Jason Sibley on Howdoo’s social media network for creators

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews with Jason Sibley the CMO of how do Dario Jason thank you so much for being on the show it's a pleasure to have you on today oh thank you so much for inviting me it's amazing to come and talk to you today you're very welcome I'm excited to learn

0:21a little bit about how do but if you could start off by giving a little bit of your background into the social media industry and blockchain and how you got involved yeah absolutely of course so I'm a 20 year veteran of marketing which means that I've kind of been around with the evolution of lots of different technologies the great thing for me is that I've been able to work with very

0:41big global brands on Google global campaigns in that time so brands like Samsung HP IBM and more lately you know exciting brands like Google and Salesforce so during that time we have like the birth of really kind of like print marketing we've gone through the birth of digital we've seen the birth of suit search we've seen the birth of social you know remembering now that

1:03foot you know Facebook's 14 years old and Twitter's 13 right so you know those guys are kind of the institution now and one thing that's always happened is that over time the marketing channels have matured and they're become less effective from a marketing point of view so you know from my point of view what I mean by that is they've become more expensive I mean take Facebook today

1:22Facebook's purely a pay-to-play you know market so if you want this video to be seen having an organic audience in Facebook gets you nothing anymore you've got to really go in there and be boosting all of your posts so you know I've kind of been through the evolution of spending marketing money and measuring returns now in parallel to that I also got into blockchain in early

1:412017 later the night should have done of course because I was there kind of watching Bitcoin come up from about $300 and part of that was looking for real world adoption areas right so the big ones like banking and supply chain and of course being a social media marketer I looked out for social media projects and frankly I found how do I reached out

2:01I was an advisor post I CEO just giving them my advice on what can you do to fix the problems as a marketeer that we find with current platforms and to be frank blockchain just perfect for social media you know it can address the modern issues of data protection privacy and ownership and provide this transaction layer you know within a social network

2:21so yeah so you know big history marketing huge social media fan I talk a lot on the topic you know in kind of where social net blockchain seemed to be almost you know familiar you know a perfect solution so yeah I was really excited to join the team at how do formerly last year that's great Jason and sounds like some great experience and insight into the now world of social

2:44media that is so cluttered and noisy especially with Facebook and Twitter and as you mentioned it's pretty much pay to play but now in comes how do can you explain a little bit on how you're making a more clear and transparent social media experience using blotching yes so putting questions so you know blockchains enables doing a lot of things right but at the heart of it

3:04let's talk about what what what we're trying to do to be different so we're not a me-too we're not telling anybody to delete facebook delete twitter we're not saying we're a better version of those we're also not a one-trick pony so we're not coming out with a new AR filter to capture people's imagination because what we've seen is that you know those those projects kind of come and go

3:25right so you know take the current trend on tick-tock well I remember tick-tock was being musically and it was all about singing songs and then that kind of faded so they took the same platform you know to do something else with it so you know our our point of value really is that we're more like a content delivery system that's hosted in the blockchain

3:42with a social application layer so we talked about it as being a social network of course because we want to be a secure place that people can come have conversations without people listening share likes and friends without somebody harvesting your data to prove sell to advertisers without your permission but at the heart of us we want to be able to

4:02use the blockchain to allow people to own their own content online and to directly monetize it to end-users without having these expensive and slow intermediates in the moment in the moment in the middle sorry definitely that's great and I'm sort of curious about the influencers businesses and content producers how does the experience differentiate you mentioned

4:24you know it's pay to play on Facebook and Twitter for the most part but how exactly are content producers that are looking to drive value experiencing something different with how do they claim the big thing is the still being driven by the way people want to consume content right so we're not we're not changing a market where we're riding on the wave of consumer

4:44behavior change so nobody really wants to sit and watch a TV program at 7 o'clock on a Saturday night anymore yeah when I was growing up that was the programming the big shows were all on Saturday night TV now people want to binge watch on Netflix people want to consume content you know and video on YouTube so you know what's happening is consumer content is changing and what

5:06that means is that we're seeing this big new wave of content creators really you know were born in the YouTube generation you know my mum told me growing up you'll never make a living out of being great at FIFA and how wrong she was and I wished I'd stuck to that rather than my marketing degree right so you know for me it's about enabling people to monetize themselves directly because at

5:27the moment there is no platform that allows you to do that yes some people will allow you to do picture and picture video streaming if you're a gamer but they might may take up to 50% of your money and pay you on 60 days because of the technology that that's kind of built on so we want we've built a system that's fair and puts the balance over to the content creator so

5:49they decide what they want to share how they want to share it and they also decide how they want to monetize it you know so a great example my favorite one is actually tipping so the blockchain allows transaction free tipping and there's a seasoned marketer I know that reciprocity is one of the strongest human triggers right really is so I'm a firm believer in giving value away and

6:10then people feel compelled to give you something back so the great thing about tipping is it's instant and the Creator gets 100% so whatever you doing if you're doing game tips if your encrypt own you're doing charting tips if you're doing makeup tips whatever it is that you want to provide you can provide value to an audience in the social network and they can just tip you and

