(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the use case, a mini series by Senior Studio hosted by me, Ben Jacobs of Senior Capital. With this mini series, we aim to shine a life on commercial businesses, generating revenue and solving a real world problem. The catch, these businesses are uniquely built using blockchain rails and crypto technology. The world wants to see more use cases beyond speculation. So we're here to showcase examples of the founders and companies disrupting industries with crypto as their weapon of choice. In this episode, I sit down with Ray Lee and Ian Ettinger, co-founders of Daisy. With deep experience in digital marketing and paid media, they built a product that helps marketers drive results in an online environment that's increasingly opaque and competitive. By discretely using crypto tooling such as ZKTLS, stablecoins and token incentives, Daisy is carving the paths for the future of an online advertising. I hope you enjoy learning about the future of marketing with Daisy. Let's get into it. Ben Jacobs is a partner at Senior Capital Management. All views expressed by Ben and a guest in this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Senior Capital Management. Yes, in the host may maintain positions in the assets and funds discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone in this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. (upbeat music) - Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the use case by Senior Studio. I am your faithful, bull market, bear market host, Ben Jacobs, a Senior Capital. As you know, with Senior Studio, we love to interview crypto's best and brightest investors, but we're actually using this mini series to shine a light on some of the best founders in this space. Some of the underrepresented stories and companies who are building real commercial businesses with material traction and revenue that are solving a real world use case uniquely made possible by integrating some of the business with blockchain and/or crypto rails. So we're gonna be covering a number of different ways in which crypto technology can be applied to traditional business models and how it can disrupt existing industries. And so today's episode, I thought covered a sector that's not widely discussed in crypto, and they've incorporated a number of crypto technology that I think is fascinating and emblematic of some of the superpowers that this tech has. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce the audience to Ray Lee and Ian Headinger of Daisy Pay. How's it going guys? - Well, thanks for having us. - Yeah, we're excited. First question, I have to jump straight into it. Why name your company Daisy Pay? Like I love the flower, it's beautiful. What's the story there? - Yeah, so Ian and I come from this world of like, head tech, audience, analytics, platforms and influencer marketing platforms. So the culmination of our decades of experience, we really want to lean in and solve one of the most fundamental problems on the career side. Because with Daisy, there's actually two sides of the marketplace, but on the career side, I think any payments is one of the most biggest issues in the number one problem that creators have when they either deliver on a post or promo post or when they create content, or in our case, when they actually engage with the content, payments tend to be like 90 days, test be highly inefficient. And also on the brand side, just in fact, that they get, you know, poked every time a crater wants to get paid, it's very inefficient operationally. So for us, we do want to create not only a system for us to make payments easier, cheaper, faster, but we also want a mechanism for them to earn on a micro transaction basis, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well. So we originally thought about the name Daisy Pay because we do feel like it in the day. We will create a mechanism where our careers are going to get paid faster, cheaper, dear, whether they're overseas, whether they're doing a brand deal and they're based in Columbia. There's ways that we're going to leverage blockchain rail to be able to make that happen. So that was the origination of the name, but from then, from there, we actually became a bit more expansive in terms of what we're offering. So as far as origination, it was more about how do we make payments faster and cheaper for craters? - Got it. So what's your guys' backgrounds led to this insight to build at the intersection of the creator economy, influencer marketing, and crypto? So maybe Ian, we'll start with your background that can go to right. - Sure, happy to. So as we were talking about like our background is this, non-traditional Web 3 space. So for me personally, it cut my teeth at NBC doing ad sales research there, working on like multi-million dollar deal, then then packaging up all of the performance information, the audience data, using like every custom research vendor out there, and then providing that information back to other ad agencies to the brand themselves to demonstrate the effectiveness of their spend. And from there I then went into a dove deeper into a social video, went to like a social video analytics company called