November 20, 2023 • 39 mins
We dive into the future of web 3 advertising as we sit down with Oleksii, the founder and CEO of Slice, a cutting-edge player in the Web3 advertising space.
Imagine a world where advertisers can connect directly with Web3 users through dApps, creating a more transparent, efficient, and personalized experience. Slice is making this possible, using wallet data over cookies and prioritizing quality over quantity. We peel back the layers on their innovative approach, discuss the core principles driving their mission, and get Oleksii's unique insights on the future of the Web3 ad market.
And to wrap it up, we open the floor for a deep-dive conversation on the mechanics of advertising in the Web3 space. Packed with valuable insights on optimizing advertising funnels, overcoming the challenges of conversion tracking, and the potential of integrating crypto into everyday life.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Crescendo Go to
Market podcast, and today wehave Alexi from Slice, one of
the first Web3 ad networks.
Alexi, why don't you introduceyourself and what Slice is?
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
sure.
So I'm Alexi, founder and CEOat Slice, maybe just starting
from my personal background.
Multimaker year was in research, so I started from doing
research in physics and thenswitched to computer science and
eventually ended up doing likeacademic research in AI.
So published a number of papers, went to conferences and been
(00:34):
doing it across institutionslike Facebook, air Research and
Oxford, but eventually felt thatI want to apply my knowledge
and my expertise to solving realworld problems.
So shifted to startups, playedaround for a bit, built a few
smaller products, differentsocial products, different media
(00:54):
channels, eventually stumbledon the larger idea where,
together with my co-founder, wefounded our first company called
Suggester.
It was a web2 company inpersonalization for e-commerce
space.
It went quite well.
We went with it through IC, buteventually I'll tell you the
(01:17):
story, what happened toSuggester but eventually it
drove us to Web3.
So now I'm working on this newcompany called Slice which,
basically, doing very simplething, solves very obvious
problems.
As we think about it Basically,we just help projects reach
(01:39):
Web3 users and we want to do itthe most efficient way, the most
transparent way, by usingwallet data instead of cookies.
Yeah, why we do it?
Because we weren't in the spacefor a bit.
We saw the situation with Web3marketing.
We think that it's disastrous.
Right now it still replicatesthe early days of the internet,
(02:00):
where people use primitive, notdata-driven techniques.
Everything was just breaking upand users were no retention, no
good metrics around useracquisition, no proper tools,
and now we kind of see it'schanging and Slice, being on the
middle layer of this funnelwhere we are responsible for the
(02:23):
actual traffic, for connectingadvertisers to the end users,
helping them to capture userattention and bring it to their
products.
Now we want to power this layerof the growth ecosystem by
enabling the most efficient wayto reach these users and to
acquire Got it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, that's really fascinating.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
All right.
So how we do it is basically webuilt a Web3 native ad network
by connecting publishers who, inour case, are the apps, so the
Web3 native applications whohave existing user bases, who
solve other problems like it'sgoing to be DeX, wallets
Analytics tools, things likethat and bringing in their
(03:08):
audience to advertisers.
And basically we power thismiddle layer by enabling
advertisers to run advertisingcampaigns on these dApps, kind
of in the basically first timepossible, by not placing ads on
the media channels or socialnetworks but on the actual dApps
.
So we kind of enabling it withall the tech around campaign
(03:31):
creation, targeting, analyticsand things like that.
And so far the product beenlive for quite some time.
We still quite early, but wealready saw good traction, good
proofs from the market that whatwe are doing is actually needed
, that we solve a really painfulproblem which has been proven
(03:53):
by really big brands in thespace using us even such early
days.
So now we're working withPayPal, we're working with
Metamask, we're working with alot of kind of bigger brands
across BTC and B2B and, yeah,again, being very early product,
we already captured more than amillion of unique users.
So far it's been great, veryexcited to work on Slice and to
(04:19):
help basically shape Web Streammarketing for the future.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, and I personally think Slice is a very
exciting project.
I think the fact is that there'sreally not many solutions for
good Web3 native advertising andI do think Slice is solving a
major problem, and I think adnetworks are one of the 100x
opportunities in the space.
So I am very excited to seewhat's coming and I do feel that
(04:48):
advertisers get involved early.
Start testing with ad networksthat are out now, like Slice,
because you will be the first toreally be able to take
advantage of, like when the nextbull run, the next cycle
happens, because you kind ofneed to obviously learn how to
use these platforms, like thedata is.
(05:09):
You know is kind of like youbasically have to feed data into
these algorithms, right, like Iimagine, for you guys, if
you're working with anadvertiser, and the more data
you have, the better results youcan get.
So I do think it's importantfor advertisers, even if right
now it's not like the biggestvolume or even if it's not the
most profitable, start messingaround with this and start like
actually running campaigns, justso you can start feeding data
(05:31):
into these systems and be readyfor scaling when the time comes.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I mean even fast, kind of just taking time
to build out the product.
You know work on the feedback,you know, continuously improve
it.
So when the big wave comes now,we are ready to take it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Exactly Now.
Obviously you're building slicenow, but I do want to take a
step back into kind of yourjourney and especially you know
you did Facebook research.
You did research for Facebookright Like you basically were
helping them with AI.
Could you go into that and howthat affected your decision to
become an entrepreneur and whatyou were doing there?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, sure.
So you know I went to Facebookright from the school, you can
say, and I did my master, butafter my master I went to
Facebook.
So it was my first likecorporate career, corporate
experience.
It was quite interesting.
You know I also was inHeadquarters in Manlow Park, so
it was my first time in the US.
(06:27):
So yeah, it was quite, quitebig experience, quite new for me
from the school to go throughall of it.
I would say I liked it overall.
You know it's a verycomfortable place to work, just
nice.
You know work-life balance,other things.
But again, you know, being superyoung, ambitious, kind of, I
felt a bit stagnating.
(06:47):
And also, you know I wasn'tsuper excited about research at
that point.
You know the big there was someAI hype before, you know, and
but the current AI hype wavehasn't come yet.
So it was some kind of, let'ssay, kind of bear market.
But yeah, you know, ai researchwas just an industry like any
(07:08):
other research A lot of science,a lot of mass, a lot of
bullshit with like conferences,reviews, was the journals, like
academic stuff which reallynobody wants to deal with.
So you know, a lot of kind ofhard efforts for very, I would
say disproportionate returns,because now research is really
(07:32):
really hard.
But you know, I didn't feelthat I'm getting rewarded for it
like in the right way, you know, for the amount of effort I put
into it.
And apart from that, yeah, youknow, I just started feeling
that like, you know, whetherit's really something for me,
whether I want to spend all mylife doing it and looking at all
the professors and all the kindof renowned scientists in the
(07:56):
lab and it didn't look like avery exciting future for me.
And yeah, and I suppose, andbecause, being in the Silicon
Valley, there was this wholeworld of startups where people
actually doing similar things,or sometimes even much easier
things, but they solve realproblems with it and they
capture value much moreefficiently.
(08:17):
So at some point I got reallyinterested in this whole kind of
industry in this market.
Yeah, eventually I decided totry.
You know I had no experience inentrepreneurship.
I mean, I had little experience, but like nothing kind of
serious, nothing very technical.
But I felt like, okay, you know, if not now, then when?
(08:40):
Because it was time when I hadsome savings.
You know I was still young, Ididn't have family and kind of
commitments.
It was, you know, my time totry.
So basically now for some time,for a few months, I just was on
my own, you know, tryingdifferent ideas using different
no-code tools which were quitepopular back then, trying
(09:05):
basically to, you know, earnmoney like out of the sea and
air, just based on my experienceand based on my ideas.
It was quite an interestingexperience.
Nothing out of it, I would say,worked.
