The Pomp Podcast - #434: Max Rofagha on Building Internet Communities

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Max Rofagha is founder and CEO of Finimize, one of the world’s largest and most engaged finance communities. Max previously founded DeinDeal, an online retailer that was acquired by media conglomerate, Ringier.  In this conversation, we discuss audience growth, monetization, copywriting, hiring for substance, the importance of community, and why Max is driven to increase financial education.  ======================= LVL is a new crypto investing platform that I'm an investor in. They allow anyone to trade an unlimited number of times per month for only $9. If you buy or sell more than $500 in Bitcoin on any exchange, you're spending too much on trading fees. Use LVL to save money and trade as many times you want, but only pay $9/month. https://lvl.co/pomp ======================= Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Max Rofaga is founder and CEO of Finimize, one of the world's largest and most engaged finance communities. Max previously founded D-Deal, an online retailer that was acquired by media conglomerate Ringer. In this conversation, we discuss audience growth, monetization, copywriting, hiring for substance, the importance of community, and why Max is driven to increase financial education. I really enjoyed this conversation with Max, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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on the link in the description. lvl.co.pomp. Go get a level account and sign up today. lvl.co.pomp. Next up is Diginex. They're the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the United States. That exchange called Equos, E-Q-U-O-S, Equos, has been built to institutional standards, but it is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin in an Ethereum spot as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and you'll get a discount on all fees by signing up using Equos.com slash Pomp. Again, Diginex has an exchange called Equos. It is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the United States. Go and check out Equos.com slash Pomp

or click on the link in the description. Equos, E-Q-U-O-S, E-Q-U-O-S.com slash Pomp. Go check out Equos. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 85,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion

on various aspects of each industry. you can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Max. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've

got Max here with me. Dude, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks. Awesome to be here. Absolutely. Let's jump right into your background. This is not the first company, Finamize, that you started. Tell us kind of where you grew up and what that first business was. Sure. So I grew up originally in Berlin and I grew up in the sector of Berlin that was American. That's why I have this weird German-American slang or dialect. And basically then studied in the UK, studied in the UK and the US economics and international relations and never really had a job. I've always been in the startup world. With the exception of one year I did right out of uni or university I did one year at a consulting firm uh for like

media sports strategy and what ended up happening is I tried to recruit one of the partners there to to start a consulting firm uh with me and do a spin out until I realized that actually this is this is kind of boring um and then I started my first company and um that was an e-commerce business and it was a it was a very random story um so I ended up in in Zurich in Switzerland out of all places because I had a couple of friends who studied there and they were like starting a company and um we originally started off with a kind of Groupon daily deal kind of model if you remember those days and uh and that was kind of the starting point uh that allowed us get like super high growth rates and build up a user base really quickly and then one day we kind

of looked at the data and we're like all right like we've a we've kind of hit a ceiling a little bit in the domestic market and b the sustainability because the with this whole daily deal model it's all about like the retention and the recurring bookings from from merchants that was not super easy and I think you're kind of seeing that all over the world and so I think the thing that we did pretty cleverly if i may say so myself is we kind of transitioned the entire business into becoming a full-on e-commerce business and so we ended up having our own warehouse we had like 60 people just working in a warehouse in the end um we took our own inventory and everything we essentially built a multi-category e-commerce shop um ended up being the largest one uh just

Amazon was larger in Switzerland. And we were reaching like 25% of all households in a small, but very, very wealthy country. And then we kind of hit the ceiling again, because you're kind of like, okay, we have super high brand recognition, more people knew us than British Airways within the country. And so if you haven't shopped with us at that point in time, then you probably just didn't care for what we did. And we couldn't really force it. And so then we basically reached this point where we said okay you know it's probably time to to either think about internationalization or or about a sale and uh we spoke to a few um to a few potential acquirers and ended up selling it um to the largest e-commerce sorry to the largest media house switzerland um and this was at the end

of 2015 um and so that was really my first uh startup founder venture building kind of experience and that then led me to start Finamize and those are two very very different companies that I've built the e-commerce business was a very mercenary business so our number one goal was how the hell do we get as much revenue as we possibly can and I think we then sort of retroactively tried to create like a mission around it but I think that was one of the learnings and also you can't apply mission in retrospect. And so with Finamize, it's been the complete opposite. It's been a personal experience that led me to start the company. We have a really strong mission, which I'm happy to dive into all that. But that's kind of the story that got me to where I am today.

