July 30, 2025 • 38 mins
FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.
John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson
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Episode Transcript
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John Newtson (00:02):
All right, hey everyone.
I got Blake here from WAP.
I think everyone now hasprobably heard of WAP.
Definitely everyone in FMS Prohas heard of WAP.
Everyone in the broader FMScommunity probably has.
Maybe not If you haven't.
Wap is what I think of as oneof these many walled gardens
that we're seeing pop up, likeThink Substack kind of a
platform that has a bunch ofpublishers on it.
(00:23):
Substack kind of a platformthat has a bunch of publishers
on it.
Right, so WAP has been.
I think it does more thanfinance, but you have a huge
trading, education and tradingservice kind of business in
there and they do a bunch ofstuff from having the platform
that helps process payments butalso all these marketing
opportunities on there.
So today we have Blake Tovestoves is that right?
(00:45):
Tovez tovez, blake tovez umjoining us.
Blake's part of our fms procommunity.
Um, everybody in fms pro canhit him up in the discord.
Um, thanks for being here, manyeah, it's uh.
Blake Toves (00:58):
It's finally good to be on, after I think it's
almost almost a year.
Got to make it out to anin-person event, though, um.
I've connected with quite a fewpeople in the community lincoln
andrew, keen, um and hope tobring some folks from our side
too into the fms pro community alot of, uh, the creators, the
people who are in the financespace on our platform.
(01:20):
They wouldn't even know whoagora was if you brought the
name up.
John Newtson (01:25):
Yeah, so that's.
It's funny because when I firststarted FMS there was there was
the same separation, right.
We had um kind of the tradereducation community and
affiliate community, and thenyou had kind of a newsletter
community and it and I wassurprised too, because even then
this was 2013, those two worldsdidn't know each other existed
and so we brought them togetherand that kind of became fms, um,
and so it's funny because nowwe have that same thing
(01:45):
happening um here, with allthese new creators coming coming
on and it's cool, it's excitingbecause that means there's lots
of folks out there to do, dodeals with, do business with um
and yeah.
So just kind of give the peoplewho don't know wop um a little
more of an overview.
You want to kind of just givelike a high level description of
(02:05):
what the platform is and does.
Blake Toves (02:08):
Yeah, so WAP started as a small team out here
in New York.
That was originally like alaunch pass alternative, so just
a simple payment gateway thatconnected a Discord group with a
payment processor and it tookthis whole niche of sneaker bots
Discord group with the paymentprocessor and it took this whole
niche of sneaker bots.
So folks who would pay to learnabout when shoes would be at
(02:30):
like a deeper discount and thenbuy them immediately.
That was the first niche thatthey got into.
And then every on the peripheryfolks who are interested in
sneaker bots were alsointerested in trading and sports
betting, and so they started toacquire a lot of Discord groups
, not like buy them out butprocess payments for them.
(02:50):
And it has since grown to now abillion dollar valuation with
investors like Peter Thiel, someother folks who in the most
recent round last summer I don'tthink I can name them, but if
you go to Crunchbase you can seeall the breakdowns of folks
who've invested into it Peoplelike Chainsmokers, that one EDM
(03:13):
artist.
You got a lot of interestingpeople on the board.
And we're out here in New York.
Behind me is this Dominofactory.
It's like a sugar factory thatthey stripped everything inside
and put in a modern office andthat's where we've mainly been
working out of and it has sinceuh grown to from 60 million
(03:33):
process last uh last year aroundthe time 660 million a month,
now 110 million a month and alot of people they use us for
processing, a lot of people useus for hosting their community.
We're a fierce school andkanjabi competitor and many
communities have been movingfrom those sites over to WAP,
(03:56):
and one part because it's freeto host your community on WAP
and secondly, the paymentprocessing capabilities are just
way better than those twooptions.
That's originally why I evencame over to WAP.
It's been a year since I've beenaware of this company and I
just wanted for me, with thecommunities that I was
(04:17):
consulting for, I wanted aseamless checkout process and
some of these sites, like schoolat the time, did not have that.
So that was the initial painpoint for me.
But upon going deeper anddeeper I realized, wow, wap
really has something specialhere and for anybody who's in
the FinPub space, they mightfind it useful to take a look at
(04:39):
how WAP has been promotingitself on just as a brand, and
you can learn about our creatorsthrough the YouTube channel,
the WAP YouTube channel.
We have, like thesedocumentaries, these mini
documentaries with each of themain creators that are on our
platforms, people processinghalf a million, a million a
(04:59):
month.
We have these.
We have our content guy go outand do it in person and think of
it as a day in the life video.
But we have a representativefrom our team that just talks
about how they got their startand their entire business model,
how they work, what theirfuture plans are and we've been
(05:20):
able to grow the YouTube channelquite well that way.
We've been able to grow theYouTube channel quite well.
John Newtson (05:24):
That way, nice, as well as finance, just for for.
I think at one point you guysare saying I think um trading
offers were like the secondbiggest or one of the top,
second biggest.
So of that 110 million, youknow offhand about what that is
a month in processing throughthere.
Blake Toves (05:43):
Yeah, we're looking at around 50 million a month of
it, right.
John Newtson (05:46):
so there's about $50 million a month in sales
guys going through WAP'splatform.
So there's this, like you said,a lot of these kind of trading
Discord communities, people whoare creators.
Blake Toves (05:59):
Every model you can think of.
Really, it could be adone-for-you trading algorithm
that people are selling.
It could be a simple for youtrading algorithm that people
are selling.
Could be a simple discordcommunity with no high ticket
back in we're talking just lowticket.
John Newtson (06:11):
It could be entirely high ticket coaching
program and everything inbetween yeah, and so for anyone
who's been, you know the peoplewho come to fms two years ago I
talked about this in the stateof finpub that, like, what we
were seeing was an explosion inthe the creator side of the
finance subscription communitiesand that we were seeing them
pop up all over the place andthat that was one of the main
(06:34):
trends that that we talked aboutin that state of FinPub.
And so now you see, like here'sa perfect example, you have a
platform that's processing $50million a month when what you
said, like the bigger creatorsare doing, you know, maybe five
to 500,000 million, 2 million amonth.
So a lot of that, there's a lotof like these successful
smaller creators building greatbusinesses there.
(06:56):
And what's interesting to me isyou can do there's the
community side you guys haveadded recently the micro
influencer kind of the clipperpiece which I'm going to get
into.
You have the processing, butyou're you're, like you said,
you're replacing kind of acontent management and community
(07:16):
, uh, education piece that theycan post on there.
So it's kind of trying to goafter being an all-in-one
solution for, I would say, amore robust product mix than,
say, like, substack and Beehiveare very much focused on the
newsletter, the email newsletter, and now, of course, substack
has added some other featuresthere, but their core thing was
(07:40):
the newsletter, whereas you guyskind of took the rest of the
marketing world, social media,discord communities, things like
that and that seems to be likeyou built out from there, which
is, I think, an interestingdifference.
Blake Toves (07:55):
Yeah, and in fact there is no robust email
marketing capability inside ofWAP.
The simplest version of thatwould be within, so you'd make a
post and that post would besent out via our email servers
to the list of all your users.
But there is no flow that youcan build or broadcasting system
(08:18):
.
It's very non-email centric.
It's very hyper-focused on theapps within the WAP ecosystem.
The most recent cool thing isyour own custom LLM custom chat
GPT that people could askquestions about content that you
have on your site, on your,within your community, and they
(08:41):
would get an answer from achatbot nice, nice, that's
pretty cool and so just for that, I want to make this kind of
point to the people who you know, email has been the driving
force of sales for everybody for20 some odd years.
John Newtson (08:57):
Um, it's like we're funny to be in a
newsletter boom in other spaceswhen I'm like it's 25 years old,
the e-letter um and uh.
So there's resistance toanything that say, oh, we're not
doing, we're an emo only kindof publisher and it's like
that's kind of missing.
The point here is that we know,like you know, sms has become
an increasingly large part ofsales for people in terms of um,
(09:21):
sales channel.
