What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
Today, I'm finally doing it.
I'm doing an episode on cryptocurrencies, specifically NFTs.
This will actually be, hopefully, one of many episodes I do on cryptocurrency, because I've
got to admit, I'm pretty hooked.
A few weeks ago, I started looking into things, and I was very skeptical.
I thought NFTs were kind of BS.
I thought it was a fad.
Today, I'm not so sure.
I read a lot.
I've spoken to a lot of people.
I bought a few NFTs on my own, and I am convinced that there's a possibility that NFTs could
be the future of the web, or part of it anyway.
So to talk about this with me, I brought on a couple of friends.
But before we jump into the episode, I just want to say that nothing contained in this
episode is financial advice.
Do not take what we're saying as advice to go out and buy a bunch of crypto.
Do your own research.
This episode is for entertainment purposes only.
Enjoy.
Why don't we start with introducing both of you guys to the audience?
I'm here with Heaton Shah.
Why don't each of you guys give us a couple of sentences on what you guys are doing in
the NFT space.
Hey, do you want to go first?
Sure.
Yeah.
I've been dabbling with NFTs for a while.
I kind of own a few on the Ethereum chain, and I've been experimenting a little bit more
on the DSO chain, which is kind of a new layer one chain, which is more aimed at the social
media, decentralized social media platforms.
And they've integrated both community and NFTs into one platform itself.
So that's really where a lot of my interest is.
Heaton, what's up with you?
Yeah.
I have over 1,000, if I count them, across all the chains, multiple ones.
My background on this, I'm a founder.
All this I do for fun.
So I have multiple businesses, one I'm very focused on, which is a funded business.
It's a startup.
So for anything but funded profit is what I would call it.
But what I mean by this is all of crypto.
How much money would you say you've made by buying and selling NFTs?
Is this like a lucrative thing to do?
DeFi is a very lucrative thing.
NFTs are very lucrative thing.
Am I saying it's easy?
No.
If I were to tell anyone how to make money, like level one, buy the coins.
Just buy like 100 bucks a week.
Do something.
Buy Ethereum, buy Bitcoin, buy Solana, do some research, figure out the ones you want
to buy.
But if you just want a high level, buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, buy like 100 bucks a week, whatever
you can afford.
Buy it on a Monday.
Monday is usually when the market's down on average.
And just keep doing that.
And then eventually, you'll either make money or you'll lose it all.
But it doesn't matter.
You bought 100 bucks a week.
If you have $5,000 a year to spend on that, what's the big deal, right?
50 bucks here, 50 bucks there.
In a Coinbase account, the proper regular Coinbase account, and you can do that.
They give you the features to do that.
You want to do it with Robinhood, do it with Robinhood.
They give you the features to do that too, right?
I suggest Coinbase because you get to own it and Ray Robin hasn't figured out their
wallet crap.
But again, might be too much detail for people.
That's level one.
Level two is a very hard gate.
But level two is decentralized finance, which means you buy the token and then you do what
you call stake it, which is give it to them and let them give you interest.
And them meaning whatever chain and exchange, it gets a little, not a little, it's very
complex if you try to wrap your head around it.
So don't be scared, read up a lot on it.
But start with level one.
I don't see why everyone doesn't do level one.
You don't put 10 bucks a week, put 10 bucks a week, put 100 bucks a week, great.
You want to put $10,000 a week, great.
Just do that.
Why would it chew?
It's there for you, right?
The number goes up.
Anyway, then level three would be somewhere between, well, not somewhere, but it's basically
NFTs.
It's way more complicated, right?
But yes, you can make money, but you can also lose a lot of money.
I have a couple of friends now in the space.
One of them is 23 years old.
He's a systems engineer in Utah, and he made half a million dollars this year trading NFTs.
And his job probably pays him, I don't know, $100K.
I haven't asked him.
He made half a million dollars this year trading NFTs because he just got smart about it and
got into it, right?
So like you can't, and he's 23.
I'm 40.
You can't deny this.
This is what's happening, right?
And yes, there's Ponzi to it, there's scams to it, all that.
I mean, if someone asks me, what is all this?
Yes, it is a giant Ponzi scheme just like money.
And if you don't understand that, money's like that, I'm sorry.
Also stock markets, giant Ponzi scheme just like money.
So we're just able to do this in a way that's like all over the place and everywhere, right?
And like, it's everywhere around you.
I mean, look, at the end of the day, we're humans and all this shit's made up anyway.
So we take a lot of people are like, oh, this is bad or this is this, I'm like, wait, wait,
hold on.
You already played that game when you go buy money, you buy stuff at the groceries and
pay tax and stuff, right?
So anyway, that's why.
But people are used to it.
It doesn't look like a game to them.
It looks super normal.
And the reason I wanted to bring like both of you on is because you're both founders.
You both have full time startups working on.
I have the same thing.
We're all sort of dabbling on the side with NFTs.
And it took me like a while to get to this point.
Like six months ago, if you'd told me to look at NFTs, I would have told you like, absolutely
not.
I don't care.
This seems like a scam.
This seems like a waste of time.
There's just a lot of reasons I think that founders have to just say, I'm focused on
my business.
I don't care about this crypto stuff.
For me, I think it's a little tricky to understand what NFTs are at first, because they lie on
this bedrock of a lot more complex tokens and crypto and blockchains you need to understand.
It's a little hard to see, I think, why they're even new or useful compared to technology
we already have on the internet.
It can be hard to understand whether or not these are just a passing fad or they're worth
investing your time and money into.
It can be hard to understand how to make actual use of them in a business.
And so I kind of want to toss it to you guys, was there ever a time where you were skeptics
about NFTs, maybe Mubs will start with you, and how did you overcome that skepticism?
What was that joke?
Yeah, I mean, I think for me fundamentally, though, it's like it's the next evolution
of what we've been, the sort of train that we've been on, right?
Everybody was like, first it was like, oh, the internet's just a fad.
Who's going to get online and spend their life online?
And then it was like, e-commerce is a fad.
People want to walk into a store and see what's on the shelves.
They don't want to actually buy stuff online, and now we're buying stuff online.
This is just the next evolution of that.
So that's what got me interested initially is like, Web 3 is the evolution of how we
host and we do infrastructure kind of online.
Like, it used to be a server that we had to buy, then it was like, then it was AWS somewhere
and now it's Web 3, now it's just kind of hosted in the cloud, but it's not even a cloud
that we own or rent or anything like that.
It's just in the cloud and the cloud just runs sort of our applications and stuff like
that.
So it's the next evolution, I think.
So that fundamentally is kind of what has me interested and why I think it's the future.
Yeah, I think this is a good point to talk about some of the underlying technology, because
what you're saying is really interesting, which is that we have been able to put our
websites and our data and host all the stuff we create online in the cloud, so to speak.
But really it's just in like Amazon servers or Google servers or some centralized servers
that some big company owns somewhere.
And the downside to that is if they don't like what you're doing, they can take it off,
right?
If they don't like porn and they want to be the moral police and you are a porn star with
your porn website or something, they can just delete you or block your access and like there's
nothing you can do because it's not really in the cloud, it's on their servers.
Whereas with the blockchain, what a blockchain is, is it's a decentralized ledger or you
can think of it as like a decentralized database.
So instead of existing on one computer somewhere in the internet, it exists across hundreds
or thousands of millions of computers.
And no one computer has any control over all of it.
Like everybody's doing a lot of computationally expensive work to keep each other in sync.
And so essentially, it really is in the cloud, like no one owns it, no one can delete it.
The whole network agrees that what you put in the blockchain is in the blockchain.
And once it's there, it's there for good.
And that's an entirely different technology to build on top of.
It's like for the first time, we're actually building things in this mystical place called
the internet rather than just on like, you know, one company's computers somewhere.
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Mubs, but I think that's just kind of the background
technology that you're talking about.
Then you get to NFTs, which are built on top of that.
Why aren't you skeptical about NFTs or are you skeptical about NFTs?
Like why are you dabbling in this space?
In terms of NFTs, I think, I think kind of heats in here to sort of nail on the head.
The entire thing's a scam, and as long as you can understand how to work your way around
the scam and kind of exist within the sort of rules of the scam, everybody's happy.
And the sort of hard part is just like identifying which are the least scammy bits of it.
And so because, yeah, I mean, because anybody can take your money and walk away at any point,
right?
