Jeff Kirdeikis on Uptrennd’s social media platform

0:00I'm Ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Jeff Curtis the founder of uptrend Jeff thanks so much for being on the show it is a pleasure to have you here today super happy to be here Aston thanks wrapping me on your very welcome I'm really excited to learn about uptrend today if you could give a little

0:21bit of background on first how you got involved into the blockchain industry and how you got involved into you know this social media network gotcha so how I first got involved in blockchain was getting absolutely hooked on cerium and its ideology behind it being able to really redistribute the power and empower the people rather than just these big centralized corporations

0:44that we can go directly from content creator to content consumer whether you're looking at Spotify or Netflix or the banking and financial industry I was just so enthralled by daps and how they can really change the face of our world obviously we haven't seen many killer DAPs yet but I'm really hopeful on it and that's just like that's my whole ethos and so that kind

1:04of ties into the social media space so once I kind of kind of got the etherium bug I started a Facebook group called aetherium investing it's just me and some friends who talked about aetherium about how much we loved it you know new people came in one too next thing we know there's 40,000 people in this group and were like wow let's open a group called cryptocurrency

1:23investing boom that one grows to 140,000 people and now the network is much much larger than just those two groups and it's all founded from just this like place of when you share valuable information and help each other out you can really create like a very cohesive and synergistic ecosystem and so then through this like experience of growing these Facebook groups and interacting on

1:47social media obviously you get to see all the pain points of social media just the way that Facebook does their algorithm they censor people they delete accounts my accounts actually personally been deactivated from Facebook so if anyone listening actually knows how to get my account back in through a back door holder at me but just so many pain points and so I was like you know what

2:07there's got to be a better way to do social media and steam it was a good first mover but they got overrun by and a couple other issues so I thought ah let's give this a shot let's see if we can build something that's gonna add value into people's lives empower them and that's that's where uptrend came from that's great Jeff and you're very right you know Facebook makes it very

2:26tough for even for you know regular businesses to get their their name out without having to pay tons of money and the same goes for YouTube and Twitter and a lot of the other popular social media platforms so you know how is uptrend making a more fair and clearer user experience in this crazy time I think you just nailed it is at any twist in turn that these platforms have

2:50they're trying to make more dollars more money so what if the business model of uptrend was similar it's like the business model of these staffs and etherium that I was talking about where you're essentially going as much from content creator to content consumer as you possibly can so we distribute 80% of all advertising revenue back to the users on the platform you know we don't

3:11have any hidden algorithms we don't have any shadow banning we don't censor content based on you know a personal bias so everything on uptrend is like for the people super transparent we didn't do an eye cos things been totally bootstrapped from day one so this is just like this is a platform for the people and I think that's what really sets us apart from anything else and you

3:33know members make suggestions on up to and like oh I'd love to see this change or that change boom next week its implemented so we listen we care and I think that's the biggest differentiator right there that's great and when you're starting a new social media platform it can be hard to to gain traction because of that network effect that these large

3:50companies already have right and all your friends are on Facebook how do you start a new one and try to convince everybody to go there and part of it is you need those influencers and content producers you know so how does uptrend exactly work for for content producers and why is it worth it for them to produce content and put it on an uptrend yeah no you nailed it to start building

4:12that network effective challenging so we decided to niche in at the very inception of the uptrend so right now we're still only focused on crypto content so it's not only a full social media platform because then things will get spread way too wide way too fast so if it's just crypto it's like this very nice cohesive conversation and people have mutual interest so the

4:32moment that you post like I kind of challenge anybody to like make an account on uptrend post below and just like see the engagement I think you're gonna be blown away if it's like for a new user on Twitter or steam it or mines it's like at least 10 X B amount so I think that's one thing that really sets us apart and then like another reason why content creators should get on it's

4:52like super simple like you know your data is secure you're gonna get paid the work that you put in the passion that you have the whole idea is that uptrend is built so that people can live and thrive financially through their passions whether that's blogging video editing doesn't really matter we're starting with cryptocurrency so if that's something you're passionate about

5:08post away and you know start earning and kind of like take back your self sovereignty and in this digital world and how easy is it for content producers to you know cash out or use that to actually you know pay their bills are they getting paid in and fiat is there uptrend tokens or other cryptocurrencies yeah for sure so if anyone's familiar with like you know that how to use a

5:32virion wallets and things like that is gonna be hyper easy and we do have our own ERC 20 token it's a 1-up token that's what you are natively on the platform you cash that out trade it for aetherium super simple process and then coming up in the following months no timelines it's out of our hands but we've partnered with an incredible project called Moby pay and so