Yeah, there was like oneproduct which I sold, which was
like a news channel, veryinteresting product which is
(09:27):
still alive today and stillworking, but apart from that,
nothing really huge came out ofit.
But then what happened then?
It's very interesting.
So I got into, like Accelerator,you know, slash Incubator
called Entrepreneur First andthere are basically a couple of
them.
It's like Entrepreneur Firstand Antler.
(09:48):
You know, they are verydifferent from typical startup
accelerators as we know thembecause they like to invest like
in talent, not in the companies, but just in talent in people.
So they kind of they getfounders at really early stages
without even ideas, withoutteams.
They put them all into like onepool and they, you know, hope
that companies will come out outof it and then they fund these
(10:11):
companies.
So that's how I started my kindof startup journey more
seriously.
You know already we've gotfounder, which is Huma Huma,
founding EF.
Yeah, I moved to Singapore andthat's kind of where Suggestor
journey started.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Got it and Suggestor is basically it was like
recommendation engine fore-commerce stores.
So, yeah, what was Suggestorexactly?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.
You know there are multipleways you can call it.
It's like we can call it, youknow, first part data management
solution, or you can call itlike a recommendation engine, or
you can call it AI fore-commerce.
But in the end, yeah, we justtook any data which was
available on the Shopify stores,you know, from their users,
from their storefronts.
We pulled it, we put it in ourmodels.
You know where kind of I couldapply my expertise, you know, to
(11:01):
be a building kind of thisreally smart kind of models
which then would spit out likerecommendations what we should
show to this specific user.
You know how to upsell andcross sell different e-commerce
items to them.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Got it and I know you guys got some solid momentum.
You guys also, I believe, gotinto Icompany over that right.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, exactly so after EF we went forward and we
raised more money, we went live,we were featured on Shopify
homepage.
Imagine kind of you work with150 brands or so.
And yeah, we went throughIcompinator Winter 22 batch Got
it.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
And then what ended up happening with that?
What were kind of like the, Iguess lessons learned or what
ended up?
You know what was the evolutionof that?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, you know, I mean it was kind of wild
decision because on the papereverything looked kind of really
well.
You know we were growing, westarted hitting first revenue,
you know Icompinator kind ofrecognition, good brand
generally things.
They looked well, you know, andin fact they did go well, you
know it.
For that point in time it wasreally kind of good place to be.
(12:15):
But, you know, carrying overthe US founders, you know we
looked at, you know ourprojections, so where we are
heading, and at this point youknow we tried different growth
tactics, we tried differentchannels.
You know we looked at ourcompetitors, we looked at our
client base and basically, youknow we felt that you know there
was kind of two big problemswhich eventually led us to shut
(12:39):
down.
Suggestor is that we first wefelt that product market feed
was not strong enough.
So it still kind of was it wasuseful for our audience, for our
users, but not useful enough,you know, to pay a lot for it to
make kind of our B2B uniteconomics actually work.
So it was kind of there wassome fit but it wasn't kind of,
(13:00):
you know, very hot.
And secondly, because weoperated specifically on this
market of SMB stores and kind ofmom and pop stores and Shopify,
because that's kind of where wesaw opportunity, because, you
know, of course, Amazon's andbig players, they have their
solutions in place already.
Now our whole thesis was tobring the advanced tools, like
(13:21):
kind of advanced personalization, from Amazon to these kind of
small SMB stores.
But then, yeah, look at thismarket and actually realize that
it's quite limited, you know,in terms of, like, their paying
capabilities.
It was quite small for us tobuild something huge out of it
and, of course, because wedeveloped it by the venture
model, you know it, it only madesense to do it for us and for
(13:44):
investors if it could be like aunicorn.
And even though we had revenue,in terms of, we had traction,
we saw that, okay, it will takeus either too long or, you know,
we won't be able to make it atall to this huge status.
And it it made more sense to usto just return the money and
say like, hey, you know, here'sthe situation.
As soon as we realized that wecannot fulfill this potential,
(14:09):
these expectations, just to turnthe money and decided to focus
our time and our efforts onsomething that actually can
fulfill this potential.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Got it.
So I guess the issue was thatthe smaller E-comp stores they
didn't really have the budgetand it wasn't creating enough of
a lift, I guess, for them tojustify paying, let's say, like
what they would pay for anagency, right, like so,
basically, and were you guysselling kind of like a Shopify
app or?
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, exactly, it was Shopify app.
I mean we could expand beyondthat, but in the end, yeah, the
issue was that it still was anoptimization level solution
where we could improve yourperformance by like a few
percentage points.
And for big stores, who makelike hundreds of millions, this
couple of percentage pointsmakes a lot of difference.
But for the small stores, theyliterally have like so many
(15:00):
other problems on top of theirminds, like with fulfillment,
customer support, other things,the shipping, that is,
optimization of user experience.
A couple of percentage pointsfor from app sales were not such
a painful issue to pay a lotfor that.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean that totally makessense and I come from that
world as well of like a lot ofdirect to commerce and I would
say that most small store ownersare not that sophisticated when
it comes to tech and it's just.
I can see the challenges ofscaling to them unless you're
able to go for those big storesthat are paying like a hundred
million or, sorry, that aredoing a hundred million, 200
(15:39):
million a year in revenue.
I kind of think that if itwasn't a VC backed venture, if
it was more bootstrapped and youalso bundled it with an agency
model, that would be a reallyinteresting like business model,
almost like getting acquired bya large direct to commerce
agency, because you give themlike an edge in terms of their
optimization and then, becauseit's being paired with
(15:59):
optimization efforts on theagency's part, the value of the
services become higher.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Did you ever think about that, or was that ever
like a consideration in terms ofa potential pivot or we thought
about that, you know, when welooked for like potential
synergies, when you know wewanted to exit and then it still
was kind of hard just becauseof the logistics of it.
You know like code base.
You know the whole operationswas kind of a bit tricky but
still, you know you shouldunderstand that Shopify market
(16:26):
is quite competitive.
You know, first it's small butyou know it has kind of its
leaders.
There are also kind of a lot ofdifferent players.
There are a kind of, so to say,like developers you know could
do a lot of different thingstogether.
So yeah, kind of you know theycan play synergy kind of between
different apps.
And yeah, again, most money areto be made on these larger
(16:51):
accounts which you know.
Actually on Shopify you havethe Shopify Plus plan, whereas
in now it's around like 2,000stores, so kind of it's like
premium Shopify plans for largerstores.
But you know there are stilljust 2,000 of them and you know
how big of the market could theymake.
So that kind of was our concern, that you know like there was
limited room to show, even ifyou would want to scale more
(17:14):
aggressively.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, and it's really like a red ocean, Like you said
right, like a lot of Shopifydevelopers.
While I think the web-freespace definitely let's get to
that, why did you decide to getinto web-free?
Speaker 2 (17:30):
I think it was exactly that reason that, you
know, being directed in thephoto of this continuous
competition and, you know, verysmall margins on this very dense
, very optimized market ofe-commerce.
You know, looking at web-freefrom that perspective was like,
yeah, completely empty fieldswhere anything you would take
just not just would startgrowing because there's
(17:51):
literally no one else doing ityet and, you know, still very
obvious, very painful ideas andvery painful problems are still
yet to be solved.
So it looked like, you know,much more like, first, easier
play.
Secondly, you know, moreconvincing.
You know.
So like, oh yeah, I know thatI'm solved, something people
actually need.
And of course, you know thewhole potential of web-free
(18:12):
market also, you know, lookedquite exciting, you know, back
then when we started.
Now probably it's a biggerquestion, you know that is
always still belief in it.
But when we started, you knowwhen the like somewhere goes to
the end of the bull run, I meanbig motivation for me, apart
from just the whole marketperspective, was that I saw a
lot of very smart people cominginto this space and even though
(18:34):
you know I was, I didn't reallydig too deep into, like you know
, economics or the like tech ofcrypto market, trying to
understand whether it actuallywill be future or not.