We also know that, like kind ofthis idea, I keep bringing this
idea of walled gardens up, butjust to kind of illustrate or
expand on that for everybody,what I think one of the trends
that we're seeing from amarketing perspective is that
we're seeing these platforms andcommunities rise up that
themselves represent a uniquemarketing opportunity and rather
(09:44):
than say, hey, I need to haveeverything integrated on the
back end of one system, we'reseeing a lot of opportunity to
generate revenue and sales bygoing onto these platforms,
participating in them to somedegree and having some of your
business generating on WAP, it'dbe like having something on
Substack, because Substack ismore than just the email
(10:07):
capability anymore.
There's an online communitythere and that's why they're
able to have some discovery andpeople who are publishing
they're able to generate.
Like you know, 20 to 30 percentof their subscribers are coming
from that platform, as opposedto just everywhere else.
And so I think that this idea ofparticipating in multiple
platforms like WAP, likeSubstack, like Beehive that's
(10:29):
becoming more important, and italso represents a lot of
opportunity for people who arejust doing the same thing and
having acquisition issues,because there's a lot of
acquisition, specifically theacquisition opportunity.
That's exciting to get somebodywho has a more established
business to move over to aplatform, right.
And so, with that, I'd like youto like let's start with kind
(10:54):
of that piece right, there's aton of capabilities on the back
end in terms of content, butlet's start with like what is
this Clipper network and whatdoes that represent to people in
terms of actually acquiringcustomers?
Clipper Network and what doesthat represent?
Blake Toves (11:05):
to people in terms of actually acquiring customers.
So with the onset of creatorspromoting products, you have
short form content on everysingle platform, blowing up
brands, and we found that Drakeand many other artists have
(11:29):
started using their own fan baseto get free work essentially
not all the way free, but yousay you're a big artist and you
want to get more views.
Overall, like a brand awarenesscampaign, you would load up
money inside of WAP and we wouldhave a clipper manager signed
(11:50):
your account if it's big enoughand would organize your fans to
edit all the content.
You'd have a google drive withall the videos that you'd want
them to make edits of and theywould create their own fan page
accounts and post those videoson there.
And the way the algo works isoften new accounts.
(12:11):
They get a nice little boostand the potentiality of going
viral on those accounts versusjust consolidating all the
videos onto one account.
Virality potential goes up.
So the way that the Clippersare incentivized is they get
paid on every like a CPM.
Every 1000 views that they mayget, they'll get paid $1 $2.
(12:34):
If one in particular goes crazyit's 100,000 views maybe
there's a bonus, and so there'sdifferent incentives that you
can have for folks within the uhcontent rewards program.
Paying them based off views isthe simplest way to think about.
So, especially for anybody whohas like a guru facing business,
(12:56):
they would find great utilityin using this.
It's especially if this guruhas high energy and is reacting
a lot to the markets.
One of the largest brands on theplatform, tjr, trades this guy
in his early 20s, based out ofPuerto Rico.
Many of his videos are of him.
(13:18):
It's vertical, with him at thetop and then the chart that he's
trading with at the bottom andhe's explaining what's going on
with the chart, maybe reactingto it, maybe and when I say
react I mean he is uh likeyelling at a screen or he's
(13:42):
showing something.
That's where there's a unique,useful insight, but it's
entertaining at the same time.
So think of whatever long formvideo that explains a concept
like support and resistance.
He's going to explain that in ashort form.
He's going to explain that in ashort form and if he does that
(14:03):
in a creative way can reach apretty broad audience and maybe
has a like how the creativitypotential is endless.
You could Some folks I'll justspeak on the gambling niche
because I've seen it they willhave their laptops open in the
(14:30):
middle of a convenience storeand they'll be game and they'll
have people that are justwalking around them like hey,
should I put it all on red orblack?
And then just you know stufflike that, and so something
could be comparable to thetrading space.
John Newtson (14:38):
But I got an example what's exciting about it
is is, and and one of thethings that and we'll be talking
about this more and more in fmspro is that the one of the
highest roi and we'll be talkingabout this more and more in FMS
Pro is that one of the highestROI spaces right now for
acquisition is micro-influencers, and that is going out to
people like this who have asmall channel, have some kind of
reach, and trying to get themto go out there and build views
(14:59):
for you and drive them to somekind of a lead gen opportunity.
Drive them to some kind of alead gen opportunity.
And some of the numbers thatI'm hearing and I can't say from
everybody in who there arepretty ridiculous numbers, like
numbers we haven't seen inacquisition for quite a while.
People who are spending, youknow, are getting like 10 to one
(15:20):
or more ROIs for every dollarspent, and at pretty substantial
scale too.
We're talking over $10 million,and so I think that's the really
exciting thing here is thathere's a platform that has
specifically a marketingopportunity that lets you come
(15:41):
in and have a bidding system formicro-influencers.
So most of the things that Isee out there you're finding an
agency, which is great, or youhave people who are just doing
cold emails and outreach andcold DMs to people to see if
they can get them to dosomething like this, and so
having a platform that lets yougo to people, small creators
specifically, who are doingstuff in trading space too
because there's a lot of offersthere, so they're out there.
(16:02):
It's a lot of offers there, sothey're out there it's a really
exciting little thing.
That's probably not so littlein terms of Do you have any idea
on what kind of revenues drivenor leads have been driven with
that?
Blake Toves (16:14):
Yeah, it's a pretty brand awareness oriented
campaign where when somebodyassesses the ROI, they look at
how much money am I making perfollower in general.
And if my funnel is to sell viamy Instagram from the Instagram
(16:37):
stories or even from DMs, thenit's very relevant for me to run
this sort of campaign.
Then it's very relevant for meto run this sort of campaign.
But say, you just havesomething as simple as like a
link to your newsletter and bioand you command all of your
Clippers to make sure they havethat link in there.
Then you could track it thatway and you can make it about
(16:58):
your newsletter and generateemail signups from that.
So, and you could, for anybody,anybody watching this as you
watch this you can go to wopright now, make an account and
go to the discover section andsee the types of affiliate
offers on there, as well as the,the communities that have the
(17:22):
most bounties available, bountyas in the, the ones who are
getting the most out of WAP'scontent rewards ecosystem
they're loading up the mostamount of money.
I don't know if it makes senseto share.
John Newtson (17:36):
Yeah, why don't you pull it up?
And I'll just share your screen, Okay cool.
Blake Toves (17:41):
Cool and there's a lot.
Hit the WAP page like this.
You have explore, you haveleaderboards, but if you go to
leaderboards you go to trading.
You can see on these categorieswhat are the newest companies
as it relates to trading thatwere just created.
(18:02):
The most addicting meaning themost time spent.
It even gives you a breakdownright here.
So most addicting is a list ofWAPs ordered by the most time
spent inside the WAP for eachuser in the last 24 hours.
So for this one, gold pips86,000 or 87,000 minutes has
been spent in the last day inthis specific free signals group
(18:27):
Nice.
It's a Forex group and then youhave options inside of Pro
Shows the minutes I like to goto most money made.
That's a really fun one.
It used to be where you couldsee the exact amount of money
people were paid, but we removedthat feature because some folks
didn't like it.
But you can see real clearlywhich companies are making the
(18:47):
most.
I'll tell you the ones at thetop.
Here.
They're doing a million a month.
John Newtson (18:52):
So then, just the $20,000, $10,000 a month.
What do those members represent?
Blake Toves (19:00):
So maybe the top ones.
They sell high ticket, but thisone in particular is a low
ticket group.
John Newtson (19:08):
Okay, so those are the prices of the products.
Blake Toves (19:10):
Yes.
John Newtson (19:11):
Okay, which is another thing.
That that's.
It seems like a lot of this, notall of it, but there's a lot of
this working towards highticket funnels, right, and and I
think that's important forpeople to realize, because this
is a lot of social content and,yes, there's also paid ads.
(19:32):
They'll send the bio advertisingto their funnel, but a lot of
this social traffic is stillgoing to high ticket funnels,
right, and there's a couple ofthings with that.
One is it speaks to quality oftraffic, right, people are
buying $20,000 products.
But also that, like, the highticket sales funnel, like with
(19:58):
phones, is increasing.
It's increasingly being usedacross not just FinPub, but like
the whole biz op industry, thewhole internet marketing
industry, because, as everythingelse got harder and more
expensive, like you need thathigh ticket to make things work,
but it's working really well.
And so, again, people who don'thave a high ticket phone kind
(20:20):
of operation or set up like it'sa missed opportunity.
