The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Mon, 22 Jul 2024
Join us for an engaging conversation with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder and CEO of Here Not There Labs, as we explore a wide range of startup ideas and business opportunities1) Dating app with on-chain reputation:• Track user behavior (response time, follow-through on dates)• Use data to predict compatibility• Reward good actors, discourage bad behavior2) Luxury watch marketplace:• Use RFID & blockchain to verify authenticity• Create NFTs tied to physical watches• Enable trusted P2P transactions• Build exclusive communities for watch enthusiasts3) Tutoring/coaching platform:• Match students with teachers based on "fit" not just reputation• Track engagement & retention to measure success• Create efficient markets for educationWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀 My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND BEN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/benrbnLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubinben/To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up toboringmarketing.comEpisode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:32 Crypto and Blockchain’s value proposition12:53 Startup Idea 1: Dating app with on-chain reputation27:28 Startup Idea 2: Luxury watch marketplace46:10 Startup Idea 3: Tutoring/coaching platform
Crypto not crypto, blockchain is a fantastic solution to the idea of how do you enumerate value on the internet and trust for it in a way that is, just by science, trustworthy. And I think that ultimately benefits the receiver of the value that you're creating online and you. in an open market that people can in transparent way acknowledge each other's value and trust.
And that's the layer that we're missing on the internet to take it to a place where accrual value by individual is much more transparent and efficient. The products we're getting for people are better because there is accountability because when you make money, you want to make the product better. You want to retain your customers. You want to make sure that they're happy.
You want to make sure that they're coming back. You want to make sure they get a V2 and a V3 and a V4. Why? Because when you do that, you make more money.
I want to summarize our entire conversation in four steps. So this is what I've learned. This is what I've learned from this conversation. How to create a product people want. Okay, so Ben Rubin, live from Soho. Ben is the guy that I call if I have a big idea. He always knows, it feels like he always knows where things are, the direction where things are going.
So if I ever need a gut check, text Ben, hey, I'm thinking about this big idea. What do you think? He's sold a company to Epic Games, House Party. He started Meerkat, which was a...
live streaming it was ig live before ig live was a thing and now he's working in the crypto space and building well we'll talk more about it but he's building kind of community infrastructure for the crypto web um so when when ben talks i listen and he's got a ton of crypto ideas that he came prepared with and i know people some people are listening to this and i would say 93 of our audience
isn't in the crypto world. So their guards are up.
To be honest, I studied architecture school and I still build digital spaces. And I mean, the crypto side of, you're right, I am backed by crypto investors and I hire crypto engineers and we are in the crypto industry, but By all accounts, the job of what we're building is to build intimacy in the internet without making it smaller.
And blockchain is just a technology that we're using to create a set of communities that are permissionless, meaning anyone can join, but they organize around a new type of graph that is trust. And we'll get into this, but I just wanted to jump in and say like, you know, That's true that if it's walk like a duck and it talks like a duck, it's maybe a duck and it quacks like whatever the saying is.
But we fundamentally see our job as here and what we do is how do we create a more intimate space? And blockchain just is a way to get people to trust that the other side of the people on the keyboard actually have the same things to lose and the same things to gain by the information that they're sharing together.
And I think that's where the internet is going and where a lot of value is going to come, especially as it's expanding in the speed of light. And with AI, like in 10 years from now, it's going to be really important to know this person on the other side really did what they do? Do they really have the same amount of, you know, podcast listeners? Do they actually live in Miami?
Did they actually go to the school? Did they actually, you know, all of these things are going to have some sort of way online to verify that they happen. And I think that that brings a new type of graph, uh, that, uh,
It's important for us as builder to be curious about and see, can we create a better internet when we are not organizing people based on self-attestation, but actually based on the things that they have done and experienced? And can we create better conversations like this and much more grounded conversation? So short stories. Yes, I do a lot of things in crypto, but I'm definitely not motivated.
The motivation is not crypto by itself. The motivation is how do you create a group of 10,000 people or 100,000 people where they're there because they have the same things to gain and the same things to lose. And that's the kind of conversation they have. And I think the internet become much more powerful like this.
The other thing I think is really interesting about building in crypto right now is if you compare crypto to, let's say, AI, there's way more competition in the AI space, like building on top of, you know, building GPT wrappers and stuff like that. Everyone's trying to do that. But with crypto, because it's... it hasn't hit the mainstream adoption. But it just feels like there's less competition.
