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Gamified Digital Collectibles w @Beezie_io
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 1:04:39Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the ongoing decline in the market while highlighting innovative projects that bridge real-world assets with gaming. The conversation emphasized the importance of strategic partnerships, community engagement, and the potential for growth in the collectibles space, showcasing how builders are adapting to market challenges.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. so man what a bloody morning in the world of crypto just keeps going lower dude i don't know he's going low just when you think you can't go
lower lower it goes man you know it's like that chart it's like you thought you lost 90 percent
well guess what you got another 90 to go man it just feels like that right now and the lower the
chart goes the lower engagement goes everyone just slowly trips away. And it literally just becomes the builders left.
We just had this conversation last week with Hunter.
It's the same thing.
He was saying, it's easier as a podcaster.
It's easier to connect and network with different types of builders.
But man, dude, everyone else is just so angry on the timeline.
Totally.
I'm actually psyched for this combo because this is one of these uh projects that it bridges into you know real world assets it bridges into
pokemon it's got all these cool things going on about it that i mean for us get get us pretty
excited about it because this is like you realize when something you know the thing that's really
going to hit in crypto you know whether it whether it's gaming, it's real world assets, it's something that's going to be not just, you know, crypto native.
It's going to be something that bridges that gap.
And I think, you know, these guys have a really good product and are trying to bridge that gap.
So excited for this conversation.
Yeah, we've loved RWAs for a while.
We had Courtyard on, was that almost two years ago when they had just started.
Emblem is also somewhat of like an RWA platform, but for digital assets, right? Trading NFTs across
different types of blockchains. We like to call it kind of like a DWA, digital world asset. But
people like BZ, people like Andrea, who are building something awesome love to learn more you know one of the
before we do dive in one of the things that we continue to harp on but seems no one on the
timeline is talking about is how Courtyard has been literally number one on the it's been number
one on the OpenSea leaderboard for weeks at this point, right?
A lot of attention.
Pokemon, some of my friends who are in the Pokemon breaking world on TikTok
have started to tell me about Courtyard and how they trade different types of things.
Obviously, we love Flow as well, who we have a relationship with.
Obviously, we love Flo as well, who we have a relationship with.
And just super excited to talk about things RWAs outside of just the traditional finance of BlackRock tokenizing money markets, man.
What is the fun in that?
I want some gamification.
I want some cards.
I want some vending machines.
So without further ado, Andrea, thank you for joining us today.
How are you feeling
and how are you holding up in the rough times of this market? Hey guys, nice to meet you.
Thanks for having us here. Yeah, the morning's been kind of shit, but for those of us that have
been here for a while, you just ride the middle. This market is not going to scare a builder that's been here since
the last pre-bull market with NFTs. We've consistently been building, busy showing up
every day, day in and day out, right in the trenches along with everyone else. It's a down
day. It's a down market, but obviously we all have conviction and where the future is going.
Yeah, absolutely love to hear it. I'd love to get a little bit on your background before we do dive into everything BZ and all of the cool stuff that you guys are doing. So I'd love to just, yeah, get a little bit of your background? Of course. So my professional background, most of my career I spent in high
tech healthcare, which doesn't have a massive amount of overlap with what we do here, other
than I'm pretty decent at taking something complicated and dumbing it down a little bit.
But in terms of collectibles, it's been a part of my personal fabric my whole life. I joke around,
I've got binders from the 80s of basketball cards
with my dad going and scouring garage sales and swap meets. I mean, Beanie Babies, coins, comics,
it's just all been there. A few weeks ago, I put something on the timeline. I had graded a collection of like base set Pokemon cards that I did not think survived
garage sales over the years. And my dad, after hearing what we were doing with Beezy, just
showed up with them one day at my house and was like, remember this binder? I've had it. Can you
do something with it? I was like, yeah, dad, we can do something with it. So it was cool because I took one of the cards
and out of my own collection and thought,
you know, I want to put it in our claw machine
and let it keep going.
Like I've been spending the last few years
building BZ with Prateek and the team.
And there was something really beautiful
about something that's been in my
life since childhood, kind of like moving on through my own passion here.
Yeah, absolutely. Love to hear it. Also, just from my own background, I had an antique store
in real life and also used to go literally just five, six years ago, going door to door to yard sales, going to storage
units, going to liquidation sales, trying to find those deals.
So I have a deep appreciation of that.
Also, Adam and myself, we were really big on historical NFTs back in the 2021-2022 cycle
of digital antiquity.
So a lot of real cool fascination that we all share that
type of appreciation. Also, Chris and I who are on stage millennials, I had Pokemon cards
and Pogs and all of the different types of collectibles. So love to hear the background
story. Let's dive in then to BZ. What is BZ? What kind of use case has it found recently? And then also I'm curious, why Flow blockchain?
30 minutes, but I'll try to keep it somewhat brief. So BZ was born conceptually in the heart
of the last bull run with NFTs. My co-founder and I, Prateek, ideated on this smart contract that
had an instant liquidity offer tied to the rarity or fair market value of an asset, whether that's
an NFT or an RWA. We actually filed a provisional patent
on that back in 2021 and still pending. It takes forever. But that's really when the inception
happened for it. We continued building out that contract and sort of like an early MVP through
the bull and then got deeper into the bear market and decided to really double down on collectibles versus, you know, more like multi-category between NFTs and collectibles.