But also, just in terms of WAP,the fact that you can go on a
network and people are driving,you know, views into things that
are generating customers onsuper high ticket prices on
products is, um, I think, a bigchange over the last five years,
(20:42):
whereas we have a lot of peoplewho've been in the business for
a long time.
Blake Toves (20:46):
And here's that, by the way, the bounties so you
can earn one dollar per 1 000views.
Earn three hundred dollars per1 million views yeah, they
position it before you end it.
John Newtson (20:56):
I just want again because I'm trying to put this
in the context for people who'vebeen in the industry for you
know, we have people been inhere for 20 years, 30 years um,
you know, tests that happenedfive years ago on different
networks, like people you know,like oh, that doesn't work.
And then we always say it'susually when they're too early,
we try things too early and thenit didn't work until you kind
(21:18):
of ignore it.
But like, uh, the microinfluencer piece, like it's
working.
Now it's been working for thelast year and a half really well
, maybe two years, and it'scrushing it and so, having that
kind of component, I can'tstress enough how much it's
worth testing for folks.
And so, yeah, if you want to goback to the bounties and show
(21:42):
the bounties is the biddingsystem right, yep.
Blake Toves (21:50):
And an issue people would have with this is well,
how do I know if the views arereal and it's not just a bunch
of bot traffic or low qualitytraffic?
We have a tool that allows youto look into that and verify.
Oh, this is not the type oftraffic that I would want to pay
for, and you specify that.
For each of these that you seehere, there are rules specified
(22:10):
in detail on what they look forto qualify for those payouts.
John Newtson (22:16):
So what kind of qualifications can you put in
there?
Blake Toves (22:19):
Oh well, like you can qualify for a payout if you
got 1,000 views and it was fromfirst world audience, like us,
canada, and yeah, that's, that'sthe simplest one, and we have a
tool that checks for that right, and then when you submit, uh,
(22:43):
the bounty, you can putparameters, including regulatory
issue things.
Oh yeah, it can't be said right,yeah, you could say do not
mention these words and have allthe words there, okay, or these
language, and in the same waythat an affiliate program would
(23:04):
be set up for highly regulatedoffers, you would do that Nice.
John Newtson (23:10):
Right.
So what else does WAP do thatmaybe we don't know about?
Blake Toves (23:17):
We have this app store.
People can submit differentapps.
That allows them to create morevalue in the WAPs, the products
that they sell.
So for those who maybe arethinking one-dimensional in that
oh, I have course I havecoaching, I have community Well,
(23:38):
there's other useful tools inhere that some people would
argue would be their own SaaSthat you charge on a monthly
basis for this syncs up people'sbets.
There are, like that AI tool Ihad mentioned earlier on the
(23:58):
call Wisp, I believe you canscroll through here and see a
few and this is what, oh yeah, acompanion that will tell people
about the content in your webcommunity and you install it and
once it's installed, you canconfigure it for your, for your
(24:23):
people.
You can have support tickets, asimple image editor.
You can play Squid Game in yourWAP Things that make it sticky.
Because the entire team werenot just focused on the amount
of people processing moneythrough the platform.
The engineering team focused onhow do we get people to stay on
(24:46):
the platform and visit itmultiple times a day, every day
of the month, because we'replaying the venture capital game
and those metrics matter whenyou're attempting to raise even
more money or whenever you'retalking to your board of
advisors, letting them know hey,we have a healthy ecosystem.
People are actually using theproduct.
You can host giveaways.
(25:09):
You can have a map where all ofthe folks inside of your
community can be viewed.
John Newtson (25:15):
All right.
So what are the processing feeshere?
Blake Toves (25:27):
Oh yeah, so we can get into the finance and
processing side my favorite one.
Oh yeah, so we can get into thefinance and processing side my
favorite one and you have mostof our million dollar a month.
Accounts are at stripe rate orwe can beat it.
For anybody who just comes offthe street and makes a WAP
account without talking toanybody on the team, they're at
a 6% total processing feebecause they can self onboard.
(25:50):
We don't know what they'regoing to do.
Often, if they talk to us, wecan get the rate down
substantially.
It depends on what their volumeis.
It depends on what theirdispute rate is and their
industry Oftentimes the industrynot as much, but the dispute is
a big deal.
And then many people have cometo us not even to process their
(26:11):
payments but for financing,because they have high ticket
offers.
We have one stock options groupthat does 2 million a month or
more and they run about 37% oftheir volume through one of our
financing options.
And because we're so big, wehave negotiation power, and so
SplitIt is a company that we'reengaged with Klar, afterpay or
(26:31):
other solutions to we haveaccess to, but split it as one
that is exclusive with us at themoment, and that's a unique
product I could go in severalminutes about, but that's just
yeah let's not.
John Newtson (26:44):
Let's talk about that, because it's a nice um,
it's an interesting financingoption for high tickets.
So, yeah, what, what's the dealwith the?
Just just kind of give a quickoverview of what you can do with
split it.
Blake Toves (26:58):
Can I bring in my guest?
Uh, derrick, who is our head ofpayments?
Let's put it up.
All right, let's bring him ingood timing.
What's up?
Hey, derrick, take a seat I'min frame.
Derek (27:08):
I'm in frame.
Um, what's going on On thesplit it piece?
Perfect segue into aconversation around that.
Yeah, to Blake's point, we havemany buy now, pay later options
that the higher ticket guys arereally focused on, split it
being our bread and butter rightnow.
Traditionally with split itthey were e-commerce physical
product only and you had to bedoing 10 to 15 million a month
top line to be considered for anaccount.
(27:29):
After some work with them,we're introducing it to the
digital coaching high ticketspace in a way that they never
really considered prior and bydoing so we're taking over some
liability, a little bit of therisk, as well as the
underwriting to give it tobusinesses that traditionally
couldn't have got it.
So the way that Splitit'sworking is, as a credit card
nerd, it's just a hyper creativecredit card transaction and so
(27:51):
it acts as a pre-auth on acustomer's credit card.
If you send somebody, forexample, a 12K USD payment link,
they're going to on ourinterface, get an option for a 3
, 6, or 12-month payment planoption and through this flow
there's no social, no ID, noaddress, upload, nothing outside
of a standard credit cardinformation link for uploading
information on.
(28:12):
They enter standard billingmaterials, credit card number.
They choose between three, sixor 12 months and they're
presented with an interest-freefinancing option for let's use
the example 12 months.
What happens on that 12Kpayment link, right, is it shows
up on their credit card as$11,000 pending and $1,000 goes
to to be paid, acting as astandard credit card transaction
, right.
30 days later, another $1,000goes to to be paid, acting as a
standard credit card transaction, right.
30 days later, another $1,000shears off that pending and goes
(28:34):
over to to be paid, and so on,so forth, for 12 months, and I
use the 12K for that 12 monthexample of it will always be
just that $1,000 flat.
On that numerical example,there's no origination fee, no
extra fees of any sort, and it'sjust a standard transaction in
the eyes of a credit cardprocessing company, in
comparison to traditional buynow, pay later financing so not
(28:56):
needing credit checks of anysort allows us to offer this in
17 different countries all ofthe eu, australia, canada,
working on mexico next and alittle bit of latin america.
But we genuinely believe we'rethe first product offering for
instant buy now, pay later forthose countries outside of
Canada or the US.
For the most part, merchantsget paid in four days, nice and
(29:16):
easy, and I know we were talkingfees there a second ago.
Internally, knowing the typesof businesses we were going to
offer it to, we spent a lot oftime determining what we wanted
to price it at and we just cameto the conclusion that pricing
that 15 flat rate to themerchant and no interest or no
fees whatsoever to the customerwas the best route.
Uh, to the stocks stock optiontrading account that blake had
(29:38):
mentioned, they're doingsignificant volume through this
program and, anecdotally, whattheir sales reps are running is
just saying hey it, for example,it's 10k today or 11 000 to
finance it for 12 months.
They're just passing through 10flat business eats five, which
is below what they're paying.
Most accounts are paying withclarna firm K today, or 11,000
to finance it for 12 months.
They're just passing through10% flat business eats five,
which is below what they'repaying.
Most accounts are paying withKlarna firm after pay anyways
Right, and so they're saving alittle bit.
Their customer eats the 10 niceand easy in comparison to
(30:00):
interest that they would seewithin a firm or a Klarna in
most cases, and that framing andthat that selling of it has
turned into.