Absolutely. And what was like your one or two biggest takeaways from building that company at such a young age? So number one was, and I think I see this across the board with a bunch younger founders is you totally underestimate the soft factor stuff so when you're young and you're ambitious you're like you know screw screw like core values like let's just go go go go go and and then you kind of realize as you mature and as you start recruiting people and you start sort of measuring what's the health of the culture i think you start appreciating all these soft factors a lot more um and and that's been one of the key learnings that i've taken away number one uh so that's been actually one of the things um that i the very first thing before i started

finamize was i wrote our culture manifest and uh and you can find it on our website finamize.com slash culture it's public and uh again that during this covid time that has been absolutely vital in getting us through this um so that's number one i think culture and the importance of soft soft factors number two i think the importance of scale and then being able to try out new things so like i said back back there in a fairly small country we had very large scale and that allowed us to just try out a bunch of different verticals so we we sold you anything from from furniture to sports to fashion all the way to sex toys like you whatever you wanted you could buy with us and at the same time though we would start verticals and then we would see this isn't

working and we would shut them down and we had that ability to do this experimentation because we had that scale and the scale allowed us to actually get real signal from the market i think that's number two and then number three at the end of the day i think uh obviously it always comes down to uh hiring the right people and and having a good business model but i think the first two are the key things that really sort of got impressed into my mind. I love that. And what is Finimize? So how did you start Finimize? And what was kind of the idea for the business? Sure. So like I said, it's been a much more personal experience. I'll quickly tell you what happened to give you a bit of context. So what I did is I was in my mid to late 20s at

the time. And everybody's like, hey, you need to start saving up some money, you know, as you approach 30, all that stuff. And so I did that. And what I did is every month I took money from my salary and I just put it onto savings account. And I did that for a couple of months. And one day I woke up and I realized, fantastic news, I've built up savings. Then the immediate follow-up question was, what do I do with those savings? And because I saw, you know, interest rates were lower than inflation, et cetera. And so the very first thing that I went to go do is I went to go see a financial advisor and what happened was I walked through the door and there was a lovely lady very friendly etc but I noticed she'd already laid out all the brochures onto the table

and I and I saw that each brochure had their logo on it and I very quickly realized okay this is going to be a sales pitch for their products rather than them genuinely wanting to help me and I knew straight away that's not the right solution for me and so I went back home and I started to inform myself as much as I could on investing and finance and all that stuff online which frankly wasn't an easy endeavor and then in the evenings I would meet friends and I was in a fortunate position that a lot of them were working in finance and I would just bombard them with all the questions that I had about the stuff that I'd learned that day and then at the same time I kept bumping into people who were in the same boat as I was so they were lacking the

finance knowledge, but they weren't fortunate enough like I was that they had that community of people around them who could help empower them to make the right investing decisions. And that was the genesis moment for Finamize, where I started to dive in a bit deeper into the whole topic and realized a couple of things. Number one is I certainly wasn't the only one with that experience and with that frustration. So 86% of millennials save each month, but they keep more than half of their savings in cash, just as I was doing, because there isn't a suitable way to get financial advice. And so that begs the question, then, why is that the case? And if you dive into the data, and there's been a bunch of different research papers on this, within the

millennial demographic, and I'm a millennial, 75%, roughly, I think 72%, say that they want to take direct control over their wealth, but they lack the know-how to doing so. And so it's all around that missing know-how piece. And then if you look at the remaining quarter who do take action, 90% of them say that they consult their friends in the media before they make a decision. And so it's really with that insight that we've been building Finamize. And so to answer your question in a very long-winded kind of way, what we're doing is we're building the world's most engaged and largest finance community. And there's really two tenets to that. Number one is we want to give our members access to best in class content from a team of analysts that we've

hired. And number two is we want to give you access to your local and now virtual community so that you can learn from the experiences of other people who've gone through exactly that financial journey that you're about to go. Got it. And so let's talk about community first, that's kind of like the backbone of what you're trying to build here. Talk a little bit about how you've thought about building the community and then how that kind of plays out in the products and content that you guys are putting out in the world. Got it. So I have to admit that we never really set out to build a community. It happened very organically on the back of our content. and so what happened was that we one day so so we started off with it with a with a newsletter