tubular labs, essentially a big data play where we ingested all of the social data for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, and then organized it, categorized it, taxonomized it, as well as diving into how each of those videos, like the viewers behind them. So we took all that information, we paired it with panel data, we put together like the most viewed, widely viewed rating system for social video. And as that was, you know, it's still out there today, but as we were going through an acquisition, I went into the area that I was most fascinated by, which was the creator space. So when I was at tubular, I saw that 95% of all content consumption was coming from creator-made content, and I said I just have to get closer to that. So from there I went into an influencer marketing holding company, it's called Baylor. They're, you know, awesome doing some of the biggest deals in the space, they represent talent directly, and they also build product. So I worked on a lot of building out their product, fitting on their product development team, building the solutions for talent manager, or agencies, or creators. And so that's kind of like the intersection of advertising, B2B analytics, and then the influencer marketing space, which we bring all of that stuff in today's email. - Yeah, so I've been passionate about bringing fans, audiences closer to IP holders or creators. So I entered the start of Metrobatic Company world, back in 2012. And that was when my first company was called Upfront. I was one of the founders. I was CEO, more many hats there. And the problem we were solving is like how to become, how to disintermediate the way that creators are monetizing, in this case, like musicians, like that mouse, and a few other big artists that we worked with. Some of their IP that they had, that they were giving away for free on social platforms, and what if there's a way they could make those, some of that content, some of the assets exclusive to, they're super fans, and also monetize. So in some respects, it was a precursor to what we see now in the adult entertainment world with the only fans, but we wanted to really solve that problem from a audience and artist perspective. And so that was my first for ray into venture back startups. We did build that company to a place where we ended up exiting. We spent a lot of time in L.A., and also a lot of time with creators, while IP holders. And so from there, it was more about how do we, how do I want you closer to the creator economy? This is back in 2020. And so I was the chief product officer for Parapop. Parapop in 2020, I think it was the first of this kind when we really started thinking about how to leverage a network of creators from a content creation perspective. 'Cause I think a lot of brands be that Amazon, be that universal, be that D to C brands. They were just figuring out how to get an edge. And how they actually get an edge in terms of their social strategy and awareness/conversions. And back then in 2021, it was all about how to get much of creators to create content, how to get them to post content. And actually that did work because it was at a time where the algorithm favored content creation and promo posting. And I think it's some respect that was the first kind of explosion, if you will, of like influencer marketing agencies and influencer marketing platforms. So a lot of learning there from a CPU perspective. But and then I spent three years building that. We scaled it to a significant level in terms of revenue and in terms of clients. But I started thinking about what the gaps were, not just from a brand perspective, but from a career perspective, which led me to start daisy within. Amazing. Well, I think that's a good point to really dive into what daisy is because I had heard about you guys in passing, but it wasn't until I had an initial conversation with Bray that the light bulb turned on for me where I noticed the gap in the market that you guys were filling and how much better your solution was over existing more traditional players out there. And I think that's where we can dovetail to some of the crypto tooling behind the scene. So yeah, walk us through like the app, how it works, the marketplace, et cetera. And then we can go from there. Yeah. So one of the-- go back to your first question we're kicking this off about the name daisy, daisy pay. Daisy from my perspective was kind of playing a playoff at words of daisy chain. And in our case, it's about sequencing effect. Sequence seeing smaller actions into a more powerful, larger action or result in our case. And so the best way to describe daisy is that we are a social syndication platform that programmatically rewards creators for their engagement. And on social, organic, or on paid content. What we mean by engagement in action is we mean comments, likes, shares, follows. Those are the things that really drive the algorithm. I believe there is a post-recently antique talk about what the algorithm is, what the composition or what the science is behind the TikTok algorithm. And every single one of those factors is a point-based system was based on engagement. And so that was after we launched. And so we had this strong belief that