That's the thing you got to understand with kind of NFTs is like, I've sold you my picture
of an ape and now I can just walk away.
But if you find the right person who's selling you that JPEG or who's creating that thing
at the beginning, who's the least scammy of all the other ones out there, at least it's
going to have some legs.
And the same is true of all these things, right?
You could have, in the 70s, you could have gone and bought a pay-to-max player to play
all your awesome movies.
And then the next year, it was like, well, everybody's got to have EHS now.
Somebody bought all of this, all their favorite movies, which now they can't watch ever again.
And so, yeah, all of this stuff has been happening forever.
And I think we just kind of forget that these things have been happening forever.
They're just happening online and a lot faster now.
And to some degree, you just have to accept the fact that sometimes things fail and sometimes
people try and scam you.
But ultimately what you're doing is trying to play and enjoy yourself while you're kind
of playing along as well.
The way I look at it now, and this wasn't the same six months ago, is these projects,
these NFT projects are all startups.
And as Mub said, it's the people building them, the founders, at first that matter.
And probably for the long haul, and one of the hardest pieces of it is they have to build
a community.
That's it.
And so this is like startups on steroids because the speed and pace is incredible.
The amount of innovation I saw, literal innovation, way faster than any startup category I've
ever seen.
But at the end of the day, it's a startup and you have to believe in their roadmap.
And roadmaps are a big deal.
The Discord communities are a big deal.
I wouldn't tell anybody today, hey, go invest your time in NFTs.
I think it's very tough to get into NFTs unless you're willing to spend a lot of time.
One example I'll give is Gary Vee gave advice a while ago, but he's basically like, do 100
hours of research on a project.
And I was double-minded because I'm like, okay, I got you.
I mean, yeah, do your research.
And DYOR is a thing in the industry where you just say, do your own research.
And they also say NFA, not financial advice.
But what I was going to say is I day trade it on Robinhood because I wanted to understand
the psychology.
And what it is at the end of the day, people get high watching number go up.
They get high on it.
They get high when they go to their favorite NFT project, or some random one, and people
are buying every minute.
And then they think something's going down.
So then they go ape in as they call it, which means they go buy a bunch of them.
That's what aping in means, just to give you guys some terminology, everyone listening,
give you folks terminology.
So anyway, there's a lot to talk about.
I try to keep things as simple as possible.
We're not going to, I hope we're not going to get too complex into the chains and all
this crap because...
No, no, no, no.
Let's dial it back up, actually.
Let's get simpler for a second because, I mean, a lot of people listening will be like,
what the hell did he just say?
What did he just say?
What the hell is an NFT?
NFT, I come at it from a different angle than I think both of you.
NFT, very basic.
It's a non-fungible token.
It's essentially digital property.
And what I mean by that is, think about the opposite.
Think about fungible tokens.
So Bitcoin, Ethereum, these are fungible tokens.
They exist on the blockchain, which I mentioned earlier, which is essentially just a decentralized
ledger.
What is a ledger?
Ledger is just something that tracks transactions.
And these transactions and blockchains usually occur in tokens.
And so these tokens are fungible, which means you don't really care about any individual
token.
You just care how many tokens there are.
You don't care which Bitcoin somebody has in their account.
You just care that they have this many Bitcoin.
Or if you go to the bank, they don't care which $100 you've deposited.
They just care that you deposited $100.
And when you go to withdraw that $100, they're not going to give you back the exact same
bills you deposited because you don't care they're fungible.
A non-fungible token is different.
Non-fungible means each individual one is its own distinct thing and it matters.
Like for example, if you drop your kids off at daycare, you don't just say, hey, I dropped
off three kids.
Give me any three kids back.
Like you want your exact kids, like your kids are non-fungible.
They matter.
It matters which kids you get back from the daycare center.
And so in a way, like fungible tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum represent digital currency.
They're just like dollars.
It doesn't matter what they are.
But non-fungible tokens represent digital items.
Every one is individual, just like real world items, just like my car is not the same as
your car and my kids are not the same as your kids.
My desk is not the same as your desk.
And so now what does this enable?
Well, now we have this new situation where we can do more than just store Bitcoin and
other forms of digital money in the blockchain.
Now we can store digital items.
And as far as I can tell, like the killer use case for this right now is people creating
digital items in the form of art and collectibles.
And this is what the two of you guys are speculating on.
It's what people are buying and holding and selling, et cetera.
And people are obviously going like so crazy over this that it's like made headlines all
year long.
Like it came on my radar earlier this year when somebody sold a piece of digital art
for $70 million.
And I was like, what the hell?
This is like, obviously a scam.
Who's going to pay $70 million for a piece of digital art?
And I kind of missed the boat because he didn't look into it.
I didn't look into the underlying technology.
I just thought this doesn't make any sense.
It's stupid.
Like even if there is now a market for digital art and collectibles, like that's not important
to me because it has no real effect on the world outside of that, right?
Like there was a market for like baseball cards and Pokemon cards and Beanie babies
in the 1990s.
But like that had no effect on anything else.
Like it didn't affect the internet.
It didn't affect any real business.
It was kind of a self-contained thing.
And I assumed that NFTs would be the same.
But I think the reality and what's got me really intrigued now, what helped me get over
my skepticism is understanding the underlying technology and understanding that no, a digital
item can be anything.
And we're just in the very early days where we're not really sure what digital property
should be.
So if you think of like real world property, it's really obvious why real world property
is useful.
You can own it.
You can move it around.
You can transport it.
Like I can buy a hat and then take that hat to my friend's house and show it to them and
hang that hat on my wall or put it on my head and show it off to people or sell it or
trade it because it's physical property.
But digital property traditionally like hasn't had this kind of functionality.
Like if I create a tweet, you know, that's digital property, but like it's kind of shitty
digital property.
Like it sits inside Twitter's database.
I can't take it with me anywhere.
I can't sell it.
I can't trade it.
They can cut me off from it.
It's really just not that useful.
No digital property really has ever been that useful.
And so we never even talk about digital property.
But now that we have NFTs, which can represent digital property on the blockchain, like NFTs
are real digital property to have all of these kind of cool things that real world property
can have.
Now you can own it because it's in your blockchain wallet.
In fact, I like to think of it as a backpack because a wallet is something that you carry
on money.
But now on the blockchain, you can carry on items too.
So you can put NFTs in your digital sort of blockchain backpack and you can carry that
with you wherever you want and you own it.
Nobody can delete it.
Now Twitter can't say, oh, we don't like the way you've been tweeting, so we're gonna delete
your tweets.
No, it's in your backpack.
No one can do anything and you can take it with you from place to place.
It's portable.
Just like a real world item.
Now you can take, you know, you can sign up for some other website or app or game.
And when you log in, you can show them your digital backpack and they can see all the
items in there.
They can see all of the uploads you've gotten on Reddit or all the tweets you've tweeted
on Twitter or all the emails you've gotten on Gmail or whatever you want to show them.
And then they can represent those digital assets inside their app or their website or
their game if they choose to do so.
And that's not something that's ever really been possible on the internet before.
Like it enables a degree of connectivity that is pretty revolutionary.
And it's really hard to understand like or even predict like where this is gonna go.
Like what are the actual use cases?
What kinds of things are going to be represented as digital property and, you know, what kinds
of new apps and new websites are we going to see as a result of this being a possibility?
And so I'm wondering like what you guys think about this vision because I talked to you
guys.
You guys are mostly on like this art and collectible speculation side of things and I guess mobs
are like this sort of social networking side of things.
But does this view, does this vision of digital property resonate with you?
Does it make any sense and does it seem like it's likely to be how things turn out?
I think that's still a long ways away, but maybe not that long, it's still a ways away.
But I mean, it's a trend that started already.
Like you've seen things like Fortnite and League of Legends and stuff where you can
buy skins and power ups and pets that follow you around while you're playing those things.
And the big problem with those things is that whatever you buy is locked into that platform,
right?
If you're asking an inside League of Legends, the only place I can see, the only place I
can do anything with it is inside of League of Legends.
If I buy something in Fortnite, the only place I can use it is in Fortnite.
If I buy something in Minecraft, it's only in kind of Minecraft.
And I think that's where the sort of technology of NFT is having this hedger that we can put
assets onto and we can access them from anywhere kind of enables us to open up the world a
little bit where if I build a game, I can now use anybody's NFT inside of my own platform
because it's available for public on the sort of ledger with an open API that kind of anybody
can access as well.