I just, you know, I basicallybet on all these people, all the
developers whom I saw, you know, shifting into crypto, into
(18:55):
web-free, from all the differentkind of areas like you know AI,
research, different otherscientific fields, you know and
it was like it looked convincedenough for me to understand
something is cooking andsomething will be, something
will come out out of that.
So that's kind of how myinterest in web-free market
(19:16):
arose.
From all these people you knowall this movement, all this
development which was going onand you know amount of
opportunity in the space.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, and when did you start building?
Slice, slice it started.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Like you know, we went through YC in winter.
We had the day end of March,start of April.
You know, right there itdecided to shut down and right
there it decided to continuewith Slice.
Because you know, we had thismotivation to just let's
continue.
You know, I think you know, wedidn't want to feel that, oh,
you know we didn't work out orwe need to stop.
(19:54):
It was like, yeah, we make thisdecision, it makes sense, but
we still motivated to continue.
Let's continue right ahead.
So I think the can you break.
And in the May of 2022, when Iremember yesterday's when
Lunacrushed, basically I startedmy major in Web3.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, it made sense because I think that's around
that period is when a lot of theweb three MarTech products
start started building, becauseeverybody realized, okay, this
is going to be pretty big, buteverybody also realized that the
growth tooling in the space wascompletely non-existent.
There's really noinfrastructure for growth and I
feel like there was a big cohortof like this last bull run,
(20:37):
where you know, a lot of growthmarketers came in from web two
to start poking around and thenyou essentially have all of
these MarTech startups startingup.
So it's really interesting andI'm really glad to see that it's
happening.
And I do feel like it is theright time, where you know you
start at the right time, whereit's not too early, where PCs
are like why, like this is, youknow, not going to be needed,
(21:02):
but it's like at that exactposition when people are trying
to figure out growth and youknow there's this conversation.
So the timing was impeccable, Ithink, for Slice.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It was quite all right.
You know, and even right now wefeel that we are in this kind
of cohort of new companies, likeMarTech companies who started
around the same period.
You know, these are attributiontools and these different CRMs,
you know, and surprisinglyenough, there was like nice and
pretty serious before, or niceand pretty new come-ups comes up
after.
So, yeah, you know we aremoving together in this cohort,
(21:35):
you know, basically talking toeach other, seeing how we can
develop this market, how it willgrow.
You know, kind of basicallycreating it from scratch.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
And I'm curious with Slice sofar, how much volume have you
seen?
How much momentum have you seen?
I'm just curious, like, whatdoes the early stages of a Web3
ad network look like in terms ofrevenue or, like, I guess,
spend by customers?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, so for the volume Also, volume for us is a
bit of a vanity metric, becausevolume is very easy to get you
know and it's very easy to getto the big number, but it's not
always good, and I'll tell youwhy.
Because you know the incumbents.
We work against is, like youknow, mostly you know where can
(22:22):
you place ads.
Now, mostly it's kind of mediaplatforms like news websites,
magazines, coin trackers, thingslike that.
They don't have worldconnection.
They had a lot of kind oforganic traffic from all the
different sources and, yeah, Imean their technical
capabilities are quite limited.
(22:45):
So when advertisers place theirads there, some of these, you
know, biggest websites can haveup to like 100 million of
monthly hits.
You know impressions, let's say.
And then when we look at thediaprador, you know we see
around 2 million of monthlyactive wallets on chain.
So you know, and then you kindof get two and two together,
(23:07):
seeing like that okay, we havetwo wall, two million of wallets
, we're actual users who dosomething in crypto and you have
100 million of impressionswhich you serve to you know who
knows whom, basically makingkind of 98% of this spend
completely relevant and go intowaste.
So far, you know it was kind ofour mission from the one to just
at least to cut off thisirrelevant traffic, you know,
(23:31):
and focus only on this kind ofcore audience or hardcore users.
So you know, and yes, it'ssmall, but you know it generates
like 98% of the value.
It's kind of, it's very skewedkind of this market and even now
we don't try to scale a crazy,you know, diluting our quality.
(23:53):
You know, on contrary, wemoderate.
You know, as we grow we must bemoderate even harder.
You know we curate ourpublishers even more strict just
to ensure that our you knowquality of this traffic, of this
audience we want they look tothis number.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
That makes sense.
So essentially it sounds likeyou're optimizing far more for
quality and conversions versusjust pure graphic and numbers.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yes, but was there was actual numbers?
How can you represent it?
Well, I mean, it's growing, youknow, and like there are
different months, you know wehad months where we would double
it, but right now we see somesomewhere around two and three
million of monthly impressions,and then it's not like it's a
(24:42):
big part of this market.
But you know, there's stillstill room to grow.
But we kind of feel quitecomfortable here.
But we know that.
Okay, we, we go to this point.
But we are sure about ourpublishers, about our traffic.
We tried more publishers andwhatever didn't work, we
filtered it out.
So yeah, and you know, we onlywant to grow and increase this
number.
Even we find good publishersagain, good traffic sources,
(25:08):
which will make sense to add tothis network.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
That makes sense.
And how do you view, forexample, gaming when it comes to
your, both your publishing anddemand demand side right?
How do you view a vertical likegaming?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, so in the reality is like we don't see
much of gaming, like, like youknow, it doesn't happen, that
doesn't come to our eyes,specifically on the advertising
side.
Because you know we also wouldexpect that, like, yeah, we have
three, we, you know, we sort ofdifferent verticals and we have
publishers across DeFi, nft,gaming trading, things like that
(25:45):
, and you would expect it.
Of course it would make a lotof sense for web three games,
like why are we three?
What three gamers?
Yeah, but surprisingly we don'tsee much of my marketing spend
in our life, marketing effortshappening in the gaming space
right now.
And this is what we see, youknow, in the web stream, native
(26:06):
tools.
Because also, kind of what werealized to this point, you know
, being on the market talking todifferent players, is that for
web three games, most of them,you know, would try to appeal to
much wider audience of likegeneral, general audience of web
two users where they wouldabstract the world away.
Like you know, they don't wantto focus just on the metamask
(26:29):
users you know, who made like acouple of millions of the whole
audience.
They would try to make just agood game.
It would appeal to anyone inweb two, and then you know it
allows them to go outside of webthree, advertise on, like meta,
on Google, acquire just regularweb two users, probably a
fraction of the cost, becausethey don't need web three users.
(26:50):
Yeah, and that's why I mean,and it makes sense for us.
You know I would feel badtaking money, you know, kind of
charging them for very expensiveweb three traffic if they don't
need it.
So I'll say, you know, insomething like like us, like
slice or in other web standardtools, they do make sense.
If you know, there's been a lotof sense for products that need
(27:13):
experienced web's nativeaudience.
You know who has wallets, wehave some assets, we know what
to do with them, how to tradethem, how to exchange them.
Yeah, and if it's the case,that's the most straightforward
and the best way to acquire suchaudience.
But if you don't need thisusers and all this prop, with
(27:33):
all these properties, then itdoesn't make sense to overpay
for it.
So maybe that's why, partially,we don't see so much gaming,
and now the fact that I believeit's not being very active right
now.
So not so many games arelaunching these days, so it's
also probably a factor.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think a lot of the Web3 gamesthey're going for more Web2
users and I do agree that itseems like probably the niche
that Slice is really tailoredtowards is perhaps DeFi, maybe a
bit of social Fi.
Would that be relativelyaccurate?
Speaker 2 (28:08):
A lot of DeFi.
Nft also kind of is quitespecific niche.
We have some NFT analyticstools, we have some minting
tools, but again for NFT we seekind of a similar picture where,
even though we had somepublishers, we didn't see a lot
of demand for it.