The biggest guys are using itfor the financially qualified
but price sensitive prospects.
Right, this isn't an end-all,be-all golden standard, the last
financing option you'll everneed, but it's fantastic for the
(30:20):
guys that are doing numbers,that have sales teams losing
deals to financially qualifiedprospects, which arguably, are
the worst deals to lose.
Right, they had the money butthey just didn't buy and and so
implementing it there for salesteams is what's turned it into,
like their ace up their sleevein most of the programs we've
seen.
John Newtson (30:36):
Nice, nice.
Do you have any evidence,anything or otherwise, on kind
of bumps they're getting?
Derek (30:44):
Yeah, so that stock option trading account that
Blake had mentioned, that's justone of our favorite case
studies is Blake had introducedthem and we spent a lot of time
onboarding them early to ourrelationship.
They were looking at 1.6, 1.7million a month as a record
prior to working with us.
They were trying everyfinancing solution under the sun
um, in a bunch of differentcreative ways uh, different
Stripe accounts and theircousins, mom's, sister's name,
(31:05):
right To have an Affirm accountfor 11 minutes, then it'd blow
up, right, and so we had broughtthem in.
We added split it and it wasfunny.
On the initial sales call theyjust said, hey, if we do 2
million this month, the wholesales team is going out to
Monaco for F1.
And I was like I'm alreadygoing, so I'm going to meet you
(31:29):
guys there.
What month specifically?
That was April.
We added them April 21st.
They basically ran all thevolume that they had through the
rest of that month throughSplitit, doing 600 grand in nine
days and that for that team wasmonstrous.
It was insanity.
And now they're hoveringbetween that 2.1, 2.6 mil a
month since April and it's onlybeen two months of an example.
But yeah, it was insanity andthat was our first really crazy
(31:52):
use case of someone usingsignificant uh, or using it for
a significant amount of theirvolume.
And so that's when the studywe're bringing up to everybody
now of like, if you're running40 percent ish, you know give or
take of your volume throughthis and you're at scale, you're
going to see an insane anduptick in conversions that's
killer, that's.
John Newtson (32:10):
I appreciate that.
So I have the payments guy onhere real quick.
This is a lot of this is highprocess or high risk processing,
right, yeah, so what kind oflike you have you have beyond
just the this, this productoverall?
Like, what are you guys doingfor your processors and how are
you handling the fact that youdo have high risk kind of
(32:31):
product lines in some of theseplaces?
Derek (32:33):
Of course, when I joined WAP, we were single PSP running
everything through Stripe, andthis is like we've talked about
this across all the socials alot.
We were Stripe only and we weredoing very well.
All things considered, we havea fantastic relationship with
Stripe on a merchant of recordlevel relationship, which puts
us in in between as a buffer, astaking full liability.
We still run tons of our volumethrough Stripe as a platform
(32:55):
and this is also like publiclyavailable that we talk about a
lot.
But we also have five PSPs aswell that are stacked on the
back end, that are layered inand that are orchestrated
through, and so we now have acascading payment orchestration
platform that is optimized forthe highest likelihood of
authorization on a transaction,depending on region, ticket size
, card brand, so on and so forth.
(33:15):
And so through those PSPs, wejust went through extreme
underwriting with them takingfull liability as a merchant of
record provider and justbasically negotiating terms of
we're going to onboard dealsthat you guys normally don't
board, but because we're holdingfull liability, let's just not
worry about it, right?
That's kind of the framing.
And then, down into the depthsof it, we've just established
our own risk policies, whatwe're willing to do and what
(33:36):
we're not willing to do.
And there's certain verticals,neutral related stuff male
enhancement, excessive FTCrelated trading offers right.
The stuff that you know isviolating one or 37 policies or
regulations right.
We don't touch almost any ofthat right.
But if it's staying withinstandard laws and a majority of
the world will board the deal inthe high risk realm.
(33:58):
But we're sticking to thatdigital info, coaching,
fulfillment style businessesversus the physical, which makes
it much easier on our end to beable to support them longer
term versus-.
John Newtson (34:07):
Yeah nice, that's awesome.
So when somebody comes on boardlike are they getting a kind?
Derek (34:15):
of a.
Blake Toves (34:16):
Is there a person they talk to, or is it?
Derek (34:17):
general rep.
Yeah, we have self onboarding.
Anyone can go and create anaccount for free and onboard you
.
We we limit many features forself onboarding individuals or
merchants just because a lot ofthem are very like
hyper-specific use case.
But if you were to come througha sales rep, which is basically
almost referral only, we don'thave a real flow for onboarding
through a sales rep, as our bestrelationships are through
(34:38):
referrals.
Always you come in through oneof our sales reps or anybody on
our growth team and we get agood understanding of the
business.
We know what specific featuresto roll out to you, what
financing to do.
We ask about previouschargeback history, the risk of
the account, overall right andyour average tickets to
determine you know what are maxticket links that you can create
, what pricing are we going toput them at.
To Blake's point about ourdifferent pricing on credit card
(35:00):
and financing, and then we kindof white glove onboard every
deal of scale and so that stockoption trading account we
mentioned.
Like the day that we onboardedthem I got on a Zoom with their
entire organization, the wholegroup, and then we had like 30
plus people on there and we dida full training on how to use
the entire platform, how toframe selling with these
(35:20):
different options, what creditauthorization rates look like,
so on and so forth.
And so those white glove styleaccounts.
We love spending time withCooler cooler.
John Newtson (35:28):
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks.
Is there anything else youthink that you know established
publishers should know about theplatform and what you guys do?
The embedded checkout.
Derek (35:36):
We have recently rolled out embedded checkout.
It's been something that wefought tooth and nail for as a
merchant of record.
That's very difficult to getaround.
Traditionally, merchant ofrecord requires it to be
completely within our ecosystem.
The checkups would have to beon a WAPcom URL.
Recently rolling out theability to embed our full
payment stack, our upsells, ourdownsells, all our order bumps,
into your go high levels, yourclick funnels, your web flow
(35:58):
sites, whatever it may be.
And now direct integration togo high level, working on
closeio as other CRMs as well.
Full Zapier integration,makecom, so on and so forth.
But we have extensive webhookAPI capacity and now, with the
embedded checkout, we're seeinglarger offerings and publishers
(36:18):
integrate us into their funnels.
Finally, because they justhated our UI, which is fair
right.
Everyone has their obsessionswith retention and conversion
optimization, and so now that wecan embed into your existing
pages, we're seeing a sickuptick in bigger offers taking
advantage.
John Newtson (36:34):
Killer.
That's great.
Yeah, awesome.
No, that's cool.
Guys, I appreciate it.
This is cool.
I think a lot of people areinterested in this and becoming
more interested in it, like Isaid, that we're pushing,
there's so many new trafficopportunities for folks and as
other ones kind of slow down,you know they got money to spend
and looking for places to spendit.
Derek (36:56):
Yeah, the FinPub circle is a different circle than
majority of the other biz optstyle or, like copywriting,
whatever different industries orniches that we've broken into
very well.
We're excited to keep breakinginto the FinPub because it's the
most tried and true, longeststanding publishing circle in my
opinion, and it's also the bestpeople to work with every time.
(37:17):
So we're excited to keepgetting introduced to it.
John Newtson (37:19):
That's where Agoras came out with the first
e-letter in 99, I think yeah,yeah, we've been doing email
newsletters forever andpublishing so yeah, no, it's a
great community and they got alot of great businesses there
and so, um, I've been excited tokind of talk to you guys and
hopefully have you guys out atFMS is coming up here.
Uh, we have to line that up sosweet.
(37:40):
Well, I appreciate you guyscoming on here.
I think this is awesome.
I'll get this out to everybody.
Um, if anyone has any questions, um, if you're an FMS pro, you
can hit Derek up or you can hitBlake up in the, uh, fms discord
.
Um, if you have any otherquestions, if you're not in FMS
pro, just hit me up and I'llmake a connection.
Derek (37:56):
So, sweet, Appreciate the time and listening to the
payments ramp, uh rambling there.
John Newtson (38:02):
No, no, that's what I love People who know what
the hell they're talking about,rambling about what they look
with what they're what they'redoing.
So that's the thing.
So I appreciate you guys.
Thanks.
Derek (38:12):
Beautiful Thanks, John.
Have a good one man.
We'll talk soon, okay, Thank?
