The Pomp Podcast - Brad Michelson, U.S. Senior Marketing Manager at eToro: The Current State of Marketing in Crypto

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Brad Michelson is the U.S. Senior Marketing Manager at eToro. In this conversation, Brad and Anthony Pompliano discuss the current state of marketing in crypto, how people should be thinking about customer acquisition, what the inherent challenges on certain marketing platforms are, and what's coming up next for eToro. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brad Michelson is the US Senior Marketing Manager at eToro. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of marketing in crypto, how people should be thinking about customer acquisition, what the inherent challenges on certain marketing platforms are, and what is coming up next for eToro. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're

trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. that's right you purchase it it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it

from the mobile app they provide and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis kind of like how tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software just you're updating your coin mine consumer mining made easy that's right. Go to coinmine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency.

6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. 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 Brad here. He's sitting in the hot seat. He's not leaving until he tells us all the marketing secrets. So thanks so much for coming in and doing this. Thanks for having me, Pomp. What's your background? Where did you get started? How the hell do you end up at eToro doing marketing? Well, I actually started as a journalist way back in the day when I was 15, started a blog, was mostly a music journalist. So I would shoot bands and film concerts. And, you know, that was sort of my first exposure to what I didn't even consider as marketing at the

time is, you know, posting links on music forums, getting traffic, ended up getting the point where it was like almost scalable. Ended up going to college, was an editor of college paper. But after college, I ended up pivoting into PR. So I had a little shop for a bit. Where'd you go to college? I grew up in Canada. So I went to the University of Victoria on the West Coast. Got it. And then what was PR? What were you doing there? I was doing music PR as well. So by the end of it, we had about a dozen clients, Western Canadian acts that were touring the country, touring the U.S. And then, you know, a year and a bit into that, I ended up going to New York for a summer and then never leaving. What brought you to New York?

Mostly for work. So at the time, I thought that I'd be able to pivot from Canadian PR into U.S. PR and who would have guessed it's not as easy as you would expect coming to, you know, a different coast in a different city, making new contacts, that sort of thing. I ended up pivoting into copywriting and then ended up going over to my first agency I worked at. I was at a digital agency, started as an account manager and ended up climbing the ladder to director of strategy at the agency. We're mostly e-commerce clients. We specialized in post-A funding startups and scaling those brands out. Some of those brands now are on the New York City subways, which is quite a thrill to see. And it was really exciting. And from there, I moved in-house. And after that,

made my first professional move into crypto. What's the first time you ever heard about crypto? Yeah. First time I heard about crypto was in 2012 when I was sort of just discovering Reddit in college. I started reading on, I can't even remember which subreddits, people were talking about Bitcoin, buying stuff with Bitcoin. But at the exact same time, actually, my little cousin, I found out, had been mining for like a year at that point. What? Yeah, it's crazy. And, you know, he sort of sold me on the philosophy of Bitcoin, sold me on the, you know, the technicals of crypto in general and why permissionless transfers of value are so valuable. And I've sort of just been growing that as a hobby for a long time.

About a year after that, I found out there's about a dozen of my friends back home. we were all closet Bitcoin people. So we started a Slack group and I'm still in that today. We talk about market sentiment and news and share each other's experience. Some of us are full-time crypto now, so it's really fun. That's awesome. What really caught your eye in the beginning when you saw it? Because it's so different and then obviously coming from music, what was the big catch there? I think the first thing for me was, like I sort of alluded to before, is permission transfers of value. So the first use case that really stuck with me and honestly still is what I think about the most is remittance payments, cross-border payments, being able to transfer

value from one country to another for pennies almost instantly. And what really sold me on this is I've got a friend back home, Joseph Weinberg, works on Shift Network. I know he's been on the show before. And that was one of his first projects was a remittance project. And ever since then, it's sort of always stuck with me. You guys knew each other before crypto? We grew up together. Really? Yeah. Wow. All right. So when you decide, hey, this crypto thing's real, you know, Bitcoin's interesting, etc. What was kind of how did you get to eToro? What was the path? Wow. Yeah. So I started my first crypto company, I guess, three years ago. They were post ICO and to help them launch their platform, which was really fun. We also launched a conference that

still goes on to this day during New York Blockchain Week. After that, I actually moved on to BlockFi, where I was the director of marketing and was there for a bit. And that was really fun and really formative for me. Zach's an amazing person to work for. And, you know, he really gives you the opportunity to experiment. And, you know, he gave me the opportunity to grow that brand and now they are what they are and that was a really fantastic experience what was uh what was the best part about block five and before every all the trolls on twitter get mad i'm an investor in block five through morgan creek they're advertisers on the podcast there's all the disclosures but they're awesome go sign up for an account block fight.com slash

