Building the BAYC marketplace and protecting creator royalties

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your trusted source for relevant and legitimate web3 information so you don't fall behind the internet Revolution I'm Jaybird and I believe that web3 is going to change the world that's why I'm here to guide the world's top talent down the rabbit hole as you contribute and capitalize on the opportunity on today's episode of the doer Spotlight we've got with us Zach herwagen from snag Solutions Zach is the co-founder and CEO over at snag where they're focused on empowering some of the top digital creators by giving them control of the

buying experience more specifically snag builds nft marketplaces for collections so it's a white label nft Marketplace they've built the nft marketplace for board Abe Yacht Club for Goblin Town for the undead super normal and about 30 other projects so they're really deep in the space which is what brings such a great conversation today from Zach today we dive into why having your own nft Marketplace is important as a Creator what does it allow what can you do with your own energy Marketplace there's the obvious that you can have lower fees that you

can enforce create a royalties we exactly I go down a bit of a rabbit hole on Creative royalties and where we're at now and he's got some really interesting takes on where he thinks we're going to be a year from now in terms of creative royalty enforcement actually becoming more of a thing where right now blur and open C have just basically both said no Creator royalties because they're just trying to grab market share so Zach really opens up our eyes to what is happening behind the scenes what are the devs working on that might be coming out in terms of protocols and standards in the next year that really will help creators enforce royalties but also we

talk about if you have your own nft Marketplace on your own website what does that allow you to do it allows you to get into a better user experience and potential around loyalty and rewards which we break all of that down so buckle up this is an incredible episode with Zach from snag Solutions breaking down nft marketplaces and building some of the top marketplaces for some of the top collections in the space but before we jump into the show let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the

creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to the profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables

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ownership with access keys and create liquidity for yourself it's a win-win situation plus the ownership and transfer of these keys are managed on chain which ensures transparency and security and we want the Webster Academy Community to be on the Forefront of this new wave of nft utility which is why we partner with segment a non-custodial nft platform set to launching Q3 of this year segment aims to allow users to easily create access keys and share ownership of nfts with other friends and community members the team is going through their Beta release soon and has opened up their waitlist for web 3 Academy listeners if you want to stay in the Forefront to web3 sign up for segment's waitlist today with the link in the show notes below shared ownership is a game changer and we want you to be there first welcome to the show Sac gmj

glad to be here really excited to chat today if you guys are listening on uh podcast you don't know that Zach is wearing an ape hat and I am wearing a moon Birds hat and we both are with black shirts on so we're in our full nft community uniforms today absolutely dressing for the neck up that's right yeah neither of us are wearing pants no pants so Zach you just got back from Denver have you had a chance to take a deep breath I'm sure the craziness that that was there are no deep breaths in web 3 as you know especially being a Founder in web3 but using the energy to push forward great to see so many Builders out there good stuff good stuff okay so always

like to start off by hearing your rabbit hole story but more than your rabbit hole story I want to go back to your schooling before and then to doordash and your experience being such an early employee at doordash and then how that sort of LED you to Webster awesome yeah I'll try to go cliff notes here but I wouldn't have called myself much of a student but but when I was my major was economics and then you know senior year really with an emphasis eight specialization on Austrian economics or kind of libertarian economics and setting up you know more decentralized governance systems both within politics

company governance Etc and so definitely caught that hill almost philosophically a little bit and put all of my money maybe 600 into one Bitcoin for the tail end of college but then was focused on getting adding into kind of tech and startups and never caught the ethereum bug and really understood the smart Contracting opportunity and so ended up at doordash early out of school as an early lunch team member traveling full-time and starting our new markets back when we were launching in places like Nashville and Miami and you know wound up through having that early opportunity and chance to learn the business moving up into a set of kind of leadership roles leading new business units like our pickup product our ads

platform and then finally our white label restaurant business helping run fulfillment for large Merchants like Papa John's Panera Etc who wanted to run delivery through their own app and website and really control the experience obviously it's that last experience that kept ties into what we're building at snag solution but also had the chance to meet my co-founder Jason along the way as our Merchant engineering lead on a lot of that product offering ads platform Carousel real estate point of sale Integrations Etc so having that first-hand experience to meet amazing technologists like Jason I've been able to kind of pull off on the back end but then also learn from amazing Business Leaders even though I feel like I sometimes missed five years of run-up in crypto I also gained six