So there's opportunities for people to see what are the new protocols coming out? How do I build something on top of it that's actually going to create value? And as the tide shift and as the industry matures, you end up swimming downstream instead of upstream. And there's less competition.
I always try to look at like, what are things that are low status right now or medium status and that will be high status in two or three or four years? Because that's where the arbitrage is. And I think that's where we're at with crypto.
And to your point, everything exists in a balance. So when you look at the things that are like, you know, not the hottest things right now, you have to ask yourself, okay, How do they compare? How do they, and if at all, are they in dialogue with the thing that is hot? And what is the kind of energy that is balancing it?
Because you can think about it almost like as one of the most interesting things as an observer, as a builder in the space. And you and I have been around the block, I don't know, for 13 years more doing what we do. I find it so interesting that AI is this, let's think about the motivation of AI, the set of ideas that it is. It's highly centralized. In order to run a service like OpenAI,
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But like all of the, all of the, those companies need to be massive and hold a huge amount of information, right? Not only that, it is also creating the type of content that is looking back and replicating itself to create above average answers, right?
So AI is this kind of like, oh, the internet had got to the place of maturity, both on the computation level and the centralization level that it can actually become its own being and self reproduce. And on the other side, you have crypto, which is actually working on the opposite direction, which is how can you enumerate identities and make proofs and,
As you think about what's going to be the balancing act when somebody can load up all the content of Greg Eisenberg, all the voice of Greg, all the photos, all the things that he wrote, everything, and create something that is... maybe even create podcasts, you know, and do this interviews. Right.
And like, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and even with your permission, even with your permission, Greg, just like extend yourself a hundred times or a thousand times. That is almost, um, that is almost, it begs the question of like, okay, so when do I know though, this is the real Greg that I'm talking to the real Greg. And what are the ways to prove online that I'm talking to the actual guy?
And another thing that is interesting to consider is that, I don't know why, but I have this instinctive belief that all derivative assets eventually increase the value of the original asset. In a way, pickleball, just the more pickleball is out there, the more the value of 10 is going up. The more there is, you know, ERC20s, coins, the more the value of Ethereum goes up.
The more knockoffs to Prada, the more the value of Prada goes up, you know. LVMH doesn't exist without the Zara and H&M and things like that, right? Manhattan doesn't exist without the barriers around it. So derivative assets, when they go up, they fundamentally increase the value of the original assets.
So now you have to, when you think about AI and replication and replication in the speed of computers, which is what AI is doing, and AI you have to ask yourself, what is, if things are going to move so fast, these derivative values, what are the things that are now going to be exponentially more valuable?
And I actually think it's like two friends holding hands, you know, looking at sunset, having a coffee, like that is the derivative value that that is that original asset, sorry, that all these derivative assets. So I actually think that actually having time with Greg one-on-one,
with Greg Eisenberg, or online, but with the real Greg, it's going to grow exponentially higher when the image and replication of Greg through AI is going, you know, thousand X. And those things need a way to be identified on the internet, right? So
Blockchain technology is a way to enumerate and verify things on the Internet is actually a very interesting counter balance to what AI, the power of AI, you know, and how we as human understand how to navigate between what's real and what's a replication.
Yeah, I love it. I think I think you're on to something. agreed, obviously, like if there's millions of pieces of content, like, you know, myself, right? Let's just say right now I create 20 pieces of content a week with AI in a year from now, I might create 300, 400 pieces of content. So, and we just need to know like who's Greg, who's not and sort of verify that.
So yeah, I think that's where blockchain comes in. You've got a lot of ideas on this list and I want to get into some of these ideas. that speak to a lot of this stuff. And you're giving these away. I want to start with the first one, the dating idea. Yeah. If you don't mind. I do not mind. Okay, let's jump in.
One of the fun things I get to learn as I started dating You know, exploring how models of communication and the idea of a trust-based graph. I call it motivational graph, but I don't know if it's going to stick. But I feel like capturing...
through blockchain like what the user has done off chain to on chain is almost like capturing the motivation and we couldn't really capture motivation uh before we just like had people just say like oh i got you know ben's number therefore i should see him on whatsapp or i have this person's username therefore i should follow them or like i self-identify as somebody who go to
this class in this college, so I should be exposed to this group of people. But it really becomes interesting where you actually need to do the action in order to facilitate the relationship. So one of the fun things that I've learned is there's something called PO-OP, which is actually a way to, in person, verify that you have been somewhere. And I do think that putting like a...
reputation graph for for dating where and it sounds i think like there's a part of me that's like it's just like a revolting against this idea um but i also hear the most insane horror stories you know between people who go on dates and maybe it's just like a new york thing i don't know but you know we don't have enough accountability i mean and maybe that's the point of
this entire part of my journey in my career right now in how i want to you know uh build the communication world you know world of products that i want to see in the world is like we don't have enough accountability and and and owning up to the way we communicate and interact online and
This is not to say that we need to punish people for behaving badly, but I actually think we need to reward people for being good stewards of healthy and nuance and mature conversation that holds opinions and is open to feedback and to give feedback, right? I'm recently single after a 10-year relationship, and I've started to be out there, go on dates.