pump it works it does it does work right actually brad is the one who uh the very first ad we ever ran on the podcast. That's right. Because of Brad and BlockFi. Sorry, what was that question? Just keep saying BlockFi.com slash POM. That's right. But what kind of caught your attention about going to work at BlockFi? Was it the team, the product? Just you wanted to like go more full time into crypto? Yeah. What really convinced you? That's a great question. I mean, I only do great questions on the podcast. At that point, you know, I was two feet into wanting to take on crypto as a career. Like I'm not a trader, so that's not really my angle. I focus on customer acquisition and growing brands. Right. So what I saw with BlockFi was that here's a company

that's gotten some funding from a few exciting places. And this was still when we were on our seed. They're not an ICO company, which was something that I personally wanted to avoid going forward. And their product was something that I saw immediate use cases for. At the time, you know, Salt was still a relatively big name and there are other major players in the space as well. So that was the original draw. And then, you know, once I started talking to Zach about his vision for the long term, there's a lot of really cool things that they have in their pipeline. Obviously we launched the BlockFi interest account last year, which has been really exciting and that's still growing rapidly. I use it myself. You guys should probably go use

it as well. I use it too. No financial advice, but I use it as well. Exactly. So yeah, that was a really cool experience for me and a lot of, you know, best practices setting there and yeah. Got it. And then you moved over to eToro earlier this year. What was that like? That was a really cool experience. So after speaking with Yoni, our CEO, and speaking with Guy, who's our MD of the US business, I was sold pretty quickly on the company. We've been around for 12 years. We have 11 million users on the platform. If you go to London right now, eToro's on all the cabs. We sponsor six Premier League teams. So it was a little bit of stepping into a pedigree, which was really cool. But on top of that, eToro has obvious differentiators in the

market, the social trading features, the copy features. I just saw a really big opportunity in that. And it's like working in a startup environment because there's like 20 people in our office, but we have the infrastructure of a very large organization. What does eToro do? I think a lot of people see the advertising. Maybe we should start with that. What exactly does eToro do? All right. So eToro is a social trading platform. What is that? Is that some bullshit Yoni made up? By the way, disclosure, we are investors in eToro through Morgan Creek. go ahead so uh to put it most basically we have a number of features on the platform that are it's more than just your normal spot buy sell right so the most basic part of the social

features are that every asset on the platform has a social feed globally we have over 2 000 assets in the u.s we're crypto only right now with equities coming next year so you click on bitcoin you see the social feed people are posting market sentiment they're posting charts we have pretty advanced charting features on the site you know competes with what TradingView does for example but on top of that you can click on people's profiles you can see their entire portfolio broken down by percentages as well as their cost basis over time which is really exciting and actually so this is like Twitter where people are like oh I'm so smart look at

my TA, you can click on their profile and be like, you're down 40%. I would just maybe not show the charts and worry about making money instead. Yeah, that's right. So that's a really big part of it. And we've got these copy features, which are really exciting. So a couple of weeks ago, we launched this new copy portfolio through a partnership with a company called The Tie that I think a bunch of people probably saw on Twitter. What The Tie does is they have access through a third party to the actual fire hose of twitter so they ingest like 850 million tweets a day from crypto twitter they cut out the spam they score the tweets and they basically produce signals for prop traders and they generate their yield off their trading strategies

so what we did with them is we partnered made a light version of their signal strategy and we launched that publicly for eToro users around the world. Got it. And how does the copy trader functionality work? Right. So copy trader is sort of a parallel feature that actually allows you to copy all the trades of other traders. And that happens automatically on your account at the exact same price that they execute at in real time. That is probably our most popular feature globally. And that's actually launching in the US on October 29th. Got it. And so really, this is if you have an account and I think that you're smart, I want to follow you. I can say, hey, just copy what Brad does. If you own, if you're in Europe and you own Apple stock and you sell

your Apple stock, then it would sell it in my portfolio as well. If you then took that money and you bought some other, let's say Bitcoin, then it would buy Bitcoin in my account as well. It just literally mimics exactly what you're doing in real time. So I get basically the performance that you get. And so rather than give you my money to manage, I'm basically just copying what you're doing. That's right. That's exactly how it works with the global product. For example, you mentioned stocks. So in the US, we're crypto only right now. But, you know, once we launch on the 29th, we'll have between 50 and 60 traders available to be copied on the platform. The people who are whitelisted to be copied, those people actually get rewarded for being copied, which is

really exciting. And like you said, the people copying them get the benefit of the trading strategy of the person they're copying. All right. So before I forget, you can go to the website eToro.com slash Pomp. And there's a whole bunch of stuff here around trading, et cetera. What's your role at eToro? Right. So I run U.S. marketing for eToro. What does that mean? So customer acquisition, brand marketing, I oversee event marketing as well as PR, anything that's sort of outward facing from a messaging or acquisition standpoint. All right. And as you guys look at the U.S. market today, because you're a crypto only, like what are the channels that you're the most active on? Yeah. So that's a really good question. So on a social side of things, we try to be really active on crypto Twitter, right? That's sort of the holy grail. That's where we all spend most of our time. So we're developing and maturing a program to spread the word for eToro on there. You know, at the same time, we like to leverage influencer relationships.

