#48: Ben Rogers on Crypto Travel

Ben Rogers is the CMO of Travala, the leading cryptocurrency-friendly online travel agency.

In this conversation, we discuss:
- Crypto specific marketing tactics
- Marketing KPIs
- Advertising for crypto companies
- SEO in crypto 
- Building trust with transparency
- Social media growth
- How Travala deals with crypto volatility
- $AVA
- The future of crypto and travel 

Travala
Website: travala.com
Twitter: @travalacom
Instagram: travalacom
Telegram: Travala.com

Ben Rogers
Twitter: @BenMRogers
LinkedIn: Ben R.

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Transcript

Matt Zahab: 0:08

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode will be an absolute treat. Today's guest is a marketing and product veteran with deep experience in the travel space with a resume that includes time with Google ever heard of them? Cover more travel insurance Flight Center and multiple big hotel chains. Present day he's the CMO of Travala, where he leads a growing team of marketing experts who have together delivered massive growth for the company. I'm very pleased to welcome to the crypto news podcast, Ben Rogers. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Rogers: 0:42

Hey Matt. How are you doing?

Matt Zahab: 0:43

Doing well, it's 8 pm for me today bright and early in the morning for you appreciate you jumping on how's the day so far?

Ben Rogers: 0:49

I've got my coffee. I'm good to go.

Matt Zahab: 0:51

I love that I should maybe have a drink with me. But I'm just sipping on water being being a good lad before the long weekend in Canada. The body often takes a bit of a rough one on long weekends. I'm not alone there am I?

Ben Rogers: 1:05

Oh, yes, like I did last weekend, getting over the years that it's getting rough.

Matt Zahab: 1:11

I know every year you get older, the hangovers seem to be a little worse. But on to the bread and butter really appreciate you coming on super excited for this one. As someone who has a bit of a marketing boner myself, whenever I get to speak with someone like you who is a chisled vet, I get super excited. Candidly, it is what it is. And in doing some research for the show, I found that you have a couple core sayings slash principles. And those are as follows. Your first one is if you can't measure a marketing or product activity, then you shouldn't do it. The second one is if you do not have revenue, you don't have a business, you have a hobby, and the third, consistent small improvements over time lead to overnight success. I absolutely love all three of these completely agree with all three of these. But I'd love to hear your two cents on all of them. In particular, just go back to the first one. If you can't measure a marketing or product activity, then you shouldn't do it. Floor is yours. Tell me what you got about this one.

Ben Rogers: 2:09

Yeah, absolutely. So this comes very much down to what you should be spending your budget. So as a marketer, your job is to take money and make the business more money than then what they're giving you to spend to do stuff. And if you can't measure that results, how are you supposed to know whether you're doing doing a good thing, good work or not? And if we look at that, you know, there are those diehard people out there who need sort of dollar for dollar measurements, you got to be able to track everything. I'm not in that camp, right? As long as you know what the beginning of doing something that it's an experiment, you've got a way to measure the success or failure of it will measure how stuff is going and that that kind of ticks, the boxes and you're sort of off to the races with what's going on as well. So it also allows you to compare activities between different channels and set expectations about what you would expect to know most basically from a from a cost per acquisition, or even things like influencer marketing these days, like what sort of influence you're expecting, and what does that mean. So if you start to measure things and know where it's going, you're going to suddenly find that you get really good at marketing, probably quite quick. It also helps to, on the flip side, when you have some failures and things as well too, which is inevitably going to happen, right. So you might have a good theory that something's gonna work, you've noticed some insights about your customers or your product, and you run a test and it goes completely the other way. Like having that other data, it's just data, it's just honest facts. Its going to help you make better decisions to sort of optimize your way out of it. So that's something I always come back to and whenever I work with someone that's pretty much the question like, how are we going to measure the success of this? I'm not a big show me a reports kind of guy, you know, big formal reports, not at all and in my mind, spend that time on growing our business. But you do need to be able to show me some intelligent way that you're measuring the value of your time and the value of the activities that we're doing.

Matt Zahab: 4:06

Building on that point. as a marketer, I'm always curious myself. In which way do you measure these KPIs? And a follow up to that is which KPIs really move the needle in your mind?