John Newtson (38:14):
you Take care Bye.
All right, hey everyone.
I got Blake here from WAP.
I think everyone now hasprobably heard of WAP.
Definitely everyone in FMS Prohas heard of WAP.
Everyone in the broader FMScommunity probably has.
Maybe not If you haven't.
Wap is what I think of as oneof these many walled gardens
that we're seeing pop up, likeThink Substack kind of a
platform that has a bunch ofpublishers on it.
(00:23):
Substack kind of a platformthat has a bunch of publishers
on it.
Right, so WAP has been.
I think it does more thanfinance, but you have a huge
trading, education and tradingservice kind of business in
there and they do a bunch ofstuff from having the platform
that helps process payments butalso all these marketing
opportunities on there.
So today we have Blake Tovestoves is that right?
(00:45):
Tovez tovez, blake tovez umjoining us.
Blake's part of our fms procommunity.
Um, everybody in fms pro canhit him up in the discord.
Um, thanks for being here, manyeah, it's uh.
Blake Toves (00:58):
It's finally good to be on, after I think it's
almost almost a year.
Got to make it out to anin-person event, though, um.
I've connected with quite a fewpeople in the community lincoln
andrew, keen, um and hope tobring some folks from our side
too into the fms pro community alot of, uh, the creators, the
people who are in the financespace on our platform.
(01:20):
They wouldn't even know whoagora was if you brought the
name up.
John Newtson (01:25):
Yeah, so that's.
It's funny because when I firststarted FMS there was there was
the same separation, right.
We had um kind of the tradereducation community and
affiliate community, and thenyou had kind of a newsletter
community and it and I wassurprised too, because even then
this was 2013, those two worldsdidn't know each other existed
and so we brought them togetherand that kind of became fms, um,
and so it's funny because nowwe have that same thing
(01:45):
happening um here, with allthese new creators coming coming
on and it's cool, it's excitingbecause that means there's lots
of folks out there to do, dodeals with, do business with um
and yeah.
So just kind of give the peoplewho don't know wop um a little
more of an overview.
You want to kind of just givelike a high level description of
(02:05):
what the platform is and does.
Blake Toves (02:08):
Yeah, so WAP started as a small team out here
in New York.
That was originally like alaunch pass alternative, so just
a simple payment gateway thatconnected a Discord group with a
payment processor and it tookthis whole niche of sneaker bots
Discord group with the paymentprocessor and it took this whole
niche of sneaker bots.
So folks who would pay to learnabout when shoes would be at
(02:30):
like a deeper discount and thenbuy them immediately.
That was the first niche thatthey got into.
And then every on the peripheryfolks who are interested in
sneaker bots were alsointerested in trading and sports
betting, and so they started toacquire a lot of Discord groups
, not like buy them out butprocess payments for them.
(02:50):
And it has since grown to now abillion dollar valuation with
investors like Peter Thiel, someother folks who in the most
recent round last summer I don'tthink I can name them, but if
you go to Crunchbase you can seeall the breakdowns of folks
who've invested into it Peoplelike Chainsmokers, that one EDM
(03:13):
artist.
You got a lot of interestingpeople on the board.
And we're out here in New York.
Behind me is this Dominofactory.
It's like a sugar factory thatthey stripped everything inside
and put in a modern office andthat's where we've mainly been
working out of and it has sinceuh grown to from 60 million
(03:33):
process last uh last year aroundthe time 660 million a month,
now 110 million a month and alot of people they use us for
processing, a lot of people useus for hosting their community.
We're a fierce school andkanjabi competitor and many
communities have been movingfrom those sites over to WAP,
(03:56):
and one part because it's freeto host your community on WAP
and secondly, the paymentprocessing capabilities are just
way better than those twooptions.
That's originally why I evencame over to WAP.
It's been a year since I've beenaware of this company and I
just wanted for me, with thecommunities that I was
(04:17):
consulting for, I wanted aseamless checkout process and
some of these sites, like schoolat the time, did not have that.
So that was the initial painpoint for me.
But upon going deeper anddeeper I realized, wow, wap
really has something specialhere and for anybody who's in
the FinPub space, they mightfind it useful to take a look at
(04:39):
how WAP has been promotingitself on just as a brand, and
you can learn about our creatorsthrough the YouTube channel,
the WAP YouTube channel.
We have, like thesedocumentaries, these mini
documentaries with each of themain creators that are on our
platforms, people processinghalf a million, a million a
(04:59):
month.
We have these.
We have our content guy go outand do it in person and think of
it as a day in the life video.
But we have a representativefrom our team that just talks
about how they got their startand their entire business model,
how they work, what theirfuture plans are and we've been
(05:20):
able to grow the YouTube channelquite well that way.
We've been able to grow theYouTube channel quite well.
John Newtson (05:24):
That way, nice, as well as finance, just for for.
I think at one point you guysare saying I think um trading
offers were like the secondbiggest or one of the top,
second biggest.
So of that 110 million, youknow offhand about what that is
a month in processing throughthere.
Blake Toves (05:43):
Yeah, we're looking at around 50 million a month of
it, right.
John Newtson (05:46):
so there's about $50 million a month in sales
guys going through WAP'splatform.
So there's this, like you said,a lot of these kind of trading
Discord communities, people whoare creators.
Blake Toves (05:59):
Every model you can think of.
Really, it could be adone-for-you trading algorithm
that people are selling.
It could be a simple for youtrading algorithm that people
are selling.
Could be a simple discordcommunity with no high ticket
back in we're talking just lowticket.
John Newtson (06:11):
It could be entirely high ticket coaching
program and everything inbetween yeah, and so for anyone
who's been, you know the peoplewho come to fms two years ago I
talked about this in the stateof finpub that, like, what we
were seeing was an explosion inthe the creator side of the
finance subscription communitiesand that we were seeing them
pop up all over the place andthat that was one of the main
(06:34):
trends that that we talked aboutin that state of FinPub.
And so now you see, like here'sa perfect example, you have a
platform that's processing $50million a month when what you
said, like the bigger creatorsare doing, you know, maybe five
to 500,000 million, 2 million amonth.
So a lot of that, there's a lotof like these successful
smaller creators building greatbusinesses there.
(06:56):
And what's interesting to me isyou can do there's the
community side you guys haveadded recently the micro
influencer kind of the clipperpiece which I'm going to get
into.
You have the processing, butyou're you're, like you said,
you're replacing kind of acontent management and community
(07:16):
, uh, education piece that theycan post on there.
So it's kind of trying to goafter being an all-in-one
solution for, I would say, amore robust product mix than,
say, like, substack and Beehiveare very much focused on the
newsletter, the email newsletter, and now, of course, substack
has added some other featuresthere, but their core thing was
(07:40):
the newsletter, whereas you guyskind of took the rest of the
marketing world, social media,discord communities, things like
that and that seems to be likeyou built out from there, which
is, I think, an interestingdifference.
Blake Toves (07:55):
Yeah, and in fact there is no robust email
marketing capability inside ofWAP.
The simplest version of thatwould be within, so you'd make a
post and that post would besent out via our email servers
to the list of all your users.
But there is no flow that youcan build or broadcasting system
(08:18):
.
It's very non-email centric.
It's very hyper-focused on theapps within the WAP ecosystem.
The most recent cool thing isyour own custom LLM custom chat
GPT that people could askquestions about content that you
have on your site, on your,within your community, and they
(08:41):
would get an answer from achatbot nice, nice, that's
pretty cool and so just for that, I want to make this kind of
point to the people who you know, email has been the driving
force of sales for everybody for20 some odd years.
John Newtson (08:57):
Um, it's like we're funny to be in a
newsletter boom in other spaceswhen I'm like it's 25 years old,
the e-letter um and uh.
So there's resistance toanything that say, oh, we're not
doing, we're an emo only kindof publisher and it's like
that's kind of missing.
The point here is that we know,like you know, sms has become
an increasingly large part ofsales for people in terms of um,
(09:21):
sales channel.
We also know that, like kind ofthis idea, I keep bringing this
idea of walled gardens up, butjust to kind of illustrate or
expand on that for everybody,what I think one of the trends
that we're seeing from amarketing perspective is that
we're seeing these platforms andcommunities rise up that
themselves represent a uniquemarketing opportunity and rather
(09:44):
than say, hey, I need to haveeverything integrated on the
back end of one system, we'reseeing a lot of opportunity to
generate revenue and sales bygoing onto these platforms,
participating in them to somedegree and having some of your
business generating on WAP, it'dbe like having something on
Substack, because Substack ismore than just the email
(10:07):
capability anymore.