if you could get creators to engage at scale, like a network or a syndicate of creators to take an action, comment, share within a certain period of time, you will drive the algorithm. You'll make an organic piece of content that normally gets 500 views to go to 50,000 views. And normally gets maybe 100 likes to 1,000 likes and get maybe zero comments to 100 comments. And so for us, we facilitate that engagement all through the app. And the way that it works from a craer perspective is you just need to connect. You're an OAuth, your TikTok, your Instagram, your Snapchat. And Ben says, last time we spoke, we just also watched Twitter X, which we've seen some very interesting results from an engagement kind of acceleration perspective. And then from a brand perspective, we just need a piece of content that you are a plan or have gone live with. Or it could be a piece of content that's been stale for like three months or three weeks. Or it could have been a piece of content that went viral six months ago that you want to reinvigorate it. That could all be done through daisy by way of using the amplification of our creators. One thing that we want to point to give us the edge is that we have 1,400 creators that are fully authenticated. So we're not creating a database. The creator is that we have to source every time it brand makes the request. They're all authenticated in the platform. So when a brand does make a request, they say if you want 50 creators to comment, or you want 100 creators to actually share the story, that can all be done within 24 hours, because we have the entire system and all the plumbing in place to make those payments into sourceless creators. So we like to say that we dispatch creators at scale on a micro transaction basis. We're wording them not four figures. We were then two figures. And it becomes more affordable, yet more effective for brands. And we see all kinds of really positive results from it as well, which we're happy to share later in this conversation. But we've been licensed July. We've done about 21,000 creator actions, really since December. And we feel that this is at the end of the year. This is an arbitrage. It's like a trade from a creator brand. So we're really arbitraging not just mega creators, but micro-nano creators to essentially transact and execute those actions in order to deliver value, in order to drive velocity on organic, or to drive amplitude on organic. And also extend the life of that content as well. And did you want to add anything? Yeah, I mean, I can walk everyone through what the process really looks like. So say you're a brand and you come to Daisy. You're going to set, or you're going to outline a few things. You're going to say, what's this hard-get-honny and something going after? What's my objective, upper funnel, lower funnel? What piece of content do you want to put into the platform? And then what's your budget? So from there, once we have the asset, we identify the coordinated network of people that are going to be your boosters. That's what we call them. So the notification then goes out to all of these boosters. And this is the part that continues to amaze us, I think, every single time. So it's going out to people with 100,000 to 10 million followers. And even some of those with the upper millions will take the action that we're prompting them to do, whether it's a comment on the post or sharing it to their story or reposting it. They'll take that action within minutes. So our response time from this group of people that is notoriously difficult to get to respond. I mean, even think about just the business world. I'll leave an email sitting at the top of my inbox for longer than five minutes. So these people sense if mobile first, we made an incredibly easy, they log into the app and they get the notification, they do the action, and then they're done. We had a creator tell us the other day that he made 100 bucks while brushing his teeth. And I've been saying that in every single conversation since, because it just emphasizes how easy it is to use Daisy for the creators. And then, as Ray was just talking about, we're happy to share all of the results that some of our clients or brand clients have seen on the other side. Amazing, I'd love to make 100 bucks while brushing my teeth. So let me know how I can get on Daisy. Let me try and synthesize what I heard. And you guys correct me if I'm wrong. So I'm a brand, actually, I don't know if the senior studio audience knows this. I used to run an e-commerce business on the side as a fun little side project where I invented a drinking game called Power Hour Tower. It was a drunk jenga. And we did all types of Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, influencer marketing, et cetera. So I'll do it through the lens of Power Hour Tower. So I'm Power Hour Tower. I created a piece of content. I want all party game, drinking game, enthusiast to see it. And so I reach out to Daisy, say I have a 1000 bucks budget. And I want to publish this on maybe Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter. I then tell you guys that. I then publish it and you guys instantly go out to your network of 1,400 influencers, creators, who you guys have