product um and since then have have um sort of launched other products and mediums as well but that was like our starting point and we would explain to people in three minutes every day here's the main things that you need to care about in the world of finance and most importantly why you should care about it so why you should care if interest rates go up or go down and how that might affect you personally and then what would happen is uh one day we're like hey let's go meet these people who read our content and we we met in london in a pub and as you do and we were super surprised that i think like 50 people showed up and we very quickly finamize took over that pub and we thought hey this is pretty cool a we get to meet all these people and b

they get to learn from each other and so we did that over and over and over and these things started getting larger and larger and larger and so in london we would have meetups of like three sometimes even 400 people showing up and then we would start getting emails because we would post it on our social media or say it in our newsletter um of people in la saying hey can you do this in la or like people in sydney being like can you do this in sydney and we said we'd love to do this because that would be an amazing life to have just to fly around the world and host meetups, but we can't.

But why don't you do this in Sydney? And why don't you do this in LA? And here's our playbook. And we trust you with the brand and we empower you to host your own meetup. And that's really what gave birth to our sort of meetup community. And now, last year,

we connected around about 15,000 people in the physical world at meetups literally all over the world there's not been a single continent where we haven't been and there's a meetup happening pretty much every single day of the week somewhere around the world and it's all completely voluntary which brings me back to the mission and this year with virtual we've completely shifted it to virtual and we've actually this year already doubled so we've connected more than 30,000 people at our meetups and that's really driving force for how we think about product, brand, etc. I'm happy to dive into that as well. Yeah and so when you think of this how much of it is I basically have created a

playbook or infrastructure and I'm going to kind of arm the community to interact with each other right like I'm going to give you the tools I'm going to give you the playbook and then you guys go and do it versus you guys are still maybe not micromanaging but definitely like hey there should be a meetup tomorrow in dublin and then the day after that we're going to do one in singapore and you guys are kind of centrally planning these to some degree yeah so this is the constant uh um sort of swinging along the spectrum of like completely giving up control and and and be having a very very tight-knit community and and so what we found what works for us and i think there's examples for either side of the spectrum we kind of for us figured out that sitting in somewhere

in the middle works best so um we are very strict in terms of who can actually host a meetup so like in a quarter we'll have a couple of thousand applications for people wanting to host a meetup and we'll take in like maybe 50 uh so we on that part we're super strict so that we make sure that the the brand is represented well because what happens otherwise is that people attend these meetups and um it's a shit experience and it looks bad on finamize and so that's obviously our brand is a huge asset that we need to maintain but then you know at the end of the day we say to them you you know we have a very engaged community for example in nigeria and i have no idea what are the financial topics in nigeria and so we depend on them to surface the

topics that are interesting to the local communities and they get to pick it and they get to organize it, but we basically provide the platform and, uh, and, and the playbook for them. Got it. And as part of this entire, um, process, what would you say are the one or two things that you've learned that for those that are trying to figure out how to build community, um, you know, for their business or their products, what are those things that you're like, if I did this all over again, here's the two things that I would really double down on and focus on. And these are my learnings yeah so i think the reason for us why this worked so well and and this is a manifest manifest itself also when we ask these because i always have these friends who like work

at top tier banks or like in private equity funds and they're like why the hell does someone host a meetup for you without getting paid and puts all this effort into it like why do they do this like is this fake or like are you paying them and i'm like no it's genuinely these people do this because they believed in the mission and so the having this really strong mission and our mission is we want to empower people to become their own financial advisors and that really resonates with our audience and that's what what draws people in so i think that's that's absolutely crucial um and then i think you know having that that really balanced approach of giving control but also having very very strict guidelines on what can and can't be can't be done i think those

are the two main areas that are important. Got it. And then let's talk about how you guys make money. Because I think part of this is like, it's great to have, you know, content, which you guys do, and we'll talk about in a minute. It's great to have community, which you do. But at some point, you got to make money, but you guys aren't just making money, you guys are doing very, very well in kind of the finance vertical across a number of countries. How the hell do you guys make money? Good question. So we have, we're basically building a multi revenue stream business. The first revenue stream is pretty straightforward. We have an audience that's highly relevant to a lot of financial brands. And so we do advertising. We let them advertise through native advertising primarily in our newsletter, but also our website. then we have a premium subscription or premium membership uh where the end consumer pays um so