So I think that technology is all there.
I think how far away are we from a AAA rated game enabling that?
We're probably a ways away from that, but the sort of indie makers are out there working
on this stuff and will those indies become true flavor of hated games at some point?
Yeah, at some point, I think some people kind of spark and kind of take off and then kind
of everybody else will have to follow along as well.
This point you made about the skins, like you're playing Fortnite, you get a skin.
It's cool.
You can use it in Fortnite.
You can't take it anywhere with you.
I think that illustrates my point.
Like in the real world, imagine if you go to IKEA, you buy a sofa and then you can't
take it home.
And they're like, oh, we got your sofa, but you got to come here if you want to sit on
it, right?
That's how digital property works.
It's all siloed.
And if the real world worked that way, nobody would create sofas or any of the other goods
that we...
Because it just wouldn't be that useful.
And it's the same as what you said with like, if you make a tweet on Twitter, like you make
a post on Twitter, it's locked inside of their platform inside.
They control who has access to your tweet with Twitter APIs.
That's one of the reasons I'm interested in DSO.
And decentralized is now I can make a post.
It's now public on the DSO blockchain.
If anybody wants to access all the things that I've posted, they can because it's public.
It's there and they can access it, they can analyze it, do whatever they want with it.
And it opens up the social media now to kind of lots more things as well.
So yeah, not just NFTs, but yeah, just moving everything onto like a public chain where
everybody can access everything and it's not locked behind somebody's paywall or anything
like that.
I think, again, it's more than just NFTs, it's more than just images, it's more than
just art.
There's just so many things that if we can track who posted them onto Ledger, you know,
which key signed it and we can kind of track that and we can see when somebody sold it
to somebody else and you can follow that chain through of where it originated, you know,
what state it's in now, who owned it, how much they purchased it for, how much they
sold it for, all of that stuff, I think has huge implications to how e-commerce works,
how commerce works, not just in the sort of online world, but also it will start to impact
the sort of real world as well, just like we said, in terms of people buying the Constitution
now.
Eden, what do you think?
I mean, we're talking about things that go beyond art, that go beyond collectibles.
Obviously, you host like this sort of Twitter space where people will kind of, as far as
I'm aware, like pitching their NFT projects and communities and there's all this utility
and cool stuff in there.
Like I was in your room for like 10 minutes the other day and I had no idea what anybody
was talking about.
It just sounded like I had like stepped in the teleporter to the future for a minute
and it was crazy.
Where do you think things are going in the future?
I've been running weekly spaces that are about kind of NFTs and are really friendly to newcomers.
And that space you came in is, we called it a shill space because in the NFT space, every
time we would do one of those spaces and someone like you or whoever can come up, ask relatively
new basic questions and we would all answer them, that's one of the reasons I really like
the community.
I'm part of the lazy lions in the NFT there.
And the space you came into was a shill space and so it was specifically designed for anyone
that wanted to pitch their project and us giving feedback, very much like a shark tank
style thing.
I just wasn't as harsh because it was the first one and I just wanted to kind of play
around with the format a little bit and I think I got the format down but then there's
a couple other things I want to tweak and I'm just having fun.
It's just like startups pitching because these NFT projects are like startups.
So I think all the norms we have there will come into here for the moment.
But stepping back to your point, I don't actually think, I think you mentioned this maybe a
little bit differently, Cortland, but like NFTs and what we're doing today is a killer
use case.
No way.
The killer use case has to do with three things.
It has to do with ownership, which is what you mentioned completely.
You own it.
You own it.
Yeah, people can right click, save it and there's now a torrent like search engine for
finding them and saving them, whatever, right?
You still own it.
You can verify ownership.
So you are absolutely correct.
That is the core of this.
Without the blockchain, none of this would matter.
Exactly.
And I just want to interject here because I think this is what trips up a lot of people
with NFTs.
They think, oh, like, you know, it's all digital.
Can somebody just copy what you have?
Like if you have an NFT copy of a piece of art or NFT representation of an email or NFT
representation of like, I don't know, your college degree, couldn't somebody just take
a screenshot of that and now they own it too?
Like all of this is fake.
And it's actually it's not true.
That's not how it works.
That's how the real world works.
You know, if you have a driver's license, somebody can create a fake driver's license
that looks like yours and it's hard for anybody to distinguish.
Like if you have a degree, somebody could get a fake fake degree that looks like yours
or somebody could write a fake resume that looks like, you know, they went to a particular
school and it'd be really hard to tell.
But with NFTs, it's all digital.
And so like if I get an NFT copy of, let's say a tweet, anyone can look on the blockchain
and see that like it was actually Twitter who issued me that NFT.
And if anyone else wants to take a screenshot of my tweet or something or say they have,
you know, an NFT copy and they own my tweet, anybody could look at their item on the blockchain
and see like, actually, that didn't come from Twitter, like those aren't real.
And so NFTs really do allow ownership.
They really do allow you to put these items in your wallet on the blockchain and for people
to verify who it came from and see that it's actually real.
Like this art came from the artist, not from some random person.
And so they know it's actually yours.
So that's ownership.
The second thing is basically something that I think people, they kind of miss and you
guys said it in passing, but they miss this.
It's access.
So I'll give one example.
Des Brine, he's like a basketball player or something.
Maybe you guys know who he is, right?
And I only know him from the NFT kind of world and all that.
He has created an NFT that gives you access to basketball games, pregame stuff.
And more importantly, most importantly, his birthday parties every year.
There are human beings that don't give a crap about NFTs or crypto that would love to be
at Des Bryant's birthday party, correct?
That's access.
And then last but not least, the third vector here is sense of belonging.
And we cannot get that, like we cannot take that away from this equation.
But because these are communities that are being built, this is like what the internet
was made for.
This is like when I was eight years old and like trying to figure out the internet, CompuServe
and Prodigy and then AOL and then eventually BBSes that like got me excited.
The reason I'm into this has nothing to do with anything except sense of belonging.
I am noticing that I can make friends fast.
I mean, I have people almost half my age.
I could be their dad.
They even call me dad sometimes, right?
They literally call me dad.
They're like, that's dad or hey, dad.
Right?
I'm like, hey, what's up?
You know?
They could have been my kids.
Right?
Like my kids are 11 and seven, but this is true.
But I get to hang out with them.
And we have a common thing and it's ownership, access and a sense of belonging.
And I think you got to take this stuff from that lens.
Otherwise you're going to worry too much about what doesn't exist or what does exist or the
scams and all that when intellectually our ability to have ownership over digital property
is now like stamped.
It's done.
Like that tweet is your tweet if it was built in, if it was backed by the blockchain.
And I'm not saying that means that the tweet isn't yours today, but it's yours by name,
but it's not yours by ownership.
You're like renting it today, right?
Twitter owns it.
Twitter keeps it in their database.
They allow you to come and see it and access it and whatever, but they can cut you off
at any point in time.
They can tell you what you can and can't do with this tweet.
And for me, early on, I heard all of these arguments and they didn't click.
I was like, yeah, but nobody cares.
So what you're renting your tweets, like who gives a shit?
Like what's the upshot?
It doesn't really matter that much.
It's because it's not about tweets.
If you don't own it.
It's because it's not about tweets.
It's not about any of that.
And I know mubs is playing with some of those things.
Those are still so far away from anyone actually like giving a crap, right?
Except people like him, which is not a bad thing because you're the experimenter.
You're the early doctor.
I don't touch any of that right now because I'm like, eh, whatever.
Like this is going to take a while for mainstream to get there.
NFTs, they're coming in.
My friends asked me about it.
They want in on it.
I've exposed some people to it and said, hey, here's how you think about it, right?
That's a little different.
So I'm just waiting for that in a bunch of these other areas.
And I think it's going to be a while, but that's iteration.
Whatever the future ownership model is and the fact that you can take this stuff across
sites and all that stuff, that's, that's, that's what's up.
Yeah.
I think I need that.
That's the thing with tweets with, with me when it's not just tweets, like it could be
with posts on Facebook and Instagram and all those kinds of things.
But I think it has to do with who cares, right?
Like, like we said, like 90% of the people don't care because they're there to consume
the content.
It's the 10% who post the content.
Some of those people really care.
And some of those it's, it's important that it, that they really care as well.
Because at the end of the day, it goes, how do you make money from those tweets?
How do you make money from those people who are following you on Twitter and Instagram
and Facebook as well?