You know, some pieces of the puzzle of all this feedback that I'm hearing, not feedback, but I guess like, you know, your friend, your single friends are saying like, oh, dating so hard and online dating so hard. And I start to see some of the behaviors that they talk about. And, you know, I have arrived to a conclusion that I think I would have been a better person
participant in the dating market, I guess, if I had fewer choices that have reputational outcome. And I think the same way to other people that I've engaged with. And I think that
If we can create the kind of data set that is rewarding people for being more intentional with the connections that they're making and how it gets manifested in an actual date, and then that goes back onto this open protocol. And there are ways to like, with keeping privacy, you can still show different kind of proofs of,
the type of behavior and the type of connections that I'm making, I actually think it's kind of powerful. And I know it sounds super geeky and dystopian, but I'm really coming to that not from the point of we should be walking around with a score on our back, but more like, how do we feel much more comfortable knowing that this is going to be a great date. This is going to be a good match.
This is going to be something that's worth my time. This is going to be something that I do not want to dishonor the commitment that I made to see this person tonight or whatever. And that I actually think that As humans, we work really well when there's structure and accountability for the most part, even if it's just self-imposed.
And I actually think that there is, and I might be just projecting a lot of things here, but I think that there's an opportunity here to do the same thing, to create a dating backend, if you will, with some sort of a client that actually allow people to connect, get together and leave a sort of footprint with protecting their privacy.
that can then infer and then other people who are building clients around it can then infer and use that, whether for other dating ideas as the backend graph for it, or actually for other types of connection that manifest in different ways.
So is this what you're saying? So basically, dating kind of sucks right now because people are... going on dates and a lot of the dates are low quality. People are wasting time. They're wasting money. It's frustrating for people.
So you're saying, what if we had some sort of scoring system basically that allowed reputation to exist on chain so that I guess like both parties or potential parties could trust this source of data.
And yeah. And just to nuance this, so it's not like, I don't think people, I think it's so emotionally indoted. So I don't think people should score other people. But what I do think is like, if there was no way for you to expose from privacy, everything is hashed and it's just like this technology called ZK proof.
But like, let's just say that the user doesn't see what's happening in the backend and their privacy is protected. you can tell that based on your previous matches, the likelihood for this person to respond in general or in this case is 10% and not 80%. What is the likelihood of this person to actually go on a date, on the second date, on the third date?
This is not we scoring one another, but this is just data as it is. Time to reply, time to follow up, the likelihood to do a first date and a second date, and actually allow local computations on a client based on other proofs to say, Look, Greg, here are 10 matches, like... We, nobody, no human ranked them.
This is just based on the matches you had before and you went on date and the matches they had before and went on date. The likelihood of you going to a second date with this person is 5%. And this other person, actually, if you have a first date, then the likelihood of you going to a third date is 90%. Where do you start?
You know, and, and I think these is not even one another just, um, given, given some
ranked ranking to one another this is just here's the data you know and just putting that data uh online i think is is interesting if you can keep you know the privacy you can protect the privacy of the people and i think you can so dude let me tell you a quick story so literally an hour ago less than an hour ago i got a text from someone we both know okay she says
that her and her boyfriend broke up okay they met on a dating app they met on a dating app and they broke up and she was you know she's obviously super upset about it and like her you know her tldr of the whole thing was uh I have to pick better and prob go a lot slower. So... Yes. That's what you're saying, right?
What you're saying is... That's what I'm saying.
Yeah. What you're saying is when you go on a dating app today, the profile, which is essentially curated by the person, aka it's biased by definition. Yes. It's biased.
Yes.
And so there needs to be some...
And it's okay for it to be biased. By the way, we're all biased. But wouldn't it be interesting to get the dimension of like based on your matches and their matches and the people that you went on the first date, the second date, and third date, and the people that they went through this app on the first and second date, the likelihood of you going to a first date is 10%.