years of awesome kind of like traditional business leadership experience that applies quite well in web 3. so tell me did you and Jason start snag while you were still at doordash did you take the leap and just go out on your own one day and give your resignation how did that go I wrote what I would kind of call a research paper right a two-pager on this opportunity I think I called it opportunities and nft infrastructure and I sent it to Jason and actually one other engineer who did not make the jump with us and we worked on it as kind of a weekly 45 minute scoping inside project for a couple of months at some point had to kind of you

know start to figure out what would need to be true here for us to take off and go commit to this and then decided to chat with a couple of custom customers and it was really when we chatted with it was crypto chicks and pirates of the metaverse were our first two sales Combos and both you know fairly immediately agreed to use the product that we felt like we had some level of traction right it was almost a little bit of a false positive at first time we had to work pretty hard to get the next five years after that uh it wasn't quite that easy but gave us some confidence Jason and I at least to jump off and go full time on this and I love that you pitched and this is what I always say to any entrepreneur any founder out there

sell the product before you even have the product because if you go build something and you're not building for somebody then you're building it for nobody and you never know what the consumer actually wants so go get a sale and tell them that you have it and then go build it like fake it a little bit in the beginning and then you go make it absolutely yeah one of my best friends who actually helped pulled me into web3 initially he gave me a real speech he had some entrepreneurial experience prior and he said hey man you have to be selling vaporware here right yeah business emails on let's have the scoping conversation he's like no you have to say we have this product do you want it which like I think some people would say that's you know that's deceiving or manipulative but that's more just like manifestation in my mind

like it's the belief it's not that you're not going to do it it's not that you're not capable of doing it you are people don't buy things people don't sign up for things unless they believe in them so you got to manifest it a bit in that way I'm curious the paper that you wrote this two-pager can you give us the Kohl's notes on that or what the highlights were from that yeah so I really described two opportunities and I think it ties to where we are today but also where we want to go to some degree as a business opportunity one again was leading this white label tooling part of the business how we build new white label services for restaurants and one was let's do that for nft projects and that was all pre you know no royalties which we can chat about a bit later so

the real value prop was as I was flipping a ape nft back a year or so ago paid 3 1000 or more dollars to open to you on a transaction and I felt like hey that that is not the right relative value here right and a lot of that is actually what has led to the feeling of loss and fairness is what has led to this whole zero royalty movement but out ahead of that I kind of felt like there's a better Creator owned model on the marketplace experience especially yeah so easy to aggravate liquidity in this space um and kind of offer that best selection really around a p reduction value prop to start so that was idea number one idea number two which is still a place I would love to go with this was around ticket and could we pretty much do a you

know Ticket Master Plus StubHub all in one that lets IRL creators use nfts as the fundamental ticketing technology to capture secondary sales as we chatted with folks like Kenny Gersh was actually super helpful he had a quick combo as kind of a friend he's in the ape community and the VP of uh Biz Dev at the MLP he was like yes we want to do this but no we're not really ready to like jump into using you know web3 technology today to do this right versus very well could be something they look at but so we really decided that we wanted to start with this white label tooling to build this fairly robust customizable solution that we could

deploy for various use cases in the future for sure I've been saying for over a year that somebody needs to do nft Marketplace white labeling and you're you nailed it and there's a few others that are doing it so let's jump into the story of you guys building the marketplace for a dow an ape coin and how did that happen I remember when I saw this story break and this is when I first heard about you the headline was something like small startup beats out magic Eden and wearable to build the board Abe Yacht Club Marketplace oh how did this go down tell us how you guys won that deal first off as I already referenced I'm part of the board ape Community which is pretty relevant here

and have been they were one of the first nfts I purchased when I was like yes I want to be in this space back a year and a half ago and so always sort of dreamed of working with that you know project organization Etc and really one of our advisors tropo farmer who's one of the better follow-up folks on Twitter probably crypto Twitter period really it was his idea that this would be an awesome way for us to put ourselves out there and an awesome way to show how quickly we can customize a experience to work well for this community and because our product at a core is truly white label there's not that much custom work hopefully that's not a dirty secret that has gone into this Marketplace some of the metadata customization is fairly

