The Road to a Billion Users - Simon Yu (StormX) - TOKEN2049 London

hello everyone nice to meet you my name is simon you i'm the co-founder and ceo of stormx uh i've been in the crypto industry for about seven years now uh it was very different uh conferences did not have as many people like this um i actually was in banking and i was driving for uber and lyft just to get our you know startup kick kicked off that was a very different fundraising environment because a lot of people at the time thought hey you know bitcoin's related to silk road mount gox all these news kept coming up and everyone thought like you know a bitcoin startup are we trying to launder money are we trying to sell drugs and it was a very different kind of environment but we really started believing in the passion it's just my co-founder and i who was very technical and for me just being in you know just stuck in a cubicle and banking and then realizing that you know just from the bitcoin technology that payment was really disrupted i i immediately knew that you know we had this opportunity to be able to send transactions to people for just fractions of a cent which is truly revolutionary and we have a really global impact and i thought immediately how the banking industry was going to be disrupted so to me that was very fascinating so it was worth uh for me to just start going all in and yeah this is stormx it's our baby and uh we're trying to create the easiest way for users to be able to earn using blockchain and cryptoc cryptocurrency so um i know our title is our road to one billion users and i want to chat about not just sort of what our accomplishments are but at the same time just you know we've had a lot of rough starts and just a rough transition through all the different ups and downs and you know just problems with product uh regulatory challenges consumers a lot of uh just different barriers to entry that we have as a crypto company being in their early stages so so far just a little background about us we have about four million users so far in our application uh we've rewarded about four and a half million uh dollars today uh we're available in 170 countries and you might have heard of us recently because we were the first crypto company to be a jersey part jersey patch partner with an nba team which is the portland trailblazers um so our how we first started uh with our crypto cashback journey so my co-founder i created this app that rewarded people two tenths of a penny in bitcoin for watching a short 30 second video and so you know when i first heard about this i was really interested in bitcoin and he was as well too but you know in seattle i think there were like at most like 10 people that were actually interested in this back in like 2014 but um when he first made this application you know we were looking at the user numbers and it kept growing you know triple digit percentages every month and i was really intrigued because you know it's such a small amount of money and at first i thought it was dumb too like you know why would anyone spend their time and effort to try to earn such a small amount but it wasn't really the amount of money that was really intriguing but the fact that you know we were able to send like 5 cents or 10 cents of payment to users in india or china or bangladesh and if you were trying to do the same thing with fiat it'd be nearly impossible because you have foreign transaction fees your wire transfer fees and all these different spreads that the bank charges it would cost you more than a hundred dollars in order to send payment so for the first time the technology allowed us to be inclusive from a global environment and from a scaling perspective you're not just you know regionally attached to a certain country or certain states and the opportunity became endless because you can be global and one of the reasons we were able to grow so quickly is the fact that we are in 170 countries right now and so throughout our journey we first started just with the pure bitcoin rewards application and then towards the beginning of 2017 uh we realized that bitcoin didn't scale so it was around three four hundred dollars for a very long time like two three years and then all of a sudden uh bitcoin went up to like 1200 on some etf news and then dipped a little bit and then it went up to like 3000 and then everyone started using it because of a lot of hype and price speculation and the transaction fee there was definitely a barrier to limitations so we ended up pivoting to ethereum and ethereum at the time was a little bit better solution uh it was about ten dollars and all of a sudden ethereum went from like ten dollars to fifty dollars and then it went to four hundred thirty dollars and then a lot more hype and a lot more usage came in and then the transaction fees also started getting really expensive so for a company like ours we're focusing on sort of microtransactions you know smaller rewards of like couple cents to a couple dollars and if we're spending you know like five to ten dollars in gas fees the business model doesn't really work and so we decided to create our own token um by actually having our patent tech as well too that helps us batch with utilizing our smart contracts and so we're able to minimize the cost in terms of sending out payments and so when we first started um we focused more on the microtask features where people can check out different apps products and services and be able to earn small amounts of rewards to cryptocurrency but there was some challenges in terms of building this because we're working on one side with very traditional advertisers and on the user side from the marketplace challenges the a lot of the users that wanted to earn these rewards came from emerging countries and advertisers typically wanted more users from tier one countries uh whereas some of our users were coming from tier three countries so there was definitely a product market fit that we were trying to learn how to better judge and then last year we recently launched uh storm x shopping rewards where you can shop from stores like nike and ebay and thousand plus stores where you can earn crypto cashback just from doing everyday things and so when we're focusing on our