things and you talk about crypto, you would be surprised at how open they are to that concept of not getting their business shut down and being able to conduct business online. You know, and to me, there’s seven industries that have a recognized problem in the United States right now with traditional payments, and they’re all distasteful to somebody. And I have to point that out. So but and those are things like cannabis and guns and pornography and prostitution and gambling and pawn shops and refugees and immigrants. And those are the industries right now that have a problem. And to me, if you’re focused is on payments, which is what our focus is. You need to focus on those industries, because those are the places that actually have an issue that and they have a problem that needs to be solved that crypto does solve. And so far, we’ve had amazing response going and educating retailers. In fact, we got 15 retailers now that have already given us a verbal soon as our first payment gateways, that they’re going to accept us for payments. So we’re already real excited about this industry and 2020 is gonna be a really big year for us. So we’re pretty, pretty stoked. But you know, even if you’re in another project, you know, the main thing is, if it doesn’t matter, I mean, you need to focus if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, you need to sell somebody sell something to somebody, whether it’s script or anything else that has a problem and solve their problem. And I think a lot of these guys are like trying, especially engineers tend to fall into this building, they will come mindset, and that’s a myth building, they will not and you know, it’s great if you have an idea that You know, technologically might be amazing. But if you don’t have a plan, and way to put that solution to someone’s problem in front of the people who have that problem, I don’t think you’re going to get very far. And I think that’s what a lot of crypto people run into. But then again, most of the crypto people, I’ve Think about it, most of the crypto projects are led by developers. And there’s a huge least what I’ve seen with developers in general, is is a huge bias against sales and marketing people in general, they just don’t like sales, marketing. And I think that’s part of the culture. Developers are often introverted, and, you know, it’s not a bad thing. Our teams like the same way. I’m like, I’m the guy with the big mouth. So yeah, but it’s, but I think if people started opening their mind a little bit about what they’re trying to accomplish as far as getting adoption, if adoption is, you know, on the horizon, you know, you got to focus on solving people’s problems, and then you got to figure out a way how to get that problem, you know, solve for those people and put that in front of them. And that’s how you win and If you’re not doing that, then I don’t know how why it makes sense to me that there’s not a lot of adoption yet, is because people aren’t really doing that. You go look at the big projects out there and go look at their team pages, ones that actually have teams. And you will see, like, you might see a bunch of developers, but you really don’t see a whole lot in the way of the sales and marketing piece. Especially when you’re talking global projects where you might need, you know, you might need a sales leader for every country, you know, if you’re really trying to get adoption, I mean, that’s what it might take. But you don’t really see that being built out that way. So, where do you think the future is going to be if, say, I’m new, I’m coming into crypto, I want to get excited. I want to be a part of it. How would you recommend the average person who’s new to crypto to kind of get started and get their feet wet with this kind of industry?

Truth Raider
I would say if you don’t know anything about it, just go to go to Robinhood or coin base or an ATM. Just buy some Bitcoin and just try it out. Just test I mean, that’s, I think that’s step one is most people don’t know about that. Most people think it’s really complicated to to access Bitcoin. So I would say step one is if you know somebody that knows about it, just go get some. And that kind of thing that creates like a spark. So like my first the first Bitcoin I ever got was in Jacksonville, Florida at a Charlie shrem ATM and a gas station. I was like that was that that was my first gateway. And it was, it was because I just finished doing a shitload of research. I watch a lot of documentaries. I love documentaries. And I was just going through tons of them. And it just it kept popping up as a theme. So I was like, you know, I’ll go try this out. Let me just see what this this thing’s all about. You know, like I knew what it was. I knew it was used in the dark web with Silk Road. I know. I knew. I’d seen it on the dark web and the deep web. I’d seen you know people buying stuff and I never used it specifically. But I was super curious. And so finally I was like, You know what, let me just go to an ATM and buy it and I did. And and then it kind of you kind of go down a rabbit hole like you You started a project, you start you started the company started a project based on just that initial like, Hey, I think we have something here, you know, with with crypto. And I think that’s kind of what all of us we kind of went down that rabbit hole, you know, and and now we’re here and it’s an interesting ride because it it makes sense. At least to me, it really does. You know,

Rob McNealy
It made sense to me too. And that’s why I tell people I’m more I’m more bullish on crypto now than I was even two years ago when you know during the height of that craziness because but I agree with you and you know, I I’m real excited that you came on here I mean, this was a good conversation and and I’m happy to have you on anytime if you got something interest You want to share with my audience? Where can people find out more about you?