custom but the core platform itself is one hour setup or less so we thought of it as really a proof of concept but magic eat and then as we were drafting The Proposal kind of sniped us and beat us to the first post and so went and kind of ripped what we had and got it cleaned up over the course of three hours from there I had it all drafted I couldn't move that quickly and you know entered The Fray along with at least a couple of others who were trying to use the platform as a similar proof of concept and the thing I would really remark on from there in terms of what led to the success in that process is one Upstream of any of the Tactical things we did just deep engagement with the community already being a Community

member helps but really like going into the Discord there's a core Discord where a lot of the core eight-point contributors hang out and really going engaging with them listening to feedback incorporating that into the draft and then the second thing is kind of looking deeply at and thinking critically about what does magic even have to offer and and I have a lot of respect for magic Eden as a web 3 startup a ton of respect they are really well and better resourced and we were by a mile right and so I had to kind of ask you know what can be unique about our platform versus others and when I really looked at the magic even stack this is on the less positive side I found it was very centralized they didn't enable

aggregation they kind of double signing requirements to stop that also all their listings are in a centralized database that's true open yeah other says well that's not unique right but anyways really inhibited our Tech stack because we were so Earthly in our build to move on to Reservoir which is an open data layer storing signatures on are we versus a centralized database utilizing their aggregation apis which help enable distribution of liquidity interoperability and then really committed to the community that those were the values we wanted to play by as well as non-extraction where we then went to I don't know maybe like 25 of what magic Eden was asking for in terms of a Marketplace fee I think they were

looking at one percent and we came back at a quarter percent if I'm remembering correctly it's really looking at you know less of the product itself because magic even as a great product and more of how we build a business that deeply aligns with creators in their communities and when we you know fast forward to the marketplace worst things when we think about the triangle of creators Traders and collectors for us it's always been obvious we're here with the creators and the collectors and so it's actually quite simplifying in terms of not needing to lead into the zero royalty thing as others have Etc and kind of right you know Focus there yeah so what I'm hearing is you won the bid partly because you were an Apollo yourself so you're in the community was

was anybody from the magic Eden side or the wearable side or any of them ape holders I actually think when a company gets that big it's not even that relevant at that point but we're the CEOs I don't know it wasn't really part of the narrative nor would it right in that authentic at that point right right okay so you were part of the community but you were also agile and able to respond to what the community wanted whereas obviously magic Eden was saying this is what we do and this is how we do it here you go so was the call from Bitcoin down and it was eight coin down that put this out right am I correcting yeah we put the proposal into the apecoin community along with magic Eden wearable X Marketplace and some others

who made the first move was it somebody on so magic even put in their proposal oh on their own they just said Marketplace and we had already planned to do the same thing so I had to go no way and I sent him the Google Doc that day because I was like you know if magic even going it's go time right holy wow so just happened at the same time yeah and what was actually interesting in the process is it was a each vote was a yes no vote right and so because three of them initially went up to vote at the same time this is a little bit semantic but the Dow side of it is actually pretty interesting as well yeah so three of them went through at the same time and they were all kind of to be unofficial Marketplace of a coined that

right and the implication there being that if multiple had won then there could be multiple links from from the eight point website would kind of be the way to think about it and so not only did we win by a pretty wide margin 85 Plus percent but none of our competitors won and none of our competitors have passed since in the several votes that have happened since I I can't say that that's forever or that that's an explicit goal but we're definitely trying to continue to deliver a high quality experience in a way that doesn't cause the community to think it's intelligent to just winter kind of consumer demand and pushing folks in One Direction yeah wouldn't they that would make any sense to have multiple marketplaces that would just be

confusing to the user I'd start to feel like I wouldn't trust either them because I'd be like which one's real am I getting scammed wow fascinating so just to go back to the Dow side for a second because this is so interesting can anybody come in and make a proposal so you don't have to be a holder to make a proposal you have to be an ape coin holder but a coin you know anybody can buy a purchasable requirement yeah exactly and you have to have a certain number of Bitcoin I think one eight coin is the only one yeah okay okay so what can you buy on this Marketplace which of the yeah these tokens Can you buy there right now it's anything created by Yuga so really odd so not things that have

been acquired by you guys I see yeah okay so it's not crypto punks it's not me bits yes and also not 10K TF honestly as we have this conversation I kind of think we should expand that one one of the reasons to not include them initially was one to start small and kind of nail the experience but two because they have a zero percent Marketplace already and so given we were starting at a quarter percent it just didn't make a ton of sense for me to be honest but now that we actually went back and we've waived all fees for all of our creators as Creator relief in wake up the opens the announcement so maybe time to go back and layer some of those in interesting I've just gotta ask that then if you have no fees how do you make Revenue we normally have these