Because as you know, obviously from your background, collectibles and the buying and selling is such a massively antiquated space and blockchain is just a really elegant solution to a lot of those problems.
is just a really elegant solution to a lot of those problems.
So we started working on BZ in that iteration.
That smart contract is still the core of our claw machine.
We actually used it on some early drops that we did in our MVP.
Our initial MVP was on Blast.
We chose Blast initially because we all have been here for a while. We knew it was
highly incentivized. There'll be a ton of traction within our WA platform, particularly one that,
you know, with physical collectibles that are sort of coming in and out of the vault, we had to make
sure we could stress test our logistics and that they would hold up with a high amount of fast volume. And we did exactly that.
What we were also able to do with that MVP
was get some amazing product feedback from our community in real time
in a really tight period of time.
So we took that feedback.
We continued to build out the product based on that.
Obviously,
you know, no shade to blast. I really respect the hell out of a lot of people on that team, but,
you know, it didn't shake out the way we all hoped and wanted it to. And so we started to think, when we pivot to a real web to focus over the next months and years, where are we going to
marry ourselves, right? What chains are out
there? So we talked to probably most chains that we all know, and there was a lot of good about
each of them. But Flow, for a lot of different reasons, was where we landed. First and foremost,
the team over there is amazing, second to none. They could not be more supportive of BZ and us as builders.
It feels like whenever we ask for something, right away they're like, yes, let's do it.
How can we do it?
What do you need?
They're always just a Slack message or a call away.
It's an amazing ecosystem to build in from that perspective.
amazing ecosystem to build in from that perspective. Second, we're a collectibles platform and the IP
that already exists in the flow world is incredible. And there's a lot of future
partnerships coming with that. And so that was a huge advantage for us to be in the same room
and have the same consumers that are putting eyes on us that initially come in for maybe Disney or Mattel or NBA or NFL was a big bonus for what we're trying to build.
So, again, I could talk about this for a while, but I kept it as short as I can.
Well, I don't think you need to really justify partnering or choosing a chain where the geniuses who started Flow basically to have Topshop and CryptoKitties on their win rate.
They're pretty darn good at winning.
And I love the idea.
Obviously, they have NBA, NFLfl they do all the you know top
shop type moments uh they're great at at bringing in like you said disney bigger ip and obviously
we're still super early in the digital collectible kind of space right um so it feels like a great
great spot for you um one question i had this, this was because when we talked to the courtyard guys,
I thought and still think choosing your kind of partner to be the trusted third party
for holding the actual asset is really, really important.
And I gave them credit for back then.
They chose Brinks as well
as you guys did. And I just think it's critical that you go with somebody who is really, really
trusted. Walk us through that process of choosing them or what was your thought process at that time?
Yeah. I mean, we've seen other platforms come out that were very, you know, like Web3, there was a focus on decentralization
and some of these vaults had no location given. And, you know, I think there's probably a carve
out of our market in Web3 that's fine with that. But ultimately, we knew that the market that we
were going after, the majority lives outside of this space.
And we just couldn't be a crypto startup, blockchain based, brand new to the scene,
asking people that maybe have never been on chain before, already had skepticism. The narrative at that point in time was not great. It's certainly not what it is today. But we needed to have that brand recognition for the vault to marry to BZ,
which was brand new. Couldn't ask people to send in their prized possessions to somewhere that they
don't know to a small startup. There was just too much of a question mark there. So really,
the contract did not happen overnight, as you can imagine, Brinks is, you know, a Web2 brand.
And there's a lot to go through when you're working with one of those big brands.
But we were able to get it done.
And it was certainly worth the time and the patience that it took.
Can you tell me a little bit about that with Brinks?
Like, it seems like just an amazing fit for them
to move into this space.
Do you know anything about how they decided
to move into the space
and kind of become this
guardian of the
assets? Do you know anything about
their history moving into it?
I won't speak too much for them, but I'll
say that they brought on
a guy who is sort of their lead in
this space that came from Web3. He's incredibly forward thinking, he's massively supportive,
and he really leads that program for them. So, you know, although I think probably the
guys that are way up on the top of the food chain there might not be, you know, as blockchain native or, or savvy as, um,
most of us are in this space. He is,
and he has been just a really great resource. And, you know,
if it makes sense,
a translator for companies like us to get stuff done and get these
partnerships in place.
So I'm sitting here on the live stream
and I'm going through BZ looking at all the different categories
that you have between some of the trending ones
are Pokemon, basketball, football,
but then some of these other categories, man,
it's really giving me some nostalgia and some flashbacks.
The one that I found most intriguing is actually video games.
What is the thought behind some of these traditional video games and selling them?
You are really tapping into nostalgia because what I see here is 007 from N64,
which was one of my favorite games growing up.
Super Mario from Nintendo.
You have Pac-Man from Atari.
And the list just continues to go on.
So we initially, it was all about being and coming out of the gates multi-category. We knew
that that was something we wanted to do. We didn't want to be just another card platform, honestly.
And it was important that we brought in more of a breadth of options for collectors because what we've found is collectors collect, right?
We've got a lot of people that maybe come in because they saw somebody post about Beezy and Pokemon on the timeline.
And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, I played this video game.
I'm really interested in trying to pick up some of these vintage graded games.
vintage graded games. So with our MVP, because of course we're still in lean startup,
we had to be multi-category, but also do something that made sense in terms of authentication and
just limited resources. So we said, let's bring in a graded collectibles because we're able to
obviously link it back at that point in time to a grading company. It was pretty easy.