verified and authenticated. And if they have overlapping interests or a demonstrated audience affiliation that might be interested with drinking games and party games, then you guys will notify them. And then they will be rewarded for engaging or interacting with Power Hour Tower's content, thus infueling the algorithm and potentially driving more visibility, impressions, et cetera. Is that correct? Yeah, you nailed it. I would only add that with Power Hour Tower, the results and performance that he would see become in the form of net incremental engagements, meaning likes, comments, shares. And we're not talking like going from 1000 to 2000 or you were talking about 1000 to maybe 100,000 views all organic. And it's been amplified by way of its creator network. And you go, hey, I'm mission-like and achieving maybe 1,000 likes from that as well. And so with Power Hour Tower, you mentioned you just references that you don't reciprocate as well on Meta or some of the other channels. So imagine taking that same organic piece of content that you just now have 50,000 views and 1,000 likes and like 100 comments. You've essentially social proof that piece of content. And you should flip that into an ad or an ad set on Meta. And you will see 40% in most cases what we've seen with our clients. When you flip organic content has been boosted on Daisy, vis-a-vis social proofing, then flipping that to a paid campaign. So now you're seeing like actual results and sales come through and increase on your row-as. But you pretty much need to flow. Row-as is return on ad spend for those who are not in the marketing world. Great. Well, I wish I knew you guys back when Power Hour Tower was going because it was a lot more trying to run those advertising campaigns. And it was burned so much money with advertising. And yeah, when it was always like the random pieces of organic traffic that ended up driving more sales. So I really love that thought of boosting organic. And then leveraging that for some of the paid campaigns to give them more juice and social proof. Yeah, that makes it when you have Power Hour Tower. Just curious. I was doing it from 2017 to 2020. OK. Now imagine the world that now you have Apple privacy challenges. You have a oversaturation of e-commerce brands, you see brands, they're fighting for the same visibility on these platforms when running ads on Meta or on a Spark and on TikTok. I mentioned this earlier with an investor. And now this problem with the Apple update with your emails now being segmented by primary to third party. The third party emails are all marketing emails. And no one has seen those marketing emails anymore. So we talked to brands a lot. And they're having constant struggles on how to create an edge and have differentiated. In 2017, 2020, I think a lot of things did work. And there was some of formulaic. In this world, it's becoming increasingly harder for marketers to actually hit your audience level on corporate on that segment as well. So we really feel like we're in a place where we could just help not just smaller brands do the seed brands. But any brand that's that can give visibility that have used paid or hasn't used paid. I just think it's harder and harder because of the challenges we see on some of these platforms. Yeah, that's a great point. I would love for you to double click into some of the broader internet changes. Like I know now, every time you go to a new website, what people don't know is most websites have a pixel on the back end, which is Facebook has tagged that website where they can then track your actions on that website. And then it enables them to then sell services to brands who are trying to better target audiences. So then me as Power Hour Tower, I'm putting-- I might have captured 1,000 people doing various actions that are related to party games, drinking games. But then they could create a lookalike audience where it extrapolates those 1,000 people to 100,000 people and finds like maybe adjacent things that they're interested in. So they could broader serve my head to a group that might be interested. So I wanted to talk about two things. One, I want you to elaborate on some of the changes that have come into effect that make it difficult for brands to run effective growth campaigns from the marketing side. But then I also want you to talk about how Instagram and TikTok and Twitter, as they see these influencers engage with the content seemingly to get paid, it's less authentic, right? They're getting paid to do something. So are they going to-- are they going to find ways to tweak the algorithm? If every brand starts doing this, they're going to start tweaking the algorithm to maybe identify projects that are boosted by something like daisy. So maybe-- I know it's a lot in there, but it's like a buffet for you guys to pick out what you want. Maybe you could start. Yeah. After two. So as you were talking and reminding me of what we hear our clients talk about a lot, which is a reach-argeting. And so the way that you outlined it is exactly how it works. All of these websites are being tracked. They're monitoring. Are you going from website A to website B? And then if you're clicking on an affiliate link or any link