5:50essentially we're gonna have the one app the one up token on this app and so you earn one up tokens it gets kind of like imported onto your app you go to over like five hundred thousand retailers I might be exaggerating that everything is like 250 thousand retailers across the United States you can tap that app at their their POS devices and boom it's

6:10just converted the one up into fiat and you've now paid merchants receives fiat they don't even know you use crypto so the idea is that no you can make a post you know maybe about your lunch and then by the time lunch is over you're able to pay for it with the 1up token mm-hmm that's great and that's something that you know I'm very familiar with steam it

6:28as a blockchain based social media platform I started using it in the first month of its inception around 2016 and it's a very convoluted sort of cash out system and you know it it's tough for people to ten cryptocurrency to start with but they have three different cryptocurrencies involved in the platform with power-ups and power downs and limits on it and it makes it a

6:51little bit tougher so I'm guessing that you guys aren't going for that same mentality no I think the you know I think you nailed it is a little simpler you can keep it the more chance you have of adoption so that's really our thing with just one token really easy the higher your level the more you earn that's it no hidden bells no steam power no steam dollar is no conversion just

7:12like cut and dry here's what you get and and how do you create a sense of fairness and some sort of sense of decentralization on you know a blockchain based platform whereas you know there's been allegations with steam it where with the the early contributors you know I contributed early but I didn't use it all the time but they have a lot of power you know solving the

7:34imbalance of power that they can vote their peers that they want up and those people earn a lot of money and you're sort of working together to collude with a system is this things that you've thought about 100% other well if this didn't exist on Steam it I think steam it would actually be a pretty viable platform but you're right because you can collude you now have vote power and

7:55these accounts you can actually buy your way into this vote power and essentially become a pay-to-play bot and use just all this bad content yet starting gets starting to be boosted to the top of the feed to go just pay into play for it so it really makes the feed like not that high quality and it's more longevity and payment so definitely we've thought

8:14about that and the way that we're counteracting that is because on Steam it the higher your level the more your vote is worth towards other people on uptrend your vote is always worth one doesn't matter if you're at level one level one hundred really doesn't matter but if your level 1 versus level twenty one let's say at level one you're gonna earn one point for up vote at level

8:31twenty one you're gonna earn three points per app votes and every time you level up your ability to earn is increase so we're seeing like every month at least sixty percent of people are locking points back into their accounts are actually burning them and spending them so people are really investing into the longevity of this platform and into themselves and

8:50levelling up their accounts so they can earn more in the future sorry that's great and how long has the platform been live on the market and what in which ways have you guys had successful marketing to actually grow the user base so far right well so we've been live since January 1st 2019 so just under 11 months now and I believe it was yesterday we just

9:12crossed the 50,000 user mark so where else like over the moon elated and excited about that especially as it ties in to marketing because we haven't spent a single dollar on marketing everything has been organic through the Facebook network through opportunities like this one right here which were super super grateful for like I said we don't have this big war chest so that we can do the

9:34the block one style thing where we're gonna throw a hundred million dollars at developers 30 million dollars at the domain voice calm we really believe in resourcefulness versus resources so the marketing has just been slow methodical and it's allowed us to grow and adapt with community requests so you know we will be ramping up marketing in the future our platform still looks very MVP

9:57it looks like 2008 right now so once we kind of give it a fresh coat of paint which is coming soon then we're gonna be really going hard on the marketing side feel that is maybe a higher bounce rate causation is that people bow ah it doesn't look the best it's not ten times better than Facebook no Elon Musk talks about this is like it's got to be 10

10:16times better so I really believe that so we haven't gone hard into the marketing spend yet just because we really want to get into that like that real sweet spot mm-hmm that's great and I understand why you guys would just want to launch you know in in software a lot of you know tech founders say that if you aren't sad if you are fully satisfied with the

10:36product when you first launch that means you've probably launched too late right so right right to launch and get iterations and feedback from your early adopters and for example the brave browser you know when I first used it back in 20 14 or 15 when it first came out it really did have a sort of a 2008 UI feel to it as well and and now it feels just as nice as all of the other

11:02mainstream browsers and they have 40 million users right it's one because popular blockchain based platforms and it's highly recommended browser and many people prefer it over all the top browsers so and that's because of the user feedback and the iterations so I think you guys are right on track for that and you know that and you guys aren't working on that as you