Truth Raider
I think the easiest way is just to go to either Truthraider.com I got a website just kind of shows the stuff I’m working on. Or just go to Twitter. At @TruthRaiderHQ is where I’m the most active. Thank you so much. I enjoyed this conversation immensely.

Rob McNealy
I appreciate it. Rob.

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Truth Raider Bitcoin Video

December 12, 2019 robmcnealy Crypto, Video Podcasts 0:00 Comments Off on Truth Raider Bitcoin Video

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Ashton Addison of EventChain Video

December 11, 2019 robmcnealy Crypto, Video Podcasts 0:00 Comments Off on Ashton Addison of EventChain Video

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Ashton Addison EventChain Transcript

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Ashton Addison, CEO of EventChain.io

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Hey, today we are talking to Ashton Addison of EventChain. How are you today?

Ashton Addison
I’m doing well Rob yourself.

Rob McNealy
Good. So where are we talking to you from today?

Ashton Addison
We are in beautiful Vancouver, Canada.

Rob McNealy
Beautiful, beautiful area up there. I live in the mountains too. So it’s like I totally I don’t think I can ever go back to flat ground after living out west. And and people in the Midwest. Guys, you got to come out. It’s just so amazing out here. And even in Western Canada, it’s just very different than you know, the mid sections in the mid you know, the eastern parts of the country. So as to tell me a little bit about Tell me about yourself. What are you up to? How’d you get here?

Ashton Addison
Yeah, well, in terms of event chain and also the crypto coin show which is the show that I’m running, both revolving deeply around cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. first got interested in the space through my father. Ironically enough, Most people’s fathers are not tech savvy, but might happen to be a tech founder as well. So we helped co found my media channel crypto coin show in 2014. When, you know before the Ethereum token craze and we wanted to help grow the industry, by making a magazine at first that switched more into a YouTube channel, and just highlighting news highlighting projects that are showcasing good use cases of blockchain technology and business. Ran that for a few years. My mainly focusing on interviews, you know, that sort of seems to be the sweet spot right now. So have about 500 videos on my channel. And then in 2017, we realized, hey, we should really make our own use case, because there’s a big problem in the ticketing industry, which is one of the industries that I’ve been working in, I’d run an event production company back in 2012. And I’ve been to show us and I’ve been ripped off by tickets. Not only just on this Secondary Market paying for tickets, but also buying tickets that were completely fake and getting ripped off and not being able to even go to the show. And we realized, hey, these tickets, if they’re on the blockchain could be, you know proven that their authenticity is real and that they’re scarce and that, you know, you’re not going to be ripped off when you go to a show. So we started event chain and in 2017 to create a self service event ticketing platform that puts the tickets on the blockchain cruiser authenticity. And that’s what we’ve been working on ever since. And it’s live in the market right now. People are able to create events that have enchained audio and our ticketing around the world. And it’s not only just paying with cryptocurrencies, we’re also paying with credit cards and PayPal, it’s we understand, be tough to find a room of even of crypto people that that all want to pay with cryptocurrency, nevermind a music festival. So we’ve designed it in a very user friendly way to try and bring awareness to crypto currencies and show people that you can use blockchain in a non financial industry to solve real problems.

Rob McNealy
Well, I think the important thing here is that you guys aren’t just accepting cryptocurrency you actually have a blockchain ticketing component built into your project.

Ashton Addison
You got it So, and we realized that with music festivals and sports arenas, you know, a music festival person, they’re an event person, they don’t necessarily need to know how the blockchain works and how transactions are verified and consensus mechanisms and technical stuff. They just want to know their tickets are real, their tickets are valid. They’re scarce, no one’s going to create counterfeit tickets, and there’s negative externalities of the event organizer are removed, and the blockchain is all on the back end, right. You don’t need to be a mechanic to be a good driver.

Rob McNealy
So is this like an ERC 20 project? Is this based on the theory and platform or did you develop your own platform or your own blockchain to support this?

Ashton Addison
Yeah, so We originally built on the Ethereum platform, just because it was very easy to do. And but as we continue to grow the platform, and we started ticketing larger music festivals, we realized that buying tickets to a festival or concert is sort of like an Ico. Everybody wants to buy tickets in the first second, and then it sells out. And then nobody buys tickets, they have this huge influx of transactions all in in a five minute span. And for a festival that has like 10,000 people, that is too many transactions to what is currently capable on the Ethereum network. So we didn’t build the full platform on top of the theorem protocol directly, although we did utilize that to store the tickets and transfer them to attendees. And because of that, once we realized that we were surpassing the scalability of aetherium, we actually pivoted through the gold chain blockchain, which actually is it’s a competitor to aetherium, but it’s actually so compatible that you can still Run a theory of node and just verify the transactions on the goshi network instead. And they could do you know, 13,000 transactions per second, with very, very similar infrastructure. So that’s what we’re currently doing.