it's uh around about sixty dollars a year and then you get access to a full content library and you get access to premium meetups and a bunch of other things and then the third piece which is actually um fairly nascent for us um and we never like thought about it until a bunch of people started approaching us is we have an we have an api business as well and so what happens is um asset managers investment platforms etc they come to us and they say hey we love your content can we have it and um now we can say yes you can have it all you have to do is you have to plug into our api and you can immediately integrate it into your own user experience and that gives them access to text and audio content, whatever they want, in order to then increase the engagement

with their own user base. So those are the three revenue streams that we are pursuing. Got it. Let's start in reverse order. Let's start with the API. What are they using the content for? And then how do you think about pricing that or getting paid via that API and the licensing? say. Sure. So we basically offer today an out-of-the-box solution, which lets you either get access to our daily news and insights or to our weekly news and insights. And then we give you that either in text or in audio. And so the cheapest version that you can get is weekly text and the most expensive version that you can get is daily audio. And so to give you an example without giving any specific brands so we had we had a um an investment platform come to us and

they said we have 10 million users um two million of them are active we want to activate the remaining eight million and in order to do that we believe content is the way to doing so and that was the the pitch point uh for them um and so that's how that works it's it's interesting for us also because obviously a lot of these um apps and platforms don't have audio and so they build media players just to integrate our audio content and then in terms of pricing you know to be totally honest we're like I said it's very nascent so we're still figuring out what's the right price point for each of them and currently we're we're pitching it as a flat fee but then obviously sort of what's normal for licensing business is that you start also having usage

based components in there but currently it's very simple you come to us pick what you want and then you and then you pay an annual license and then what we're also doing is if you want to have custom content within that license and within that api that's also something that we look at got it and let's talk about uh subscriptions and advertising obviously those two are sometimes at odds with each other right i think there's this like debate should you do advertising should you do subscriptions everyone thinks it's a binary world you guys are doing both so maybe talk through just how you think about um kind of when to put advertising somewhere versus when to go subscription uh and the pros the pros and cons of that decision yeah so to be totally honest we

actually started with uh with subscription and then kind of moved more into advertising because we don't necessarily so we actually originally thought exactly what you were saying so we thought you got to pick one or the other and we picked subscription um but i think you know i think the best example of a company that's proven that both can work is the new york times i think they've done a phenomenal job in building up both and obviously for subscription for them is something that's been uh that's really really been taking off alongside advertising the way that we think about it is we have a free product and it's super high quality you know we have we we we have analysts um who write all the content so they're expensive and we give out that that piece of

content in our newsletter for free and so we monetize that through through advertising and for us there's also a user benefit because we often and a lot find that users use our advertising specifically with financial brands as a discovery product so they find out about new platforms like oh here's an investment platform that lets you invest into art or here's an investment platform that lets you invest into sneakers and stuff like that which they normally perhaps wouldn't come across and so in the premium product and i think this is where we're different to perhaps a new york times or any of those guys in the premium product we have zero advertising so once you pay it removes all of the ads and that's how we that's how we separate it got it and when you

think about growing the business from here is this something where you'll continue to invest in all three of these uh revenue channels right so you'll continue to have advertising uh subscription and also the licensing business uh or do you see the business evolving as you get larger to kind of uh coalesce around one of those revenue streams um right now the plan is that to continue with with all three um so i so we have we've built this internal uh funnel i guess so obviously our main aim is to upgrade someone into a subscription and if we fail to do that then we obviously still can monetize our users through advertising um and so we're able to achieve really interesting unit economics that way. And then, like I said, the licensing business is super interesting

because it's essentially a pure contribution margin for us, but it's very nascent. And so I would love for it to work, but it's early days. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about new revenue streams. Are there other things that you have looked at that you think are interesting, whether they're physical products or other types of things that could potentially become part of the business? Or do you think it's just these three that you'll stick with? So we have a lot of discussion about that within our board around, you know, I think there's different businesses who have different strategies when it