It's not just about the content.
It's about the community that you built on that platform.
And if Twitter can take down your posts, not only can they take down your posts, they can
also take away all of your following, all of your community as well.
And if you've built community and you know how hard it is to build community, you absolutely
want to fight as hard as you can to keep it.
Yep.
I think for me, one of the things that sort of pushed me over the edge was like sort of
these three principles that, that Heaton listed, ownership, access, sense of belonging, belong
to this community.
And in addition to that portability, I don't necessarily see a world in which people abandon
Twitter or current social networks and mass because they don't own their stuff.
I think for the most part, we're pretty much happy with it.
But I do see a world where people bottom up, start using new apps, new websites, new games
that have this cool, additional NFT based functionality as part of them that the incumbents
don't have.
And I can see a path and it's not a hundred percent guaranteed.
It might fail.
It might be disrupted.
It might go in some other direction, but I can see a path where, you know, two, three
years from now, companies like Twitter are like, you know what?
We're going to give you an NFT for every tweet that you've made.
Companies like Reddit are like, you know, we're going to give you an NFT for every badge,
for every upvote you get.
And essentially we create this world full of digital goods and digital property that
we can all carry around with us.
And that to me is pretty revolutionary in ways that are hard to even predict or describe.
Like if it was like 1993 right now and you're asking me like, what's what apps is the internet
going to lead to?
Like I couldn't have predicted Uber.
I couldn't have predicted Airbnb.
Like literally nobody could back then.
But it was pretty obvious that like the technology itself was crazy and would enable a lot.
I think you're right.
I mean, like just like just like with the Internet, just like with e-commerce, like
the supermarkets on the high street haven't gone away, they've changed and some of them
have because they couldn't compete.
But the local supermarket will always exist.
And I think it's the same with like Instagram and Twitter and Facebook or whatever.
You know, like those things are going to continue to exist because for the for a large amount
of the population, like you said, there's certain things that they just don't care about
and and whether it's going to be where wherever the popular people are posting, that's where
they will be because they want to consume their content because they want to engage
with that particular person.
And since you've got such a large active user base already, that's where a large part of
the people will continue to kind of interact with.
But just like you said, just like with Snapchat and TikTok, there was there was a new generation
of content creators.
There was a new, you know, they had this new idea about how to engage with their audience
and know that we can't do this on on the platforms that exist already.
We're going to do it on this new platform.
I think this is the same with with kind of NFTs and things like that or digital assets.
There's going to be a new class of application, a new class of entertainment that involves
those NFTs that you can't do in the existing platforms.
I just tweeted the other day, one of my favorite articles was published in Newsweek magazine
in 1995.
And there was this guy making these predictions about the Internet or specifically, he was
sort of arguing against predictions of what the Internet would do.
And he was wrong on like every count, like he could have made billions of dollars betting
for every single thing this guy bet against.
He says, after two decades online, I'm perplexed.
I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community.
Internet visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers and interactive libraries and multimedia
classrooms.
They speak of electric town meetings and virtual communities.
Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems baloney.
Do computer pundits lack all common sense?
And it's crazy to go back and read this because like this guy was a computer expert like he
had already been on the Internet for 20 years by the time he wrote this piece, which is
way before anybody else was and even he couldn't see the trends like everything he predicted
was wrong.
Like we do have telecommuting workers.
We do have Wikipedia.
We do have virtual communities, e-commerce.
It's not e-commerce that's dying.
It's malls that are dying.
And so I think it just goes to show that even if you're very savvy, these future predictions
that are extremely accurate might look inaccurate at the time because they mean you have to
envision a world that's very different than the world that you live in.
And that's hard to do.
It's really easy to argue against.
And so I'm curious what you guys have as sort of your wildest futuristic predictions for
NFTs.
Like what do you see digital property enabling in the future that might seem a little bit
crazy in the world of today?
I mean, me personally, I mean, I think some of the things we've already touched on and
just like the ownership of the digital assets in the video game industry is an absolute
certainty in my mind.
I mean, like we've kind of already seen it with kind of Ax infinity where, you know,
people are buying things and using them on, you know, using NFTs kind of online.
I think that trend is something that will continue a long way.
I also think things like sports collectibles and things that again, it's a trend that's
already started.
You can buy kind of NBA shots and things like that.
You know, like people are already buying sports collectibles as NFTs already.
So that's that's a trend I think that will absolutely continue as well.
It's a natural extension of one because those assets are actually digital anyway.
Like when you want to see what your favorite athlete did, that is a piece of digital asset
anyway.
So owning it online and proving that you own it just makes all the sense in the world.
Yeah.
The digital collection thing to me is so interesting because it's like for whatever reason, I found
it unconvincing that it would stay and I wouldn't bet against it.
But it seems to me like there's this market of buyers, this market of sellers and you
can make a lot of money if you like know your way around and you know what's going on.
But also it doesn't seem to me like there's any like permanent infrastructure being developed
that can't be sort of unraveled.
If all the hype next year goes to a particular like a different project or different sort
of activity, will people keep will there still be a market to sell digital art for 70 million
dollars?
Like, I don't know.
Whereas I know that like even if people don't get people, if some new project comes out
next year, HTML isn't going anywhere because we have this giant infrastructure websites
built on HTML.
And so I guess what my question for you is like, how do you know this won't just like
unravel?
How do you know that people keep collecting ultimately depends on what they're buying,
right?
People are still gonna be following the NFL next year and the year after that in the next
hundred years, probably they're going to be following the NBA for the next year.
Now whether it moves from the Ethereum chain to Solana to some other chain, I have no freaking
clue of what's going to happen with that.
But it's the it's the thing that you're buying, which is the important bit, not that the fact
that you're buying it on Ethereum or Solana.
I mean, the fact that it's on a public chain actually gives me more confidence because
if the NBA wanted to move from Ethereum to Solana, they can.
There's nothing stopping them, right?
Like all of the the sort of ledger is already public.
If they want to migrate from one to another, you know, had they had they used some Microsoft
technology, could they do the same thing?
Maybe, but maybe not right?
Like it it depends on the technology versus we know with the public ledger, we know with
the part if somebody wants to move from from something, if they want to fork the chain
even and start a new chain, it's all possible.
So that like that vendor lock in that used to happen in a lot of enterprise is and things
like that just isn't there anymore.
But so I think ultimately, like you said, though, it still depends on what you're what
you're buying.
Are people still being buying apes next year?
I have no freaking clue, but but if you're good, but you're talking about things that
people care about things like the the NBA, the NFL, NHL, English English Premier League
Soccer, the World Cup, like those kind of assets that people really care about, then
then, yes, they will continue to purchase them every year because people have been doing
for 100 years.
So it's not going to stop just because it's online now.
Art not going anywhere.
Sports not going anywhere.
Collectibles not going anywhere.
The technology might change.
It might be cards.
It might be NFTs, might be on Ethereum, might be on some other blockchain, but the actual
things people are collecting aren't going anywhere.
I think I buy that.
That makes sense to me.
Keaton, what's an example of an NFT project that you've seen that to you sort of embodies
like the what the technology is capable of?
Yeah, I don't like to think about the future from a prediction standpoint, because like
people get really dreamy when you start doing that.
And I don't like to dream like in that.
I like my dreams to be real fantasies, not this kind of stuff.
If I were to make a prediction, right, I know I just said I don't like to, but if I were
to make one, because, you know, I want to get NFTs, all tickets will have to be NFTs
because then you'll have proof that you went there.
It will be a stub you throw away or save in some random corner house and it'll be on the
blockchain because it has to be.
And my best example of that is Mark Cuban Cuban is totally on top of this, accepting
Dogecoin and just like getting on it.
And he's a big crypto junkie, from what I can tell.
If you follow his wallets around and stuff, not that I do, but other people do.
And then I see the tweets.
He's him and his team.
It's not just him.
It's his team are heavy into this.
I wouldn't say that like they understand everything because like I've spent some time with people
that have spent time with them, but they're trying really hard to figure this stuff out.
And more importantly, he's pushing it forward with things he can control, not just like
going and investing.
He's trying to make, you know, everything kind of crypto friendly, eventually crypto
first.
And like, if you asked me about like Web 2.0 back in the day, or you asked me about Facebook
apps back in the day to say, predict the future, I don't know, look, nobody thinks about Facebook
apps anymore.