The likelihood of you breaking up in three months is actually 90%. Like And the reason I bring reputation and open protocols to this is because if that's a standard that other dating apps can write into, it doesn't matter if you're on Hinge, on Raya, on Tinder, or anything, right? It's just like... It's a set. It doesn't matter where you profile.
It's just a set that says time to reply, time to go on date, likely the first, second, third date on community relationship broke up, you know, no scoring, just looking at the data based on actions, you know? Yeah. And that is, I think, so cool. Yeah.
yeah i also think that i mean you can make some of those some of that data free but you can also make some of it premium data that if you know i want to see ben's like i would pay so much money to know that information yeah because like you know four dates are costly in new york yeah they're costly also just from like um a mental time.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, you can do like a tagline, like something like, you know, heartbreak costs an arm and a leg or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um, okay. So if you wanted, so I, I buy the idea that this would be valuable. So, Ben, how hard is it to build something like this? And can you give us like a step by step on how you build this proof of concept?
For proof of concept, I would start with just a set of smart contracts that is on an L2, basically on it. layer that is much cheaper on top of Ethereum where you can actually create this protocol, like just exist on Ethereum and without starting a whole new backend infrastructure. And I think you can actually POC it like that. You will have to be somebody who knows how to do an SDK and publish it.
But I think if you can build an SDK from A to Z and publish it, and curiosity around the Web3 space, I would build an SDK that essentially all it does, it helps other developers integrate it to the actions that users are doing on their clients, you know, on their Tinder or any other. And when an action happened verifiably locally, your SDK gets the kind of confirmation that it needs.
One of the interesting thing is integrating it with pass keys, right? You got pass keys on the phone. You can store locally in the local encrypted drawer of the iPhone that you can only open with your face. You can store there the key that allows for the signature for the local action, right? So you can actually...
almost verified an action has happened with somebody's face, which is kind of cool. Go and sign that transaction on the backend on that protocol that you created, that is a smart contract. And now all of a sudden,
you have this permissionless open set of encrypted users and like hashed users and hash action that maybe on the hash action, only the developers of that implemented have the key to understand what is the action. And for the hash users, only the user have the key to know that this is who they are. And yeah,
That way you kind of keep everybody shielded, but you also create this great database of action that actually happened locally and the likelihood of the second action to happen. And I think that's great. That's actually something one person can do.
It's something one person could do. And you kind of, it's one of those ideas where you don't know where it's going to go in which direction. So it's kind of fun. It's kind of fun. It is fun.
Cause like if somebody is selling ads somewhere and they're like, wait, wait, wait, can we pay? Can we pay to know? Like if somebody saw that ad and we, we take it like, what's the likelihood of them doing something completely random and something else somewhere else. They will pay also for that kind of information. Yeah.
Yep. So I want to go over two more ideas today. The next idea I want to go over is the watch marketplace idea. And then I want to end with the teaching and tutoring business idea. The watch marketplace idea. Do you watch like watch talk like with all these influencers? Do you just be honest with me?
Yeah.
I'm trying to take it slow.
You're talking to a guy who's wearing no watch and a $4.50 Kirkland t-shirt. I get it. But for whatever reason, on my TikTok feed, I get a lot of these luxury watch people trading on... It's because of your lookalike, probably.
Yeah. The lookalike based on the... No, lookalike on the graph. No, for sure. Like, yeah.
So there is a situation. Some people probably even... know the situation where there's these two guys on watch talk. There's this guy named Vukom who has like millions of followers or something. And then there's this guy named Manny. Okay. Now Vukom and his partner, what the hell's his name? Buckley. Okay. These guys are like the Kings of watch talk and Manny is
is now accusing Buckley of just being like, you know, he's out there selling, you know, saying he's selling $100,000 Rolexes, but this is like a, what does he call him? He calls him a battery repairman. All he knows is to repair battery. Who is this guy? And then you have Buckley creating videos being like, Manny is like.
They're selling watches with batteries? That's not real watches.
That's Manny's point, right? Manny's point. And maybe we can include one of the videos so people could see it. But the point is, there's a lack of trust. Like both of them are trying to create a lack of trust in the luxury marketplace. So tell me, I just want to set the stage with that. Tell me about your watch marketplace idea and why trust is really important in this space.