I love the
vintage video games personally we had you know a lot of people that were really pressing for comics
we had some funko pop lovers and it's just an easy lift in terms of logistics back then
and that's kind of where the the thought process behind opening up just beyond graded cards.
Yeah, there's some other ones you have.
I see some watches with Rolex, comics,
even some sealed products like boxes and such.
So first, when did you guys launch?
And since then, what type of lessons have you learned? Or maybe some types of, you know, I guess you'd say what type of like difference has the market presented you since launching?
Was there any type of reaction from the market that maybe was unintended or unexpected or has the the business plan
essentially just been uh pretty clear and straightforward um since launch i mean nothing's
clear and straightforward in the world there's startups especially in this industry yeah especially
in this industry but again when you've been here you're a Web3 native team. It's really hard
to be surprised in that sense. You know, like lessons learned. I don't know if it's so much
as a lesson, but what I think is really important to startups, not only in this space, but all
startups. And, you know, you certainly hear, I think there's a clip of the Airbnb founders saying this, but
100 or 1,000 people that really love your product and will sort of be your disciples screaming about
it is way better than 10,000, 20,000, or 100,000 that try it once and walk away and never talk
about it again. And I think that gives you longevity as a builder. It doesn't take, you know, you might not
pop off the same way we've seen other projects where overnight they have, you know, millions in
TBL and people are going crazy and it's all over your timeline. But then a month later, they don't
exist anymore. It certainly doesn't happen that way when you are building with consistency and
really focused on, you know, iterating on the product based on your community's feedback, listening to your community, and really bringing those early members along for the ride and truly being grateful for the feedback in their presence. So if I were to tell any builder, it's, you know, find that organic,
authentic community that is at your core, what will give you legs to last much longer than,
you know, a quick flash in the pan on the timeline.
What's your, has your like revenue strategy, have you had to pivot? I mean, we've had to pivot,
you know, with the destruction of
royalties. Have you been able to kind of stay with your initial revenue model or you guys had
to pivot? I'd imagine there's kind of like, especially with Brinks and stuff, there are
kind of these are like standard recurring fees and costs you guys have. But can you kind of,
without necessarily naming specifics,
but kind of give us a framework of how you're thinking about revenue?
Yeah. So I think one of the pivots, and it's not something that we've taken off, but
in our MVP, we did drops, right? So we would let our resellers or brands come on the platform and do a drop of, you know, 100 slabs or 200 slabs.
We did the initial pre-sale for Vibes, their booster boxes.
And drops are great.
But what we found is that people really want that 24-7 option to scratch the itch, to like just be able come on BZ and interact in a gamified way.
I remember back in the day, Courtyard was doing drops too.
And then obviously, they pivot to their vending machine.
We have our CLAW, which is multi-category one, and then TAG is the other.
I think that a lot of brands and RWAs that you see
are kind of looking at that model. What I'm pretty proud of is that for us, it's the same, again,
it's the same smart contract we've been working on since 2021. And that ties in that buyback,
that instant liquidity that we wrote 160 something pages on. So even whether we were using it in a drop,
whether we're using it in the claw machine, it's the core logic of all of it has remained true.
I think it's just being able to adapt to what the market's asking you for.
And tell us a little bit about for people hearing it for the first time, what is that buyback
feature? So, you know, with cards or sneakers or whatever's in the claw, we basically
look at what the value is on the secondary market. And then when the user reveals the asset,
we give you what we call a swap offer. For right now, it's 90% of the fair market value.
So if someone gets a pair of sneakers in the claw, that's not their size or their taste,
you know, right away they can swap it back for 90%.
If they get a card that they're sort of like, I don't want this in my collection, right
away they can swap it back.
It's just, you know, it takes a bit of the risk away for the buyer.
And as the platform, you know, any of these platforms, ours included, that's really where you're making your
revenue. It's on that 6% fee that most of us take in the swap or the buyback.
I have it here pulled up on the live stream. This seems to be really catering towards the
crypto natives that love, whether it's a gambling aspect or you call it a speculative aspect to it
it really gamifies experience and kind of mimics what's hot right now which is
breaking packs on the internet like what you see people doing on youtube or on
tiktok i think is the other one yeah with tiktok shop um well How has this been so far, the claw? And then take us through kind
of your thought of really merging these different types of, I guess you'd say, emerging markets
between those who were marketing cards and games and stuff on TikTok and breaking to this on-chain environment of crypto?
Where to start?
So I'll start with merging environments.
For us, it was important to do the multi-category claw first
and then be able to showcase the partner claw with tag
because one of the things about BZ that makes us different from some other startups and platforms is that we've built out our platform to channel, a way for new brands to tap into Web3 and crypto.
Obviously, the claw is magic for content and engagement. So they're able to use that. But
as a startup, you can't just go to someone and say, hey, brand X, give us 50K to start this up
for you. Here's what we think will work, right?
You need real data points.
And so the last quarter since we were live,
what we've been able to do
is roll out a few different price points,
be able to accumulate a ton on the analytics and data front.
So now when we're having conversations
with partners and potential partners,
we're saying, here's what we've seen. here's what we've tested, here's what works, here's what we would recommend.
Ultimately, it's always going to be their decision on how they want to create their claw.
But at the same time, you really need that data to support any assumptions.
Yeah, I totally agree on this.