So the NFT products are the Facebook apps phase, right?
It might all disappear.
You're right.
It might.
I don't think it will.
Facebook apps, I said disappeared.
But here's the thing.
The first phase of Facebook apps was poking and throwing sheeps.
The second phase was people making quiz makers, right?
For everyone to make quizzes and there's more utility there for the individual.
And then the third phase for everyone that got to there, not many companies, because
you know, it is Facebook and they own the platform, was like Spotify.
Would Spotify be where it is today without Facebook?
Hell no, is what I would say.
And so we're just in the phase of somewhere in between throwing sheep and quiz makers.
Right.
And then we'll get to that Spotify and yeah, it'll dwindle down.
But these are all startup projects just like back in the day.
Those are all startup projects.
And like, it's just cyclical and you could find the patterns, but nobody knows what the
sequence is or what's going to happen next.
But tickets and access, get those three vectors, right, that I really think is what this stuff's
all about.
I think tickets are super cool.
And what you mentioned was like, it's not just like, because the sort of skeptical reply
would be, can we already do tickets without the blockchain?
Like, do we really need this?
And it's like, well, we don't need this, but they're better tickets, right?
It's hard to see how some of these cases are kind of obvious, but some of the use cases
are sort of unimaginable.
And that's what gets me excited about all this stuff.
Like, why not turn your assets into NFTs if you can, and then other people can use them
and connect to them and like however they want in so many creative ways that you might
even be able to imagine today that they can't do with a normal paper tape.
Let's just take an insane scenario, and I'm not into sports, but I can understand it psychologically
very well.
I have lots of friends that are into it, right?
Let's say you got to take it to a game, it was digitized, right?
So now you have, there's a ledger, it's yours, just however way you want to look at it.
That game was amazing.
Ten years from now, that brand can throw a party for everyone that was at that game.
Because the game was so epic.
Maybe someone's retiring.
You could get all of those people that were there that had that shared experience back
ten years from now.
You cannot do that today.
There's no ledger.
I don't know who was at the game.
Even the arena doesn't know who was at the game.
That's an insane one.
Like I said, I don't like to dream, but like linearly, if you think linearly, that just
makes perfect sense, right?
It's a crazy idea, but it's going to happen some form of that kind of like revisiting
the past, right, bringing it back, having events related to the fact that there was
an event and something epic happened.
And then think about it.
People are going to want to be more at the games because of that opportunity.
You know, it's done.
Like that's marketing, right?
That's what people want.
Consumers are happy.
The brands are happy.
That's where things are going.
That's why this stuff's exciting.
Not because of all this stuff that's happening today alone, but because of all these dots
that you can see that are just like kind of obvious.
It's an enabling technology.
That's what it boils down to.
Yeah, I think up till now we have to rely on other people to be able to prove things,
right?
Like we have to be able to rely on the NFL or the arena or Pisa or MasterCard to say,
look, I bought that ticket to that game.
Here's my receipt from my statement 10 years ago, which I don't keep anymore.
So we had to rely on people to keep those records and then give us access to those records.
And I'm not, you know, there's no conspiracy theory here.
It's just like, why, why, why do people have my records?
And I don't really care if they have my records.
I don't, I don't really, the only thing I care about is why can't I access my records?
If they have them, why can't I access them?
And I think that's what the ledger and the public ledger allows us to do.
Yeah, it's very cool that I put that thing on the ledger and I can then access it whenever
I want to at any point in sort of in sort of in the future, I can access it.
And then obviously the sort of nice thing is, is that if I put something on there, I
can also sell it to somebody else as well.
And then I can make money from selling it to somebody else as well.
And that's the other part of this in terms of like the creator economy in terms of, you
know, if I do make a piece of art that I sell every time it sells in the future, I can make
some money from that as well.
Like that's the, that's the one thing about art right now that really, I think people
do not really pay enough attention to is like, if I, if I actually painted a painting right
now and I sold it to somebody else, that's the only time I can really make any money
from it.
Is like when I sell it to somebody else with NFTs, I can sell it to somebody.
Somebody can sell it to somebody else and I'm, and I can make a percentage.
They can sell it to somebody else and I'll still make a percentage and they sell somebody
else and I'll still make a percentage.
Like I sold, I did a small test, a very small 23 NFT collection run just to test how NFTs
work.
But I've made more money in secondary sales than I made for the initial sales of the NFTs
in the first place.
And I think that from a creator economy, from a, from a founder, from a creator standpoint,
from a maker hack, indie hacker standpoint, is something that I think is really interesting
that people aren't, aren't paying enough attention to in terms of like, royalties thing for when
some people used to act in Hollywood movies and do stuff for TV and stuff.
But it's opened that kind of opportunity up now to everybody on the planet.
You don't have to be a member of SAG and all of those kinds of things and then go act in
a big Hollywood movie to be able to get that residual income anymore.
Anybody can do that now.
And I think that to me is really interesting as well.
And I think what you're highlighting here, Mubs, is something that's really important,
which is that like, let's say you're an app developer and you're of course building an
app that has all sorts of digital items in it.
There's a lot of advantages to turning those digital items into NFTs and storing them on
the blockchain for your users.
You sort of unlock a bunch of functionality that you don't have to code manually because
the blockchain has that functionality embedded.
For example, you get the sort of long lasting nature where these items you put on the blockchain
are never going to disappear.
They're not disposable like paper goods.
If you give your users an NFT ticket, they're not going to throw it in the trash can.
It's always going to be there.
It's always going to be accessible.
And you're always going to be able to go back to that stuff later.
And plus that stuff will outlive your company.
Like your company might die and go under, but your users will still have the assets
that you gave them as NFTs.
And so they don't have to worry about losing their data just because you're using your
company and your company is sort of a risky bet, which is really cool.
Plus the items you put on the blockchain as NFTs are portable because the blockchain is
publicly accessible.
So any other website or app or game can look inside your user's wallets and they can see
the NFTs that you've given them and they can use them, they can remix them, they can incorporate
them into their own website or app or game.
And you don't have to like build some sort of proprietary API to make that happen.
You don't have to teach people your API.
You don't have to sort of evangelize your API.
It automatically happens.
Everybody can connect to the blockchain and see the items that you've created.
And then I think the third thing is you get this sort of marketplace where any item you
put in your user's wallets, they can trade and they can sell and they can, you know,
people can buy from each other.
And that's super cool because it means you don't have to like build some sort of marketplace
and hope people use the marketplace to trade the items that you're assigning to your users.
Like it just automatically happens because it's on a blockchain.
And on top of that, like it can happen in ways that are more complex than we see with
real world items.
So what you're highlighting is with real world items, like you sell an item once, you get
the money and that's it.
But on the blockchain with NFTs, you can sort of program them to programmable.
And so you can say, hey, I want us the percentage of every sale in perpetuity.
You know, if I'm like a starving artist right now, my art might not be worth that much.
And so I'll sell it for cheap.
But like, if I become super world famous, you know, in a hundred years or in 10 years,
you know, some timescale, I'm still alive, my art might be worth a ton.
And I don't want to be like, feel like I get cheated out of my early sales.
So I want like 10% of every additional sale.
And so when my art starts selling for millions, I want to be able to make millions.
And like, that's really cool.
Like you can't do that with physical goods today.
And so NFTs have all these advantages over sort of siloed digital goods that live inside
a database by themselves and over physical goods as well.
And I think, you know, there's just kind of this trend with the web, it's just, it's increasingly
about money.
You know, like the first version of the web in the 90s was about information.
I think it was about finding information.
Yahoo was a directory of every website and media companies are coming online.
And then Google came online and allows you to search every website and find information.
And it was really cool.
But then Web 2.0 enabled connection.
So Facebook and social networks allowed us to connect to the people that we know about.
And that eventually morphed into status.
Once you have connections with enough people, you kind of want to see who's on the top of
the hierarchy, who's the most popular, who's the most trustworthy.
And so Instagram and Facebook had us all sort of competing for like hearts and likes and
followers.
And I think Web 3.0 is all about money, which is the most powerful force of these three.
Like if money doesn't motivate people, like what does?
And so, you know, I was listening to Chris Dixon on Tim Ferriss' podcast talk about crypto
projects and how often they don't even have to really market themselves because their
early users sort of are rewarded in tokens.
All of the early users basically become investors and these tokens are worth money, similar
to people buying NFTs that often become worth money.