they're waived through uh end of June as of right now okay I definitely could consider extending that very much on the table but at some point we will need to make money so it's a temporary thing it's a temporary thing yeah okay okay so similar to what openc did when I think they only weighed them for like 48 hours or something like that yeah but I think it's actually the exact opposite of that open C reduced royalties and remove the user feed to try to drive traffic right we have never had a user fee but have now also eliminated our creator for you to go to true you know Revenue in order to support creators when they need it most fantastic okay so let's talk about why Board of yacht club or any other

collection would want their own Marketplace what was the reason that you thought that this was such a good idea and you mentioned a few of them before when you talk about your paper but just take us down that path and then we'll have to come back to the reason today which is royalties right right yeah which was not the case in this headspace back six months ago so I can answer your question first I would say it's reducing fees for users right and the marketplace fee itself right and taking that to zero because the truth is even back then that folks were using OTC services like an nft Trader at the time right in large part he cut you know the way I would always explain it is I'm fine with the

royalty but I'm not fine with the 2.5 percent for a thousand dollar open CP right and so you're giving users back to the kind of tipping analogy here social reason to work around your royalty that was my framing of the problem prior to everything that's happened since the second one that's you even more relevant the bigger the brand is is to keep consumers on your own platform it's all I'll talk through the context of Adidas for a second it would be a definitely a dream customer for us because right now they take folks from their Adidas Twitter page and they either push them directly to open seat or they push them to their website which then pushes them to open Cedar purchase right I'd imagine to some degree when I go on the Adidas

side it's like Adidas times Gucci right they're trying to get us djends moved over into their other luxury products and they're not really solving that as effectively as they can be from a computer experience perspective and that's before you get it to kind of more of a generalized version of that problem which is the ability to capture CRM information add-in programs like loyalty customize the experience in a way that that really improves conversion and pulls people back Etc et cetera right so so we have a lot of road map on kind of Social and royalty it's maybe maybe we can get Snoop Dogg to do a rhyme on that he's he's all in web3 he's absolute smoking web very recently

so I think you can come up with something yeah he's a Creator so he could say like Hey where's the Loyalty yeah you know it's new if you're listening to this man we want to hear it okay so I love that because buying an nft isn't like buying toilet paper where I can go to Amazon to buy it right buying an nft and especially in the future when nfts have the tech is used to its fullest potential when there's a membership pass involved or there's access involved through token getting or there's some sort of perks involved doing that all on a generalized Marketplace you're losing

out on your full customer experience you can't explain it nearly as well marketplaces work well for Traders right so the thing I'm curious about is are you seeing the volume though are people transacting on these marketplaces and I know that in context most trading right now is done by wash trading and just flipping back and forth yeah for the blur or the next floor air drop but it's tough yeah I don't think we've seen our product in a fair environment or we did two weeks post launch when our product wasn't very good and because we enforced royalties on every transaction by the way even if it's an aggregated listing that there's a royalty enforce on the buy side back to the thesis of you know

being the platform for creators full royalty payments at large or something in the like 10 to 15 category in this space right 10 to 15 right right now on average when I look at that's collection specific but I look at this stuff yeah as I'm formulating sales materials Etc our top communities are doing five to ten percent of total volume through our Marketplace all of which enforce royalties right is that meaningful in the grand scheme of things I wish it was a lot higher but it's meaningful in terms of royalty and forced transactions right now absolutely for sure five to ten percent's pretty good when especially right now in the current market there's not a lot of new people coming into the space new people

coming into the space might go to board API club's website or might go to Goblin Town's website and then they end up on their Marketplace and they're purchasing through that way but Traders aren't doing that so let's talk about royalties a little bit just curious to get your thoughts on how this all played out and how you think about it moving forward in the future absolutely loaded question ball get going and then you you can chime in I think personally that royalties are the primary innovation of nfts as a technology platform right now and if I tie it back to what I talked about a bit ago on ticketing that's why someday I think we'll be able to sell the NBA on using nfts as a tech platform