We've gone through some learning experiences
on our own through Emblem of trying to encourage people,
especially in the NFT space, to participate.
There's this kind of cultural aspect to it.
There's this adoption aspect.
And then there's obviously a technical hurdle to this as well.
How is BZ and you guys going about targeting new users?
Obviously, RWAs are subtly somewhat of a hot topic.
On the traditional side, you have BlackRock coming in
and doing tokenized money markets.
And then on the other side of this, that caters more towards,
I guess you'd say that the crypto natives, right? You have like Pokemon cards and Courtyard and
it has kind of like really kind of pushed the door and then you guys are coming in and coming
about it in a different way. Who's the target audience here? And then how are you attracting
those who are maybe breaking cards, you know, on YouTube or TikTok to then essentially vault their card with
Brinks and then sell it on BZ? So I'll just say we have just not even scratched the surface on
really doubling down on user acquisition. I always tell the team it's a marathon, not a sprint.
And to do it the right way
doesn't mean you come out of the gates going full steam.
I think it's really important to be thoughtful,
to be planned, to be measured,
especially in these early days
with a new product activation like Claw.
We are playing in the playground right now that we
know best right and that's web3 so credit to the team i see you know shanice in the audience
profits over wages obviously we have docs and wizard people know really well it's we're a
massively oh she's there okay so you know all of the um, and she can pop up here for that, but all of the volume,
the revenue, our users, I would say 90% right now comes from Web3. And it's just credit to
the team and knowing what works and what doesn't work because they've been here. We've all been
here for a really long time. We've sort of seen so much come and go, tapping into our own networks, communities that we've been in.
And again, just doubling down for this early data in this playground that we've all been in
for the last few years. Aside from that, the playbook on how to get web to consumers
is already been written, right? It's there. It's much more
straightforward. That's why a platform like ours is so attractive to other bigger web to brands
to potentially come into and tap in for distribution. Because when it comes to web
three and crypto, other brands outside of space, you don't know what you don't know, right? You
can put together a great team of engineers, You might find some decent marketing people, but you don't really know, you know, how to navigate these
waters unless you've been actively here. And so we give other brands that, right? They can say,
hey, we want to tap into this market in 30 days, in 60 days. And we have the roadmap,
the playbook for them to do it
really, really well and really, really efficiently.
So enticing a little bit, I kind of want to dive a little bit deeper because I'm curious,
you know, RWAs are really fascinating. Obviously I've, I've done like antiquing and I had my own
antique store for a few years, bringing these assets on-chain,
it's tough because there's this physical component to it.
And then there's also this digital component,
but the Web2 digital component of the attention economy
of these users who are breaking packs
and making thousands of dollars a day.
And then they're doing these kind of sales
in a manual way through their
chat on their TikTok shop. But there's literally tens of billions of dollars of assets sitting,
maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars of assets sitting in the real world that needs to
be brought on chain. If that were to happen, if you were to penetrate even 1% or 2% of that, that's a gigantic warehousing
cost, but also a gigantic warehousing kind of problem that has to be solved. So I'd love to
just dive in a little bit more of like, how do you go about this of even bringing, we'll say,
1% of the entire physical collectible market on chain? Yeah, I think that you can't just focus on pack-breaking, right?
Because that has its own unique sort of element
and how it gets from the pack-breaker to the buyer.
So that's sort of a separate conversation.
But you can look at traditional Web2 models.
I think the RealReal is a great example of a model that worked well
from a warehousing authenticating component web two models. I think the real real is a great example of a model that worked well from like a
warehousing authenticating component to distributing it to the, you know, the buyers from the sellers.
Adding, you know, the real real on chain would not be a huge lift because the all the other
pieces are already in place. You're 100% correct that it's a massive market. And when you look at it as a whole,
it can be really daunting. But when you thoughtfully think through vaulting combined with
potentially warehousing, which is much lower cost versus we always talk about, do you have an option
of cold storage and sort of hot storage as a company? Cold storage is like our ledger where
these are assets that are not coming
in and out of the vault.
They're high value.
They're really sitting there.
And then this hot storage option,
which is more what we know is going to come in and out.
I think it's not as challenging
from an on-chain perspective
as it is what models exist already in logistics and distribution
that you can take and then actually plug in on-chain. Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely. One question, sorry Jake, one question there is, just because I don't know the
industry, are any of these kind of card manufacturers or even the grading so it seemed
like this would be a natural um business for the grading you know the card grading services
um are any of them moving you know is the tops moving into this space at all right now or or
what's the kind of state of the industry right now i think that's a better question for Gary Vee. He seems to have the plug over at the top. So maybe invite him on for that one. I don't have the alpha with them,
but certainly there are grading companies that we talk to that, again, I can't speak for them,
but the interest is definitely there. And I think they see the success of different brands and
the writing is on the wall for a lot of these pieces.
But again, you'd be surprised the companies that we speak to that have blockchain at some point in time, either in the past or now on their roadmap, but just don't have a great grasp on how to actually do it and do it well. And the scary thing is for those brands, as we all know, because we've been here,
we've seen bigger brands, especially in the luxury world,
where when you're looking at it, you think, oh, this kind of makes sense,
but then just fall flat on their face because maybe they've partnered with the wrong people.
Maybe they didn't really tap in the way they should have.
So it's daunting for these companies.
And to not have a really great source or proof point
to help them along the way,
they're looking for it.
They want to do it.
It's on their roadmap,
but it's really about how do we get there?