And that turns them into evangelists, because not only do they enjoy the product itself,
but they see an avenue for them to make a lot of money by evangelizing the product and
telling others about it.
So the value of their NFTs or their tokens goes up.
And so it's just a crazy world.
And I think by embracing NFTs, you just get a lot of stuff that you wouldn't get otherwise
as an app developer.
I want to dig one level deeper on what Chris Dixon said.
I think he's kind of wrong.
It's not very wrong.
And it's because of one specific thing, which is community.
So basically, like he's wrong.
The marketing they do is just not traditional marketing.
It's community marketing.
So it's in their discourse.
And I mean, like as many as I could find.
And I know why he said that.
He's wrong, though.
Like the way they're doing marketing is community marketing.
Yeah, it's different.
And it's Twitter marketing, too.
It's not like accident that there's all these memes about these crypto coins, right?
That's like somebody doing good community management.
And yes, there are a lot of community members that will just do that stuff on their own,
but they'll do it because they're bought in.
How do they get bought in?
You're sending messages in Discord.
You have an announcements channel.
You have a news channel.
It's like a whole other layer of marketing.
But I'm a marketer first, right?
So I always take that lens and say, wait, where is the marketing?
Not there is no marketing, right?
So that's absolutely incorrect.
And the reason I say that is not to prove it right or wrong.
It doesn't matter.
But to say that the marketing that has to happen on these things is so aligned with
the customer.
It's insane.
Because community does not like something.
It's not going to work.
I don't care how awesome it is.
I don't care how wonderful it is.
The only time that I saw such a tight feedback loop, whether it's NFTs or whatever, was Clubhouse.
Because in the early days of Clubhouse, Paul and Rohan, the founders, would get on these
like Clubhouse like rooms and just listen because half the time people were talking
about Clubhouse and all the issues with it or the interface or how much they loved it.
And it was like the biggest like, oh my God.
Like how much feedback are they getting?
I'm so jealous.
I can't get that kind of feedback.
I'm literal.
I was jealous.
I was like, damn, how do I create this loop for myself?
Right?
And then I saw NFTs and all this and I'm like, holy crap.
Like Discord is actually the marketing.
Twitter is the realization of that marketing, which is essentially the channel, right?
So it's almost like Discord is a medium.
Twitter is the channel and there's just a loop there.
And then the substance is the cryptocurrency, the NFT project or whatever.
And you're just playing with that.
And that's the model.
And it's a completely different model than what we've been used to in startups because
we don't have that velocity of feedback.
Maybe you do Cortland, which is like somewhere in between like normal startup and like Clubhouse
or these NFTs because you have a community, right?
And you manage it.
And I've seen you do all kinds of things where you get their feedback and like also you get
to tell them what you're thinking and they do that.
Because at all the NFT products, I mean, the best ones, they have voting mechanisms.
And then they make it so that, hey, what do you guys want to do?
Do we, should we do this or should we do that?
Right?
Like, and then they vote with emoji on the simplest level and on a more advanced level,
they've created a decentralized autonomous organization, which is essentially a governance
model in this space.
And they're basically jammed that into the NFT.
And the whole idea of that is we're voting by committee, frankly, I'm not saying that's
good or bad.
There's issues, major issues.
But that's the secondary system here on the blockchain that I think is going to flip a
lot more stuff upside down.
There might even be, if you want to go crazy with this, like sports teams that are just
doubts where even the players are able to make decisions.
This is going to take forever, but like, or a new game would have to be created.
But like, this is kind of the types of things that I'm seeing.
I think it's important to clarify, right?
This is not a no marketing type of thing, but yes, the financial incentive pulls people
in extremely fast.
The velocities there, the audiences there, even for the fact that we're in the hundreds
of thousands, maybe a couple million from a crypto DeFi standpoint.
And still there's so much speed and so much audience to grab that it is relatively easy
if you have a decent idea.
But then the community management is the marketing.
That's super tough.
And I'm only saying that because that's the aspect where if you want to think about the
future, you want to think about that stuff.
You want to think about how communities are formed and belonging is created and that ownership
is kind of oriented around that.
Yeah, I think it goes back to a little bit, you know, I mean, to some degree, what Chris
said is right in that in the traditional sense of marketing, yeah, none of these folks have
the there's no TV ads, there's no marketing in magazines that you don't see any of these
things kind of there.
But in but in the new sense, in the new Web three way of thinking, this sort of marketing,
the community is the marketing kind of at that point.
And I think there's an evolution of because the incentives align just kind of like you
said, this people promote it because it's in their it's in their best interest to promote
an asset that they own or kind of already as well.
The company doesn't have to go spend its own money to get more people to go purchase the
thing that people already hold the thing, want other people to go hold the thing as
well.
So that is that alignment of of kind of incentives that kind of make that possible.
Like the communities wouldn't do that in the old Web two world, you know, the reason that
those companies needed to go advertise to get people to go spend, you know, on their
website was because there was no reason for the community to that because they weren't
going to make any money, extra money out of that.
To me is also the sort of interesting thing with these NFTs like, yeah, I see people promote
a collection because they own two or three or four or whatever it is of that NFT.
But they're also trying to promote it to get other people to buy it, you know, to sweep
the floor and and do these kind of things because it raises the value of the assets
that they hold.
Right.
Like if the value wasn't being shared with the community, which is what's happening with
this kind of web free and NFT space, there would be no reason for them to go to that.
And people would have to go advertise and do those things.
And then you go back into the how do you fund all that stuff where you have to go with with
like some kind of venture capital.
And that's why the model has been kind of flipped on its head.
You know, people are funding and like like Heaton said, like this is the new startup
world.
Like people are funding their enterprises through an NFT sale.
Like people are going to venture capital to go raise money so they can build a video game.
People are selling an NFT, which is raising half a million dollars, two million dollars,
three million dollars in some cases so that they can build their video game.
Right.
And it's changing who owns it.
It's not some venture capital in Silicon Valley or L.A. or something who kind of owns the
sort of rights to this thing.
It's the people who want to play it who actually own the rights to it and will, because they
believe in it, they can actually share in the upside as well.
And I think that that to me is again, why it's getting interesting is it's it is changing
who owns what we're going to do for the next five or 10, 20, 100 years, right?
It's going to it's finally going to break the monopoly of there's like a handful of
companies that own all the media, all the video games, all the TV, you know, all the
all all the content that we consume and all the video games that we play are now going
to be controlled by the people that actually play them, which I think is really amazing.
Let's talk about how you can actually invest in this as a founder today or as anybody.
You mentioned you've got sort of like three levels, you know, number one, just buy tokens.
Number two, get into DeFi.
Number three, explore this crazy world of NFTs.
Is there any room as like a founder, like we're talking about people selling NFTs to
fund projects, etc.
If you're just a normal SaaS founder listening to this, like, is it too late?
Like, is there any way you can get into the NFT world and some is there any way to like
in any way relate that to your business?
And I think you do with the people like the perfect people to ask about this because you
both have SaaS companies you're running.
Like, is there any connection between this like fanciful world of NFTs and an actual
business you're running as a founder?
I mean, for me specifically, I mean, I'm interested in the whole DeFi space because it changes
the financial models of the world are going to change in terms of where do we go to borrow
money?
Where do we go to raise capital for enterprises and things like that?
Whether it's an NFT or a DeFi project, or you do something like an ICO at some point
or whatever.
You know, people already tried that.
And it's already, I mean, it's already worked in some cases and in other cases, they would
just fund these schemes.
But yeah.
Well, like to zoom out for a second, I mean, you're working on founder path, right?
I'm on your website now where bootstraps SaaS founders get capital.
So essentially, you come to founder path, you're like, I've got the SaaS business.
We're doing, you know, 35k and monthly recurring revenue, etc, fill out a few things.
And then you basically will give them money for funding.
Like, that's pretty revolutionary funding model.
And so like, it seems like that is something like there's got to be some end roads into
crypto there, like into DeFi, as you mentioned, or like, how does that play a part or does
it not?
No, it will absolutely play a part.
I mean, because right now, like we need capital to give to other people, right?
So we need access to a warehouse or, you know, somebody has to give us millions of dollars
that we can now put to work to, to kind of, to kind of lend to SaaS companies.
In a future DeFi world, people can stake their Ethereum and their Bitcoin with us.