it really works well for the use case but that sale will only be possible when we're able to to sufficiently restrict you know non-royalty platforms I.E you know in this analogy seat geek StubHub Etc from picking up in the listings in a way that actually just ends up mirroring the current system with that in mind and then kind of a second thought here hot take this time next year 80 of all nft volume will be coming from Smart contracts that are not yet written today right so if you pair those in conjunction then the creators are actually going to be able to take control of this situation and it's never going to be perfect by the way but but we're talking about entirely new

protocols and token standards that really do a better job of enforcing royalties and tracking royalties at the Smart contract layer and so as we get those Solutions in place and you know just the next few weeks or a month here I mean there are lots of other folks sprinting on this as well and we're working with you know I would shout out Reservoir in particular who I mentioned as an awesome technology partner earlier but we now need to act less as a white label Marketplace and more as a royalty enforcement platform for food creators and that white label Marketplace is a core tool or even the core tool because it gives the creators a royalty and force high quality Buy sell experience

to send their four collectors um and none of the rest of this works without I think that's really what we're building for and I've worked at least 50 percent more per week since the open Z announcement on a reasonably High base because I am so energized by the opportunity that this is presented for us due to candidly put I view as a big strategic misstep by openc and along with that I'll actually say part of me wants to villainize blur but when I've heard their founder Pac-Man talk I can't help but think that he seems like he was genuinely building for this trading use case that that is long gone unaddressed and I kind of do think that the royalty enforcers can play with blur where blur acts as more of a almost derivatives

platform right like in the scenario I'm describing they could still wrap the tokens and trade them right like we don't need to eliminate trading we just need to more appropriately reward folks who pay and enforce royalties there's so much to unpack in that first of all I completely agree that I think openc made a misstep i quite frankly don't understand why they did this I mean I actually do understand why they were losing Marketplace way too fast and they felt like they had no choice they really stepped outside of what they said their core values and what they said their mission was I had heard the founders talk about it I read about it and so yeah I thought that was bizarre but let me go back to your hot take that one year from now 80 percent of Trades will

be on new smart contracts where's that coming from is that because you see any smart contracts being worked at at the protocol level or at the ethereum foundation or yeah getting that from all I have real insight into is what we're working on personally because anyone working on as much as as we are is going to have some level of secrecy right now we're sharing with with all the right partners of course please reach out if you'd like to learn more and are listening to this but you know with the proper ndas Etc so anyways what I can say is that on the Creator side which is what's driving all of this work and Innovation they want to enforce royalties and even though there's some who could say hey we'll royalties and grossed all others are up the smarter

and bigger creators recognize that one that is driven by wash trade sales that are going to go away at some point in time right and that too there's actually nothing stopping either blur or open seat from that matter from taking a next Notch down from point five to zero right like and if one of them does it they've both show them they'll both sometimes so the creators are actually you know at this moment in time have no control and with that in mind most creators not art blocks they've come out and talked about you know the provenance associated with the tokens which makes complete sense not punks but most creators are very comfortable with you know wrapping the

token migrating contracts moving to a standard that works better for what I'm describing here and do you think that because you mentioned there will always be a way around it so I think the big question here is is it really ever going to be enforceable on chain or will it just be you know one Dev moves it does a new protocol or new standard and then another Dev moves and figures out a way to get around it it's never truly enforceable we're going pretty deep here but the kind of two ways that I would think about that one is that the wrapping is the easiest way to think about this even though there's other tactics and mechanics here where the same way that we can wrap any collection you have Moon Birds on so Moon birds and

move them over onto a new smart contract that enforces royalties in kind of the core call functions then blur can still wrap that thing and move it back onto their platform for to trade without royalty right right you can always wrap the wrapper right but with that in mind that the next layer here is actually to add coming back to loyalty but kind of abstracting that concept is to figure out how we help creators provide Rewards or incentives to The Collector your audience in particular versus the trader audience that are more meaningful than foregoing royalty itself right and the simple version would be whatever the next moon Birds meant is to stick on that they could reference this this on-chain royalty record in the mint function and if the royalty wasn't paid

on the most recent transaction with well that meant right well and so what I'm describing there is you can abstract that into a point system right or you can you know create ways to block things that have interacted with blur contracts or ways to let people pay to let things back into the system right you can create a whole system here that is on paper in mine and others heads right now but it definitely can exist and it will never completely solve the problem but it will hopefully shift the majority of volume or at least the open c plus blur duopoly world was not that bad it'll at least bring that back is kind