So again, how many collectionshave been launched and have been
minted these days?
(28:28):
Not so many.
How many of them are activelyadvertising?
Not so many.
So we didn't see enough demandand in the end at this point of
time most of our demand, of ourcustomers, is coming from DeFi
world, all kind of not likeinfra but like utility tools,
like different wallets orsecurity tools or things like
(28:51):
that.
But yeah, not many likespecific consumer facing
applications like NFT or games.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Got it and what do you think is the most successful
type of funnel you've seen sofar in Veptery?
Because obviously, as we getinto ads, you're not just
talking about ads, you'retalking about what people do
after they click on the ad, anda funnel, for those who don't
know, is basically the landingpage and the page after that.
So would be interested on yourthoughts on the best funnels
(29:22):
you've seen.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to talk
about it because we don't do somuch analytics on the actual
page of the product.
Now we work with attributiontools who help us with that,
because we do want to accountfor this date and for this
conversions, but it's a wholedifferent product to do this
kind of analytics.
So what you know but of coursewe see stuff, you know we go
(29:48):
through different advertisers,different campaigns I clearly
can tell you know what doesn'twork so clearly it clearly
doesn't work is to send trafficto the discord.
It doesn't work to send trafficto Twitter.
Yes, again, and conversions aremuch lower from web to mobile
(30:08):
apps.
Because now, if it's like extrastep of, you know, going to App
Store, we can separate, you knowwe can segment traffic which
would come from mobile.
But again, doing this funnel,that like mobile browser and
then mobile landing page, thengoing to App Store and
downloading app, is a bit fullof friction, so it doesn't work
(30:31):
as well.
Also, and yeah, the bestfunnels are the simplest, the
most straightforward funnelswhere users get on some landing
page, where there's very clearCTA straight on this landing
page, whether it's going to fitin the form or maintain
something or signing up, andthat's so far you know, and it's
(30:52):
all the same stuff from web to.
But yeah, things like that work.
And then, if it's all over, thesteps.
So basically, minimizing thenumber of steps and optimizing
each of these steps separatelyproduces the best results you
should make sense, and are you,with Slice, able to track
conversions back, or how do youdeal with attributions and
(31:13):
conversion tracking?
Yeah, so I mean it was like alagging couple of minutes, but I
mentioned that we do work withattribution providers.
So we have something on our ownwhich we integrate now just to
track clicks and kind of verybasic information, but the whole
attribution is completelydifferent product which needs
(31:36):
its own kind of analytics.
It needs its own kind ofintegrations, data sources.
So what we do, yeah, we partnerwith attribution providers with
kind of other apps, you knowother kind of players in our
cohort and yeah, we exchangedata with them because for them
it makes sense to report, youknow, also advertising spend,
advertising impressions andthings like that, while for us,
(31:59):
you know, we capture all thedata related to advertising.
But we also want to know what'shappened, what happens after.
So we do show conversions inour dashboard, in our analytics
page, but usually do it withhelp of other providers.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
And final question, the trickquestion, the most important
question what do you think isthe vertical in Web 3 that's
going to really take the cryptoand Web 3 world mainstream?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
First of all, yeah, it's a really tricky question.
A lot of people, you know, talkabout gaming, you know, and
though I believe like there's alot of kind of good game being
developed, I'm not sure how muchthey will help Web 3, right,
because they actually we seethat they tried to abstract it
away, so how much it will affectI'm not sure.
(32:55):
Yeah, I mean, I honestly believein integration of like crypto
in daily life and it's kind ofbeen topic, you know, a long
time ago, when people don'tthink what's that much, but we
still see, you know, even withour clients and what people
advertise, we see veryinteresting traction, you know,
coming to these platforms wherethey allow to spend crypto on
(33:15):
their physical world goods,different tickets or, you know,
to pop your phone or things likethat and, again, super
primitive idea, but we seeinterest to that and I think you
know, as a number of suchopportunities, such ways to
actually spend crypto and use itas actual fiat money, you know,
(33:36):
indistinguishably, yeah, Ithink it can help with adoption
for most consumer because, apartfrom that, yeah, a lot of
things which we saw, they werebased on speculation, so it's
not really sustainable.
So, yeah, there should be kindof utility and in the end of the
(33:59):
day, you know, utility shouldcome kind of from not just
experts but regular users whocan spend crypto in their daily
life and use, you know, theirMetaMask just like as I used to
come maybe PayPal now.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, I mean I've seen a lot of startups for that,
like I think lowly was one thatI recently saw and they're
doing kind of like, I think youget Bitcoin back when you shop
at different stores, and Ibelieve they're getting a lot of
success with that.
So, yeah, it's reallyinteresting to see these
different I guess IRL use casesright, and then you also have
(34:35):
these decentralized networkslike for computing and you know,
I think there's obviouslyhelium for Wi-Fi and like
connectivity.
So, really interested in tip inlike a decentralized
infrastructure that usesblockchain.
That's really interesting.
And one question I do have ishow can customers work with
(34:56):
Slice?
Do you guys have a minimumspend requirement?
How do they reach out to you tolearn more?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, so we just roll out our social interface, so
something we will presentgradually to more customers.
But we are available by all themeans he can reach us.
Now, probably the best would beour website and there is kind
of our email and our contact usform.
That would be the best to startwith, you know, for both
(35:25):
publishers and advertisers.
So I know for the.
I mean for to clarify to peoplethat we work as two-sided
marketplace, where we havepublishers who place advertising
and whom we help to monetize bypaying them, and we have
advertisers who, whom we help to, whom we help to tap into
(35:45):
audiences of these publishers byplacing their ads there.
So there's kind of a way toacquire users and advertisers
pay us for the traffic and wepay publishers in the end.
So for both publishers andadvertisers we're happy to
discuss, happy to meet newpeople contact us form would be
(36:05):
the best way to start from there.
Again, probably we would offerto open a call just to chat
first to see what the needs, howwe can help, if it's really a
good fit, you know, if we canshare more data from there.
You know we have some kind ofmetrics and some new diligence
information to share before westart, and then you basically
(36:27):
kind of be shared that into theplatform where they can start
playing around and set up theircampaigns, you know with
different segments, withdifferent filters.
You know to control their CPM,their spend and things like that
.
For the minimum spend, I meanit changes with time.
So I don't want, you know, justto be one number and the big
(36:47):
one that after.
But I would say I mean itprobably makes sense to start
like above $1000.
Even smaller.
It's hard to kind of make itwork and even to see
representative numbers, becausethe display ads is basically
numbers game.
You need to test a lot ofthings, you need to get a lot of
(37:08):
traffic even to start seeingfirst results.
So again, and I'm not reallyworried, you know telling that,
even though it will discouragesome potential users, because
the worst we can deal with isthe kind of too high
expectations, when you know whenWebstream marketers who never
did marketing before they'relike come to us and say, hey,
here is $100.
They want kind of 100 whales,can you give it to me?
(37:31):
And you know the answer is no.
You know, in fact, we justpublished on Twitter one
research from a research companywhich showed the price of a
cost of user acquisition formajor kind of protocols through
airdrops, looking at theretention of the few months at
the price of token, whatactually cost to get these users
to use these protocols, and theminimum price is kind of above
(37:56):
$1,000 for a single user.
You know, for optimism, forBitcoin, for protocols like that
, it goes in thousands ofdollars.
So, yeah, this pool is too small.
The users who actually activeusers in Webstream, they are
very valuable because they arewilling to spend, they are
willing to invest, they cangenerate a lot of value.
(38:17):
But also advertisers need toknow how to work with them and
they need to be ready to test,to approach their marketing
strategy seriously, you know,and not just to hope that they
will, you know, just buy likewhales for $1.
So, yeah, I mean it will startprobably somewhere from $1,000
and above, and you know.