And we can use that as funds that we can lend out, you know, like, we won't need to go find
a big endowment or a big pension fund or something like that, that is going to give us lots of
money to work to work, we can we can just get it from from all over the crypto space.
So that I mean, that's that's one of the reasons I got interested in to investigate the space
because I was like, at some point, the model will flip.
And so I need to know how that flip might happen so that I can position myself to be
able to kind of operate in whatever this new world is.
And I'm not sure we know what that is yet.
But it's but it's one of those things that we know, like I said, it's one of those inevitable
things that yes, there'll be some regulations from the SEC and the Federal Reserve and all
those kind of things in terms of what's allowed and what's not allowed.
And, you know, even Coinbase tried to do staking, but the SEC said, no, you can't do staking,
because we haven't told you what that means yet.
And so at some point, you know, all those things will be resolved.
People will will make sure what's allowed on kind of what's not.
Here's I'll tell you what I want to see with founder path.
Here's what I would like to see with with NFTs in particular.
If a founder goes to founder path, and they raise like, I don't know, what's like an average
amount of money somebody might get from founder path?
You go anywhere from 100,000 in anywhere from 100,000 higher.
Okay, someone someone raises 500k from founder path, right?
I want you guys to issue them an NFT that says they're part of the 500k club and just
put that in their crypto wallet.
You don't even care if they're going to use that for they just have representation that
they did that.
And then on any hackers, I want to be able to like look at someone's wallet when they
join and just show a little batch on their product.
This founder raised this much money from founder path or somebody goes through Y Combinator
I want YC to give them an NFT that says they are a YC alum.
And then on any hackers, I want to be able to see without any sort of API calls, any
sort of talking to YC whatsoever.
Oh, this is a verified YC founder.
Here's at the very least a badge that shows on their profile.
Maybe I automatically invite them to do AMAs.
Maybe they get posting privileges, etc.
Like, I would love to just see a world where almost everything is represented as an NFT.
And that tells me something about the identity of the people who come to my website because
they're bringing all of that data with them rather than that data being locked away like
in the founder path database where you know who's raised money from you, but they don't
take that with them.
Yeah, so this is one of the interesting things I was listening to some podcasts and talking
to Dharmesh Shah, who is the CTO of HubSpot.
And one of the things that he's really interested in doing is like he's like, I love and hate
LinkedIn because it's such a valuable set of information in terms of where people worked
and what they did and what the skills are.
He says, I love it, but I hate it because it's LinkedIn and they lock down everything.
You can't access any information.
The APIs are really horrible.
And to get access to all those things, you can't.
And he's like, I would love it if that was on the public chain.
Like if you could just put all of your history, the places that you work, the places that
all the skills that you've accumulated over the years, if you could get from somewhere
and a sort of NFT for each one of those skills that you had for all the places that you work
now if I can now like you could come from indie hack and say, who is this founder?
Or I could come from founder path and say, who is this person who wants to raise capital?
And if I could see that they've worked at all these different places and they have all
of these different skills and things like that, again, that would allow me to evaluate
who they are and to make specific offers kind of about the sort of tied around that kind
of stuff as well.
So I'd love to be able to do stuff like that.
It takes time to kind of, because those are all established industries and technologies
that are just going to, it's going to take time for them to wake up to what the new reality
is.
But I think we will, I think we'll work on it there at some point in your working on,
I believe, basically, I think it's like security or like sort of redundancy for file storage.
It's a cybersecurity tool.
So basically it helps people understand like all the documents that exist in their Google
workspace.
And I'm focused on that right now and who has access to that.
And they have no way to manage that Google admin or with any other tool.
If a company has like hundreds of millions of documents or tens of millions of documents
or simply pulls them all in and lets them find all the way down to like the first document
and who has access to it.
So this is basically designed to prevent leaks and stuff like that.
Because like some of the company like Stripe has thousands and thousands of employees.
We all have hundreds of documents like it's they probably have 100 million documents.
You guys probably are somewhere in the 100 million range, or maybe 50 if I were to be
too nice.
But it's a document heavy culture.
And so we just make sure that you know, the gates to that content are closed and managed
and all that and there's no way to do it.
So we build something to do it.
In terms of this question you have, I'm deep in this.
And I'm not doing anything with it in my business just to be clear, right, like I'm not even
thinking about it.
There's a couple things I've seen that are like, Oh, interesting.
Some tweets I've seen about people thinking about things unrelated to us like, what if
someone could access a document with their kind of MetaMask and their crypto credentials
instead of their email, right?
There's some interesting concepts again, I'm not entertaining them.
But to the point of that thing, if I were a SaaS business, there is this NFT concept
where it's like access and all the stuff that we said, I don't see how you would want to
jam that into your business.
And this is what I hear from founders today because they think crypto is like an add on
or NFTs are an add on.
I'm sorry.
I don't see it, right?
Like I don't see the add on like, and again, if anyone would tell you if there was something
it would be me.
I'm in all the world and like I would say it and again, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Someone bring it, please.
If you have something good that anyone, any SaaS business can do, but I got one thing.
When it comes to like crypto and what you mentioned, Cortland and mobs in a bunch of
different ways.
It's about this idea of I have data.
It's my data.
It sits on the blockchain and there's wallets.
So MetaMask is a wallet.
There's Coinbase wallet, which I actually prefer 10 hundred X than MetaMask for a bunch
of reasons.
But anyway, and then there's these other wallets for the chains.
But the wallet is the same as like your authentication system, just like signing in with Google.
You're signing in with your wallet, right?
Just for anyone that doesn't get it or doesn't know yet.
If I sign in with Google, I'm able to get in and they can get my profile pic and all
that stuff.
If I sign in with my ID, I'm not only able to they can get like a bunch of stuff about
my wallet and all that, although that's public data.
They can also with just a couple of clicks I can buy.
Right.
It's very interesting.
But my bigger point was if there's an experience where the wallet can be authenticated and
you could do something as a result of that in your SaaS app, depending on what it is,
probably more consumer use cases today.
Hey, that's fascinating.
That's really fascinating.
Now, if you're really early or you have time resources and you want to think about this,
think about what exists on the blockchain that you have access to because of someone's
wallet being connected.
And then think about what can you build with them?
So for and it doesn't have to be NFT or anything related, but what utility can you provide?
Right.
So the simple you guys will laugh, but like the simplest thing is like we have analytics
tools now.
My thousand NFTs, there's no easy way for me to look at them like naturally.
So I can go to the one of 50 services, unfortunately, you know, because there's a lot of them that
can get connected and I can see all my NFTs.
The biggest utility right now around that, believe it or not, is taxes.
I want to connect them for taxes.
Right.
That's the key because like that's a problem.
It's a big pain.
It's still not solved.
I've used all the tools and they're okay.
Nothing's magical.
But people are trying.
I commend them for that, but it's a complex problem because there's a lot of wallets and
there's a lot of things that happen that are not as easy to track.
The tools are not clear as to how to analyze that.
I mean, the data is all there.
I actually do it manually still for the things I want to do to calculate my earnings and
stuff like that in general, because, you know, there's tools, but they're all big.
But anyway, my point is people are still in that world of picks and shovels for this space.
But if you're a SaaS founder and you have the energy or you need a pivot and you're
thinking about this, yeah, cool.
But if you're a SaaS founder and you have something at scale, like I do like product
market fit and I'm going after it and there's a lane, dude, whatever.
Mubs though, it's kind of in the middle where he's got something and he's trying to figure
out how to fund it.
Hey, respect.
You should figure it out.
But like so many founders I see on Twitter or talk to me randomly, Hey, I got this NFT
idea, but I got this business here and I think it's like a way of three, but let's back
the heck up.
What's up?
What's going on?
So like, yeah, your idea.
I get it.
You need to fund this thing.
You want to fund whatever it is you're doing?
Yeah.
And NFTs crypto, it could do something for you right once you figure it out.
So that's like a little bit of a middle ground, but the earlier stage, yeah, go mess around
with it.
This is where the tailwind is.
You should play with it.
Figure out if there is anything.
What about what I'm doing?
Any hackers is a community.
Crypto tips.
People can tip each other.
Simple idea with the communities.
People can tip each other with crypto somehow.
That's a high level idea I have for any community, though, is does someone already have a wallet
or not?
Do they have?
They already jumped through those hoops and if they haven't, is it your job to train
them?
Do you want them to?
So if it's a community and you and it's existing like yours, I just figure out which chain
do people have wallets in?