So today you might have seen a tweet go out from Ben Askren, who we've partnered with, which is really exciting. Earlier this year, you might have seen that we partnered with Bitcoin Is, which was founded by Russell Okung and the Chargers. So that's really exciting. And there's some more cool partnerships coming out soon. Do you want to tell us about any of them right now? No, I don't think I can do that. All right. Just wondering.

I thought I could get you. Go ahead. Um, on top of that, you might've been hearing about eToro through a number of podcasts that we sponsor, including yours. Um, you know, it's a big channel for a lot of people in crypto. Uh, it's been really effective for me at other companies I've worked with and it's, you know, a direct line to our lowest funnel customer. Absolutely. So, uh, social's big, podcasts are big. Anything else that you guys have that you're active with? Yeah. So we also advertise on the social platforms where we can. We buy ad space on publishers that, you know, we think our customers

are on. You know, we don't really buy articles. We buy banners. I know that there's some confusion with that sometimes in crypto land. So we like to experiment a little bit with everything. But when we try something, we do a real deep dive execution on those plans. Cool. So I wanted to bring you in because I want to talk about just marketing in general, but specifically around crypto as well. Right. Let's go through the different channels and just kind of give me your philosophy, right, or the framework that you use to evaluate some of this. So social and Twitter specifically, like how do you think about what the value prop is?

Like what's the best way to actually engage there? And what do you see being effective or not effective? Yeah, that's a great question. That's the third time you said that. It must be a really great question. You're a pro, man. So it really depends on the product, right? Don't tell Peter McCormick that.

Go ahead. So it really depends on the product, right? So we are a trading platform. Obviously, there's the key value propositions being social trading platform, great place to buy and sell, the basics, right? good app, the whole deal. But then you have to think about who your customer is, where they are, what are the most effective ways to access these people, and develop your full marketing funnel, right? So you have your upper funnel where you're just trying to get fresh eyeballs. We're trying to get people into the brand, following along in one way or another. These are typically through

social media, working through affiliates, banner ads, sponsoring newsletters, that sort of thing. And then you've got your medium funnel where you're engaging with, you know, your customers directly who reach out to you on social media, on the platform itself. You're leveraging them to promote your brand further through things like refer a friend programs. You're hitting them through email marketing. There's a million different things to hit on this funnel. And then you've got sort of your lower funnel where you're worried about conversion. So we like to, we're investing quite a bit in optimizing our website funnel, our customer acquisition funnel, and just making it as smooth as possible for people during the onboarding process. Got it. Top of the funnel, what have you guys tried that hasn't worked or even if it's not an eToro specific thing, just like what are things that you think might be a misconception in marketing that you're like, oh, that seems to be a top of funnel thing.

but they're actually not nearly as effective as people think. I think that posting memes on crypto Twitter are not as effective as some people think. Why? Twitter is so fleeting of a platform that although sometimes you're winning a little bit of mindshare, you're not actually selling people. Selling is not the right word,

but you're not, um, endearing or themselves to your brand. Uh, so sometimes that's a liability, but none of these things are like existential existential truths, right? Sometimes things don't work. Some things do work. Sometimes an ad campaign, uh, that you put all over the subways and train stations, whatever doesn't work in the immediate term, but it's an investment for a long term strategy that will actually pay off 10 months later. Um, so I don't know if there's one specific thing that straight up doesn't work it's all contextual and it's all timely you know yeah and do you feel like you can um try to uh script like the customer journey where you're like hey we know we need to hit customers six or seven times with different messages on different

platforms and then they convert yeah are you able to kind of um in the marketing plans uh maybe identify or measure at that level of granularity or is it much more kind of hey you know we ran banner ads on a website, this is how many people saw it, how many people clicked and then we converted, but you can't really necessarily track back how many other times they see your ads and things like that. Like, like what level of granularity can you actually get to? Yeah. So, I mean, the objective is always to get as granular as possible, even if your strategy doesn't go through all those layers of granularity. Right. So, um, yes, you want to be as involved impossible in your customer acquisition funnel. You have everything from retargeting banners that

start serving the day of or the day after someone hits your website. You have drip campaigns coming from email campaigns when someone becomes a lead or becomes a funded customer. So for those things, you want to be as granular as possible because there's a million opportunities to optimize. but sometimes you know there is such thing as being too granular because the program becomes too complex so in order to a b test or optimize those programs in the long term um it needs to be like a manageable size right so if you have um an email drip campaign that's 25 steps deep um that's way too many because you're going to be testing buttons and call to actions and wording and graphics on 25 different emails simultaneously. And you need, you know, a full

team of people to do that sort of thing. Um, when you're talking about the sort of campaigns that you can be, uh, a little bit more high level on, um, there's a lot of opportunities for that stuff. So when you're doing podcast advertising, for example, um, these are investments in a brand, right? These aren't direct response activations. So you come up with some ad copy, some talking points. Um, you let those run for a few weeks, see how that performs, change it up for a few more weeks, compare the two. Um, it really depends on your marketing style, but, um, there are certain things that you can geek out about and other things you sort of just have to let it breathe. Yeah. And then how do you think about, um, when I worked at Facebook and we would really