And that's what we hope to be the bridge for a lot of those companies.
Go ahead, Profits.
What's up, Jake?
What's good?
Yeah, that was a good question you asked.
And I lost my train of thought a bit.
But I was just going to go after the fact that there's a big problem that's being solved here that has never been
solved in collectibles in all the years, like years, years, years. And unfortunately, we just
chalk it up to, oh, it's an L. I bought from eBay. I got a fake. Or I bought from somebody on
Instagram that I thought was legit. Or PayPal, right? I remember back in the day, it was annoying
as shit to make a sale if you didn't have PayPal, because it's like, oh, I don't trust you. I remember back in the day, it was annoying as shit to make a sale if you didn't have PayPal because it's like, oh, I don't trust you.
I don't know you. And so people have that's why there's certain collectors and resellers that have a higher, I think, even customer base because they had to you know, you're forcing now credibility and accountability, I should say, because now it's like, well, I don't want any fees and I don't want to lose out on this customer.
Let me make sure to, like to give them their product whenever they ask
and give them good prices.
But there's the RWA phrase.
I'm not going to lie.
I'm annoyed of it.
You know, a baseball card worth 10 grand isn't an asset for them,
even though they can go get liquid.
You can go sell it for 10 grand, but real estate is right.
And so I think we're, we're going to kind of break into like disruptive space,
not just RWAs, obviously collectibles,
but I think we're even going to come up with a new term too,
because this is a little, it's a little too corporate-y for me,
if I'm being honest. And um tell rwa to a collector
bro they're gonna be like what they're like yeah this is valuable this is an asset but
um but yeah thank you thank you guys for hosting this space it's been a it's been a fun time so far
well i'm wondering your your thoughts on like um what happens right we kind of know because
we're in crypto we we kind of know what happens when you basically make collectibles uh instantly tradable like my kid's got thousands of pokemon cards up
there he he mistakenly believes that he's got he's sitting on literally a gold mine right
but it's like the moment you may actually make them actually tradable right what happens you
get like oh wow this is actually price drops because there are way more than you thought of these, right? It's almost like part of me feels like,
especially for the amateur collector kids, basically, there's this illusion of value
simply because they're untradeable or unsellable. And, you know, maybe in that way, you know,
bringing all this stuff to like instant liquidity
with a bunch of DGENs
maybe doesn't have the intended consequence.
I don't know what your thoughts on that.
Oh, we lost profits.
Profits is off stage.
But maybe Andrea, maybe you ever thought of it.
Yeah, I think, you know, I come at it.
I've got kids that collect pokemon cards
right now and my son will be like oh my collection it's like two thousand bucks i'm like dude how are
you gonna sell it you're gonna take pictures set up an ebay account have me do it for you link my
debit card it's a massive process for them and these are kids that are used to fortnite and
roblox and everything instant.
eBay and these sort of web to marketplaces and the length of time it takes to actually tap into that liquidity is not the future.
Truly, I mean, if he could snap his fingers and get his entire collection on chain tomorrow, he would do it.
And it would be a much easier way.
So, you know, that's sort of the consumer that we're truly building for at this point in time. Yeah, it is interesting. So kind of looking at it from a larger,
I guess you'd say macro perspective, BZ right now supports mostly millennial type nostalgia.
And then I guess the newer versions of like pokemon cards and stuff that's
attracting zoomers but what is the the larger objective profits mentioned like real estate
um but what other type of rwa's right in that went out sorry i don't know where you guys left
off hold on jake i don't like the way you're putting us in a small box pal every every slab
every collectible known to man is is available you can get it you can be
into comics you can be into cards there's guys that like basketball but not pokemon uh so yeah
we're not like uh we're not a one-trick pony here oh yeah you missed the beginning we went over all
the categories in the very beginning of the show you know i, I think, I think Whatnot did a really good job expanding
categories slowly. I don't know if you've, you know, followed them since launch, but you can't
open the floodgates on day one. And so you have to be thoughtful about what's going to appeal to
the current people in the room. For us, it's all about expanding categories with partnerships.
So I think that's what you need to keep an eye on with BayZ.
You know, when it makes sense to bring in luxury bags because we have, you know, someone where that is their focus and they've got a community that follows them and they want to get these assets on chain, we're going to do it.
Until that point in time, we're not going to do it.
We're working on a big watch partnership how do you i mean that it's challenge it's super challenging obviously from a
marketing perspective to bring in kind of these different like you said okay you're bringing in
birkin bags well how do you even how does somebody who wants a birkin bag even know to to come to you
right like what's what's your thought process on the marketing? I mean,
obviously you have the crypto kind of market covered, but to reach out to these kind of
what we call web2 communities, what's the strategy there? I mean, it's got to be super challenging.
Yeah. I mean, it's solving a problem for them first and foremost, right? And I'll say it's
much easier to build your brand as a startup on the backs of other brands that already exist than it is just to build your brand
as a startup. And that's why this model has legs. So when we put out the Tag Claw, the partnership
with Tag, we had an instant influx of brand new users that were coming in because they saw BZ on Tag's channel.
Now, arguably, Tag is a smaller grading company than PSA or CGC or Beckett,
but they have more eyes on them than BZ did.
You'll continue to see that model with us,
with some of the partnerships that we're bringing in.
We come from the space that we double double down on user generated content. We look at the claw as a great solution to like a cold start problem that a lot of marketplaces and other platforms have because it's a hook, right?