buffet, they're all tracked with who clicked on it and did that person ultimately buy the product that they're promoting. You'll hear a lot of marketers talk about the problems with attribution. And last click attribution gets a lot of airspace because it only gives credit to the last place that they saw the content or the last place that they engaged with your brand and then went on to purchase something. What it misses is all of those other moments in time, maybe the seven other exposures, the four other times you clicked on, something related to that brand. And it just attributes it to that end source. And so almost all of these websites that you see cooking recipes or anything like that, they're just loaded with affiliate codes. And so that area is definitely the type of client that we work really well with where they have all of these programs running. They're doing multi-channel marketing. They're creating content to stimulate their audience, engage with their audience, and drive more general awareness for their brand. But one thing I want to highlight specifically is if you publish a video on Instagram as a brand and you see the people that engage with it, you can then retarget that list of viewers for a follow-up campaign. And so just getting more traction and more visibility onto your own content from net new audience that is one of the main value props of Daisy, because we expand the audience that would see your content. That might not otherwise see your content by way of having other creators drive more traffic to that original video. So you're instead of just targeting your core follower base, you can really target anyone that is reachable by these creators. Yeah, I'll add to that. I had to call this morning with a medium-sized brand, maybe 20 million of annual revenue. And it was a CMO. And she was talking about she doesn't have an answer, especially in this day and age, and she could do 20 years. And especially now, it's been so hard for them to identify how to drive sales, how to create the funnel, in order to drive sales and customers and new customers. She mentioned several times that they had viral content that just took off, but had no idea why it took off. There's some holiday stuff that they did. And they generate, like, a quarter of my dollar sales. And they don't know how to replicate that. And I think this is one of the things that we're really leaning on is how to make influence or mark in programmatic, repeatable. And the way we believe you could do that is what Ian talked about as attribution. It's all about classification of creators, to create your audiences. Then you touch on this as well, like interest graphs, making sure that they're aligned with a specific brand. But most importantly, like, micro transactions is really how you get creators to engage a skill. Engagement is really what makes a piece of content go viral. So you can replicate that. You can't predict that. And we stand over and over again with some of our clients. Your second part of the question, with respect to how the platforms could view this as a not necessary authentic engagement. You've seen a couple ways of addressing this. One is the alignment of the creator, syndicate, that we get to boost any piece of content, be that organic or paid. There's a system on our side to make sure that they have an affinity towards that brand or towards Lisa at Calibur. So there's that check that we just make sure that they do love that category. And they wouldn't take the action unless they really resonate with that content or the product. The other part is we're starting to test-- this is a little bit of alpha-- how the community could engage to the actual piece of content, not just influencers. So we have 51% of our creators right now have 50K followers or more. So they're kind of in that macro or higher bucket. But we're testing whereby you could have your customers or fans, this is say, other brand, engage and create a soft currency earning daisies as a point system to go on monster benefits of the product. So we're not-- we're inviting the network of users, customers. It could be token holders, in the case of Web 3, to be able to boost as well. So you don't have to have influence per se or 50K followers in order to engage on daisy. You could have 500 followers, but you're a token holder of a specific network, and you could be invited to boost. And we feel that we could even increase authenticity, but also accelerate authenticity by inviting customers that we could verify our actual customers or fans of that particular brand and/or network. I love that. I love that. That opens up the audience base of who you guys can target. And you can prove that they own a token or that they've done an action and can get rewarded with tokens, whatever it may be. That makes sense. Yeah, we're testing it with them. Yeah, we're testing it with my client right now where we're taking their Shopify information of their top 80 customers. And so we could verify that their actual purchasers of the product and then put them into the a closed loop boost, specific for the brand and just for those customers. I love that. But I want to talk about the crypto underneath the hood because obviously I know like