products our focus is to try to bring earning as easy as possible through one application so my my personal background and my co-founder as well too like we have to cell phone our entire college education along with living expenses and everything and it was really tough to try to find just a little bit of income that would help me live on a better day my parents had declared bankruptcy and because of that i was working multiple jobs and it was really tough to find a way to earn money and so what we decided to focus on was there's no central kind of like one single platformer you can focus on and try to you know give people an opportunity to earn and if we could aggregate all of these different ways to earn money into one single platform and allow anyone from the world to be able to have access to it then that's a true good use case to create just because it's not just you know for if you look at airbnb uber from a tam perspective you're looking at okay how many people are going to need taxis or how many people are going to lead the lodging or hotel in this case is how many people are going to need money whether that's for primary income or secondary income it's something that everybody will need at one point in their lives at least so uh we tried to really focus on user experience as much as possible so most of our users come from a non-crypto native background and so they don't really tend to understand you know one of these walled addresses they don't understand you know all these different d5 terms and you know the nft boom and all that stuff they're they're just simply looking for a way to earn and we're just trying to put more margins into their wallets by using blockchain by mitigating some of the fees so we can pass on more cost savings to the users so we have an android app we have an ios we have a chrome extension and we try to make that uh experience as easy as possible uh and going back to sort of our blazes partnership um it was really an awesome deal for us because some of crypto uh as a crypto company there's definitely challenges we face when we're trying to bring this to mass adoption um right now unfortunately when you mention the word crypto it's it's gotten a lot better in 2014 where people don't think you're you know selling drugs or doing money laundering or something like that but the immediate thought that someone has is price speculation and the immediate thought that someone you know is like oh you know you're in a crypto company oh i bought some deutsche dogecoin or i buy some shiba coin you know i'm like oh and then i made two three hundred percent in a month or something like that or you know i bought bitcoin at 8 000. but there's so many different use cases for blockchain and crypto as i'm sure you guys have all seen from all these wonderful projects is you know we have to get that mindset out of the traditional users because the technology is really limitless and with web 3.0 and all these different use cases not just you know the flashy what's trendy and hot things like nfts but out all these different use cases let's get them focusing on you know there's more use cases outside of just trading and the blazes partnership really helped us because people are starting to figure out you know what is store max they're looking at it they see our branding on the courtside logos and in the jerseys and they start doing more research and finding out that there there is a lot more out there uh and it's very similar to sort of how the internet when it began as well too people just thought you know this is for email and some of the more use cases and now you know the internet just consumes our everyday lives and also it helps us from a credibility perspective as well too because unfortunately building in crypto there are still a lot of scams and you know we've been building for a long time i personally have been rug pulled multiple times i'm sure some of you guys have as well and it's just unfortunate i know the regulators are coming in but it seems like there's they're focusing more on the wrong side of things rather than trying to go and target actual scammers that are taking money and running away i'm buying some villas in thailand or whatever and those are really the types of frauds that we need to stop and we're not quite there yet there's still a lot of projects that are very scammy and to you know associate crypto oftentimes there is a negative association with um some of those you know projects that are tied into it so having that brand credibility and visibility are really awesome and it's also you know we've been seeing a lot of crypto partnerships with sports teams not just ourselves but you know companies like ftx and others as well and so when we look at you know some of the geograph um one of some of the data with how sports audience relates to crypto there's a very good synergy a lot of gen y and gen z you know consumers are coming into crypto and you know sports audience is has a very good synergy with that and it's it's a great first step into mass adoption and there's other you know from a product perspective when we're looking at challenges to mass adoption right so you know we have four million users and you know it seems like if you say that with to another crypto company then it seems like it's a lot of users but if you compare that to a traditional fintech or traditional tech company four million is nothing right so you look at even what's whatsapp or instagram they have billions of monthly active users ticktock recently just uh reached 1 billion mau as well too but in order for us to get to 1 billion mau as a you know any crypto company we still need to figure out certain things um when we look at you know from our user data uh gas fees are definitely one of the biggest challenges that users don't like paying because um you know who can afford 50 or 100 transaction fees for normal transactions right and most people can't you know most people won't only the people that got in crypto early or really into the whole trading and defy space consider this as sort of you know just the write-off for just interactions with a day-to-day basis but normal people aren't able to afford those gas fees so what we've done from our application is when we send the