It's a gamified experience that gets people in the door. I am, let's say, a luxury goods consignment platform that has great content that's being
pushed out from brand ambassadors.
And all of a sudden, now I'm dabbling with BZ.
If I have 50,000, 100,000 followers on Instagram, and I am posting about a claw with a Birkin
bag on it, all of a sudden, all those new eyes come onto BZ.
It's a really interesting model and way and something we've found success in so far.
And I anticipate continuing to find success in and how we continue to build our brand
and tap into new communities and new collectors.
The expansion methodology reminds me a lot of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, where their initial
vision was to be the everything store.
But he started with books because he thought that was the easiest penetration path because
everyone read books in the market that he was going about.
It's interesting how the other aspect of this is expanding through brands and partnerships,
The other aspect of this is expanding through brands and partnerships, where if you're going to dive into kind of Birkinbags, you probably try to go talk with the Birkinbag company to kind of let them know that this kind of thing is available.
And then obviously you have the bottom up approach through the user base, either whether it's through crypto or kind of through this traditional methodology.
But even, again, going back to kind of the macro kind of perspective,
where do you see this type of platform headed to?
Is it something that eventually tokenizes every type of non-fungible item
in the real world, whether it's vehicles and house deeds and art? Or
is there something else that maybe people are missing that this type of platform, BZ,
can eventually become is like the larger objective here?
No, I mean, listen, you don't want to spread yourself too thin, a lot of people get excited about real estate and other RWAs coming
on chain, but BZs for collectibles. So we will stay in that lane. There's no reason to go outside
of it. It's a massive market and, you know, finding success here is truly success. It'll be
interesting, you know, the conversations that we're being approached with and things that could potentially involve with that, that's sort of, you know, to be determined.
But it is a super exciting path to be on because you really feel like you're at the front of this tech.
And again, you're bringing solutions to real problems for other brands out there.
But the roundabout way to answer your question is we're a collectibles platform and that's
where we'll always stay.
Awesome. I absolutely love it. Chris, do you have any questions for Andrea?
Yeah, she's killing it. I love the space that you're building in. It's one of my favorites
to follow at the moment. It's so different.
I'm so unique and just has so much potential.
So I guess from me, first off, where is the attention on the platform?
What is the most impactful product?
Is it the packs?
Is it just Pokemon cards in general?
Is it the claw?
Is it sneakers?
Where is the claw? Is it sneakers? Like where's the focus?
Right now that there's massive overlap in Web3 with TCG, particularly Pokemon. So we get a ton
of traction with not only slabs, but sealed product people are really interested in. So
we're going to keep pushing along those lines. They love the claw machine. It's super fun. But what we've
really enjoyed as a team is seeing people that build their collections out based on what they're
grabbing from the claw. So that's been a lot of fun to watch that happen. So I would say if the
biggest revenue driver right now is 100% the claw, but we're also seeing a lot of fun
marketplace sales and people just building out their on-chain collection. And we love to see
people redeem too, and then post those assets on the timeline. Like BZ Delivery Day is the best day
of the week. We see all of those posts and we really love it because it feels like it's a truly full circle platform.
One of the great parts about it
is how much user-generated content you get from it,
from just pulling the packs
or, like you said, redeeming the items.
You have so many moments that you can kind of capture,
which is really interesting.
So do you guys curate the packs
and then you guys fill the claw machine is that right on both ends
yeah so the packs i mean it we don't necessarily call them packs in the claw machine it's
their assets so we're constantly replenishing and you know keeping our odds where they need to be
we look at it multiple times a day and if pratik and the dev team need to put in more grails
more bases more commons they're you know it's a it's a constant ongoing back and forth um the
first clause multi-category so it's again it's anything from sneakers we had a rolex in there
at one point to card slabs to sealed product nice um. This is like an interesting one.
I don't know how many NFT people we have in crypto,
Web3 people.
And I don't know how many collectible people there are.
Are we importing Web2 people, collectors,
to Web3 at the moment?
Or are we exporting Web3 people
to more of like the Web2 digital collectibles
like Pokemon and like sports?
Where do you think we're at?
You know, I think I'll give credit where credit's due.
I think Courtyard has done a great job
with bringing Web2 people on chain
without them necessarily knowing it.
That bending machine, you know,
is doing really, really well
from a revenue standpoint.
I think we are probably the flip side of that
and we're bringing more Web3 people back into TCG,
whether it's Pokemon or whatever.
We hear that story over and over and over again,
like, oh my God, I'm reigniting my passion for collecting
that I used to collect these Pokemon cards.
I had a binder and now I'm doing it again with BZ.
So I think there's a bit of both.
Yeah, I definitely think it's both.
I think you kind of got it right that the future is obviously totally digital,
but this is kind of like the stepping stone.
And it's like Web3 people have to go backwards to bring these Web2 people on.
So we kind of have to like work backwards before we can kind of move forward.
So I think that that approach is kind of actually the best one because that market is so big,
but we kind of have to pace ourselves before we go fully digital.
And this seems like the biggest stepping stone.
I think maybe last one for me, where do you see the product evolving? I mean, you're at the forefront of what I think is like one of the most kind of exciting
spaces at the moment.
How, you know, how big can you guys get?
How, what, what are you looking at in terms of scale and kind of like what does, you know,
in general, kind of not like financial success, but just general success look like?
Yeah. How big can we get? Pretty fucking big. That's my answer to that.