Rob McNealy
So right now, with your system with Todd is a an event organizer, how do they verify when someone comes up to the front desk? Is it just is there a paper ticket involved at all with a hologram on it? Or is it just you show your iPhone or what have you with, you know, a QR code?

Ashton Addison
So, the ideology that we have for the system is that event organizers and artists know it’s their event so they can put as many restrictions or options as they want. Now, we don’t want to limit their capacity and what they want to do. So if they want to have paper tickets, and you know, there’s an older crowd or non technical crowd that just wants to print out their paper and come they have that ability. However, You can’t prove that that ticket hasn’t been printed out twice and resold. So in that case, you can use the system as a fully functional event ticketing system. But you’re not proving the authenticity of the tickets with paper tickets. If you do want to have those security measures, you can do digital only tickets on your phone. And we’re even coming up with extra security functions like smart qR dynamic QR codes that change and limits of when tickets become available. You know, for example, 24 hours before 48 hours before to limit scalpers. And then with those digital only tickets, because they’re scarce, because when you transfer them, it’s almost like digital money, right? It’s like like Bitcoin once you transfer it, you no longer have access to that ticket yourself. Whereas currently with PDF tickets, once you send it to somebody email, you still have a copy. How can you prove when you’re buying a ticket from somebody off of Craigslist or a secondary market that that person doesn’t still have the ticket after you buy it from them? Right. So

Rob McNealy
So that was I was talking about the chain of custody. So the question is, and I don’t know the economics of events and in especially sporting events and scalpers, but my understanding is some places that scalping is actually part of that business model ecosystem. So does this completely lock the scalper types out of the market? Or is that an optional kind of thing that the event organizer can allow? Like, for instance, Can people resell tickets once they have them early?

Ashton Addison
So again, goes back to the same ideology that the organizers if they want to have that they can allow that right. And currently, we’re just running a primary ticketing market. And if people have PDFs, they can do whatever they wish with them. But as we build out our unified secondary market, you have the ability for example, if you know Ed Sheeran wants to have no markup on his tickets, and they want to have face value only through the digital only tickets, you can put those pricing variables into the smart ticket. So as it goes to the secondary market, you cannot Mark it up. But if they want to have unlimited markup and scalpers or if the artist wants to have a kickback from that, and like say people can resell them for whatever they want, but at least the artists and the organizers are getting a portion of that, you can also program that into the tickets. So if they want to have scalping they can. And if they want to cut they can if they don’t want to have scalping the can, right. It’s all about providing the tools to allow them to do what they want with their own tickets.

Rob McNealy
So the secondary markets really interesting. So the question is, and just from a legal standpoint, does that start becoming a lot like a Securities Exchange at that point? I don’t know the legalities. There’s like Canada, but I’m wondering you know how that would work. I mean, the the SEC doesn’t look at BB Beanie Babies on eBay as a security. So the The question is, if these things aren’t sold as security, is there any kind of concern about that secondary market or auction or trading between ticket holders like that, legally speaking?

Ashton Addison
I don’t know for sure what I would say def, you know, I don’t believe so because how it works with StubHub right now is, you know, there’s they actually just they’re just selling to via gogo right now for $4 billion. And they trade millions of tickets every year. And they have, you can put whatever limits they want. And on Viagogo, you can do face value only if you want. And those are, you know, it’s just a paper ticket. It’s not a security, it doesn’t have any ownership of the event or that, you know, anything to do with that. It’s just an entitlement to go to that event. So I would say definitely, you know, we’d look into it, but I’m guessing not.

Rob McNealy
So how did you guys fund this?

Ashton Addison
Yeah, so we actually did a private equity round in Canada, we raised about $2 million Canadian and through through local investors that were very involved in the blockchain industry. And that allowed us to bootstrap the development of the application. And from there we started chargeable system sort of getting revenues and then just raising money. additional funds for growth, marketing and driving the sales team and trying to create a traditional business. You know, a lot of these blockchain companies, they are very blockchain focused. And we realized that with event organizers especially you need to be very business focused and cater towards their industry. And through for that, you know, have sales people that, you know, they don’t necessarily need to know about blockchain. It’s a selling feature. But there’s so many other functions needed to create a successful event that it’s a competitive advantage, but it’s definitely not the only thing that’s needed to create a successful event.

Rob McNealy
So are you looking to do an exit say in three to five years and for your investors? Hmm.