(38:37):
But there you have all thetools to actually measure the
conversions.
This is a measure, the CPC, theclick rate.
Try different creatives, trydifferent formats, so it's all
kind of possible and only thisway it can actually work and be
successful.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
So guys go check out SliceS-L-I-S-E dot X-Y-Z I think
definitely one of the moreinteresting Web3 Martech
products out there.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Crescendo Go to
Market podcast, and today wehave Alexi from Slice, one of
the first Web3 ad networks.
Alexi, why don't you introduceyourself and what Slice is?
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
sure.
So I'm Alexi, founder and CEOat Slice, maybe just starting
from my personal background.
Multimaker year was in research, so I started from doing
research in physics and thenswitched to computer science and
eventually ended up doing likeacademic research in AI.
So published a number of papers, went to conferences and been
(00:34):
doing it across institutionslike Facebook, air Research and
Oxford, but eventually felt thatI want to apply my knowledge
and my expertise to solving realworld problems.
So shifted to startups, playedaround for a bit, built a few
smaller products, differentsocial products, different media
(00:54):
channels, eventually stumbledon the larger idea where,
together with my co-founder, wefounded our first company called
Suggester.
It was a web2 company inpersonalization for e-commerce
space.
It went quite well.
We went with it through IC, buteventually I'll tell you the
(01:17):
story, what happened toSuggester but eventually it
drove us to Web3.
So now I'm working on this newcompany called Slice which,
basically, doing very simplething, solves very obvious
problems.
As we think about it Basically,we just help projects reach
(01:39):
Web3 users and we want to do itthe most efficient way, the most
transparent way, by usingwallet data instead of cookies.
Yeah, why we do it?
Because we weren't in the spacefor a bit.
We saw the situation with Web3marketing.
We think that it's disastrous.
Right now it still replicatesthe early days of the internet,
(02:00):
where people use primitive, notdata-driven techniques.
Everything was just breaking upand users were no retention, no
good metrics around useracquisition, no proper tools,
and now we kind of see it'schanging and Slice, being on the
middle layer of this funnelwhere we are responsible for the
(02:23):
actual traffic, for connectingadvertisers to the end users,
helping them to capture userattention and bring it to their
products.
Now we want to power this layerof the growth ecosystem by
enabling the most efficient wayto reach these users and to
acquire Got it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, that's really fascinating.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
All right.
So how we do it is basically webuilt a Web3 native ad network
by connecting publishers who, inour case, are the apps, so the
Web3 native applications whohave existing user bases, who
solve other problems like it'sgoing to be DeX, wallets
Analytics tools, things likethat and bringing in their
(03:08):
audience to advertisers.
And basically we power thismiddle layer by enabling
advertisers to run advertisingcampaigns on these dApps, kind
of in the basically first timepossible, by not placing ads on
the media channels or socialnetworks but on the actual dApps
.
So we kind of enabling it withall the tech around campaign
(03:31):
creation, targeting, analyticsand things like that.
And so far the product beenlive for quite some time.
We still quite early, but wealready saw good traction, good
proofs from the market that whatwe are doing is actually needed
, that we solve a really painfulproblem which has been proven
(03:53):
by really big brands in thespace using us even such early
days.
So now we're working withPayPal, we're working with
Metamask, we're working with alot of kind of bigger brands
across BTC and B2B and, yeah,again, being very early product,
we already captured more than amillion of unique users.
So far it's been great, veryexcited to work on Slice and to
(04:19):
help basically shape Web Streammarketing for the future.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, and I personally think Slice is a very
exciting project.
I think the fact is that there'sreally not many solutions for
good Web3 native advertising andI do think Slice is solving a
major problem, and I think adnetworks are one of the 100x
opportunities in the space.
So I am very excited to seewhat's coming and I do feel that
(04:48):
advertisers get involved early.
Start testing with ad networksthat are out now, like Slice,
because you will be the first toreally be able to take
advantage of, like when the nextbull run, the next cycle
happens, because you kind ofneed to obviously learn how to
use these platforms, like thedata is.
(05:09):
You know is kind of like youbasically have to feed data into
these algorithms, right, like Iimagine, for you guys, if
you're working with anadvertiser, and the more data
you have, the better results youcan get.
So I do think it's importantfor advertisers, even if right
now it's not like the biggestvolume or even if it's not the
most profitable, start messingaround with this and start like
actually running campaigns, justso you can start feeding data
(05:31):
into these systems and be readyfor scaling when the time comes.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I mean even fast, kind of just taking time
to build out the product.
You know work on the feedback,you know, continuously improve
it.
So when the big wave comes now,we are ready to take it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Exactly Now.
Obviously you're building slicenow, but I do want to take a
step back into kind of yourjourney and especially you know
you did Facebook research.
You did research for Facebookright Like you basically were
helping them with AI.
Could you go into that and howthat affected your decision to
become an entrepreneur and whatyou were doing there?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, sure.
So you know I went to Facebookright from the school, you can
say, and I did my master, butafter my master I went to
Facebook.
So it was my first likecorporate career, corporate
experience.
It was quite interesting.
You know I also was inHeadquarters in Manlow Park, so
it was my first time in the US.
(06:27):
So yeah, it was quite, quitebig experience, quite new for me
from the school to go throughall of it.
I would say I liked it overall.
You know it's a verycomfortable place to work, just
nice.
You know work-life balance,other things.
But again, you know, being superyoung, ambitious, kind of, I
felt a bit stagnating.
(06:47):
And also, you know I wasn'tsuper excited about research at
that point.
You know the big there was someAI hype before, you know, and
but the current AI hype wavehasn't come yet.
So it was some kind of, let'ssay, kind of bear market.
But yeah, you know, ai researchwas just an industry like any
(07:08):
other research A lot of science,a lot of mass, a lot of
bullshit with like conferences,reviews, was the journals, like
academic stuff which reallynobody wants to deal with.
So you know, a lot of kind ofhard efforts for very, I would
say disproportionate returns,because now research is really
(07:32):
really hard.
But you know, I didn't feelthat I'm getting rewarded for it
like in the right way, you know, for the amount of effort I put
into it.
And apart from that, yeah, youknow, I just started feeling
that like, you know, whetherit's really something for me,
whether I want to spend all mylife doing it and looking at all
the professors and all the kindof renowned scientists in the
(07:56):
lab and it didn't look like avery exciting future for me.
And yeah, and I suppose, andbecause, being in the Silicon
Valley, there was this wholeworld of startups where people
actually doing similar things,or sometimes even much easier
things, but they solve realproblems with it and they
capture value much moreefficiently.
(08:17):
So at some point I got reallyinterested in this whole kind of
industry in this market.
Yeah, eventually I decided totry.
You know I had no experience inentrepreneurship.
I mean, I had little experience, but like nothing kind of
serious, nothing very technical.
But I felt like, okay, you know, if not now, then when?
(08:40):
Because it was time when I hadsome savings.
You know I was still young, Ididn't have family and kind of
commitments.
It was, you know, my time totry.
So basically now for some time,for a few months, I just was on
my own, you know, tryingdifferent ideas using different
no-code tools which were quitepopular back then, trying
(09:05):
basically to, you know, earnmoney like out of the sea and
air, just based on my experienceand based on my ideas.
It was quite an interestingexperience.
Nothing out of it, I would say,worked.
Yeah, there was like oneproduct which I sold, which was
like a news channel, veryinteresting product which is
(09:27):
still alive today and stillworking, but apart from that,
nothing really huge came out ofit.
But then what happened then?
It's very interesting.
So I got into, like Accelerator,you know, slash Incubator
called Entrepreneur First andthere are basically a couple of
them.
It's like Entrepreneur Firstand Antler.