There's an online communitythere and that's why they're
able to have some discovery andpeople who are publishing
they're able to generate.
Like you know, 20 to 30 percentof their subscribers are coming
from that platform, as opposedto just everywhere else.
And so I think that this idea ofparticipating in multiple
platforms like WAP, likeSubstack, like Beehive that's
(10:29):
becoming more important, and italso represents a lot of
opportunity for people who arejust doing the same thing and
having acquisition issues,because there's a lot of
acquisition, specifically theacquisition opportunity.
That's exciting to get somebodywho has a more established
business to move over to aplatform, right.
And so, with that, I'd like youto like let's start with kind
(10:54):
of that piece right, there's aton of capabilities on the back
end in terms of content, butlet's start with like what is
this Clipper network and whatdoes that represent to people in
terms of actually acquiringcustomers?
Clipper Network and what doesthat represent?
Blake Toves (11:05):
to people in terms of actually acquiring customers.
So with the onset of creatorspromoting products, you have
short form content on everysingle platform, blowing up
brands, and we found that Drakeand many other artists have
(11:29):
started using their own fan baseto get free work essentially
not all the way free, but yousay you're a big artist and you
want to get more views.
Overall, like a brand awarenesscampaign, you would load up
money inside of WAP and we wouldhave a clipper manager signed
(11:50):
your account if it's big enoughand would organize your fans to
edit all the content.
You'd have a google drive withall the videos that you'd want
them to make edits of and theywould create their own fan page
accounts and post those videoson there.
And the way the algo works isoften new accounts.
(12:11):
They get a nice little boostand the potentiality of going
viral on those accounts versusjust consolidating all the
videos onto one account.
Virality potential goes up.
So the way that the Clippersare incentivized is they get
paid on every like a CPM.
Every 1000 views that they mayget, they'll get paid $1 $2.
(12:34):
If one in particular goes crazyit's 100,000 views maybe
there's a bonus, and so there'sdifferent incentives that you
can have for folks within the uhcontent rewards program.
Paying them based off views isthe simplest way to think about.
So, especially for anybody whohas like a guru facing business,
(12:56):
they would find great utilityin using this.
It's especially if this guruhas high energy and is reacting
a lot to the markets.
One of the largest brands on theplatform, tjr, trades this guy
in his early 20s, based out ofPuerto Rico.
Many of his videos are of him.
(13:18):
It's vertical, with him at thetop and then the chart that he's
trading with at the bottom andhe's explaining what's going on
with the chart, maybe reactingto it, maybe and when I say
react I mean he is uh likeyelling at a screen or he's
(13:42):
showing something.
That's where there's a unique,useful insight, but it's
entertaining at the same time.
So think of whatever long formvideo that explains a concept
like support and resistance.
He's going to explain that in ashort form.
He's going to explain that in ashort form and if he does that
(14:03):
in a creative way can reach apretty broad audience and maybe
has a like how the creativitypotential is endless.
You could Some folks I'll justspeak on the gambling niche
because I've seen it they willhave their laptops open in the
(14:30):
middle of a convenience storeand they'll be game and they'll
have people that are justwalking around them like hey,
should I put it all on red orblack?
And then just you know stufflike that, and so something
could be comparable to thetrading space.
John Newtson (14:38):
But I got an example what's exciting about it
is is, and and one of thethings that and we'll be talking
about this more and more in fmspro is that the one of the
highest roi and we'll be talkingabout this more and more in FMS
Pro is that one of the highestROI spaces right now for
acquisition is micro-influencers, and that is going out to
people like this who have asmall channel, have some kind of
reach, and trying to get themto go out there and build views
(14:59):
for you and drive them to somekind of a lead gen opportunity.
Drive them to some kind of alead gen opportunity.
And some of the numbers thatI'm hearing and I can't say from
everybody in who there arepretty ridiculous numbers, like
numbers we haven't seen inacquisition for quite a while.
People who are spending, youknow, are getting like 10 to one
(15:20):
or more ROIs for every dollarspent, and at pretty substantial
scale too.
We're talking over $10 million,and so I think that's the really
exciting thing here is thathere's a platform that has
specifically a marketingopportunity that lets you come
(15:41):
in and have a bidding system formicro-influencers.
So most of the things that Isee out there you're finding an
agency, which is great, or youhave people who are just doing
cold emails and outreach andcold DMs to people to see if
they can get them to dosomething like this, and so
having a platform that lets yougo to people, small creators
specifically, who are doingstuff in trading space too
because there's a lot of offersthere, so they're out there.
(16:02):
It's a lot of offers there, sothey're out there it's a really
exciting little thing.
That's probably not so littlein terms of Do you have any idea
on what kind of revenues drivenor leads have been driven with
that?
Blake Toves (16:14):
Yeah, it's a pretty brand awareness oriented
campaign where when somebodyassesses the ROI, they look at
how much money am I making perfollower in general.
And if my funnel is to sell viamy Instagram from the Instagram
(16:37):
stories or even from DMs, thenit's very relevant for me to run
this sort of campaign.
Then it's very relevant for meto run this sort of campaign.
But say, you just havesomething as simple as like a
link to your newsletter and bioand you command all of your
Clippers to make sure they havethat link in there.
Then you could track it thatway and you can make it about
(16:58):
your newsletter and generateemail signups from that.
So, and you could, for anybody,anybody watching this as you
watch this you can go to wopright now, make an account and
go to the discover section andsee the types of affiliate
offers on there, as well as the,the communities that have the
(17:22):
most bounties available, bountyas in the, the ones who are
getting the most out of WAP'scontent rewards ecosystem
they're loading up the mostamount of money.
I don't know if it makes senseto share.
John Newtson (17:36):
Yeah, why don't you pull it up?
And I'll just share your screen, Okay cool.
Blake Toves (17:41):
Cool and there's a lot.
Hit the WAP page like this.
You have explore, you haveleaderboards, but if you go to
leaderboards you go to trading.
You can see on these categorieswhat are the newest companies
as it relates to trading thatwere just created.
(18:02):
The most addicting meaning themost time spent.
It even gives you a breakdownright here.
So most addicting is a list ofWAPs ordered by the most time
spent inside the WAP for eachuser in the last 24 hours.
So for this one, gold pips86,000 or 87,000 minutes has
been spent in the last day inthis specific free signals group
(18:27):
Nice.
It's a Forex group and then youhave options inside of Pro
Shows the minutes I like to goto most money made.
That's a really fun one.
It used to be where you couldsee the exact amount of money
people were paid, but we removedthat feature because some folks
didn't like it.
But you can see real clearlywhich companies are making the
(18:47):
most.
I'll tell you the ones at thetop.
Here.
They're doing a million a month.
John Newtson (18:52):
So then, just the $20,000, $10,000 a month.
What do those members represent?
Blake Toves (19:00):
So maybe the top ones.
They sell high ticket, but thisone in particular is a low
ticket group.
John Newtson (19:08):
Okay, so those are the prices of the products.
Blake Toves (19:10):
Yes.
John Newtson (19:11):
Okay, which is another thing.
That that's.
It seems like a lot of this, notall of it, but there's a lot of
this working towards highticket funnels, right, and and I
think that's important forpeople to realize, because this
is a lot of social content and,yes, there's also paid ads.
(19:32):
They'll send the bio advertisingto their funnel, but a lot of
this social traffic is stillgoing to high ticket funnels,
right, and there's a couple ofthings with that.
One is it speaks to quality oftraffic, right, people are
buying $20,000 products.
But also that, like, the highticket sales funnel, like with
(19:58):
phones, is increasing.
It's increasingly being usedacross not just FinPub, but like
the whole biz op industry, thewhole internet marketing
industry, because, as everythingelse got harder and more
expensive, like you need thathigh ticket to make things work,
but it's working really well.
And so, again, people who don'thave a high ticket phone kind
(20:20):
of operation or set up like it'sa missed opportunity.
But also, just in terms of WAP,the fact that you can go on a
network and people are driving,you know, views into things that
are generating customers onsuper high ticket prices on
products is, um, I think, a bigchange over the last five years,
(20:42):
whereas we have a lot of peoplewho've been in the business for
a long time.