6:28all of that all of that money delivered to our token the you do is available immediately in your wallet with no transaction fees now of course there's other things as well so you can set up subscription channels you can set up one-off pages paid a piece of content and of course we also have the obligatory advertising share – but the bit where it's different

6:47for advertising for producers is you decide if you allow advertising or not so if you allow advertising on your channel you'll get a minimum of 60% of the ad revenue as you get bigger you can get to 80% so you always keep the line share but you decide if you'll allow it or not it's not forced on your channel and that's also same for users so if users want to allow advertising they get

7:09a share of the ad revenue through a passive income if they want to be completely incognito and not share any data advertisers yes they don't passively earn but you're kind of in control so we feel this combination of allow you to reach out to your audience nurturing develop them allow you to monetize yourself directly and but also give you control over what advertisers

7:30see and also give your audience control gives people this combination of control and fairness and to be frank it's only really the blockchain that allows it to do that and my ambition is that you know next year nobody really cares about the fact that we're on the blockchain you know you know security and ownership and monetization is just a feature of the

7:49platform nobody worries what technology Facebook sat on right so you know in order for us to break through this we have to provide real value to creators and users and I think that's ultimately going to be our differentiator in this face well that's a lot of great background Jason I appreciate that and I want to dive a little bit deeper into the monetization there's two great

8:10things that you said there which intrigued me the first one is getting paid for your content and of when I think of other blockchain platforms I'm reminded of steam it which I signed up as an early contributor started producing and was receiving some tokens for the post that I made however the system was very convoluted and as well as a viewer getting rewarded for seeing

8:33advertising really reminds me of the brave platform which I don't think his other fully flushed out either right now so and there's a lot of convoluted experience involved with that where to actually monetize it in cash oh the tokens either into Bitcoin or cash and things like that how straightforward is it for content producers and viewers to be able to actually cash out either in

8:55called hard cash for a Bitcoin and to get out of the ecosystem I feel like we had a similar journey so my journey before finding how do initially we block gems on Steam it because I you know I write and I speak so it's almost steam it and D tube were kind of my first experience but the whole process of you know set up a bridge so whatever that is why I'm not gonna mention when here that

9:17set up a bridge to put my feet in to get my Bitcoin then find that work out what exchange the tokens on and send it over you know what happens there is that brilliant platform so actually I use on a daily basis that they're stuck within this crypto bubble and what I mean by bubble is just in a sense of that it's hard for users that aren't in crypto to

9:35get into that because both on the user and the creator side because how do I tip or how do I pay and how do I read or the money now what I just want to start by saying is that that's the perfect case right you don't have to go to steam it now and look at the top tipped blog so even though there's all these barriers you can earn easily for five hundred dollars on a really insightful

9:56piece well-written on steam it today you really can and that's not just on crypto topic you can you can earn on any kind of topic and that shows that people are willing to take even quite small audience so the thing that we've been working the hardest on this year has been making the adoption almost in a creek crypto invisible right so the you do is a token it's a medium of exchange

10:20I tip you you cash out so the biggest piece of work has been putting together our fiat gateway in the app so we're currently in beta we haven't turned the Fiat gateway on but that'll be fully live by the end of the year in ready for a big launch event in January now what this means is that users will just be able to interact like you will be able to with things like three books in there

10:41fortnight for example you don't need to worry that there's cryptography in the background you'll just be able to deposit some dollars are using your card and then creators will be able to spend directly from the app now the big piece of news were announcing this week is that creators will be able to apply or if that's anybody with you dues will be able to apply and receive a how do these

11:01a card so you can put out a video in the morning go get your coffee and by the time you go to get your coffee you might have received in of tips to pay for your Starbucks on your Visa card now of course if you're running subscription channels and you're ready then that could become a sizable amount that you're moving around but that card won't be a charge card it'll

11:20be a full-on Visa debit card that you can go to a cash point on withdraw cash and we've spent the most time on this purely because it's the only way to break out of that crypto market if we're not seamless the minute we stop talking about blockchain we can start talking about mass adoption but why we say our differentiator is blockchain really it is no differentiator we've got to bring

11:40the technology that Bach chain offers completely to the masses and that's why we're not really going to end users saying come onboard because they're their first experience has got to be how do i buy and cash out of tokens especially when they're getting passive advertising because they should be saying oh I don't $5 today what do I do with it do I keep it in my token or do I

12:01cash it out two dollars or euros or pounds or whatever it is you know to go and spend it spend where I like so yeah that's our most exciting things that's perfect timing because we're just about to announce the process to apply for your very own how do Visa card and how do Visa Black Card if you're one of our kind of VIP creators so yes it's an exciting time

12:21and for me that's going to be a tipping point is when we move away from even talking about blockchain technology that's great insight Jason and now you mentioned you're in the beta right now you're still working on the development to do the full launch in January I'm excited to see that come out when that does happen I want to get into a little bit of business behind how do right now