One of the thesis behind the protocol and the client that we're building, our protocol that we're building called River. And the idea is to create an end-to-end encrypted social messaging protocol that is essentially built on the graph of trust or the graph of motivation. And the bet is that the more there is off-chain proofs that are going on-chain
The more we can validate online in a way that is open and trustless, I guess, that somebody did the actions that they said they did, the more that we're creating a new graph that is around motivation and alignment of interest of what we stand to gain and lose. And that warrants a new type of communication product that is not organized around. I'm a watch salesman.
I sold a lot of watches and you're like, I'm a watch buyer. I bought a lot of watches. Therefore, we should all come to this forum and engage, which is not a good idea because one of you is going to lose their pants. Right. So. In the kind of.
Work that we're doing now, which is to build this kind of digital spaces of communities that are permissionless and people can come and trust that the right people are in the right place and the wrong people are not in the place. It provokes the imagination of what kind of
Community that is permissionless, that everybody can join, is organized around the idea of trust between sellers and buyers, specifically of luxury goods that have an enumerated or like an identifying ID. In that case, you think about luxury watches. Each of them have, and even Prada today have RFIDs on all the clothes, right? You can actually scan those things. I've been playing around.
Have you ever seen this thing called Flipper? No. What is it? Is this thing recorded like with a video? I can bring it here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, basically Flipper is a purpoise.
It's a purpoise.
This is this thing. Some people use it for nefarious stuff. But it can scan all of those RFID stuff, you know, RFC, RFID, all of those. And it can scan it and then replay it. So you can actually, you can go to my fob of my elevator and copy it and replay it and write it somewhere.
But what's interesting with this and those readers is like, you know, you can basically verify that this is that because Prada shirts have now RFIDs, right? Some watches have RFIDs, you know, those things don't need batteries. And there's no way for you to read that signal without like, you have to be next to it to read that signal.
So that means that you can create the type of backend that verify that somebody has a certain watch next to them. Not only this, you can enforce the existence of this item as something called, basically call it like an NFT. I'm sorry for, I know that word has a lot of bad baggage, but just think about it as a piece on the internet that is tied with that item that cannot be replicated.
And for sure, in a mathematical way, you can prove that this is the one. And you say, hey, like in order for me to buy it from you, this is going to go to an escrow that also exists in a permissionless way. with my money in a permissionless way. When I get it, the only way for me to get it is when I get it in my hand, the only way to
secure my reputation is to release the funds from the escrow to the seller and receive that that nft sorry again for the for that word but like we release that that digital image right no because i feel like digital image that is verifiable to me and in that way i have um didn't lose any of my reputation as a buyer and the seller didn't lose any of the reputation of, uh, the seller.
Not only this, maybe we can both, uh, uh, rank one another, right? And how good was that? Just thumbs up, thumbs down. How good was the experience, right? Then all of the sudden you start getting this, uh, uh, publicly available and permissionless and secure database of who has what watches. It includes also the transactions of the... the money itself.
So it's highly, highly cost prohibitive to betray it, right? To be a bad actor on it. And now instead of going through, you know, million different forums and blogs and try to verify who is who and what's what. And I'm hearing, you know, there is like horror stories where like some, some of those, not horror stories, but like,
Some of the people who sell online have great reputation in a specific site and some have in another site, but they not share the same inventory. So one will post on behalf of the other in their inventory to increase. You know, it's kind of a collab, you know, and you kind of you don't control that. Right. But it also opened another avenue where like.
you want to, you have, you have a watch that you want to sell to me like somebody, but you don't know who they are and what it is. Okay. Show me, show me your, your, your, show me that watches like, uh, you know, NFT. And then you can see like, okay, who owns it? It's you. What's the, what's the credit?
What's the reputation, you know, and you can actually feel relatively secure to do this transaction without the, uh, Because right now, all these marketplaces, they take arbitrage to create the illusion of trust, right? So they take their 20% or 10% of the transaction because they are, you know, Chrono or other places where people buy watches.
But if you can verify that a watch and the seller are in good condition and the seller is a good seller and the watch is in a good condition and there is a good layer of trust there, then you can actually maybe make the market a little bit more efficient and remove the third party that, you know. So that's that's essentially the idea.
And then all of a sudden, when you tie to like the work we do with with River and like You can actually put the most interesting watch owners that probably have those interesting watches together in a group chat. People give just them right entitlement so they can trade with one another.
They know who is the other person. Just for people listening, how can they... Okay, so let's say someone wants to go and build this... this watch marketplace idea, take, you know, the VIG, I think as it's called, or the commission from, or percentage from 15% to like a dollar a transaction, how do they go, okay, they build this, they build it in a month.