(09:48):
You know, they are verydifferent from typical startup
accelerators as we know thembecause they like to invest like
in talent, not in the companies, but just in talent in people.
So they kind of they getfounders at really early stages
without even ideas, withoutteams.
They put them all into like onepool and they, you know, hope
that companies will come out outof it and then they fund these
(10:11):
companies.
So that's how I started my kindof startup journey more
seriously.
You know already we've gotfounder, which is Huma Huma,
founding EF.
Yeah, I moved to Singapore andthat's kind of where Suggestor
journey started.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Got it and Suggestor is basically it was like
recommendation engine fore-commerce stores.
So, yeah, what was Suggestorexactly?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.
You know there are multipleways you can call it.
It's like we can call it, youknow, first part data management
solution, or you can call itlike a recommendation engine, or
you can call it AI fore-commerce.
But in the end, yeah, we justtook any data which was
available on the Shopify stores,you know, from their users,
from their storefronts.
We pulled it, we put it in ourmodels.
You know where kind of I couldapply my expertise, you know, to
(11:01):
be a building kind of thisreally smart kind of models
which then would spit out likerecommendations what we should
show to this specific user.
You know how to upsell andcross sell different e-commerce
items to them.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Got it and I know you guys got some solid momentum.
You guys also, I believe, gotinto Icompany over that right.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, exactly so after EF we went forward and we
raised more money, we went live,we were featured on Shopify
homepage.
Imagine kind of you work with150 brands or so.
And yeah, we went throughIcompinator Winter 22 batch Got
it.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
And then what ended up happening with that?
What were kind of like the, Iguess lessons learned or what
ended up?
You know what was the evolutionof that?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, you know, I mean it was kind of wild
decision because on the papereverything looked kind of really
well.
You know we were growing, westarted hitting first revenue,
you know Icompinator kind ofrecognition, good brand
generally things.
They looked well, you know, andin fact they did go well, you
know it.
For that point in time it wasreally kind of good place to be.
(12:15):
But, you know, carrying overthe US founders, you know we
looked at, you know ourprojections, so where we are
heading, and at this point youknow we tried different growth
tactics, we tried differentchannels.
You know we looked at ourcompetitors, we looked at our
client base and basically, youknow we felt that you know there
was kind of two big problemswhich eventually led us to shut
(12:39):
down.
Suggestor is that we first wefelt that product market feed
was not strong enough.
So it still kind of was it wasuseful for our audience, for our
users, but not useful enough,you know, to pay a lot for it to
make kind of our B2B uniteconomics actually work.
So it was kind of there wassome fit but it wasn't kind of,
(13:00):
you know, very hot.
And secondly, because weoperated specifically on this
market of SMB stores and kind ofmom and pop stores and Shopify,
because that's kind of where wesaw opportunity, because, you
know, of course, Amazon's andbig players, they have their
solutions in place already.
Now our whole thesis was tobring the advanced tools, like
(13:21):
kind of advanced personalization, from Amazon to these kind of
small SMB stores.
But then, yeah, look at thismarket and actually realize that
it's quite limited, you know,in terms of, like, their paying
capabilities.
It was quite small for us tobuild something huge out of it
and, of course, because wedeveloped it by the venture
model, you know it, it only madesense to do it for us and for
(13:44):
investors if it could be like aunicorn.
And even though we had revenue,in terms of, we had traction,
we saw that, okay, it will takeus either too long or, you know,
we won't be able to make it atall to this huge status.
And it it made more sense to usto just return the money and
say like, hey, you know, here'sthe situation.
As soon as we realized that wecannot fulfill this potential,
(14:09):
these expectations, just to turnthe money and decided to focus
our time and our efforts onsomething that actually can
fulfill this potential.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Got it.
So I guess the issue was thatthe smaller E-comp stores they
didn't really have the budgetand it wasn't creating enough of
a lift, I guess, for them tojustify paying, let's say, like
what they would pay for anagency, right, like so,
basically, and were you guysselling kind of like a Shopify
app or?
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, exactly, it was Shopify app.
I mean we could expand beyondthat, but in the end, yeah, the
issue was that it still was anoptimization level solution
where we could improve yourperformance by like a few
percentage points.
And for big stores, who makelike hundreds of millions, this
couple of percentage pointsmakes a lot of difference.
But for the small stores, theyliterally have like so many
(15:00):
other problems on top of theirminds, like with fulfillment,
customer support, other things,the shipping, that is,
optimization of user experience.
A couple of percentage pointsfor from app sales were not such
a painful issue to pay a lotfor that.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean that totally makessense and I come from that
world as well of like a lot ofdirect to commerce and I would
say that most small store ownersare not that sophisticated when
it comes to tech and it's just.
I can see the challenges ofscaling to them unless you're
able to go for those big storesthat are paying like a hundred
million or, sorry, that aredoing a hundred million, 200
(15:39):
million a year in revenue.
I kind of think that if itwasn't a VC backed venture, if
it was more bootstrapped and youalso bundled it with an agency
model, that would be a reallyinteresting like business model,
almost like getting acquired bya large direct to commerce
agency, because you give themlike an edge in terms of their
optimization and then, becauseit's being paired with
(15:59):
optimization efforts on theagency's part, the value of the
services become higher.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Did you ever think about that, or was that ever
like a consideration in terms ofa potential pivot or we thought
about that, you know, when welooked for like potential
synergies, when you know wewanted to exit and then it still
was kind of hard just becauseof the logistics of it.
You know like code base.
You know the whole operationswas kind of a bit tricky but
still, you know you shouldunderstand that Shopify market
(16:26):
is quite competitive.
You know, first it's small butyou know it has kind of its
leaders.
There are also kind of a lot ofdifferent players.
There are a kind of, so to say,like developers you know could
do a lot of different thingstogether.
So yeah, kind of you know theycan play synergy kind of between
different apps.
And yeah, again, most money areto be made on these larger
(16:51):
accounts which you know.
Actually on Shopify you havethe Shopify Plus plan, whereas
in now it's around like 2,000stores, so kind of it's like
premium Shopify plans for largerstores.
But you know there are stilljust 2,000 of them and you know
how big of the market could theymake.
So that kind of was our concern, that you know like there was
limited room to show, even ifyou would want to scale more
(17:14):
aggressively.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, and it's really like a red ocean, Like you said
right, like a lot of Shopifydevelopers.
While I think the web-freespace definitely let's get to
that, why did you decide to getinto web-free?
Speaker 2 (17:30):
I think it was exactly that reason that, you
know, being directed in thephoto of this continuous
competition and, you know, verysmall margins on this very dense
, very optimized market ofe-commerce.
You know, looking at web-freefrom that perspective was like,
yeah, completely empty fieldswhere anything you would take
just not just would startgrowing because there's
(17:51):
literally no one else doing ityet and, you know, still very
obvious, very painful ideas andvery painful problems are still
yet to be solved.
So it looked like, you know,much more like, first, easier
play.
Secondly, you know, moreconvincing.
You know.
So like, oh yeah, I know thatI'm solved, something people
actually need.
And of course, you know thewhole potential of web-free
(18:12):
market also, you know, lookedquite exciting, you know, back
then when we started.
Now probably it's a biggerquestion, you know that is
always still belief in it.
But when we started, you knowwhen the like somewhere goes to
the end of the bull run, I meanbig motivation for me, apart
from just the whole marketperspective, was that I saw a
lot of very smart people cominginto this space and even though
(18:34):
you know I was, I didn't reallydig too deep into, like you know
, economics or the like tech ofcrypto market, trying to
understand whether it actuallywill be future or not.
I just, you know, I basicallybet on all these people, all the
developers whom I saw, you know, shifting into crypto, into
(18:55):
web-free, from all the differentkind of areas like you know AI,
research, different otherscientific fields, you know and
it was like it looked convincedenough for me to understand
something is cooking andsomething will be, something
will come out out of that.