comes to revenues. Some people say focus on one and the more revenue streams you add, the less focused you are and that's bad for the business. And then others say the opposite. it um i think for now we're just going to focus on on on those three and if we were to explore other ones um i think there's a bunch of things that we could do you know one thing that we could do is go further downstream and actually go into a transaction so we know that a lot of our users want to take a transaction so that's an avenue that we could take another one is uh so the more

classic media play which is going to merchandise uh that could be that could be is probably a smaller one but kind of a fun one to do um but to be honest right now uh we don't want to like spread it any more thinly um one thing that we that we do occasionally do is uh research so obviously we have a lot of access to people and their investing behaviors and attitudes That's something that we might explore a little bit further. But again, we don't want to get too distracted by spreading ourselves too thin. Absolutely. And when you think about kind of the team, how does your team change based on these various

monetization strategies? Do you have to go and kind of hire a completely new team with new skill set? Or do you continue just to kind of use the team that you have, maybe add some people, but you've learned the skill as you guys go into the new monetization strategy. No, so we're, we're very lean. And, and we, we, we like that and we like being lean. And so we, we have one content team that content team produces free and that same content

team produces premium, same with the licensing. And I think that's the way it has to be because that's the only way that you ensure consistency across all the different products. And for us, really, it's all about the quality of the people who we hire who produce the content. That's the number one thing. It doesn't really matter what product they end up working on. Got it. What is the thing that you're most excited about moving forward, given the audience you have in finance? I know that obviously kind of the Robin Hood trader has become the topic du jour of a lot of the mainstream media, But how do you think about the pandemic impacting that audience, that kind of rise of the millennial investor or the Robinhood investor, and how that will impact the business in the future?

Yeah, so I think what's interesting, and I know that you're big into crypto. So in 2018, we saw a really interesting surge in people actually being interested in finance in general. And I think crypto was a big driver there, right? um then now we're seeing a big surge again and people being interested uh through this whole sort of robin hood surge um and so i think what you're seeing is these these drivers or these triggers that lead people to to enter the world of finance which perhaps typically would have been something that would have been a bit too mystic and a bit too dull for them and and these triggers allow them to sort of peek into that world um our our the way that we are always have positioned

ourselves is we are not for the day trader we are for people who want to have a sophisticated more refined more thoughtful trading strategy or investing strategy and the way that we describe our sort of persona of a customer is the casual investor and I think you're starting to get many many more casual investors as a result of all the things that are happening and what a casual investor is someone who wants to actively invest because they don't just want to be passive, completely passive. They might be partially passive, but they also don't want to be a day trader. And so these are the kinds of people who might spend a couple of hours a week on investing, not every single day. And that's really who we are catering the product.

Got it. One of the things that you've said previously is like the importance of copywriting. So the way that you communicate with your customer or your audience, talk a little bit about what you mean, why that is such an important skill set. Yeah. So I think copywriting is one of the most overlooked skill sets that you can have and people really just take it for granted. And I think for us sort of taking a step back, the sort of secret sauce that we have, or that we like to think we have is we manage to synthesize two things that are typically not synthesized very easily or very well on the one side is we, we take substance. So that's why we hire X analysts who really, really know what they're talking about. And on the other side,

we have simplicity. And that's why we hire copywriters. And so typically what you have is you have people with substance who produce these really complicated convoluted reports that nobody really understands. And on the other side, you have people who produce pretty shallow, but very easy to understand financial content, but it's so shallow that it actually doesn't really add any value to you and so what we really focus on is combining those two things um and so copy i think for us is the crucial piece that grabs someone's attention and the way that we think about that is and we've always been picturing this user is imagine someone standing at the subway station it's loud they have their their headphones plugged

in they're reading what you're what you've been writing and they probably have 50 of their attention span is with you and as soon as they have to reread a sentence we've lost them and so we need to be able to write in a way that a conveys the substance but b has a nice flow is conversational etc and i think that's one of those things that's way easier said than done and is a real craft and you see that both on the actual content side but also you know more recently we started doing paid acquisition for the first time really and that's a big big driver at the end of the day paid acquisition is all about how good is your copy and your ad creative. And so hugely important skill set. Have you seen an impact on the cost of acquisition by simply changing the ad copy,

but kind of same target, same audience, same platform? I mean, I'm a firm believer that the people who win in paid acquisition are the people who win with ad creatives. I mean, that's also the way that we've been structuring our own organization is as much testing as you can do with ad creatives. And typically what we find is the copy, in our experience, the copy is more important even than the visual. So, again, copy is everything. Absolutely. Makes a lot of sense. You've hired tons of analysts, but not journalists. Explain that decision. Yeah, so, like I said, we really, really focus on the substance part.