11:21said and I'd love to know a little bit more about you know what else is in the six-month roadmap for the first half of 2020 for uptrend for sure so of course you know that the big faiths lifts make the front end user interface a lot more clean and palatable and marketable as well we have the mobile app on iOS and Android we just got it into testing from

11:42the developers pretty much really recently so we're starting on testing you know anticipated one month two month we'll have mobile app on iOS and Android and then in terms of features on the platform I'd say a couple that I'm the most excited about are which one should I go first ownership of communities I think that that one I'm really excited about so if you look at a platform like

12:03Reddit or Facebook you know you have these little communities let's say it's politics for example and there's always a leader of that community an administrator well imagine if you could own that community and you're incentivized to grow it and to build it and expand it and to have a good quality content in there because every time an upvote happens in that community or

12:23alike you're actually getting paid a fraction of that upvote so you're it's essentially like you can you can buy this community you can build it you can grow it have a passive stream of income then feel like it's essentially like a digital piece of real it like rental real estate almost because at the end of the day like okay it's a I'm done with this I maybe want to flip it great you

12:42can sell it to somebody else so I'm really excited for that one and the second piece is investing in contents and I think this is going to really level the playing field in democratize the ability for new users people to thrive on the platform and so what this is is let's say I you come on to the uptrend you're a new user but I see this piece of content you might this is a

13:03great piece of content like more people should be seeing this so I'm gonna boost your content I'm gonna submit a proposal to you I'm gonna say hey I want to boost this for ten thousand views and now I can say how much of the of the boost like upvote winnings I get to earn whether it's your percent 100 percent or anywhere in between you thumbs-up thumbs-down

13:22or counter propose so those are the two I won't go like we have a thousand and one things but those are the two I'm really excited about investing in contents that like new users can really thrive they can reach this ecosystem where everyone's like helping each other out with synergy one of my favorite word's and yeah owning your own community that's great and in the part about

13:41owning your own community you mentioned you know streams of income for for moderators or people that have their own communities what about Uptrend itself as a company you know how are you guys gonna sustain a business you know is there a revenue model built in or you know how you guys gonna work that out for sure yeah and so just touching on the community business model so

14:02obviously if we're gonna sell a community from the inception let's say we sell the cryptocurrency community we're gonna do that auction style so you know let's say it goes for $50,000 or so we're gonna take that money and then redistribute let's say whatever a percentage of that to the community keeps them as our own revenue and then on the resale of every community we'll

14:18take a fractional percentage of that as well so that's that's on the community side then obviously we have the banner ads we've been doing lots of partnerships with different projects that we have one with Telos and peg net right now phenomenal projects and so you know we obviously it's just we're very much like the most ethical version of like a PR release firm like a coin

14:39Telegraph that you can have so like we really dive deep we do the interviews it's a lot more than just like here's your one blanket statement so that's another big revenue model for us it's just putting projects into the limelight in front of a niche community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts that's great and moving forward are you guys expanding your development team are you

14:59just looking for more users obviously are you also looking for strategic partnerships or anything else yeah for sure so obviously yeah more and more users the better developers yes we're onboarding a couple teams right now I won't go too deep into vets nothing's been signed yet so I can't say anything but yeah strategic partnerships we've been partnering with a lot of different

15:20projects who you know just want to kind of establish their presence on uptrend especially in the crypto space there's been quite a few who've come on ago like okay yeah like we're gonna kind of like Route in here reddit has been censoring everything that's happening and this is just a lot more ease it's easier for our community interact here and then yeah right now we

15:38have just started opening up to funding as well we're ready to take this into the next level like I said we haven't raised a dollar yet but now we feel is the time okay let's let's open the gates let's get things moving especially with voice coming in so we really feel like you know now's a good time to kind of put the foot on the gas that we've received the community

15:55feedback we've implemented things we've established a very effective and efficient business model and team chemistry and so now we're like yeah it's time to go now awesome and if people are interested in reaching out you know for business partnership wise how can they reach out to you and obviously they can go to uptrend comm if they're looking to be a you got it right

16:17yeah probably the easiest way to get at me is on Twitter please don't get at me on LinkedIn you'll just get buried in the thousands of LinkedIn requests in there or on uptrend those are the two best ways awesome well I'll leave those links in the description box below for the users Jeff thank you so much for your time that's all the time that we have for the interview this time but it

16:36sounds like uptrend is well on its way and moving up in the world so I appreciate you taking the time and let's follow up in the near future I love it thanks so much for the opportunity Ashton really appreciate it you're welcome