If any, it's almost like do you have a crypto wallet?
That's the first thing I would ask.
And I might even make it open ended just so you can get the questions or, you know, a
few options and other and then see if they have a wallet because if they have a wallet,
then you got to figure out which chain and all that stuff.
But about NFTs, I mean, like I see so many communities that are based on NFTs are giving
every one of their community members their own unique NFT and that acts as sort of like
a gateway.
So any hackers recently, I sort of closed the doors.
It's now invite only any member who's active enough can get an invite and invite somebody
else.
But this is like sort of very web 2.0 way of doing it.
You know, presumably, MFTs should have additional functionality like what would that make sense?
I got to give the ENS example.
So ENS is the is the service that powers all those dot E dot E T H domains that you see
on Twitter.
Like I have one, it's Heaton dot E and it connects it links to my wallet, right?
And it's called ENS dot domain, I think, or ENS dot domains.
I don't remember their URL and they recently did something incredible, like just absolutely
incredible.
And I'm going to I'm going to show you guys if I can here with my phone.
I do have one as well.
So I know what I know.
You know, yeah, I know you know if anyone knows you would know we got the right guy
here for sure on that.
So let me show you what just happened.
I have one name.
I registered for a long time because it's Heaton.
That's my name.
Right.
Check this out.
Oh, oh, he's got one.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
And the only thing I wanted to show was the token drop, the token drop they did.
Look, did you go claim yours?
Yes, I did.
You got a good.
Oh, he needs claim as a sound.
Yes.
So you need to go.
Look at this, Courtland.
I had Heaton dot E. I registered it for 10 years and I had $18,000 in their token.
It went all the way up to $27,000.
I'm a hodler.
If someone gives me free money like this and it's a business I believe in, I will
I'm good.
So they just I think it was a $2.5 billion in valuation when they dropped it.
And all the holders, early believers got it.
And so you have a vibrant community.
They have points, right, or not points, but upvotes.
You can come up with a credibility ranking model.
And based on what their sort of votes and all that is, you could drop a certain number
of tokens.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's almost like doing kind of an IPO for a community where you issue tokens to everybody.
And then you start selling some of the tokens that you don't issue.
And that creates a market and you can raise a bunch of money like a normal IPO.
I think this concept is called social tokens.
And I want to do an entire episode on that.
But first, I bought one of these NFTs from ENS that you're talking about.
And I want to go claim my money and see if I got any money.
So how do I how do I do this?
I don't know when you bought it.
But if you bought it before, like what is it?
Yeah, yeah.
He'll send you a link.
You can claim them.
Yeah, I'm sure if you bought it early enough.
Yeah.
And they stopped at a certain date.
So if it was after that date, you don't get any, but before that date, everybody got it
and can claim it.
But like at the end of the day, I think we're going to see more of this model because they've
essentially funded their thing doing this.
I'm checking mine right now.
I'll go.
I'll do it right now.
Yeah.
The power of money.
I'm like ignoring everything you're saying.
Let us know.
Claim your tokens.
It says I will receive three hundred and seventy eight point seven four.
And I have three.
I have three ninety one, which means I have about eighteen grand.
So if you have three sixty something or whatever, you've got like fifteen plus grand.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got about fifteen thousand dollars.
We just made two fifteen thousand dollars.
We just made you money, dude.
Where's my cut?
That's literally the one NFT that I bought.
Good job.
Someone told me this is where I used to start and I did it two months ago.
And now here I am.
Good job.
What a world we're living in.
This is nuts.
Maybe to close out, you're listening to this.
You were, you know, maybe kind of sort of sold in NFTs.
Not really.
It's interesting.
Hopefully, if you're a listener, what's like is there a resource that can go to like learn
more?
Like you've said by crypto.
OK, but like what next?
Like, is there a particular website they should trust?
Where do you go if you want to put in like this hundred hours of learning that Gary Vee
mentioned?
So let me start with the basic, basic, because I started earlier, Coinbase or Robin Hood,
and you just basically set a recurring buy for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I would probably do both.
A lot of people say like seventy five twenty five eighty twenty biased towards Bitcoin
if you're really doing it for savings long term.
Don't put a lot of money in there if you're worried about the money you're putting in.
Of course, not financial advice, but it's Coinbase or Robin Hood is safe, good, personal
use, really good stuff.
I would probably opt for Coinbase over Robin Hood just because they haven't figured out
their ownership situation there and the wallet.
So Coinbase is like plus plus plus there because I wouldn't trust any other brand right now
if you are new to it.
If you're not new to it, I'm sure Mubs and I have all kinds of wallets and all kinds
of crazy stuff going on.
All good.
So I wanted to just preempt that and I'll share one thing about NFTs.
Just YouTube.
YouTube has been like probably one of the easiest ways and a lot of people links in
them.
You might not know who to trust.
So then just go find all of Gary Vee's videos and then find all of Gary Vee's actual blog
content and you'll be in the safest area because it's Gary Vee.
He is trustworthy as much as you might think he's crazy.
I do think he's crazy in a lot of ways, but he's trustworthy.
So if it's Gary approved and you can verify it's Gary's video, cool.
He verifies Gary's blog or website, the Vee friends one or whatever other Gary Vee one
he has and you look at the content, the MetaMask stuff and things he says, they're good.
But there's a big trust issue in this space, but the ultimate truth, find a buddy.
To me, I always suggest the buddy system.
All my spaces when we're in the noob spaces, which is about once a week, it's on a Tuesday
night.
If you see me on Twitter, come on there and we try to get through all this basic stuff
for anyone that shows up because we like to keep it at that level in those spaces.
Of course, you just happened to be in one of my experiments, I was not one of those
spaces.
So yeah, anyway, those are those are my two suggestions, but if you have anything else,
I know you're into the other chains, for sure.
So I don't know about any of those and how you would suggest people start those even.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think I just echo kind of what you said in terms of, you know, just
look for the reputable sources like, you know, just just like on Twitter, like, who do you
follow?
Who do you, you know, you have to look for the people who who built up a following who
have terrified maybe as well, kind of those kind of things, just to make sure that you're
not following some random just talking about random stuff.
And, you know, even even even on medium, I think there is a lot of good content on there.
But again, you have to go hunting for it and find it.
But then obviously, just look for what has, you know, sort of most stuff and and and and
kind of kind of stuff like that there unfortunately isn't, you know, one good place to go.
If there was, I think they'd be they'd be making a lot of money right now.
But we are probably just because it's hard to make good content like that.
But also because the world changes so fast in this space, it's hard to keep that kind
of content up to date and accurate as well.
So but yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I've been using Coinbase for as long as they've allowed me to sign up because it
really is the easy and safe and secure place that you can you can, you know, and obviously
it means that you may not be able to buy every little tiny coin that somebody has mentioned.
But that's probably a good thing.
You probably don't want to buy every little coin that everybody's going to mention everywhere
either.
I think, you know, just from a purely indie hacker standpoint, since there's the indie
hackers podcast, there is still a massive, massive opportunity to sell picks and shovels
and all the other things that go into into this space with smart contracts and how do
people manage and sell?
How do you manage the community that you've built around your NFT?
There's lots of tooling and things that need to be built.
If you're looking for an idea to work on right now, you know, those are the kind of there's
so many different ideas and opportunities that you can build to make the tool to make
the lives of people are in this space much easier instead of just ignoring buying NFTs
themselves, just like building the tools that allow the people in the space to kind of interact
with each other in a more efficient and manageable way.
I think there's lots of opportunities there without even exposing yourself to the risk
of which coin am I supposed to buy, which NFT am I supposed to buy?
Just go build your SaaS for the people in the space.
Yeah, I think if you're if you're skeptical that like the crypto hype is going to be here,
any particular coin or token or blockchain is going to survive.
One thing that you can probably have faith in is that there's going to be a lot of crypto
nuts who love crypto who want to build stuff and so you build tools for them like they're
not going anywhere.
They're holding for the long term.
Yep.
All right.
Heat and mubs.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Can you let us know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to with your
SaaS businesses and what you're up to in the NFT space as well?
Yeah, I'm working on founder path.
So that's founder path.com.
And you can find me on Twitter and all the usual social media places at about Sherik
ball.
All right.
Thank you, man.
For me, I'm on Twitter.
Everything's linked from there.
It's H N S H H on Twitter.
Thanks both of you for coming on.
It's fun.
Thanks for having me.