rewards out we the costs and again you know going back to we created a tech to minimize these costs to not be able to charge ridiculous gas views to users um but when we try to integrate some of the other like defy you know platforms and staking and all that stuff um there is gas fees associated with being on the ethereum blockchain which is uh sort of you know going back to how early we are in the technology and if you look at ethereum at how we were and compared to the internet stages um right now i think it's aol was for dial up and the internet speed because you know it's expensive uh it's very slow it's clunky uh you need a phone charger and you know you need to be plugged into a phone device and uh you know back when i was a kid i got in trouble all the time because i was trying to download a game it took 40 hours and you know the phone was off the whole time my dad would you know yell at me but uh we're very in a similar situation right now too with ethereum you know not it doesn't process as many transactions but at the same time it's been engraved for so long and you need good wallets and exchange integrations in order to make some of the daps work and unfortunately because ethereum has been around the longest it has the best interactions with some of these other products which help you know mass adoption but the trade-off is the fees could be a little expensive but at the same time there's some really awesome layer one companies that are coming out that have faster tps there's layer two solutions coming out for ethereum as well so again it's just going back to just the time that we need in order to just evolve in order to get to where gas fees are near zero so we can interact with every transaction in the blockchain for virtually free um also another thing that's really challenging is the addresses uh because for most crypto addresses they're long text that could be 0x abcd1234 and if you're trying to explain it to your grandma or your aunt or anyone else it could be very tricky because you know like what if you're off by one digit and what i don't want to you know risk sending 50 or 250 to someone and find out that i sent it to the wrong person because i can never get it back that fear does become a barrier to a lot of people trying crypto for the first time and we've seen some involvement with this ethereum for example has ens where you can have you know simon u.e or you could have you know dot eth domains that are just name based but one of the challenges for that is it is again very expensive to set up ens because gas fees typically will cost you around 100 200 at current prices to try to set those up um there's other platforms like coinbase where they're integrated you just have email address within the coinbase application then you can send it those are also very easier you know ways to get that started and certain apps like strike that just integrated with twitter for example you just need a user account and user id so it's it's more like a venmo experience so the the user experience is definitely getting better but we're still again a little bit early in terms of that so ftx you know awesome stuff they're bringing so much massive adoption um you know there's bringing so much awareness through all these partnerships through sports and esports and all that stuff but at the same time you know when you're looking at just from a trading perspective you have to also look at the market size of how many people are actually investors and at the world from an 8 billion you know user perspective it's still a very small percentage in terms of actual number of investors that are going to be out there so even though their business model is very profitable and it has a wide reach uh for them to get a billion users it'll be much harder just because there is a financial gap that you need in order to start investing and so for us we're thinking of things more simple you don't need to invest you don't need to have any startup capital anyone can get started to start using our application you can shop for many of our stores complete some micro tasks do some surveys and find different ways to just start earning your first crypto and you don't have to risk your money so it's an easier barrier to entry and so this is what our app looks like again we're focusing a lot on user experience because crypto apps could be very clunky and very scary for a lot of first-time users and yeah our total addressable market um is three billion users and it's again going back to you know how many people at the end of the day is going to need to earn money and that's what we're trying to focus on and we're really trying to put blockchain and crypto in the back end so when people think about it when think about our app they don't think about crypto or blockchain as much but they think about just using it so they can get rewarded because when you think about you know the ultimate user experience at the end of the day when you're using a refrigerator right you're not thinking about how does this refrigerator work okay is it with the cooling processor is all these motors and do i have to actually understand how this refrigerator works or do i just want my food to be cold and it works and it's cost efficient and it's usually the latter and that's that's how we view things and that's our goal so i mean it really is just a matter of time and going back to sort of you know all the points that i've addressed uh it has evolved quite a bit in the last seven years and it does continue evolving as more capital comes uh more talent keeps coming into this industry and the technology continues getting better from the wallets and exchanges and the dapps and layer ones layer twos and uh it's been really exciting to see but we're still early so to anyone that hasn't really joined crypto yet or are thinking about joining crypto i still think that there's a massive upside at this point to start building and start you know going into you know just trying to solve the unknowns because there's definitely a lot of problems to be solved yeah so thank you very much we also have a booth over there if you have any questions you can uh feel free to reach out to us awesome excellent thank you so much simon big round of applause for simon