Now they want to make it more interesting with River. What does that mean?
So the fun thing is that you don't, they don't need to do a lot with River. So I'll explain. The way people should think about when I say river, you should think about it as imagine if the backend of WhatsApp was an open protocol that is owned and operated by the groups. So anyone can build clients on it. Anyone can maintain it. Anyone can improve it and operate it.
That means you, you, me, anyone, not just us, the builders of the protocol. If somebody wanted to create a community, a permissionless community where the people who have the most interesting watches can trade them and have reputation and they take maybe certain amount of fee just to facilitate it. What I would do, I would do, there's just one thing that they should do is create the smart contract
that people can interact with and use the unique identifier of the luxury item to receive from the smart contract the digital representation in the form of NFT that basically says this person actually secured here in an encrypted way secured here, all the information that's needed as an owner for this Rolex. Let's say you just do it for Rolex or something like that. Okay, cool.
Now you have this smart contract that produce signatures for, it's still, prone to mistakes because it's self-attestation. However, because it's a two-sided market, people can give each other reputation, which means that accountability will happen if you're assuming that people are going to use it.
like I'm saying, I actually have this watch, then for me to receive the money from you as the buyer, it actually goes through the smart contract and released only after you verified that you got the watch and I received the digital signature. Okay, great. Now that you have that, you can say, now that you have...
before you did the sale, that you have that digital signature that proves that you have the luxury watch, you can create a town. You can use... River has a client called Towns, which is basically, you can think about it like Discord and Slack had a baby. And this is a way of us as the builders of the protocol to create like a... a business card for the protocol and show people what they can do.
And you would create a town that says only allow people that have this, uh, uh, uh, that have the digital signature of the, that verified that they have, you know, that they say for tested that they have, uh, the luxury watch in and only give them, uh, um, uh, a right access into, into the group.
And the way it looks like is that if you have a big community or like you have some followers or you know people who have some followers that are in the watch community, they will publish a link to the town. The town is available to anyone to come in if they own a Rolex. How do they do that? You go to the smart contract that you wrote as a builder. You put all the information as an owner online.
to receive the digital signature, the NFT, and then that gives you the permission to actually enter the group chat. So you don't need to build a lot. You just need to build the smart contract that takes the information that a Rolex owner would have, only the owner would have, you know, and do
the kind of computation needed to create the signature that is then stored encrypted and sent to you the NFT with that item. Now, I wish the watch companies themselves did it. I think it works even better with the RFID stuff, like things like Prada and other stuff. But I think it's a great start because then...
I feel like somebody as a watch owner, I would go open the box, write all the details on your website, receive the NFT, and that will give me an access to the group chat. And now the group chat is like a bunch of people that you know what they own. You know everything. you know that they have those things. And I think that's pretty cool. And that's a great start.
Yeah, so I want to synthesize a little bit what you said for people.
Yeah, I rambled a little bit there.
No, it's just, this is why I'm here. So, because I think what you're saying is really smart. The way Vukom and Buckley built their business was they built an audience up top on TikTok and Instagram. Then they created a paid community called Vukom Verified where you have to pay $20 a month and other watch dealers and watch buyers can buy and sell from each other.
But there's no real trust besides for the fact that you have to have a credit card that can spend $20 a month. What you're saying, I mean, you can still build the audience on these platforms, build the audiences on these platforms. but create and focus on areas where there's not so much trust, like in the watch industry, but basically create a trust layer between both parties.
And once the trust layer exists, then it's almost like someone gets a badge that allows them to enter to the community as like, hey, I'm not just... You know, there's a difference between... Okay, I went to a concert last night, and this is not a flex, but I was backstage. And, you know, anyone could buy it. Not a flex, okay. I mean, I didn't say what show it could be.
What concert, Greg?
It could have been, like, my cousin's ukulele show. Yeah, recital. So let's keep it at that. But, you know, the idea was anyone could... Anyone could buy a ticket to the show, but not anyone could get backstage passes. What you're saying is, by virtue of this verified trust layer, you actually get the backstage passes and the exhaust, so to speak, from the...
The trust is the ability to have this social layer. That's what you're saying.
Yes. And even if you take it further, you can even say like, hey, if you already bought a Rolex and you have the details of the Rolex, you get in free. It's the people that are curious or people who couldn't prove that they already, from an ethos perspective, believe in the value of watch. They don't have a luxury watch because they didn't do this proof.