Blake Toves (20:46):
And here's that, by the way, the bounties so you
can earn one dollar per 1 000views.
Earn three hundred dollars per1 million views yeah, they
position it before you end it.
John Newtson (20:56):
I just want again because I'm trying to put this
in the context for people who'vebeen in the industry for you
know, we have people been inhere for 20 years, 30 years um,
you know, tests that happenedfive years ago on different
networks, like people you know,like oh, that doesn't work.
And then we always say it'susually when they're too early,
we try things too early and thenit didn't work until you kind
(21:18):
of ignore it.
But like, uh, the microinfluencer piece, like it's
working.
Now it's been working for thelast year and a half really well
, maybe two years, and it'scrushing it and so, having that
kind of component, I can'tstress enough how much it's
worth testing for folks.
And so, yeah, if you want to goback to the bounties and show
(21:42):
the bounties is the biddingsystem right, yep.
Blake Toves (21:50):
And an issue people would have with this is well,
how do I know if the views arereal and it's not just a bunch
of bot traffic or low qualitytraffic?
We have a tool that allows youto look into that and verify.
Oh, this is not the type oftraffic that I would want to pay
for, and you specify that.
For each of these that you seehere, there are rules specified
(22:10):
in detail on what they look forto qualify for those payouts.
John Newtson (22:16):
So what kind of qualifications can you put in
there?
Blake Toves (22:19):
Oh well, like you can qualify for a payout if you
got 1,000 views and it was fromfirst world audience, like us,
canada, and yeah, that's, that'sthe simplest one, and we have a
tool that checks for that right, and then when you submit, uh,
(22:43):
the bounty, you can putparameters, including regulatory
issue things.
Oh yeah, it can't be said right,yeah, you could say do not
mention these words and have allthe words there, okay, or these
language, and in the same waythat an affiliate program would
(23:04):
be set up for highly regulatedoffers, you would do that Nice.
John Newtson (23:10):
Right.
So what else does WAP do thatmaybe we don't know about?
Blake Toves (23:17):
We have this app store.
People can submit differentapps.
That allows them to create morevalue in the WAPs, the products
that they sell.
So for those who maybe arethinking one-dimensional in that
oh, I have course I havecoaching, I have community Well,
(23:38):
there's other useful tools inhere that some people would
argue would be their own SaaSthat you charge on a monthly
basis for this syncs up people'sbets.
There are, like that AI tool Ihad mentioned earlier on the
(23:58):
call Wisp, I believe you canscroll through here and see a
few and this is what, oh yeah, acompanion that will tell people
about the content in your webcommunity and you install it and
once it's installed, you canconfigure it for your, for your
(24:23):
people.
You can have support tickets, asimple image editor.
You can play Squid Game in yourWAP Things that make it sticky.
Because the entire team werenot just focused on the amount
of people processing moneythrough the platform.
The engineering team focused onhow do we get people to stay on
(24:46):
the platform and visit itmultiple times a day, every day
of the month, because we'replaying the venture capital game
and those metrics matter whenyou're attempting to raise even
more money or whenever you'retalking to your board of
advisors, letting them know hey,we have a healthy ecosystem.
People are actually using theproduct.
You can host giveaways.
(25:09):
You can have a map where all ofthe folks inside of your
community can be viewed.
John Newtson (25:15):
All right.
So what are the processing feeshere?
Blake Toves (25:27):
Oh yeah, so we can get into the finance and
processing side my favorite one.
Oh yeah, so we can get into thefinance and processing side my
favorite one and you have mostof our million dollar a month.
Accounts are at stripe rate orwe can beat it.
For anybody who just comes offthe street and makes a WAP
account without talking toanybody on the team, they're at
a 6% total processing feebecause they can self onboard.
(25:50):
We don't know what they'regoing to do.
Often, if they talk to us, wecan get the rate down
substantially.
It depends on what their volumeis.
It depends on what theirdispute rate is and their
industry Oftentimes the industrynot as much, but the dispute is
a big deal.
And then many people have cometo us not even to process their
(26:11):
payments but for financing,because they have high ticket
offers.
We have one stock options groupthat does 2 million a month or
more and they run about 37% oftheir volume through one of our
financing options.
And because we're so big, wehave negotiation power, and so
SplitIt is a company that we'reengaged with Klar, afterpay or
(26:31):
other solutions to we haveaccess to, but split it as one
that is exclusive with us at themoment, and that's a unique
product I could go in severalminutes about, but that's just
yeah let's not.
John Newtson (26:44):
Let's talk about that, because it's a nice um,
it's an interesting financingoption for high tickets.
So, yeah, what, what's the dealwith the?
Just just kind of give a quickoverview of what you can do with
split it.
Blake Toves (26:58):
Can I bring in my guest?
Uh, derrick, who is our head ofpayments?
Let's put it up.
All right, let's bring him ingood timing.
What's up?
Hey, derrick, take a seat I'min frame.
Derek (27:08):
I'm in frame.
Um, what's going on On thesplit it piece?
Perfect segue into aconversation around that.
Yeah, to Blake's point, we havemany buy now, pay later options
that the higher ticket guys arereally focused on, split it
being our bread and butter rightnow.
Traditionally with split itthey were e-commerce physical
product only and you had to bedoing 10 to 15 million a month
top line to be considered for anaccount.
(27:29):
After some work with them,we're introducing it to the
digital coaching high ticketspace in a way that they never
really considered prior and bydoing so we're taking over some
liability, a little bit of therisk, as well as the
underwriting to give it tobusinesses that traditionally
couldn't have got it.
So the way that Splitit'sworking is, as a credit card
nerd, it's just a hyper creativecredit card transaction and so
(27:51):
it acts as a pre-auth on acustomer's credit card.
If you send somebody, forexample, a 12K USD payment link,
they're going to on ourinterface, get an option for a 3
, 6, or 12-month payment planoption and through this flow
there's no social, no ID, noaddress, upload, nothing outside
of a standard credit cardinformation link for uploading
information on.
(28:12):
They enter standard billingmaterials, credit card number.
They choose between three, sixor 12 months and they're
presented with an interest-freefinancing option for let's use
the example 12 months.
What happens on that 12Kpayment link, right, is it shows
up on their credit card as$11,000 pending and $1,000 goes
to to be paid, acting as astandard credit card transaction
, right.
30 days later, another $1,000goes to to be paid, acting as a
standard credit card transaction, right.
30 days later, another $1,000shears off that pending and goes
(28:34):
over to to be paid, and so on,so forth, for 12 months, and I
use the 12K for that 12 monthexample of it will always be
just that $1,000 flat.
On that numerical example,there's no origination fee, no
extra fees of any sort, and it'sjust a standard transaction in
the eyes of a credit cardprocessing company, in
comparison to traditional buynow, pay later financing so not
(28:56):
needing credit checks of anysort allows us to offer this in
17 different countries all ofthe eu, australia, canada,
working on mexico next and alittle bit of latin america.
But we genuinely believe we'rethe first product offering for
instant buy now, pay later forthose countries outside of
Canada or the US.
For the most part, merchantsget paid in four days, nice and
(29:16):
easy, and I know we were talkingfees there a second ago.
Internally, knowing the typesof businesses we were going to
offer it to, we spent a lot oftime determining what we wanted
to price it at and we just cameto the conclusion that pricing
that 15 flat rate to themerchant and no interest or no
fees whatsoever to the customerwas the best route.
Uh, to the stocks stock optiontrading account that blake had
(29:38):
mentioned, they're doingsignificant volume through this
program and, anecdotally, whattheir sales reps are running is
just saying hey it, for example,it's 10k today or 11 000 to
finance it for 12 months.
They're just passing through 10flat business eats five, which
is below what they're paying.
Most accounts are paying withclarna firm K today, or 11,000
to finance it for 12 months.
They're just passing through10% flat business eats five,
which is below what they'repaying.
Most accounts are paying withKlarna firm after pay anyways
Right, and so they're saving alittle bit.
Their customer eats the 10 niceand easy in comparison to
(30:00):
interest that they would seewithin a firm or a Klarna in
most cases, and that framing andthat that selling of it has
turned into.
The biggest guys are using itfor the financially qualified
but price sensitive prospects.