work on growth right it's actually growing users we used to break it down into there's new user acquisition there's retention work there's churns and there's resurrection is that a general framework that you guys look at or do you have some twist on it in terms of how you guys actually measure yeah absolutely so we have acquisition teams retention teams customer service teams so they kind of hit different points in that customer journey all the way through got it but like you were alluding to there's sort of the acquisition retargeting and like conversion channels even just in your acquisition side of things um and yeah you have different priorities and and messaging and funnels for all those different steps typically and the reason i ask is because one

of the things that's different about crypto and bitcoin than let's say like you know a social application or a mobile app or something is that like the whole idea of like holding is a use case yeah right so i went on somewhere i bought bitcoin and i'm just holding on to it yeah i'm not necessarily transacting i'm not necessarily um you know doing anything with i'm not selling it or anything but because i'm holding it i still am a user right right and so are you an active user are you not an active user right that changes the way that you think about retention and resurrection of churned users etc just like how do you think of that having come from like the not crypto world into the crypto world and kind of what's the comparison there? Yeah. I mean, I consider myself

one of those people that you just described. Like I first bought in 2013 and I've never sold any of it. Like I'm just a long-term holder. So my lifetime value on an exchange is the fact that I dollar cost average. So I buy a small amount once a week and I've been doing that for a couple years and that's my value to them however for customers that sort of buy once a quarter like once every few months those are valuable people too because a lot of these people keep their equity on the exchange um so that's valuable to the company as well there's opportunities to upsell um from a i guess in crypto upselling is more like encouraging people to uh educate themselves more in order to, I don't know, improve their trading strategies if they're that kind of

investor, or just in general, engage with your brand in a way that they're enriching their knowledge in the category. For sure. What are some of the campaigns that you've seen others run that you're impressed by? I think Kosset does really amazing things. And I think that the core from a marketing perspective with them is that they obviously pay a lot of attention to customer experience. And, you know, this is a brand that's not just online. Like so much in crypto is magical Internet money that you have no physical connection to.

And they do a really fantastic job of making the complex process of, you know, becoming your own bank something that's user friendly, but also aesthetically nice. And I, you know, I'm constantly looking at what they're doing as sort of a leading indicator for where we should all be trying to go. Who else? Anybody else? I really like BlockFi. It's, you know, I think that from a high level with crypto, let's say crypto adoption to the point where we all sort of are striving and hoping that we're all going to end up where everyone in, you know, the U.S. say, is engaged in one way or another with either Bitcoin or cryptocurrency more largely. There's three steps how I think about it. So there's sort of like the MVP, which was, you know, early days, people sort of buying stuff, a little bit of something here, a little bit of

something there. Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much at the time. And there were fluctuations, but it wasn't something that we thought we would be, you know, I didn't know we'd be in an office in Midtown Manhattan recording a podcast five years ago, right? I got dress shoes on today too. I was looking sharp. Go ahead. So there's sort of like that MVP stage. Next, we've sort of got our, you know, we're thinking about it like building a product, right? So you got your beta testers and we've got a little bit of a proof of concept. So people are onboarding into the ecosystem. we're seeing that the base layer is usable you can trust it you know the bitcoin protocol hasn't been you know taken over by some bad actor um so we have a bit of an idea of where we can go

and we're sort of listening to the needs of the consumer and we're sort of in in some middle stage before what the third one is which is more of like a mass adoption right like we have the whole stacking sats phenomenon, which is kind of, in my mind, a little bit of a placeholder for whatever that next step is. But where I see BlockFi's role is, you know, we before we're building all this future tech, and there has to be context for this future tech. And I really think that the first step to getting there is building financial tools within the crypto ecosystem that sort of mirror what goes on in the traditional finance world in order to get people comfortable with the technology. And then from there, you can start building and innovating to whatever that future

tech is because people are already onboarded into this decentralized free flow of money technology. And how do you think about like what I'll call more of the ancillary platforms, right? So like Reddit isn't huge in traditional marketing. Even YouTube's not that big in I think a lot of traditional marketing plans. Those are much bigger in crypto. Like, how do you think about the intersection of a company like eToro that does, you know, literally sponsors, I'll call it soccer, they call it football teams, cabs. And then also like you have to deal with these platforms that are more kind of niche. Like, what do you guys think about there? Yeah. So it's interesting, right? Like Reddit really was crypto Twitter before crypto Twitter, I think. Most people

were talking about it on Reddit before they were shit posting on Twitter all day. That's where I discovered Bitcoin for the first time. But the flip side of it is that now Reddit for a large percentage of the content on there has actually been gamified by marketers. So most of the stuff that does hit the front page or hits your timeline is something that someone more than likely manipulated to get there in one way or another. And I'm not saying all of the content is, but a good chunk of it is. Their ad platform is improving over time, but, you know, is notoriously inefficient. So whether that's from a targeting standpoint or just performance overall, it's always at least been a struggle for me. And I think a lot of people would agree with that.

Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you.

Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. everybody got some electricity and wi-fi all you got to do is go to coinmine.com you buy a coin mine it's like an xbox or a playstation that helps you turn your electricity into bitcoin that's right you purchase it it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it from the

mobile app they provide and then you receive over the air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your CoinMine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com,

tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor, BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds,

So you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi, and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So now's a good time. Disclosure, I'm an investor in Reddit. Go ahead.

through an SPV we did go ahead but with YouTube for example um you know it's similar to Twitter in the way that um there are some huge crypto influencer like doesn't almost doesn't feel like the right word for the people on YouTube like people like Luke Martin who are just churning out all this really high-end content all the time and there are people like learning how to do their entire careers based on watching videos of him every day, right? It is one of the fastest growing platforms in marketing in general. And I think people have started noticing how YouTube has really invested in their ad placements. They're blowing it up. You can do Google shopping ads through YouTube placements now. They have banner ads on top of their actual video ad placements,

the pre-rolls and the mid-rolls and everything. So whether you're a crypto company or an e-commerce brand or whatever, spending money either through retargeting or even acquisition on YouTube has to be part of your mix. Yeah. What is the, not eToros, I don't want to get into any of the confidential information, but just in your mind, what is the difference between traditional marketing and these social platforms from a cost of acquisition standpoint? Is it a material you know like like a magnitude difference is it actually not as big of a difference as people think just like how do you think about i have x dollars to spend i need to be as efficient as possible is it true that the online platforms are that much more efficient or is it really the case

dependent on what i'm trying to accomplish and what the the channel i choose is yeah i mean customer acquisition costs are actually not that much different um when you're sort of setting your flagpole based on what, you know, traditional financial firms are looking at or reported to be looking at. It's not that far off, which is actually really encouraging considering the size of the crypto ecosystem versus the addressable market of like SoFi or Wealthfront, for example. For sure. I want to play a game. I didn't tell you we were going to play this game. Okay, let's do this. Uh, I want to go through and see one for one to name every person we could think of on

Twitter. First one to not be able to name somebody loses to not be able to name somebody. Yeah. So you throw out a name, I throw out a name and we'll see who, uh, who has to give up first. All right. They have to be somebody who there's three criteria. Yeah.

They have to be somebody who's into Bitcoin, crypto, et cetera. Yeah. They have to be regularly engaged. Right. and they have to have some element of being a smartass, a troll, or a shitposter. Oh, man. This is a lot of pressure. Let's do it.

All right. You go first. All right. I got to shout out my buddy, CodyIsFun. All right. I'm going to go with my guy, Peter McCormick, the troll of all trolls. That was my next one. How about we go with Peter Schiff on this next one?

All right. I'm going to go with Rhythm Trader who responds to every one of my tweets great guy and rides off into the virality which I appreciate you got to shout out Marty Bent

Marty Bent I'll go with his counterpart Matt O'Dell who else we got here Tom Shaughnessy Tom Shaughnessy I will go with Balaji nice

um who should i get uh let's go with yoni yoni sia etoro ceo all right well okay then i'll go with zach prince let's go uh brian armstrong on this one all right i will go with uh i feel like we should call her the queen of wall street at this point uh caitlin long nice uh let's go crypto bobby crypto bobby i will go with uh tom o'sha or uh jim o'shaughnessy almost got me shout out jim o'shaughnessy who was one of the first three guests ever on off the chain and came on and said at least 50 times i don't know uh let's do uh crypto randy crypto randy i will go with uh Jill Carlson, and I'll throw in the next one, and Meltem for What Grinds My Gear. Great podcast.

Podcast, go ahead. Let's do, oh, I just had it. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. No, I had a good one. No, I had a good one. I lost it. It's over. On the spot.

It's over. Literally all day. Who were you thinking of? Oh, man. He really lost it. Oh, Luke Martin is what I was going to say. Ah, it's over. All right.

We could have gone for a long time. We really could have. The reason I wanted to do that is if you look at all of those people, they all have completely different roles in an ecosystem. Totally. And it's like the WWF. And I talked about this on a podcast before, but like there's the heroes, there's the villains, there's like the tag team partners, right? Like you get all this stuff and it's entertainment at the end of the day. Like when you get on Twitter, yes, there is like information and you're learning and education and all that.

but it's entertainment like there are people dunking on each other there are people trolling each other there are people who have like the long-standing feuds there are the people who are like overly nice to each other and like how does that company play into that see you thought i was joking around i was like wow that was a long way to get to that question with the game but But that's, you know, Twitter feuds are a funny thing, right? Like some of those are a little bit manufactured for the sake of impressions. And some of those become real life beefs. And I think the ones that are real life beefs are things that are coming largely from a good place, right?