of the way I would think about it where there is a platform for creators in their communities as a primary trading platform and so that's where our headspace is a lot yeah the Loyalty it's so funny that we keep saying royalty and loyalty but the Loyalty side of it that makes a ton of sense to me because as you said from the beginning if you have your own Marketplace then there's much more you can do to improve the user experience for your collectors and let's be real here if you can have them transacting in your own Marketplace then you could have a loyalty program and there's all the different things you can do for that I like your example if you can admit to the next thing that's real

pain right there I was thinking more something like you get you get perks or points or something like that but that's easier to play ball he's he's not messing around not my decision I'm creating both options for the Creator to enforce this the way they see fit okay let's talk about some other projects that you've worked on what other collections have you worked with and what have you seen go well what have you learned from those I'll talk about maybe two or three here today just we have for contacts definitely 40 plus active Partners at this point activating something like 10 a month but let's talk about Goblin Town genuine Undead and the plane today those have been three awesome Partners amongst many other

awesome Partners Goblin Town was a really big deal for us early and the marketplace has not gone that well at the same time and both can can be true and we will come back and solve the marketplace problem with them they're an Engaged partner we're gonna take a few cracks at this until we get it right but one they were the first big Creator to get excited to work with us even out ahead of us having a product that was ready for our creator at their scale um this is Goblin Town and Truth Labs the little ecosystem but their co-vatter Alex who's a entrepreneur of a dow tooling startup Upstream he's actually just like a really smart business person intuitively saw the value in having his own channel that helped reinforce this

world that they're building at this digital world right and so I'm trying to not use metaverse for that because I don't know if that's quite right anyways you saw the value and he helped really Define our roadmap early I think the customization of that experience is excellent we've recently embedded features like Creator announcements that let them cryptographically sign to more securely communicate with their Community uh which has been a problem for them amongst many others in the past right so they've really driven a lot of our early road map but the one decision that is not yet panned out is that they decided not to aggregate listings from other platforms and because of that we've definitely had a bit of a cold start problem on driving kind of that that consumer side flywheel due to the

amount of liquidity that we've been able to get on there at any point in time learning is that the aggregation tactic is critical to this first party experience and lots of other great learnings that will hopefully help us you know kind of crack this one in terms of how we drive we're a real flywheel there the second one I'll talk about you know I'm actually going to skip genuine dead for right now I'm gonna sorry Jen G you I love you all but I'm gonna chat about super normal because I think there's a more interesting learning there which is they're uh one of the probably the top project in Korea a huge following out there and very tied into the kind of Korean Hollywood is definitely not the right term but that's what's coming out right now anyways the core thing they asked for which has been

really helpful to play around with and learn about as a user is they wanted us to help Market make their collection so that we could perpetuate liquidity that was unique back onto the marketplace while helping them kind of fix the blur verse at the time open see floor price Dynamic where blur was always running at their royalties eight percent so blur always runs exactly eight percent lower right like Traders are smart and so we're talking with a market making firm now about how we scale this mechanic but what we effectively found is that if they give the ability for one maker or one set of Creator aligned market makers to tape listings and on offers off of your royalty platforms and redistribute

them onto royalty and worse platforms at or just below the royalty enforced floor that there is demand for the right like as you can create unique liquidity there is demand for that royalty enforced experience I've been doing this on my own just to kind of like learn the process and help us solve some of the mechanics here but I've long learned a lot about the third platform a lot about Market making but two learned that doubling down on unique native liquidity does Drive demand the listings get purchased right if you can drive the best liquidity they will come again for sure and then the last one I mentioned is the play again that that's been an exciting one they launched just about a week ago two things they did one they launched up old new digital experience

that we were well linked from and featured in which is a huge piece of the growth flywheel just be linked into the website and Twitter well the difference I'd say like 25 of our creators are in that five to ten percent purchasing rain and they're the 10 that have us really well linked into their website right it's really just for sure I don't think better right now but that's the first thing is they launch with that but they also launched with FRG token enabled which is their ERC okay and what's been really interesting is because there's like eight point is a currency to some degree already even though other side has not launched yet it's already thought of that way it's traded on uniswap that way it's financialized