Love it. That's the answer.
All the fucking cards, bro. All the cards.
Yeah.
You know, where we see like the end of going, looking out towards the end of this year,
we crushed our Q1 projection. Super proud of that. We'll continue to build off that momentum.
You know, a big focus is bringing in new brand partnerships
and having an arcade full of claws that are not BZ branded.
Our North Star has always been that this platform is built
for other brands for distribution and scale
and really to tap into great UGC with the claw
for them to utilize it and bring them on chain.
So, you know, just keep an eye out for new brands that we're going to be bringing into the platform
and the mix. We'll probably have a couple of white label claws put out there as well.
A lot of really interesting, fun stuff that we're working on from a partnership standpoint.
We will continue to double down on building BZ as a great place for collectors to connect.
So, you know, you can't anticipate collector chats being integrated into the platform.
Yeah, obviously live streaming is going to be on the horizon.
That's a little bit more of a way out.
And whether it's through a partnership or our own integration, that will happen at some point.
But, you know, we're constantly shipping.
We are we love feedback from the community.
I see a lot of members in the audience
appreciate every single one of them.
Keep the feedback coming, guys,
because everything we do,
it truly, most of it comes from a seed
or an idea or an ask
from our core group of users.
And we will continue to always listen and build for them.
I love it.
How are the sneakers?
How is the interest on the sneakers?
It's such a big community online.
I wonder what the crossover is at the moment.
Yeah, there's a fair amount of sneakerheads here.
I mean, certainly profits can speak to that.
This is really her wheelhouse and world. Not a lot of people know she was an OG sneakerhead and streetwear and all that. So it's been fun to have her kind of leading that journey.
right now and so much of that is tcg focused i personally love sneakers like i i have a big
collection and if i'm pulling from the claw or you know friends are pulling from the claw i think
there's a lot of web 2 interest there but web 3 loves pokemon right now so that's what we're
gonna get them they love come on cards i don't know what it is i was gonna chime and say personally
for me jake i don't know if you buy sneakers regularly.
You seem kind of like a stylish dude.
So I think you do.
But lately, I would say in the sneaker world, and I'm sure a lot would agree, it is such a wild, just wild west when it comes to fakes and all the things.
I mean, you got every influencer with 100,000 followers faint wearing fake travis scotts on instagram uh all types of stuff and
some don't even care some actually don't care most don't realize don't know that they spent a
thousand bucks on a fake but the point is um we have a unique way of how we kind of went about
sneakers which is going with the collectors first that have you know the trust
right we have two really big um collectors slash resellers on the platform that have stocked the
the sneakers pretty well that have og like just die hard buyers that any drop anytime they need
a sneaker christmas they go through them so we've we've been very specific with um how we go
about sneakers really going with the people that are trusted first working with them and now their
community has access to you know another way that they can buy those same sneakers from that trusted
person right so sneakers are a little different because even even the smartest mom trying to get
a cool pair of sneakers for her son will ask a sneaker head, hey, where do I get a real pair for my son?
Right. And so that is until that's changed, which, you know, I see blockchain changing
that and creating more trust and having to think about if you're buying a fake or not.
But to answer your question, that's kind of how we went about it.
Kind of onboarding core resellers that have a really large community of buyers already
that now are onboarding them to our platform.
Yeah, makes sense.
Andrew, I have two questions from my side.
One of them is when you're talking with potential partners,
mostly in the Web2 kind of brand space, what is their thoughts about RWAs and tokenizing, you know,
some of their assets on the secondary market and trading through crypto?
Is it a positive response?
And are they open to this type of innovation?
You know, most of the people that we get a call with,
there's already some familiarity and interest there. So it's,
you know, from, it's mostly positive. There's always those questions like, oh, is gas killing
you? Like, how do you deal with that? And, you know, there's, there's some education up front,
but I think the industry is really at a place where we can elegantly bring people in without the friction of three or four years ago.
So these brands, a lot of the conversation is, well, your users can sign in with their email
and pay with their credit card and their Google Pay and their Apple Pay.
And it's all really simple.
really simple. And so that alleviates a lot of those concerns. And then there's the interest of
And so that alleviates a lot of those concerns.
brand new revenue for them because we take what we know in this space as quote unquote creator
royalties and we tie that to collectibles and we call it commission sharing. So if I'm a brand and
I put 5,000 assets on chain with Beasy, now every time one of those digital sells,
I'm getting 1% back. And that's something that doesn't happen in the Web2 world. So when you
couple like, we're solving logistics, we're giving you new revenue, and there's zero to no friction
point for your consumers, it's a pretty compelling argument. Tell me about do they
kind of, is one of the questions you get hit with
blockchain, there's no backseas
are they concerned about their user
experience?
Is this a concern
like
why they would prefer to just have the assets
just live on their own website kind of thing
without a blockchain because they could kind of control the assets themselves.
Do you get any pushback in that kind of arena?
Not really.
I mean, again, a lot of the conversations when they get to my desk,
they're already at a place of interest.
So I don't need to convince someone about the benefits of crypto.
That's not my job, right?
They have to come at least open-minded enough where they've said,
oh, this could be a potential interesting partnership.
And a lot of the conversation is around the user experience.
And I think once you're able to show that,
and right now the proof is in the pudding,
I can quite literally say, go try the claw yourself on BZ. It's live. You can actually
go through the user experience and here's what it would look like for you and your community.