Right, this isn't an end-all,be-all golden standard, the last
financing option you'll everneed, but it's fantastic for the
(30:20):
guys that are doing numbers,that have sales teams losing
deals to financially qualifiedprospects, which arguably, are
the worst deals to lose.
Right, they had the money butthey just didn't buy and and so
implementing it there for salesteams is what's turned it into,
like their ace up their sleevein most of the programs we've
seen.
John Newtson (30:36):
Nice, nice.
Do you have any evidence,anything or otherwise, on kind
of bumps they're getting?
Derek (30:44):
Yeah, so that stock option trading account that
Blake had mentioned, that's justone of our favorite case
studies is Blake had introducedthem and we spent a lot of time
onboarding them early to ourrelationship.
They were looking at 1.6, 1.7million a month as a record
prior to working with us.
They were trying everyfinancing solution under the sun
um, in a bunch of differentcreative ways uh, different
Stripe accounts and theircousins, mom's, sister's name,
(31:05):
right To have an Affirm accountfor 11 minutes, then it'd blow
up, right, and so we had broughtthem in.
We added split it and it wasfunny.
On the initial sales call theyjust said, hey, if we do 2
million this month, the wholesales team is going out to
Monaco for F1.
And I was like I'm alreadygoing, so I'm going to meet you
(31:29):
guys there.
What month specifically?
That was April.
We added them April 21st.
They basically ran all thevolume that they had through the
rest of that month throughSplitit, doing 600 grand in nine
days and that for that team wasmonstrous.
It was insanity.
And now they're hoveringbetween that 2.1, 2.6 mil a
month since April and it's onlybeen two months of an example.
But yeah, it was insanity andthat was our first really crazy
(31:52):
use case of someone usingsignificant uh, or using it for
a significant amount of theirvolume.
And so that's when the studywe're bringing up to everybody
now of like, if you're running40 percent ish, you know give or
take of your volume throughthis and you're at scale, you're
going to see an insane anduptick in conversions that's
killer, that's.
John Newtson (32:10):
I appreciate that.
So I have the payments guy onhere real quick.
This is a lot of this is highprocess or high risk processing,
right, yeah, so what kind oflike you have you have beyond
just the this, this productoverall?
Like, what are you guys doingfor your processors and how are
you handling the fact that youdo have high risk kind of
(32:31):
product lines in some of theseplaces?
Derek (32:33):
Of course, when I joined WAP, we were single PSP running
everything through Stripe, andthis is like we've talked about
this across all the socials alot.
We were Stripe only and we weredoing very well.
All things considered, we havea fantastic relationship with
Stripe on a merchant of recordlevel relationship, which puts
us in in between as a buffer, astaking full liability.
We still run tons of our volumethrough Stripe as a platform
(32:55):
and this is also like publiclyavailable that we talk about a
lot.
But we also have five PSPs aswell that are stacked on the
back end, that are layered inand that are orchestrated
through, and so we now have acascading payment orchestration
platform that is optimized forthe highest likelihood of
authorization on a transaction,depending on region, ticket size
, card brand, so on and so forth.
(33:15):
And so through those PSPs, wejust went through extreme
underwriting with them takingfull liability as a merchant of
record provider and justbasically negotiating terms of
we're going to onboard dealsthat you guys normally don't
board, but because we're holdingfull liability, let's just not
worry about it, right?
That's kind of the framing.
And then, down into the depthsof it, we've just established
our own risk policies, whatwe're willing to do and what
(33:36):
we're not willing to do.
And there's certain verticals,neutral related stuff male
enhancement, excessive FTCrelated trading offers right.
The stuff that you know isviolating one or 37 policies or
regulations right.
We don't touch almost any ofthat right.
But if it's staying withinstandard laws and a majority of
the world will board the deal inthe high risk realm.
(33:58):
But we're sticking to thatdigital info, coaching,
fulfillment style businessesversus the physical, which makes
it much easier on our end to beable to support them longer
term versus-.
John Newtson (34:07):
Yeah nice, that's awesome.
So when somebody comes on boardlike are they getting a kind?
Derek (34:15):
of a.
Blake Toves (34:16):
Is there a person they talk to, or is it?
Derek (34:17):
general rep.
Yeah, we have self onboarding.
Anyone can go and create anaccount for free and onboard you
.
We we limit many features forself onboarding individuals or
merchants just because a lot ofthem are very like
hyper-specific use case.
But if you were to come througha sales rep, which is basically
almost referral only, we don'thave a real flow for onboarding
through a sales rep, as our bestrelationships are through
(34:38):
referrals.
Always you come in through oneof our sales reps or anybody on
our growth team and we get agood understanding of the
business.
We know what specific featuresto roll out to you, what
financing to do.
We ask about previouschargeback history, the risk of
the account, overall right andyour average tickets to
determine you know what are maxticket links that you can create
, what pricing are we going toput them at.
To Blake's point about ourdifferent pricing on credit card
(35:00):
and financing, and then we kindof white glove onboard every
deal of scale and so that stockoption trading account we
mentioned.
Like the day that we onboardedthem I got on a Zoom with their
entire organization, the wholegroup, and then we had like 30
plus people on there and we dida full training on how to use
the entire platform, how toframe selling with these
(35:20):
different options, what creditauthorization rates look like,
so on and so forth.
And so those white glove styleaccounts.
We love spending time withCooler cooler.
John Newtson (35:28):
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks.
Is there anything else youthink that you know established
publishers should know about theplatform and what you guys do?
The embedded checkout.
Derek (35:36):
We have recently rolled out embedded checkout.
It's been something that wefought tooth and nail for as a
merchant of record.
That's very difficult to getaround.
Traditionally, merchant ofrecord requires it to be
completely within our ecosystem.
The checkups would have to beon a WAPcom URL.
Recently rolling out theability to embed our full
payment stack, our upsells, ourdownsells, all our order bumps,
into your go high levels, yourclick funnels, your web flow
(35:58):
sites, whatever it may be.
And now direct integration togo high level, working on
closeio as other CRMs as well.
Full Zapier integration,makecom, so on and so forth.
But we have extensive webhookAPI capacity and now, with the
embedded checkout, we're seeinglarger offerings and publishers
(36:18):
integrate us into their funnels.
Finally, because they justhated our UI, which is fair
right.
Everyone has their obsessionswith retention and conversion
optimization, and so now that wecan embed into your existing
pages, we're seeing a sickuptick in bigger offers taking
advantage.
John Newtson (36:34):
Killer.
That's great.
Yeah, awesome.
No, that's cool.
Guys, I appreciate it.
This is cool.
I think a lot of people areinterested in this and becoming
more interested in it, like Isaid, that we're pushing,
there's so many new trafficopportunities for folks and as
other ones kind of slow down,you know they got money to spend
and looking for places to spendit.
Derek (36:56):
Yeah, the FinPub circle is a different circle than
majority of the other biz optstyle or, like copywriting,
whatever different industries orniches that we've broken into
very well.
We're excited to keep breakinginto the FinPub because it's the
most tried and true, longeststanding publishing circle in my
opinion, and it's also the bestpeople to work with every time.
(37:17):
So we're excited to keepgetting introduced to it.
John Newtson (37:19):
That's where Agoras came out with the first
e-letter in 99, I think yeah,yeah, we've been doing email
newsletters forever andpublishing so yeah, no, it's a
great community and they got alot of great businesses there
and so, um, I've been excited tokind of talk to you guys and
hopefully have you guys out atFMS is coming up here.
Uh, we have to line that up sosweet.
(37:40):
Well, I appreciate you guyscoming on here.
I think this is awesome.
I'll get this out to everybody.
Um, if anyone has any questions, um, if you're an FMS pro, you
can hit Derek up or you can hitBlake up in the, uh, fms discord
.
Um, if you have any otherquestions, if you're not in FMS
pro, just hit me up and I'llmake a connection.
Derek (37:56):
So, sweet, Appreciate the time and listening to the
payments ramp, uh rambling there.
John Newtson (38:02):
No, no, that's what I love People who know what
the hell they're talking about,rambling about what they look
with what they're what they'redoing.
So that's the thing.
So I appreciate you guys.
Thanks.
Derek (38:12):
Beautiful Thanks, John.
Have a good one man.
We'll talk soon, okay, Thank?
John Newtson (38:14):
you Take care Bye.
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