and you know when we started with our newsletter product we've always been answering three questions for our users number one is what's going on here number two is what does this mean and number three why should you care and the why should you care question what we found is not something that a financial journalist and I don't mean to offend anybody out there but in our experience is not something that they are able to answer very well because they don't have that deep understanding that someone from the industry has and so when we did the hiring you know we we interviewed a range of candidates from the with journalism background because that's kind of the obvious that profile that you want to hire for someone and we just figured or we just found

that the quality of the insights that they provide just isn't strong enough and so that's then what what you know ended up leading us to the analysts and so we've hired people um you know we more most recent hire as someone who was at goldman sachs for 10 years um and we only hire analysts right now we have one exception and and he kind of sits at the intersection of product and content and he um was a managing editor at bloomberg for 10 years um so he's the one exception that we've made but other than that we've always hired analysts because the insights that they provide is what we're really looking after absolutely do you think that other media companies could benefit from kind of taking a similar strategy of almost hiring people who um are either one

have skin in the game so actually the investors themselves uh or the uh kind of analyst who has spent years and years um kind of more focused on analysis rather than just journalism i i mean i think it really depends on what what the publication wants to do um our so when we define internally what we care about is we care all about providing insights and so in order to provide insights you need people to understand it and that's what led us there if if your thing is hey i just want to have breaking news and i want to be the first one to break that i don't think you necessarily need that you probably actually or if you want to have investigative pieces you probably want to have a journalist because that's their skill set but i think as soon as you start

really digging into something and and providing those insights i think it makes a lot of sense absolutely what what's the biggest challenge for you guys moving forward good question um we always have a bunch of challenges that we're thinking about um i think for us it's uh it's all about um when we think about what we're doing is we we essentially are creating a new kind of product category, um, a product where people are paying to get financial insights. There isn't really a product out there that exists yet. Um, similar to what maybe like a headspace and a calm did in the meditation space,

you know, getting people into this space where they're paying for meditation was something new was, was category defining. And we believe that we are doing something similar in the financial news analysis insights space. And so the challenge that that brings is you're constantly having to educate the market on what you're doing, why this is worth paying for, why you can't Google this. So I think it's all about customer and market education and development. That's really what we're focusing on. Got it. And then for you personally, we talked a little bit about what you've learned in your first company.

What have you learned in this company so far that other founders could benefit from hearing? I think I applied the thing that I learned from my previous company with the culture manifest and defining that early on. I think that's been an absolute winner, and I would definitely do that again. So really focusing on getting the soft factors and the soft values right. I think importance of brand, again, is something that's super crucial. And that's something that you just build up every single day by providing value to your end users. And then I think monetization.

So when we started out, we had a very different business plan in place. And I would probably next time, I guess, try to put a little bit more emphasis on the business plan from day one, rather than building great product that you're proud of and building a good brand because you need both. And I think we kind of, um, did a lot of experimentation and figured it out along the way. Um, which maybe that's the natural way to do it. And I know a lot of companies have done it, but, uh, it's probably easier if you, if you really nail that from day one. Got it. Before I wrap up, I always ask everyone the same two questions and then you'll get a chance to ask me one. The first is what's the most important book that you've ever read?

that's a good question um the most important i mean i guess i guess i'll give you two answers one is uh sort of on the on the business side um i love reading business books uh so i love stuff like shoe dog um and i i love stuff like um i just read michael obitz's autobiography which was which was super entertaining and really interesting but i think in terms of the book that i really love uh because i think it's a it's a really interesting perspective on life it's uh the little prince um from saint expiry um i don't know if you've ever heard of it but it happened why that one it's a uh it's i guess it's uh it's a it's a french book from uh from a french author uh the little prince it's a very simple book it's it's sort of intended to be for

children um but it's an adult book with really really important life lessons if you sort of uncover it a little bit and go a little bit below the surface and it just you know gives you lessons and perspectives on you know what matters in life uh what matters with relationships what matters with love. All the stuff that I think in our world of business and finance, you kind of lose. And I think that book is just a really refreshing read to sort of open your mind again. I love that answer. Second question is more fun. Aliens, are you a believer or a non-believer? I'm not a believer today, but I'm open to being convinced. So I'm not categorically against it. Why not a believer yet?