Like people have philosophical differences on the role of certain parts of crypto and blockchain tech. Um, that really hit home for these people. Like some people are really into lightning network and some people really like to troll lightning network people. Same with XRP and vice versa. Right. Um, so when you're a brand in an ecosystem where this is likely to happen, um, you typically try to stay out of it. but, um, you know, sometimes it's good when there are trolls spending a bunch of time talking about you because sometimes that's a really interesting way to farm new farmer followers on your brand. And eventually they convert into new customers. Is there one troll that picks fights with people that you would say, uh, has done it well, like, like I said, in a positive thing and you can, and you can opt out. I'll give you an escape route if you don't want to answer, but I'm just wondering like from a and not like somebody who picks fights necessarily but just like trolls

really well and it's worked out uh so he is not a troll and he's a great human being but peter mccormack's uh beefs are actually noteworthy for a number of reasons i mean like the the whole uh lawsuit thing that's going on this is like an interesting thing that we should probably be talking about. Like someone's trying to claim a role of being the inventor of Bitcoin. And, you know, one could argue that maybe that person should be able to prove it. And, you know, that person is also suing other people for saying the contrary. So maybe this is something that we should be paying attention to. I mean, there's... I love that you answered with Peter McCormick. So I'm going to go with that one. All right. That's fair. What's the one thing that you

believe in marketing and crypto that you think most people don't understand or agree with but you would want them to learn about so basically what's the secrets yeah uh though honestly with marketing and crypto it's you got to think of it as a long game right like in a lot of ways certain key like boilerplate direct response marketing things are not as effective as one would think So if someone's coming from a direct response digital agency and is like, let's put all this crazy amount of money into AdWords. Well, if you're a small company with lean budgets, that might not be the best way to do it, especially if you're a new company with not a lot of brand recognition. You should probably invest in something that's just going to get as many eyeballs from your market segment on your brand as possible and then rely on your company being noteworthy enough to, you know, acquire the press mentions, which is really, you know, a really big part of marketing and crypto is being able to be noteworthy. For sure. And then what do you see are the biggest mistakes that people make in that vein? Right.

So there's definitely the people who come from traditional marketing who maybe don't understand the nuances of crypto, but like, what are some of the mistakes that you see teams making? Yeah, I think, um, the people that are trying to monetize, uh, memes, right? So I can't remember who it was, but someone tried to trademark like the stacking sats thing a while back. And I get it because the claim was that they were trying to like protect it for the community. And that's what they said when they did it too.

And when they presented it, but there were a lot of people that took exception to that. So, you know, brands aren't doing that to, like, screw you over. They are going into it with good intentions in mind. But sometimes it's hard to anticipate what the wider community is going to try to go for. Yeah. And there was another, what, stacking sats was one. And there was another thing somebody, wait, it was Coinbase tried to. Do like HODL or something like that.

Was that what it was? There was some other term that people tried to trademark. And again, they were saying, hey, look, we're not going to use it in an offensive manner. Yeah. It's more defensive, but still people not thrilled about it. It's a tough spot. Will we see eToro in the future get into similar things like they're doing internationally? You talked about stocks are coming at some point.

Yeah. What can you say about other things you guys are thinking about or other things that you personally would like to see you guys get into? Anything you can talk about there? Yeah. I think, I mean, I can't get into too many details because we want it to be a surprise. There's a PR person staring at me when I ask this question. It's like, it's like being under the gun, but I asked it anyways. So what I can say is that we're just trying to offer products that people want to use.

And the exchange game really is about being sticky. So that, like you were alluding to a little bit earlier, like retention is a big part of that. So when you're thinking about how to retain people, what do they want to see? What exchanges are they likely using mostly, and what are the limitations of those platforms? We think that we already have a lot of really great value propositions that compete or beat what other people are offering. But being able to not only surpass what other competitors are doing, but also be comparable with incumbents in the traditional financial tools world, that's really important.

important. So you see, you know, Robinhood and all these, uh, companies trying to become non-bank lenders in the same way that SoFi has been doing it because they're trying to, uh, acquire more customers before making that attempt to go public or whatever. Right. So, um, it's about being sticky and, you know, listening to your customer base. Got it. Uh, before I wrap up, I always ask rapid fire set of questions. Yeah. What's the most important company in crypto other than eToro or BlockFi? Other than eToro and BlockFi. I really love the block. The block. Why? That's a controversial topic. I think that those guys do a really good job of contextualizing everything from big to small stories in the space that help people that are even new to crypto

uh, at least understand what's going on. Right. Um, it's really easy to get lost in a lot of the other publications. Um, and I think that, you know, the people over there are great and they do a really good job at what they do. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could? Hmm. I'm not sure. No, no, no, no. Bullshit. You got to answer. Come on. Yeah. I got head shaking in my head. Come on, let's go. You know, I'm not too focused on pending legislation when it comes to crypto. Okay. I'm more focused on making crypto approachable for the average consumer right um we put a lot of thought into the balance of are we talking only to crypto people are we trying to convert what we call pre-coiners into the the ecosystem and i think that there are