testimonials and sponsored content is a thing that obviously the social media giants are aware of. So what is the edge that Daisy offers but to creators, I know that the payment stuff, but I think some of the verification and the data sharing elements are will make it most distinct. So either of you could take that. But I would love to hear the crypto owner that-- Yeah, I think our approach from the beginning has always been build something end-to-end that works, get it out, and then learn from what we've seen. So with that, like as Larry mentioned earlier on, we launched in July. And since then, we've had a fully working end-to-end product. But the majority of it has been in traditional web to end-prestructure. So by getting this out and by facilitating 20-plot transaction in that period of time, we've identified the areas that will keep the user experience where it is, if not improve it, and just make everything more efficient. So Ben, the first one you mentioned was payments. Naturally, every payment that is issued through date will be on chain and allow for creators to have access to their fund almost immediately. The really interesting thing about that is we're actually going to have net new wallets created for a cohort of people that traditionally not been wallet holders in general at all. And so all of the Daisy users will be issued a wallet. But we're going with a lot of partners that can make those on and off ramp, that's impossible, so that they don't need complicated log in, complicated setup. From the user, from the creator perspective, they just want to do the action. They want to get paid, and they want to have it acceptable. So on the payment side, that's definitely one. And then the other one that you mentioned was verification. So when it comes to verification, every action that we do right now has to be verified. So we're using traditional methods in order to do that. But love the opportunities that things like ZKTLS bring into this equation so that we can not only verify that a user took the action, but we can also verify different audience attributes about them, different off-platform behaviors. And I think this type of data aggregation is where it really is going to step to be a part. Because, as Ray was just talking about, if we can verify that you're a customer, verify that you're a token holder, your opportunities increase. And if your opportunities increase your payment opportunities, or your reward opportunities increase. Do we have this natural built-in incentive for users to want to participate in these mechanisms? And one of those specifically is around data sharing. So specifically in this world of advertising, you're leveraging primarily public information, you're leveraging any type of behavioral data and this person went to the website on it so far. Boy, you're not getting as a user to opt into a system, see the benefit for sharing their data and get appropriately rewarded for it. Because what's happening currently is, he learned just using your data and you don't get anything out of it. So on Daisy, we want to make this system where you provide us, you know, your watch history, your comment history, the videos that you liked on, so on and so forth. And then you get appropriately rewarded for that. And as a result, you also get more opportunities. And they're going to be more relevant opportunities. And the brand is going to be even more likely to come back and keep spending on the platform, because we're engaging with people that are super, super relevant to their mission, to their KPIs, to everything like that. Yeah, three main areas for us, just like building off of our intense solution already, payments, verification, and data sharing. - Can you elaborate on what ZKTLS is and how it's different than connecting like via an API to your Instagram or like what makes ZKTLS so unique in its capabilities and what it unlocks? - So I think the best way to think about ZKTLS is anything that just is displayed to the user is available to be captured. So the way that I think about is like any action that you take on your mobile device is essentially calling the server and saying like this is the type of information that I'm asking for and this is, and then it's retiring a result. And so as a result, like anything that's visible to a user on mobile is then theoretically able to be extracted through ZK methodology. And with that, that lets you get access to different areas of application that might not be available via a traditional API. So for example, seeing who viewed a page or seeing who interacted with something, oftentimes the platforms met a TikTok snapshot in our world. They are selective in terms of what information is shared with all their API users. Whereas if you go directly to the user and you verify the action through ZKTLS, you have that source of truth and it's you and the user that are interacting with one another. So it's based on your trust relationship with them and the incentive mechanisms that you put in place for them to opt in as opposed to going through a centralized math platform and having them determine what data you have access to. Can I try parroting this back? Just to make sure. So I'm a creator. I hear about Daisy. I then use Daisy's technology, ZKTLS, which I think is run by another company called Opacity that built the tech. And through ZKTLS tech, I can link my Spotify, my TikTok, my Instagram, my Twitter. et cetera, without having to like those social media giants don't know that I'm doing this. And as a result of that, rather than like if I was connecting via an API or their traditional means of connecting, more information can be brought over from my accounts. And therefore I can get. Daisy has a better understanding of my actions, my visits, et cetera. And therefore can better serve me opportunities and a broader spectrum of opportunities. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. That's a good read back. Yeah. Yeah, well, I wanted to have one more thing. And we mentioned like the Daisy chain effect on Daisy in terms of sequencing of actions or sequencing careers with a series of actions. We've introduced, I mean that's been in test mode around this is like the ability to cross platform your series of actions. So what if you reposted a tweet and had video content as to say, and we rewarded the creator to then syndicated across to Instagram as well as TikTok and Snapchat. So that in itself is like a Daisy chain that for that individual creator. So the idea there is that we can have the creator be rewarded on all four platforms by making us a piece of content, which obviously is a blank content. But to that end, information that we get from Spotify, like for your favorite artist, that will absolutely play part in terms of like attribution of how we select these creators and their audiences, especially when we cross platform. So getting other, even though we're not boosting on Spotify or not boosting a ticket master, those proofs that we get from the career's action or the user's behavior, always the HLS will become extremely valuable as we're identifying boosters and actually their audience. So this is where it could be extremely impactful because we're layering in other data, not just data that we're boosting on. So if I'm onboarding as a creator, anyone, to Daisy, my onboarding flow will be ultimately connecting via ZKTLS, all the relevant platforms that I have an account with. And then you guys will go from there. Can I limit like, or if there's certain things that I don't want to share, is that possible? It's like, turns certain things off. And then is there any way in which these platforms could then block some of the ZKTLS connection? The answer to the limitations, yes. I think we said restrictions on the user side. We will always do that for our privacy policy. I do, in terms of the block, the block is potential. It goes back to every creator, every user that has a profile in these platforms to have proprietary data. And proprietary data like Watch History as you can find out is the only people that can see that is just the user. Just through the login. So for us, make sure that we also layer in proprietary data that the user has control of not the platform that you share. They can export it. It is important for us. So as long as we start getting some proprietary access points of data, which we will use test with the Daisy token for to reward the creators for sharing their data, we will always have a niche. And the platforms can't do anything about that because the creator is on their own data. And by their privacy policy, I believe, in their terms of service, they can export any of their products. That's very interesting. Amazing job, guys. This is a core product, a core protocol, and can see you guys have spent a lot of time thinking about the pain points for a number of different constituents on the brand side, the creator side, and have found an elegant solution. So talk to me. You guys have some exciting news. Tell me about this news. Yeah, some of your traction, like tangible numbers, et cetera. Well, exciting news is that we closed our pre-seed round of $3.9 million. I was led by CMT Digital Envol Capable. Escape Velocity EV3, which is none of the industry, I'm also invested. So we're excited to just have them as partners. And we really are looking to make this not just a character web to audiences, but make it into a web 3 product that we talked about in terms of the infrastructure components. Yeah, the part is that we're going to be looking to launch a token. Our goal would be by the end of the year. I mentioned that we would be introducing a soft currencies, which is daisy. Daisy's, like people could earn. And that would form us in terms of rewarding users of the platform beyond just cash payments. But a soft currency, whether you get points and convert to other unlocks, such as product discounts, and obviously cash as well. I think there'll be a lot of things that will be coming out of that in terms of releasing that, which is about, you know, too much away. But that will eventually flip into a daisy token. The other side thing that we're going to be announcing that shortly, but what we mentioned here, is that we also want to create features for creators to be able to boost their own content, which will also tie it to the daisy. So imagine a creator and artist, an up-and-coming artist, or an pen artist, that is a booster on daisy earns like 1,000 daisy