You know, it's much easier, right? It's not a beta play. It's not closed. It's there for
It's there for them to experience themselves so they can really imagine it and see it.
them to experience themselves so they can really imagine it and see it.
Makes sense.
Last question for me is just understanding the composition of the BZ team.
Are you guys something that's VC-backed?
Is this self-funded?
Is this a cohort of a few individuals?
And how large is the team?
Wait, before Andrew answers that, we actually decided we're going to go ahead and launch a meme coin today.
So go ahead.
Oh my God, shut up.
Someone's going to clip that and I'm going to be...
I'm just fucking around.
Holy shit, she makes me sweat.
So, no, we have six full-time.
We actually brought our engineering team in-house,
so they make up the most of that.
My co-founder, Prateek, is a technical founder.
He's amazing.
You know, he's a dev,
but he's got some amazing engineers under him.
We have myself, obviously Shanice is here,
Obviously, Shanice is here, Dox and Wizard on the marketing and BD side.
Docs and Wizard on the marketing and BD side.
We are a team that we got some small angel and family-sized offices that backed us early
that we have great relationships with.
They've been massively supportive.
We did our MVP.
We took in some revenue.
We were able to extend our runway.
We're making revenue right now.
We are certainly not one of those teams that goes out and just blows a shit ton of money.
We know how to stretch a dollar and be really efficient with our capital.
And so we're in a really good place right now.
I love to hear that. As a team emblem, eight people who's never received any VC funding and
bootstrapped the
entire thing and you know you have multiple people on a small team playing different positions i
really admire tenacity especially in a market like this where you have to continue to push
put one foot forward and continue to build so um andre really appreciate you for coming on and bz
you know i'd love to talk deeper to see if there's some sort of partnership
or relationship we can have between Emblem and BZ.
I have some ideas, so I'll reach out at a different time.
And for those that are new to the show,
we host your show Tuesday through Thursday at 11.30 a.m. Eastern time.
Please make sure that you follow Andrea and BZ
so you can follow along with the cool RW experience.
If you love the show, please follow the Emblem account as well as Agent Hustle. That's on stage. That's
our AI project. Andrea, I'll give the floor to you for any kind of last comments, anything you'd
like to announce. No, I just want to give some gratitude. This was an amazing stage. You guys
asked some really thoughtful questions. I very
much enjoyed the opportunity to come on and talk a bit about BZ and hope to do it again soon.
Yeah, absolutely. One more for me. One more for me. Hold on. Hold on. It's too good.
What about the prize makeup? You guys filled the claw machine. Are people looking for just the highest level grails?
Like when you have that one of one kind of item in there,
is that spiking the kind of participation in a meaningful way?
Or most people looking for like an average hit rate where they would rather
have it filled with like 10, you know,
eight out of 10 items than one 11 out of 10 items.
I'm going to be honest.
I don't know what she's going to say, but I'll tell you this.
We have crack addicts.
So I don't even know if they wait for the restauce or what.
They just shoot all day, every day.
But yeah, I think maybe Andrew wants to answer that.
I mean, there's always going to be a certain spread in the machine.
And you can see that with, you know, what we post there.
There are certainly, you know, more coveted grails that are harder to get your
hands on that we put in and we can see a spike, but there's also people that are just running
through and using it and kind of like pulling out mid tiers because it's a great addition to what
they collect. Um, I think, so that's fine. I mean. I mean, it depends on who you're asking, right?
But it seems like it's mostly in the meat of it.
They want a higher hit rate
rather than trying to hit that
kind of super massive lottery kind of pick.
Is that logical?
You would think, but no.
Again, it's really like who you're talking to.
I mean, we have some users that have, you know, they'll play a hundred times in one sitting.
I think our average number right now of polls per consumer is somewhere between 30 and 40, which is wild.
But it's so fun because a lot of people keep, right?
So we have some people that will hit a grail and they'll take the swap value and then
maybe they'll go shop on the marketplace and get multiple items or they'll keep playing and we have
other people that are really chasing that one grail because they want to hold that and add it
to their collection wait so are they like pulling and then immediately selling back to you and then
pulling again and immediately selling back and pulling again i mean are they doing that kind of stuff sometimes sometimes yeah for sure we will
i'll tell you what we had the guy the guy that um hit the rolex the first time we put it in
he's a great community member he decided to take the swap value and then i know he went and shopped
for a bunch of collectibles i think he got some some stuff on BZ. I think he grabbed like an elemental because he's an Izuki holder.
So that was cool to see too.
And then the next person that hit the Rolex, which was like three weeks later, we put it back in.
They decided to hold it.
They redeemed it.
He was from the UK.
I think he got it within like four days from the vault because Brinks is exceptional.
And, you know, he had his wrist on the timeline within, like, 24
hours of receiving it. So it's been
really fun to see the diversity of,
like, what people actually want as
collectors and as participants
in the ecosystem.
Absolutely. Love to hear that.
DGENs from all over. DGENs
all over the space. Yeah.
Andrea Profits, appreciate you guys,
ladies, for coming on. Really enjoyed
the conversation. I know we'll absolutely
stay in touch and appreciate everyone
who joined us today.
We have a show Tuesday through Thursday at 11.30 a.m.
Eastern time. I'll be back tomorrow.
Please follow all of the awesome speakers
and accounts on stage to stay in tune.
Everyone have a fun and
safe weekend and we'll see everybody next week.