a lot of existing uh options for people that are really deep into crypto they live and breathe it but getting my dad into it that's a whole challenge that i don't think anyone in the ecosystem has really cracked, really. So we're investing quite a bit in figuring out how to do that. For those that don't realize what he just did, he didn't answer the question, but that's fine. What's the most controversial thought you have in crypto? I think that we should be open to the idea of governments digitizing fiat currencies, because I think that although a lot of people hate the idea of it very legitimately because there's serious privacy concerns that go along with that, it becomes significantly easier to, you know, lock people

out of the economy, you know, follow all the payments people are doing. But the way that I think about it is when you introduce on that scale, and this is, you know, this goes into Libra a little bit as well. When you're introducing people at the scale of like 360 million people all at once, or, you know, a couple billion people overseas into the crypto ecosystem, and the government is finding a way, whether you think that's efficient or not, finding a way to make that an easy enough process that people can just opt in really simply. That is only, from that perspective, a good thing for crypto largely. Yeah.

I always just look at it as, well, more people have digital wallets. Yeah. And if more people have digital wallets, they have choice. Exactly. And they can use whatever they want. Yeah. And it's our job to educate them on why something like Bitcoin is better than digital fiat. Yeah.

But digital fiat will accelerate digital wallet adoption. Absolutely. Like, I think one of the biggest gaps into onboarding into crypto is actually the terminology. Like, my dad conceptually can understand what a wallet is, but trying to explain seed phrases and how important they are to, like, save. And the fact that there's no one to call if he loses them, like his email password that he loses, what are you going to do? It's a big deal. Exactly. So that's why, even though it's a little bit controversial, centralized options are really important for what I consider the average person.

Yeah. And again, you need both, right? You need the decentralized, personal freedom-based, kind of Bitcoin-ethos-based options. And then you also need the centralized version because there's just some people who aren't going to buy into or get comfortable with the other one. Exactly. What's the most important book you've ever read? I really love This Is Marketing by Seth Godin. Probably read it two and a half times.

And every time, I mean, that's not a lot, but I'm presenting it as if it's my Bible here. But every time I read it, there's like a new nugget. And the reason I say two and a half is because I'm constantly going back to like a page that I marked. Because there's always something that I'm extracting from that. What's another book other than a marketing book? See, people come in here and they're all prepared to answer these questions. And then I just throw a little loop. Now what's the second most important?

Hmm. um maybe this is uh this doesn't reflect well on me but i spend a lot of time reading newsletters and like money stuff for example uh matt levine yeah uh every get matt in here yo you have to do that absolutely money stuff um you know he is an amazingly talented writer in the way that he can turn a story that you are you you're assuming is going to go one way into something else he always ties an implication of one story into something else that's going on and it really just broadens the way that i think about how um you know one industry affects another or how there's always something going on behind the scenes in a macro sense that's affecting all

these sorts of businesses in ways that we wouldn't you know the layman wouldn't anticipate for sure uh aliens real or not i think probably real why just statistically no no no come on why do you have to ever come to earth no i don't think that's true why not i mean i'm open statistically i'm open to the idea i would i would not be like a naysayer if there was like some sort of concrete proof i'm like all about these new york times articles that keep coming out twice a year look it's washington post new york times like this isn't you know like alien conspiracy theory.com this is like legit media is saying hey this might be real yeah but i'm like you know my life is not about that so i just don't spend too much time on it but i think for sure

there's life somewhere i uh i don't know when this is going to get posted so i think this is going to come out before uh the alien interview but i'm interviewing a guy tomorrow who uh he claims that 780 000 years ago there was a um if i get this i might get this wrong but basically an alien techno signature extraterrestrial post-biological artificial intelligence spacecraft that blew up and that's where all these materials that people are showing up that have different uh physical property like physics of quantum uh properties that's where that material came from It's from the 780,000 years ago, an alien spacecraft with all those characteristics blew up and crashed into Earth. But couldn't it have just been, like, asteroids hitting the Earth that contain those properties?

For sure. But maybe the asteroid had the aliens on it. Who knows? I tend to think that the simpler explanation is probably what happened. I got intrigued just because I wanted to know what an extraterrestrial post-biological artificial intelligence alien aircraft is like. All right. What one question do you have for me to finish up? What do you think the next stage in crypto is?