points. And then now it could use 500 of the daisy points, let's just say house money, and some respects to token at some point, to be able to launch their own, you know, and boost their own content, because they need visibility as well. So that's been, that's like, in terms of our major, you know, announcement where super excited to say that we just close that round, 3.9 million, so I'm from the esteemed investors. In terms of traction, I mentioned that we did 21,000 transactions within the last three months. Again, a transaction is defined as a creator action, with, you know, a comment or a like or a share. One brand that we worked with, we did 850 creator actions within 72 hours, which is absolutely unheard of. Try to find 850 creators to engage with the content with the 72 hours anywhere else. So that was also something assigned to us to see the one thing that really excites me is the increase of creator payments. So we just hit about $150,000 of MRR, so in since July, we're now 150K of MRR, we're paying out close to $100,000 to creators each month, which again, it's through a micro transaction, so we're talking the average order size, a micro transaction size is like $30. This is a lot of transactions, especially for like a stable provider, which we're excited about implementing. And so that was another highlight in terms of what we've been able to see in terms of our attraction. And then our top 30% of creators, you mentioned there's a query that has 10,000 followers and more of this, which is over 96 times, I believe, our top 30% of our booster cohort, is $2,500 a month. That's for, that's quadrupled in the last three months. So for us to see that as a KPI of like $2,500 is is decent money for some of these creators. It's actually a earning wage in other markets. We want to give it to 10,000. Then we will get to that to 10,000. So for us, we're seeing a lot of volume on the transaction size, we're seeing the increase of average payments going out to creators. So we're just getting started. We're just scratching the surface. So we're pretty excited, not only will we accomplish, but also where we're headed. - Incredibly impressive. Congrats on the raise. Some great VCs involved there. And more importantly, congrats on the traction. Seems like you guys have had a nerve. - Thank you. - One quick question. Are you what chain are you guys building in? - I think we're evaluating a few few chains. That's a, we're talking to pretty much everyone. - Cool. One, one final question from Ion. You guys didn't come from, yeah, crypto world. You came from a very different, you know, sector. Do you pay attention to what's going on in crypto more broadly? Are you sucked into crypto Twitter? Do you care about the markets? Are you just heads down, building? - I would say it's a little bit of both. From my perspective, I pay attention to the app layers of projects. Some of the social five stuff as well. Do pay attention to the liquidity of the markets as well. Just how, how do pay the markets have been? Or like they're of, I guess recently. But super bullish, not just about what we have in place, but also where the markets headed. So I do pay close attention from that perspective. And I both attend and talk, we speak on some of these, web three oriented events. We were just at East Denver. Some of our investors have advised some other, you know, events as well. And you'll see more of a presence for us in terms of, you know, speaking engagement specifically for the web three audience. The last thing about web three is that 30% of our customers are web three companies. And so we definitely pay attention to what's going on in their world. 'Cause we're just like front center with everything doing from a message perspective, from a pride perspective. And we just love the fact that we're helping web three companies bridge over to web two audiences, which has been our sweet spot for a lot of web two companies, or about three companies. Amazing. Cool guys, where can people follow along with the Daisy journey? Yes, so there's a few ways you can follow us on Twitter, which we just launched our Twitter at X. So it's at Daisy Pay app. You could also just email
[email protected]. You know, I also happy to share my telegram, which is at Hollywood underscore Ray. Those are the three best ways to reach us. Amazing. Well, if the senior studio audience sees me, ramping up to 10 million followers, you know who is behind the scenes. That's right. That's right. Awesome, guys. Thank you so much. This was awesome. And I think, as I said at the start, emblematic of blockchain tech being integrated into a real use case and being a significant improvement over some of the options that are currently out there currently. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you guys and to everyone listening. We'll catch you next time. Thank you for listening. And we hope you enjoyed this episode of senior studio. Please leave us a review and rating wherever you listen to podcasts if you love today's show. For more senior capital content, check us out at seniorscapital.substac.com and shoot me a follow on Twitter at Benny P. Jacobs. We'll see you next time.
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