12:41if we can how does how do monetize and grow the ecosystem and create a sustainable business out of the network yeah that's important for us right so of course our token holders are important about you know our interesting utility you know we're interesting actually growing a business so we've built out I mean we've been very fortunate through our fundraising through our token sales

13:03so we're you know we we have great budgets for things like exchange listings and to bring on creators to bring on audiences so part of that as well as to give us a good soft landing in terms of our time to revenue so we're planning our time to revenue really start to kick in within the middle of next year now what we're working on is a scalable AARP you model and to make our

13:25numbers work we're actually only starting from a 25 cents per user as an AARP year which is way below any buddy's achieving at the moment and we can run the business based on that purely because of the fact that we don't have to maintain these big servers to run run the site right this is what the blockchain is for so you know we've got our series of super nodes and us our

13:45seed nodes that are carrying the weight of the service so and how we bring that money in is through multiple ways the most obvious way that everybody goes with at the beginning is obviously share of advertising and we're very lucky to already have some advertising partners on board because we build it we've kind of been consulting with them on what they need and the biggest thing they

14:04want is a predictable cost per acquisition nobody else does it's in social media so we will offer people a fixed cost for acquisition to whatever the content is so if you're getting webinar signups and you want to only pay $5 per webinar signup based on your profile then that's how you'll be able to configure your campaign and this is we think this is a real unique edge but

14:24the other areas of income are going to be not tipping because we said tipping goes all the way to the Creator 5% of any subscription-based revenue or paywalls we take as a transaction fee and the the the kind of VIP channel subscription that's a really growing area so a lot of the creator's want to give away content but then invite people to VIP channels for extra special

14:48content now when you realize that the transaction fees are so low you can charge less so everybody wins in this scenario you know the creator gets more revenue the user gets better value at a lower cost and we also will have a very small hedge on the token purchases in the app so yes of course we're going to have our token that you do on exchanges and it will be you know more effective

15:09to buy the token on the exchanges but we will have a very small hedge when we think of that like you know if you're going to travel in with 4x right so yes you can go and buy on a 4x exchange and we'll probably get the best right on that day or for convenience you can rock up at the airport and there will be a we buy dollars we sell dollars at so it

15:26won't be extreme you know it'll be a small percent we're just working on that now but you know we're very fortunate that with the technologies there in the blockchain that enables us to run a quite a relatively lean ship for in technical infrastructure our point of view so like I said that time to revenue really is starting middle of next year when we get up to ten million users will

15:46have around a million dollars a month in revenue which is an amazing platform to base from and you know our predictive targets is within the first 18 months our target is to get to 40 million users now my aim is to go beyond that and if you look at current crypto projects the amount of users they have you know we will be by far one of the largest projects

16:07definitely the largest in the kind of the space that the space that we have and that will be achieved through a combination of the Fiat gateway but also having great content providers bringing their audiences onboard which is kind of part of our launch plan Wow well that's very exciting Jason I'm very excited to see the launch to January and then the

16:25lead-up to the monetization and revenue streams are you guys right now looking for beta testers or more people for your team or maybe strategic partners and how can they find out more information 100% yes so let me reel off what we need okay because we're fast growing so the first one is we're hiring so if you have a skill particularly kind of creative or

16:46dev or something like that we're you know we're constantly hiring so please reach out right we also you know recently confirmed some new partners so while ways a big partner of ours so you know while we are sixty-five million daily users from the biggest handsets in the world so you know and they they launched alongside IBM and HP and the do we serve people like that so you know if

17:06you want to work out how you can create some tie-in and the value for audience again please reach out for us we're also looking for creators to work with so if you have an audience and you're frustrated with being d monetized on YouTube or you've been D platforms on patreon please give us a shout because we want to support you in how do ecosystem so anybody the community also

17:26work where reach out also anybody wants to buy token you know and get involved because it's still very early days and we're excitingly planning on opening a Series A in 2022 so anybody that's interested in being part of the next social revolution and come reach us – so all of our details are on our website which is how do the IO anybody that wants to get involved in the community

17:46just go to telegram it's the best place in search and we can cite you can be in part of our community channel but also be one of our beta testers and be shaping the platform so you know we have we have around 80,000 pre signups waiting for us to let them in but we are over a thousand beta testers and these guys are amazing every day they're so passionate you know

18:06they're coming in with feedback and no so so a good example of that and we've just launched a new feature called YouTube sync and that came from the beach testing group because they said well I've got a YouTube channel but I'd like to be able to just synchronize the video on both whichever way right so we've just added a YouTube and video bi-directional sync – how do channel so

18:24you know it's if you've got something to add please please come in join the community and I am just a JD s at how do that I oh if you want to email me if any of anything – but I spend a lot of my life as I guess most people in crypto projects in telegram so you know the best way to get a hold of me is coming to them I'm incredibly active with the community talking answering questions

18:45getting feedback so it's a great place to start awesome thank you so much Jason I'll leave those links in the description box below that's all the time that we have for today but let's follow up in the near future oh I'd love to come back thank you so much