So when you think about the focus over the last year and a half on making products that are approachable by consumers and usable with a good UX, what is the next step? Now that we have good UXs, what's the next step? There's three milestones that I'm waiting for. uh one is a sovereign nation acquiring bitcoin and putting it in their uh national reserves uh i think that you will see a bonanza like you think you've seen a chart go bend backwards like that thing will explode that's one uh and we kind of saw that this week with china saying that they were going all in on blockchain and it's specifically bitcoin yeah

But they definitely directionally are now becoming more public about, hey, this is serious. This is important. We're going to make it a national initiative. The second thing I think is today we're probably at like 1% of the world's population, about 70 million people. I think that when we get to 10%, so like an order of magnitude from here, I think that's a lot of people. I think that's a lot. Well, yes, 700 million people. uh if you think about that that's like really breaking the threshold of like true global

adoption right but it's still you got 90 to go from there right to get everyone so it's not like an impossible number but it's also like to go from 70 to 700 like you gotta you know 10x right what indicator would you use to know that like some people like to look at the amount of wallets that are being opened but you know everyone has like 10 50 wallets they've generated over time right? So what are you looking for? I don't think it's one metric, right? I think it's like a whole host of different things. And then I think what you probably can do if you really wanted one metric is you could take that wallet, you try to figure out what's the average number of wallets somebody has, right? And kind of back into it. Or you can look at the exchanges and you could

probably like extrapolate out how quickly they're acquiring users, right? And then if a new user comes into the ecosystem, how many exchange accounts do they set up? It's probably one. And then for some period of time, it's two, three, whatever. And then what you can do is kind of like do some math and say, OK, this is what we kind of think it is. But part of the beauty is we'll never know. Yeah. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

And then the third one is I think a sovereign nation not only puts it in the reserves, they adopt Bitcoin as the national currency. How far away are we from that? Ten years or less. Or less. Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I think that there's some countries that are in really, really big trouble.

Yeah. and uh i think that somebody's gonna throw a hail mary yeah right like think about iphone's 12 years old not really that long right yeah feels like forever it really does like feels like i like grew up with this thing in my hand yeah right yeah check out first cell phone when i was in high school right like it wasn't a smartphone either right yeah you know uh i actually think uh did you ever have one of the sidekicks we didn't have them that slid out and you had the keyboard we didn't have them in canada oh man i didn't get one till i was in college but i wanted one so bad but like if you think about right iphone's 12 years old uh if you look at you know today yeah

bitcoin is 11 right actually turns 11 on the october 31st um from the white paper but like i'll buy into the idea that in the first 20 years since the white paper gets released one country decides and it could be some you know nonsense small like hail mary type situation or it might not be like it may be some real yeah you know established country but like to me that is the the three milestones right is you've got to get somebody putting in the national reserves you got to get it uh to 10 global population and then you got to get a country to accept it or to identify it with it as its national currency and then like hyper bitcoinization is a foregone conclusion at that point right and uh you know trace meyer and every other yahoo's that you know

from early days of bitcoin are all vindicated yeah right um and so far so good for that all of them but i think that that's like when it's going to be pretty indisputable like this is real cool you agree i do 10 years or less than a country oh no so i don't know i think that's debatable topic i mean what in your mind what is like the impetus that they switch from their uh fiat to um bitcoin as their like national currency it's like the failing of the state uh no failing of the currency of the currency yeah like their currency fails and they're like fuck what do we do we can try to start another one yeah right yeah or like oh let's just use this one like we don't have control over it but neither does anybody else do you think that we

have to see a stabilization of the price before we get to that point? It is stable. How stable? Well, if you price goods in Bitcoin, it's stable. That's true. Bitcoin's always won Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, it's like dollars, right? Like technically the dollar continues to lose value every year, but $1, $1, and it just costs more dollars to buy that asset. And like, I get, some people don't like that analogy or whatever, but at the same time, like that's the same way that fiat works right now is if the problem is that what you're trying to buy you're using one currency to buy something priced in another currency if you price everything in that currency then you don't have the quote-unquote volatility because you're just simply buying things that are

priced in the same currency that you hold now it would be a big you know kind of mental switch for an entire country to do that um but i think that from a top down in some countries if the government said this is the new national currency yeah like sure i just want to get paid man right like i just want to provide for my family right i just want to live a good life like the people aren't really that complicated when you think of the incentive system and then at what point do we switch to satoshi's as our like main uh unit well i think that's what would happen whenever you know whenever you'd switch the national currency right is basically think most things would get priced in satoshi's just given that uh at that point you know in the next 10 years it's like you know i

I don't think Bitcoin is $8,500, right? What it is, who knows? But, you know, even today at $8,500, you want to buy a pack of gum, like it's not going to be, you know, hey, you owe me, you know, one ten thousandth of a Bitcoin. Yeah. It's definitely priced in institutions. Right. So I don't know. All right.

Thanks for coming to do this. Sorry that I had to embarrass the PR component. That's my new rule is that people bring PR folks. They're getting embarrassed. but I'm getting a thumbs up from this that means that we didn't violate any rules

and where can people go find out more about eToro you can head to eToro.com slash pomp slash pomp find out more

go in fund your account complete a trade and pretty soon you'll be able to copy other people awesome man and where can they find you

you can find me on Twitter at Brad Michelson that's a very original name I know i thought really hard about it all right man thanks so much we'll do it again thanks hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and

subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.