They are the one that should be paying 20 bucks to be part of. And if you have a watch to sell, you just make the proof and come on in. And if you don't have, then put your money where your mouth is.
Right. Cool. Okay, we have time for one last quick startup idea. Teaching, tutoring businesses. I think it's very similar. So... It's basically a manifestation of what we talked about. Explain what you're thinking here.
You know, it's actually a combo of the two previous ideas, the dating and that. Because it is, teaching is such a, it's like a one-on-one relationship or one-to-few, right? And there is something about the likelihood of an action for you to go to the second class and the first class and the second class, like how consistent you are with a teacher. which is kind of similar, right?
To what we talked about with the reputation with dating, like arguably without attesting to the quality of Greg, you as a person or your partner as a person, I can just say, you know, that if I had a way to observe how much, how many days, how many unique days you're spending time in person and just say, what's the streak?
and how long it's been consistent, if I had this database on all the relationship in the world, I will probably just by that can infer what are good relationships and what are not, what are ones that are people continue to engage it.
And you're right, it's not gonna capture all the codependency relationship, the weird ones stuff, but it will speak to some form of quality that keeps both people engaged. And my point is that we don't know who is a good teacher and who is a bad teacher.
But if we could know that, like, look, according to students that look like you and teachers that look like this person that you're considering, there is high likelihood that you're going to retain in this class just by observing recurrency. Therefore, You know, this is a good match. And I brought it here because, you know, there's a lot of people that have
desire to receive feedback and be coached. And there's a lot of people that feel qualified to do that. And a lot of people that are qualified to do that, right? It's not our business to judge or decide for them. But I think there is a huge gap in which how do you know which one is for you and how they're going to get the best out of you.
And I think just like if you just implement the same thought that we had with the dating, but to recurrence of going to somebody's class, you can effectively do this for coaches and for the topics and the teacher. So I think that's, that's interesting. This is what.
Yeah.
Well, I think so. And the way it's like combo with, with the luxury stuff is like, you can do the same thing where there is like, uh, you put the money through the smart contract. You save it after you watch, after you saw, after you had the class, then there is some reputational aspect. And that's kind of like, it's the combo of, uh, like the goods and the repetition.
Education and coaching are fundamentally retention businesses. Your goal is you want the person.
Also relationships.
And relationships. Yeah, for sure. It's relationships and it's retention. It's those two things. It's, you know, I can even just thinking about like in high school and elementary school, like some of the teachers that made a meaningful impact on my life, And it was a mix of like who they were as people, how they were able to communicate.
But also they were just really good at getting me to retain information and stories and stuff like that. So what you're saying is interesting because you're saying like, oh, with something like this, this is going to help. Like you're kind of gamifying the experience in some way where there's like levels and almost leaderboards. And in some ways, right?
Because you're like, couldn't you use this technology to do that? And in which case the outcome is like a high, more retentive student. For sure.
And I think what I'm trying to get at here, what I'm trying to get at is a lot of bad tutoring is the actual, the relationship, the fit between the teacher and the student, right? So now what you have, what we have now, because we don't have a way to judge that reputation of the fit, because there's no shared open databases that people can make, you know, those products can make.
decisions or help users make decisions because of that you have an inefficient market where the most excellent teachers in the world who by definition capture a lot of students because they're the top of the top now they have much more beaters on their time and the price go up because they have but the argument here is that
Instead of Greg going to Tony Robbins and get like, you know, world-class one-on-one coaching because Tony Robbins, you know, is, you know, considered world-class. My curiosity is this is because Tony Robbins, regardless of his relationship with Greg, is a, you know, number one in his field. Let's call it like this, just for the sake of the example.
The outcome that Greg is getting from having a teacher that is relationship agnostic, but the teacher is number one in the world. I'm curious about that outcome if I gave you A teacher that is half as good as Tony Robbins, but is world-class fit to you.
Yes, totally.
And that's what I'm trying to say is that we have, because we don't have time to take surfing lessons from a thousand teachers to find the one that is great from us. Now the best surfing teachers in that area are getting their prices jacked up because normally a lot of bidders on this time will just bid more to get in line, right?
But what if we can put you in touch with the person that you have higher likelihood to succeed with even though they might be less of a great teacher as the other person. That's the inefficiency that I put. And it's the same with dating.