So that's kind of how myinterest in web-free market
(19:16):
arose.
From all these people you knowall this movement, all this
development which was going onand you know amount of
opportunity in the space.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, and when did you start building?
Slice, slice it started.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Like you know, we went through YC in winter.
We had the day end of March,start of April.
You know, right there itdecided to shut down and right
there it decided to continuewith Slice.
Because you know, we had thismotivation to just let's
continue.
You know, I think you know, wedidn't want to feel that, oh,
you know we didn't work out orwe need to stop.
(19:54):
It was like, yeah, we make thisdecision, it makes sense, but
we still motivated to continue.
Let's continue right ahead.
So I think the can you break.
And in the May of 2022, when Iremember yesterday's when
Lunacrushed, basically I startedmy major in Web3.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, it made sense because I think that's around
that period is when a lot of theweb three MarTech products
start started building, becauseeverybody realized, okay, this
is going to be pretty big, buteverybody also realized that the
growth tooling in the space wascompletely non-existent.
There's really noinfrastructure for growth and I
feel like there was a big cohortof like this last bull run,
(20:37):
where you know, a lot of growthmarketers came in from web two
to start poking around and thenyou essentially have all of
these MarTech startups startingup.
So it's really interesting andI'm really glad to see that it's
happening.
And I do feel like it is theright time, where you know you
start at the right time, whereit's not too early, where PCs
are like why, like this is, youknow, not going to be needed,
(21:02):
but it's like at that exactposition when people are trying
to figure out growth and youknow there's this conversation.
So the timing was impeccable, Ithink, for Slice.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It was quite all right.
You know, and even right now wefeel that we are in this kind
of cohort of new companies, likeMarTech companies who started
around the same period.
You know, these are attributiontools and these different CRMs,
you know, and surprisinglyenough, there was like nice and
pretty serious before, or niceand pretty new come-ups comes up
after.
So, yeah, you know we aremoving together in this cohort,
(21:35):
you know, basically talking toeach other, seeing how we can
develop this market, how it willgrow.
You know, kind of basicallycreating it from scratch.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
And I'm curious with Slice sofar, how much volume have you
seen?
How much momentum have you seen?
I'm just curious, like, whatdoes the early stages of a Web3
ad network look like in terms ofrevenue or, like, I guess,
spend by customers?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, so for the volume Also, volume for us is a
bit of a vanity metric, becausevolume is very easy to get you
know and it's very easy to getto the big number, but it's not
always good, and I'll tell youwhy.
Because you know the incumbents.
We work against is, like youknow, mostly you know where can
(22:22):
you place ads.
Now, mostly it's kind of mediaplatforms like news websites,
magazines, coin trackers, thingslike that.
They don't have worldconnection.
They had a lot of kind oforganic traffic from all the
different sources and, yeah, Imean their technical
capabilities are quite limited.
(22:45):
So when advertisers place theirads there, some of these, you
know, biggest websites can haveup to like 100 million of
monthly hits.
You know impressions, let's say.
And then when we look at thediaprador, you know we see
around 2 million of monthlyactive wallets on chain.
So you know, and then you kindof get two and two together,
(23:07):
seeing like that okay, we havetwo wall, two million of wallets
, we're actual users who dosomething in crypto and you have
100 million of impressionswhich you serve to you know who
knows whom, basically makingkind of 98% of this spend
completely relevant and go intowaste.
So far, you know it was kind ofour mission from the one to just
at least to cut off thisirrelevant traffic, you know,
(23:31):
and focus only on this kind ofcore audience or hardcore users.
So you know, and yes, it'ssmall, but you know it generates
like 98% of the value.
It's kind of, it's very skewedkind of this market and even now
we don't try to scale a crazy,you know, diluting our quality.
(23:53):
You know, on contrary, wemoderate.
You know, as we grow we must bemoderate even harder.
You know we curate ourpublishers even more strict just
to ensure that our you knowquality of this traffic, of this
audience we want they look tothis number.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
That makes sense.
So essentially it sounds likeyou're optimizing far more for
quality and conversions versusjust pure graphic and numbers.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yes, but was there was actual numbers?
How can you represent it?
Well, I mean, it's growing, youknow, and like there are
different months, you know wehad months where we would double
it, but right now we see somesomewhere around two and three
million of monthly impressions,and then it's not like it's a
(24:42):
big part of this market.
But you know, there's stillstill room to grow.
But we kind of feel quitecomfortable here.
But we know that.
Okay, we, we go to this point.
But we are sure about ourpublishers, about our traffic.
We tried more publishers andwhatever didn't work, we
filtered it out.
So yeah, and you know, we onlywant to grow and increase this
number.
Even we find good publishersagain, good traffic sources,
(25:08):
which will make sense to add tothis network.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
That makes sense.
And how do you view, forexample, gaming when it comes to
your, both your publishing anddemand demand side right?
How do you view a vertical likegaming?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, so in the reality is like we don't see
much of gaming, like, like youknow, it doesn't happen, that
doesn't come to our eyes,specifically on the advertising
side.
Because you know we also wouldexpect that, like, yeah, we have
three, we, you know, we sort ofdifferent verticals and we have
publishers across DeFi, nft,gaming trading, things like that
(25:45):
, and you would expect it.
Of course it would make a lotof sense for web three games,
like why are we three?
What three gamers?
Yeah, but surprisingly we don'tsee much of my marketing spend
in our life, marketing effortshappening in the gaming space
right now.
And this is what we see, youknow, in the web stream, native
(26:06):
tools.
Because also, kind of what werealized to this point, you know
, being on the market talking todifferent players, is that for
web three games, most of them,you know, would try to appeal to
much wider audience of likegeneral, general audience of web
two users where they wouldabstract the world away.
Like you know, they don't wantto focus just on the metamask
(26:29):
users you know, who made like acouple of millions of the whole
audience.
They would try to make just agood game.
It would appeal to anyone inweb two, and then you know it
allows them to go outside of webthree, advertise on, like meta,
on Google, acquire just regularweb two users, probably a
fraction of the cost, becausethey don't need web three users.
(26:50):
Yeah, and that's why I mean,and it makes sense for us.
You know I would feel badtaking money, you know, kind of
charging them for very expensiveweb three traffic if they don't
need it.
So I'll say, you know, insomething like like us, like
slice or in other web standardtools, they do make sense.
If you know, there's been a lotof sense for products that need
(27:13):
experienced web's nativeaudience.
You know who has wallets, wehave some assets, we know what
to do with them, how to tradethem, how to exchange them.
Yeah, and if it's the case,that's the most straightforward
and the best way to acquire suchaudience.
But if you don't need thisusers and all this prop, with
(27:33):
all these properties, then itdoesn't make sense to overpay
for it.
So maybe that's why, partially,we don't see so much gaming,
and now the fact that I believeit's not being very active right
now.
So not so many games arelaunching these days, so it's
also probably a factor.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think a lot of the Web3 gamesthey're going for more Web2
users and I do agree that itseems like probably the niche
that Slice is really tailoredtowards is perhaps DeFi, maybe a
bit of social Fi.
Would that be relativelyaccurate?
Speaker 2 (28:08):
A lot of DeFi.
Nft also kind of is quitespecific niche.
We have some NFT analyticstools, we have some minting
tools, but again for NFT we seekind of a similar picture where,
even though we had somepublishers, we didn't see a lot
of demand for it.
So again, how many collectionshave been launched and have been
minted these days?
(28:28):
Not so many.
How many of them are activelyadvertising?
Not so many.
So we didn't see enough demandand in the end at this point of
time most of our demand, of ourcustomers, is coming from DeFi
world, all kind of not likeinfra but like utility tools,
like different wallets orsecurity tools or things like
(28:51):
that.