FRG is somewhat pre-financialization but it still has real value to community members who believe in the play Community they're really building Cool Stuff ponds is awesome he's one of my favorite Twitter follows really big on building decentralization via you know an nft community and so because of that ability to kind of capture that energy from the community around use of token for purchasing it's helped to drive a recurring traffic flywheel and we're seeing pretty solid usage of both FRG postings but also just purchasing open CE and other listings while they're there shopping on the platform so that's been really great to see the last week or two do you confident at the beginning

of you never get a deep breath in web 3 is so true you're just the amount that you must have to wake up every day and be like oh god what happened while I was sleeping like because you're a small team I guess that's probably one of the key reasons that you're able to be so agile and to respond to Pivot as a founder and as an entrepreneur how do you think about that and you know what advice would you have to fellow Founders out there yeah great questions the thing that's really worked for me personally is to carve out space for what I'm excelling at and hire great team members to manage everything else even early right even though if anything about our core team today it's four or five folks including myself so super small I have

an amazing intern who hadn't gone to full time who I consider one of those four to five core team members who helps me scale Business Development Outreach which you just can't scale when you get busy on everything else right we don't need a sales department but I do need help following up with people he also manages a lot of kind of you know account management activations just like keeping the thing running and he's hungry and hiring for Hunger really obviously matters and then I everyone else on the team is an engineer so you know the two things I love to do are are strategic Business Development and then build custom product based on strategic Business Development to Drive product roadmap and so I've been able to even a small team scale higher in a way that

lets me do kind of my dream job right now because those were kind of the things I did at doordash but I had to deal with everything else too right because you're just part of this big organization tons of people management too that all you know to get back to exhausting in a little bit but it is exhausting right and then so at this scale to be able to kind of Drive road map and do that based on what the best Partners the best creators out there are asking for and it's a lot of fun and you talk about hey like waking up and seeing what's going on the interesting thing is at our current scale the data isn't yet that helpful so it's really like I look at my inbox as like who do I need to respond to I'm our head of support I'm

our head of account management and the head of sales what nail do I have today that's going to pull us in a New Direction and how much time do you guys spend looking at the future with the engineers in terms of what they're building are you developing a long road map or are you more just going you know month to month because things are changing so fast at least start thinking three months out in roadmap like planning quarterly I don't think we've yet like nailed the every three months it's quarterly it's more just a running three month out at this point but we'll add some structure in the future I'd say plan but then plan to Pivot right host opens the announcement we accelerated a bunch of work on this kind of like

royalty enforcement concept building visualization of royalty enforcement into the core UI and then we also already was core on our roadmap but we also accelerated some of our core social build so that as we take a bigger bet on top Creator experience that we have a unique value prop to customers to hopefully keep them coming back so you know planning five things and choosing two to focus on it and again classic Founders dilemma all right before we wrap up I'm going to give you a couple of fun speed round questions coming at you but before that I just want to give you a chance to let our listeners know where they can find you online where they can find snag Solutions and anything that you want to tell them

about or this is the floor is yours to show creators are already thinking about about the problem around incentivization Etc so if you're the same way you farm an airdrop the same thing could apply to starting to think about honoring some of those Creator royalties obviously that doesn't apply to all communities but that could be like some light Alpha from the show and beyond that you can find snag Solutions on Twitter snag underscore Solutions online spagsolutions dot IO and my biggest message would be that we are capitalized to be here for a couple of years that's how we're subsidizing zero Feats for creators for the next several months and we're here to do exactly that help creators enforce royalties as I've said you know a couple times today so I would love to chat about how we can help and

interact variety of ways we build around custom requirements so always looking to chat and learn from folks in the space awesome I love it okay quick speed round couple questions coming at you first question what's an nft you'll never sell my crypto bunk which one do you have oh God name dyslexic here seven seven one eight one seven one eight one cool awesome something you bought recently for under a hundred dollars that brings you Joy doesn't have to be web 3 yeah it could be something else I'm just trying to think because I live in San Francisco and everything's over a hundred dollars here wow there's an in and out a half mile for me that brings me Joyce I'll go

with that that's cool we don't have it in and out in Canada so I'm jealous someday soon I hope so I hope so I don't know I don't know why not okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it that's super topic but support Ukraine uh I don't have any thesis that scales to a billion users for web 3 right now are not that many people are paying attention to us quite yet so let's use the ad real estate well yeah well said well said a true humanitarian Zach this has been a pleasure thanks so much for the time yeah really appreciate having you on the show great great speaking today Jay thanks so much for listening in

everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one