Ashton Addison
Definitely. In the works, you know, the ticketing industry right now is full of acquisitions. Event bright has made seven acquisitions in the last five years, including the Vancouver ticketing company. They haven’t done anything with blockchain yet. But Ticketmaster acquired a blockchain startup last year called upgraded and I feel like the other ticketing company They’re all they’re all sort of looking to acquire and grow their businesses through acquisitions. So that’s one route. And, of course, you know, the, when people invest in the company, we want to give them a return and give them an exit. So, definitely want to give back to our investors who, who believed in the project since the beginning.

Rob McNealy
So are there a specific niche you’re looking at? Are you going after sporting, you’re looking at music, you’re looking at conferences, where do you see yourselves fitting into the market?

Ashton Addison
Yeah, so right now we’ve been targeting the high growth industries. There’s, there’s multiple facets to that. First of all the industries which are prone to counterfeit ticketing, you know, music festivals, high price tickets, concerts in sports are often resold and and often people are counterfeit from that. So those industries we’ve been targeting as well as the sports industry and the tech industries where people want to use blockchain technology, they’re advocating for the use of it. If they can use it and showcase that it is an actual thing in a in a non financial industry, they’re willing to do that. So, yeah, we’ve been ticketing, music festivals eSports. But the system being a self serve system and allowing anybody to create events without even talking to us. We have every kind of event on there from, you know, art shows, fashion shows, business meetups, anything that can be posted on meetup. com can be posted on event chain. If you’re doing a free event, it’s completely free. Whereas on meetup, you actually have to pay as an organizer for for free events. And you don’t even get your attendees data. And on event chain, you can so we’ve opened it up to all those different types of events. And similar to event brights business model, there’s all of these different types of industries. But we’re focused our business development on the high growth industries, high price tickets, high capacity, prone to counterfeiting, and technical people. Wow.

Rob McNealy
So you kind of are competing with both meetup and event right then technically

Ashton Addison
Definitely, yeah, but meetups functionality sort of limited in terms of what you can gather, you know, and data is everything nowadays. And with event chain, we’ve built the system out. So you can ask custom questions and not just your traditional Now, what’s your company and title if you’re going to a conference, but you know, your dietary restrictions, your investing habits, whatever kind of questions you want to ask, you can ask that and then have we have the integrations to deliver those email addresses directly to your MailChimp, for example, or into your CRM, so you can target those attendees and help them come to your future events, or use them as a lead generation tool for whatever other business you’re running.

Rob McNealy
Wow. So do you have the ability to have multiple like one organization can do multiple recurring events in different locations under like one master account?

Ashton Addison
Totally. Yeah, you can create as many events as you want. You can also assign other people to be your checking people and they can have access to the attendee list and checking in but not have access to the sales reports and things like that. And we’re working on even more functionality to create, you know, promoter list and resellers that can help facilitate sales but have limited access to, to the back end of the master account for the events.

Rob McNealy
So when did you guys first launch into the market?

Ashton Addison
So we first launched the product, more of an MVP in about 12 months ago, so around Christmas time, and since then just piloting about 800 different events in about 28 countries. A lot of that was just, you know, organic growth of people that wanted to have been waiting for the system to launch and tech, you know, early tech adopters. You know, we’ve done everything from music festivals in Bermuda to events in Italy, in London to Hong Kong blockchain week and in Hong Kong, to events in Canada, you know, small, small networking events, so sort of a little bit of everything, and getting user feedback. And no, I was I was just reading A book they’re saying, with software as a service, you know, if you are if your system is like fully ready, and you and you’re completely competent with it when you launch, you’ve almost launched too late, right? You need to launch right away, get the feedback from your first customers. We’ve already had lots of repeat customers, you know, for example, anarcho Vegas conference, if you know Aaron, in Vegas, now they’re early advocates of the system. They thoroughly enjoyed using event chain for their 2019 conference that they put up the 2020 conference two days, two days after. So we’ve had great feedback so far. And we’re continuing to grow and target larger events.

Rob McNealy
So for instance, right now, you not only are based on blockchain for the security, anti fraud elements of this, but you also accept crypto currencies or some crypto currencies as payments. Say I wanted to set up an event through your system and accept crypto. Do you guys pay the people that are organizing and crypto Or do you just pay them a piece of the ticket? How does that the payment system work?