But yeah, not many likespecific consumer facing
applications like NFT or games.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Got it and what do you think is the most successful
type of funnel you've seen sofar in Veptery?
Because obviously, as we getinto ads, you're not just
talking about ads, you'retalking about what people do
after they click on the ad, anda funnel, for those who don't
know, is basically the landingpage and the page after that.
So would be interested on yourthoughts on the best funnels
(29:22):
you've seen.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to talk
about it because we don't do somuch analytics on the actual
page of the product.
Now we work with attributiontools who help us with that,
because we do want to accountfor this date and for this
conversions, but it's a wholedifferent product to do this
kind of analytics.
So what you know but of coursewe see stuff, you know we go
(29:48):
through different advertisers,different campaigns I clearly
can tell you know what doesn'twork so clearly it clearly
doesn't work is to send trafficto the discord.
It doesn't work to send trafficto Twitter.
Yes, again, and conversions aremuch lower from web to mobile
(30:08):
apps.
Because now, if it's like extrastep of, you know, going to App
Store, we can separate, you knowwe can segment traffic which
would come from mobile.
But again, doing this funnel,that like mobile browser and
then mobile landing page, thengoing to App Store and
downloading app, is a bit fullof friction, so it doesn't work
(30:31):
as well.
Also, and yeah, the bestfunnels are the simplest, the
most straightforward funnelswhere users get on some landing
page, where there's very clearCTA straight on this landing
page, whether it's going to fitin the form or maintain
something or signing up, andthat's so far you know, and it's
(30:52):
all the same stuff from web to.
But yeah, things like that work.
And then, if it's all over, thesteps.
So basically, minimizing thenumber of steps and optimizing
each of these steps separatelyproduces the best results you
should make sense, and are you,with Slice, able to track
conversions back, or how do youdeal with attributions and
(31:13):
conversion tracking?
Yeah, so I mean it was like alagging couple of minutes, but I
mentioned that we do work withattribution providers.
So we have something on our ownwhich we integrate now just to
track clicks and kind of verybasic information, but the whole
attribution is completelydifferent product which needs
(31:36):
its own kind of analytics.
It needs its own kind ofintegrations, data sources.
So what we do, yeah, we partnerwith attribution providers with
kind of other apps, you knowother kind of players in our
cohort and yeah, we exchangedata with them because for them
it makes sense to report, youknow, also advertising spend,
advertising impressions andthings like that, while for us,
(31:59):
you know, we capture all thedata related to advertising.
But we also want to know what'shappened, what happens after.
So we do show conversions inour dashboard, in our analytics
page, but usually do it withhelp of other providers.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
And final question, the trickquestion, the most important
question what do you think isthe vertical in Web 3 that's
going to really take the cryptoand Web 3 world mainstream?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
First of all, yeah, it's a really tricky question.
A lot of people, you know, talkabout gaming, you know, and
though I believe like there's alot of kind of good game being
developed, I'm not sure how muchthey will help Web 3, right,
because they actually we seethat they tried to abstract it
away, so how much it will affectI'm not sure.
(32:55):
Yeah, I mean, I honestly believein integration of like crypto
in daily life and it's kind ofbeen topic, you know, a long
time ago, when people don'tthink what's that much, but we
still see, you know, even withour clients and what people
advertise, we see veryinteresting traction, you know,
coming to these platforms wherethey allow to spend crypto on
(33:15):
their physical world goods,different tickets or, you know,
to pop your phone or things likethat and, again, super
primitive idea, but we seeinterest to that and I think you
know, as a number of suchopportunities, such ways to
actually spend crypto and use itas actual fiat money, you know,
(33:36):
indistinguishably, yeah, Ithink it can help with adoption
for most consumer because, apartfrom that, yeah, a lot of
things which we saw, they werebased on speculation, so it's
not really sustainable.
So, yeah, there should be kindof utility and in the end of the
(33:59):
day, you know, utility shouldcome kind of from not just
experts but regular users whocan spend crypto in their daily
life and use, you know, theirMetaMask just like as I used to
come maybe PayPal now.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, I mean I've seen a lot of startups for that,
like I think lowly was one thatI recently saw and they're
doing kind of like, I think youget Bitcoin back when you shop
at different stores, and Ibelieve they're getting a lot of
success with that.
So, yeah, it's reallyinteresting to see these
different I guess IRL use casesright, and then you also have
(34:35):
these decentralized networkslike for computing and you know,
I think there's obviouslyhelium for Wi-Fi and like
connectivity.
So, really interested in tip inlike a decentralized
infrastructure that usesblockchain.
That's really interesting.
And one question I do have ishow can customers work with
(34:56):
Slice?
Do you guys have a minimumspend requirement?
How do they reach out to you tolearn more?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, so we just roll out our social interface, so
something we will presentgradually to more customers.
But we are available by all themeans he can reach us.
Now, probably the best would beour website and there is kind
of our email and our contact usform.
That would be the best to startwith, you know, for both
(35:25):
publishers and advertisers.
So I know for the.
I mean for to clarify to peoplethat we work as two-sided
marketplace, where we havepublishers who place advertising
and whom we help to monetize bypaying them, and we have
advertisers who, whom we help to, whom we help to tap into
(35:45):
audiences of these publishers byplacing their ads there.
So there's kind of a way toacquire users and advertisers
pay us for the traffic and wepay publishers in the end.
So for both publishers andadvertisers we're happy to
discuss, happy to meet newpeople contact us form would be
(36:05):
the best way to start from there.
Again, probably we would offerto open a call just to chat
first to see what the needs, howwe can help, if it's really a
good fit, you know, if we canshare more data from there.
You know we have some kind ofmetrics and some new diligence
information to share before westart, and then you basically
(36:27):
kind of be shared that into theplatform where they can start
playing around and set up theircampaigns, you know with
different segments, withdifferent filters.
You know to control their CPM,their spend and things like that
.
For the minimum spend, I meanit changes with time.
So I don't want, you know, justto be one number and the big
(36:47):
one that after.
But I would say I mean itprobably makes sense to start
like above $1000.
Even smaller.
It's hard to kind of make itwork and even to see
representative numbers, becausethe display ads is basically
numbers game.
You need to test a lot ofthings, you need to get a lot of
(37:08):
traffic even to start seeingfirst results.
So again, and I'm not reallyworried, you know telling that,
even though it will discouragesome potential users, because
the worst we can deal with isthe kind of too high
expectations, when you know whenWebstream marketers who never
did marketing before they'relike come to us and say, hey,
here is $100.
They want kind of 100 whales,can you give it to me?
(37:31):
And you know the answer is no.
You know, in fact, we justpublished on Twitter one
research from a research companywhich showed the price of a
cost of user acquisition formajor kind of protocols through
airdrops, looking at theretention of the few months at
the price of token, whatactually cost to get these users
to use these protocols, and theminimum price is kind of above
(37:56):
$1,000 for a single user.
You know, for optimism, forBitcoin, for protocols like that
, it goes in thousands ofdollars.
So, yeah, this pool is too small.
The users who actually activeusers in Webstream, they are
very valuable because they arewilling to spend, they are
willing to invest, they cangenerate a lot of value.
(38:17):
But also advertisers need toknow how to work with them and
they need to be ready to test,to approach their marketing
strategy seriously, you know,and not just to hope that they
will, you know, just buy likewhales for $1.
So, yeah, I mean it will startprobably somewhere from $1,000
and above, and you know.
(38:37):
But there you have all thetools to actually measure the
conversions.
This is a measure, the CPC, theclick rate.
Try different creatives, trydifferent formats, so it's all
kind of possible and only thisway it can actually work and be
successful.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
So guys go check out SliceS-L-I-S-E dot X-Y-Z I think
definitely one of the moreinteresting Web3 Martech
products out there.
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