I guess, uh, I haven't really seen any, any, uh, indication of it. Um, I know that there's, you know, that you always read these studies that are coming out, um, from different planets, but I don't know. I probably believe in ghosts more than I believe in aliens. Uh, but yeah. Why do you believe in ghosts? You're like the third, you're like the third person ever to say that. Why do you believe in ghosts? Uh, I don't think I believe in ghosts per se,

but I think I'd probably believe in ghosts a little bit more than I believe in aliens, just because sometimes things happen and you're there's isn't really a good explanation for it. And you're kind of in this old historic place or something like that. And you're like, Oh, I guess it could, could have been a ghost. I love it. What's the one question you got for me to wrap us up? I actually have a quick one. So my favorite part of your podcast is when you open up and you say bang,

bang what's the what's the background there uh literally there is none i just did it one day and then i was like i'm gonna do it again and then uh about the third time uh i was like i probably can't stop now like in a couple hundred episodes later like just bang bang what's up i love that it's uh that's the energy tone right and then the second question is so bitcoin on a rise where do you think it's going to go this time i think we see 100k by the end of next year for sure end of 2021 um you know how much higher than that i have no clue could it not go to 100 absolutely like i kind of just think of it as um the the thesis is there like there's a fixed supply demand is only going to continue to increase over time uh how long does that take

what are the price targets all that is debatable but like you know it's going to be worth more you know 10 years from now than it is today type thing right and you think uh last time we hit this sort of 18k mark then afterwards it all sort of dribbling down again you're convinced or you're bullish it's not going to happen this time oh no i i think that we get another kind of parabolic run let's say, you know, say 100k, right, or whatever the number ends up being. And then from there, you get a pretty nasty, like 80% drawdown again. So I kind of, you know, if you put a gun to my head and said, what do I think is going to happen 100k or more by the end of next year. And then after that kind of blow off top, you'll then get a pretty nasty drawdown. You know, 80% probably

somewhere in that range uh then you'll go through a multi-year kind of bear market like we did uh already and then you'll basically um you know kind of get another parabolic run again so it's uh you know over the last 11 years this game has been played right um and it's kind of done this a number of times uh i tend to think that uh you know this is no different we're just in the next cycle of it yeah awesome so we'll we'll see uh max thank you so much for doing this where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Finamize? Sure. So, uh, you can find me personally on Twitter.

I have a bizarre Twitter handle, which is whole earth web, uh, which has a whole story to it, but whole earth. You're going to have to tell us what the story is. Um, so I was, uh, when I really got in, so I was like one of those kids in, in, in, in school, I was like the first kid in my high school to have a website. So I've always been really into the web and I kind of went down this, really sort of rabbit hole uh for a year or something uh understanding where the worldwide

web came from and i and i found out about the whole earth catalog from stewart brand and i bought one everything and i looked at that and then i was like oh i guess you know those guys who were sort of the hippies of that generation they actually helped create the worldwide web so i thought i was going to be smart and just combine the terms whole earth catalog with web which led me to whole earth web and now i have to stick with it and you've been using that as uh as kind of the uh the name on the internet since yeah you know i kind of stuck i one day i signed up for twitter and like ever since i've been having it i kind of like it it's not great for like personal recognition but i'll stick with it i love it all right so they can find you there on

on twitter and then what about finamize well finamize uh you can find us on on twitter just finimize you can go to our website finimize.com f-i-n-i-m-i-z-e instagram social media etc and in all the app stores so uh apple and android i love it man you are uh you're a legend i appreciate you uh taking the time to do this and obviously you've built a very very large engaged audience uh and community uh and are figuring out how to kind of in a win-win way monetize it so thank you so much for coming on and we'll definitely have to do this again in the future. Thank you. Awesome.