Ashton Addison
Yeah. So it goes back to our ideology that the organizers should be able to do what they wish in terms of accepting payments. So if they want to turn off credit cards, they do that if they use PayPal to do that. And if they want to accept just Bitcoin, they can do that if they want accept, you know, the top 50 coins, and they hope that it’s a cryptocurrency event, and people are going to have smaller coins or stable coins, they can accept that. Our system right now is set up on the flip side to just accept the top five currencies, Canadian American, Euro pound and Australian dollar. As we grow, we’re getting a lot of traction in Southeast Asia. So we’re looking at building in more payment processing and our own payment processing system so that people aren’t paying the merchants, you know, an extra 3% outside of the system, we can cut those costs for them, and possibly accepting more international currencies there. And then, generally, if you’re one of those five fiat currencies, We will Well, actually how it works right now is that because you are connecting to your PayPal or stripe directly, when somebody buys a ticket, you get the money right away. Right? So whereas with some systems, we have a payment gateway, if you do an event, you don’t get the money for the tickets until after the event or you know, each month and sometimes you need to pay artists or pay the venue and things like that before the event starts. So you know, where do you get that money from? So currently with invention, you get the money right away. And then we actually just bill for the ticketing fees afterwards in whichever those top five fiat currencies that they were using.

Rob McNealy
So someone bought a ticket with crypto though the event organizer right now would receive the crypto itself or would they.

Ashton Addison
They would receive the crypto directly into their wallet and the system because we’re not a money transmitter. We don’t have a system to like track. You know, settle that into cash for them. So if they pay with Bitcoin, they’re collecting Bitcoin, hopefully they hold on to it and the price goes up or maybe they want to manage their funds right away and and sell it. And in that case, you know, the fees are are just in American and it’s a very small percentage. So it’s just easier for us because we have to pay our expenses right away to keep it in fit.

Rob McNealy
So what, where do you see the biggest growth like geographically Canada, North America, Asia?

Ashton Addison
Yeah, um, well, with our system so far, you know, besides our marketing efforts have been targeting North America and Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia seems very progressive on the cryptocurrency, you know, legislation, adoption of it. There’s huge numbers of people there. So yeah, we’ve had events in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It seems to be growing very rapidly. And so that’s been pretty But also just throughout America and Canada as well, since we’re based in Canada, you can’t forget about the homeland here. And we want to make sure that everyone there is doing great events on event chain as well. So those have been the top two spots so far.

Rob McNealy
What are your goals are how many events do you want to do in 2020?

Ashton Addison
I would say we need to nail down a bunch more large size festivals that have you know, 10,000 plus attendees. If we can get a handful of those, and then some eSports arenas, we’re already ticketing some sports arenas that do smaller events. But the scale of the sports is growing so quickly right now that some of these events have 10s of thousands of people. And as well, we’re working on a streaming integration platform, so that if you have people that are watching the esports event from from their home, they can know the organizers have the ability to pay well that and sell a ticket to exclusive content, which can open it up to hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no capacity proceeding. So that’s another thing that we’re working on for 2020.

Rob McNealy
Wow, that’s really kind of cool. I’m, I’m really interested in what you’re doing. Do you guys have your own token?

Ashton Addison
We do have an EventChain token as well that we’ve created. Right now it can be used to pay for tickets. And we’re working on building an incentivization and rewards platform for that, where if you create events, you’re incentivized with the token. And if you share content, go to events, engage with the event organizers, after or during the event. You’ll be incentivized. So that’s something that’s supposed to be coming in in 2020 as well.

Rob McNealy
Is your token currently traded anywhere?

Ashton Addison
Yes, traded on a couple third party exchanges, some smaller exchanges like murca talks to live coin and decentralized exchanges as well.

Rob McNealy
So what’s the symbol

Ashton Addison
EVC. It’s on coin market cap and you can check it out there.

Rob McNealy
Very cool. Passion. Where can people find out more?

Ashton Addison
The easiest way is to go to event chain.io or go to go dot event chain.io, which is where all of our corporate information is. And we do have information on each category of events, everything from festivals, to nonprofits to, to eSports, or join our telegram t.me slash event chain. And our whole team is there to help support and answer any questions that you guys have. And, you know, feel free to create an event. Even if you’re just a local Bitcoin meetup organizer in your country, you can create events on event change.io for free for free events and you don’t even have to talk to us. But of course, come into the chat and we will be there for support. And you can accept cryptocurrencies, if you want to accept Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ripple any kind of crypto, we’re one of the only systems that accept crypto and fiat all together in one package, and we would love to support people’s events moving forward.

Rob McNealy
Ashton, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this conversation a lot.

Ashton Addison
Thank you so much Rob.

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NFTs, TUSC, Crypto, Small business, blockchain technology, and politics go hand in hand. The Rob McNealy Program covers them all and much more. Hosted by Rob McNealy, a crypto entrepreneur and personal liberty activist, interviews thought leading guests on topics ranging from Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain and startups, to politics, gun rights and personal liberty.