I think this is honestly my favorite idea of all of them because it drives the most amount of impact and it feels relatively simple to create something to get to proof of concept it. I want to summarize our entire conversation in four steps. So this is what I've learned. This is what I've learned from this conversation. How to create a product people want. Number one, find inefficient markets.
Number two, add a trust layer. Number three, build social. And number four, don't necessarily say it's crypto. I mean, you said the word NFT before. But it doesn't matter, right? You don't have to expose that.
It doesn't matter, guys. It doesn't matter. And it's a shame that I almost need to feel embarrassed when I speak to people who are not – when I speak to an audience that is not necessarily – because a lot of the – Because there's so much good in it. The idea that the Internet was built so fast, was built so fast, and with the idea that people wouldn't pay for it.
And now we have groups of people online that are creating value every day. And because the inception of the Internet was from the state of mind that, oh, people won't pay for it, the people who create this insane value on the Internet, they work hard.
two times harder to repackage some of the attention that they're getting and selling it in some inefficient way where they need to prove that they're worthy of your credit card and stuff. And I think that... that must have been the way we needed the internet to start in order to get a lot of people on board.
But it is a time for us to say the internet need to be accessible for everyone, but it shouldn't be necessarily free. There are people who are honest people who are doing day-to-day work on the internet
to bring value to their community and their job is just you know it's it's not as rewarding as it should be it's thankless it's exhausting you know and they need to almost like hustle to just be rewarded for the kind of value that they're bringing in and you know crypto not crypto
Blockchain is a fantastic solution to the idea of how do you enumerate value on the internet and trust for it in a way that is, just by science, trustworthy. And I think that ultimately benefits the receiver of the value that you're creating online and you in an open market that people can in transparent way acknowledge each other's value and trust.
And that's the layer that we're missing on the internet to take it to a place where accrual value by individual is much more transparent and efficient. And the products we're getting for people are better because there is accountability. Because when you make money, you want to make the product better. You want to retain your customers. You want to make sure that they're happy.
You want to make sure that they're coming back. You want to make sure they get a V2 and a V3 and a V4. And you are much... Why? Because when you do that, you make more money. You know? So... That's my romance with blockchain and social and why I'm infatuated with that as a medium to work in right now.
Beautiful. Ben, where could people find more about you and building on top of the River Protocol?
Um, you, uh, on me, um, it's at Ben RBN, uh, on, on Twitter. Um, The River protocol is river.build. You can go and look at what the protocol, there's all the documentation there.
If you're just curious about like, oh, how can I create simple, you know, reputation, smart contracts, which is, I feel like the idea we've been talking about, like that thing is literally a hackathon thing to do the thing that we talked about with the teachers, right? And then you can just,
go on towns, towns.com, which is the, the, the client that we built for, for river and anyone can build a client for river actually. And if you created that smart contract on reputation, you can create a town that is gated by that reputation.
All of a sudden, uh, uh, now you have, uh, uh, a social place for people who did the action, uh, and have that kind of reputation of teachers and tutor and, and students to have a place to come together and discuss and knowing that, you know, They're talking to the right teachers and the students are talking to the right teachers and teachers are talking to the right students.
And also, to the monologue that I had right before that about value accrual, space creators on towns, they have ways to charge for that in a way that is transparent and on-chain. You can Just say like, hey, this space costs a certain amount of money a year or for whatever you set it. And that's also going to benefit you as a builder and a community facilitator if you choose to do that.
So you got river protocol, you got towns, and yeah.
Yeah, I think if what Ben was saying resonated with you at all, and you're like, that's kind of interesting. I came into this. maybe skeptical and now less skeptical. I think I always like to get my hands dirty and just try different things. That's why when it comes to AI tools, I'm always just like, hey, go and play with it. Try to build something.
If you're interested in Web3, this is a great place to experiment. LCA, our innovation agency, actually built something on top of the River Protocol and it was an absolute blast.
called propeller.chat and you learn from you learn from this you literally learn from this and it's fun it's it's a lot of fun so it is and there's gonna be some people who listen to this are gonna be like you know what like this this doesn't speak to me whatever this doesn't speak to me but there are gonna be people listen to this are gonna be like wow
you know, if I could, you know, add efficiencies to the billion dollar watch market or, um, you know, I'm really into, you know, this one tutor in school, like made such a big difference in my life. And if I could give that same experience that, you know, thousands of people in the world, like I want to dedicate some time, I want to dedicate, you know, three weeks of time to hack on something.
So thanks for coming on. And, uh, Appreciate you. Thank you, Greg. It was a pleasure. Later.