Ben Rogers: 4:16

Oh, look, there's one KPI that matters and that is money in the bank. You know, that is money in the bank. That is the truest measure and metric that company has is how much money do they have in the bank, from what you're doing? You know, the people can show me like reports, we look how many impressions I got, how many clicks, you got, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if it's not leading to money in the bank, what are you doing? So financial metrics are really, really important. It's not to say that higher up the funnel like to get to those financial metrics, you need to see, you know, things that are going to get there. And so impressions are quite important. clicks can be quite important, visits to your site can be quite important time on site can be important. All of those things matter as to what the tools are right. Like I love my Absolutely preferences, things like sort of Google Analytics. So you know, Google Optimize, if we're doing some maybe split tests, that stuff is fantastic. But it's not always possible to do things. And particularly, as we're under this new age, and you know, apples sort of blocking, more and more things right now. And there's always systems that come out to change it, that does change. So Excel, I'm actually not an Excel guy, I'm already Google Sheets guy, but same principle that can be where we can put some stuff together and start to make some sensible guesses. I'm more looking for trends over time than perfect information as what I said, because the perfect information is money in the bank. But if you are seeing that certain activities, you're running it in isolation, and it is sort of pushing the needle in the right direction. That's gonna get you there in the long run. Also, there's all sorts of arguments and things as well to you, Google Analytics data will never be perfect. Your Facebook data ads, data will never be perfect, whatever it is, it's not going to be perfect. But if you can sort of track those trends over time, and they match up with what's in the bank, I think that's a far more important indicator, and you can kind of get focus on improving that.

Matt Zahab: 6:11

You just talked about Facebook ads for a sec. I used to work for an e commerce company and Facebook ads. Again, I see this stat all the time, and people are flabbergasted when I do say it, I think flabbergasted is the right word. But if it's not, sue me. There's not one e commerce company that has turned into a unicorn without using Facebook ads, Facebook, being Facebook and Instagram. Crazy stat legit, like, imagine not being able to reach that upper echelon, without spending hundreds of 1000s realistically, millions of dollars on Facebook and Insta ads. Going over to the crypto industry. A lot of companies cannot do that, because Facebook takes it down right away. So where do you sort of look for those paid channel acquisitions? What's the bread and butter? And what's the secret sauce there?

Ben Rogers: 6:54

With Travala I get to use them. Right? Like I'm basically saying can book travel? Oh, and we accept crypto, I'm not, I'm not selling financial investments or anything along those lines. So we can literally focus on the use case, we can use pictures of Bitcoin in our ads, and we can just mock it. So we can take out first party data overlay that with intent based information, or employment, information, whatever we want to take out of Facebook, these other tools, travel intenders, and put all that together to push forwards. And on that were quite lucky is you know, where we're kind of a within the extra layer of the crypto and what we're trying to do that the other travel companies don't have that information or can't really provide it. So we have some incredibly competitive sort of cost per acquisitions that we're able to get with that extra data layer. But yeah, no we're in that. Similarly, we actually don't do too much Facebook ads with Travala.com. Reason being a lot of we get a lot of that through display and SEO has been more beneficial and just didn't really sort of stack up for us. There is talk that we might do something with Facebook in future, they've actually approached us about doing something I don't think I'm spoiling anything that but yeah, we do a lot more Twitter advertising. And again, same principles can apply. And that's where sort of all the crypto community is. So I can show ads over the top of people who are looking at token information. But saying, hey, come book us and think about us for travel, which is fantastic. More broadly, though, is what I've sort of worked on other crypto projects, you are right. If you are just a crypto project or DeFi farm or something like that, these channels and these doors are close to you. And it is quite hard to get out there. You do have to rely on sort of word of mouth or organic pushes. We see a lot of people who will do the you know, like and follow get some crypto, you know, so they kind of sort of back door to the ways to sort of gamify these platforms and that stuff works quite well. But when I say a lot of crypto platforms, and I've got one in particular with thinking I'm thinking about right now, actually two that I'm thinking about right now, they're fantastic use cases, they're fantastic use cases, and the crypto is really just a tiny part of it. So yes, their goals are to get people to buy more crypto, but we can promote that use case. And the same way we're promoting the travel use case we can use these paid channels and get it up and running be purely speculative assets. That one is really hard and you do have to think about how you can gamify your influence and sort of work within the rules of the platform to get some traction.

Matt Zahab: 9:34

Definitely have to go outside the box. You brought up two things there. You brought up SEO and you brought up Twitter that is literally Twitter's the bread and butter of the crypto verse. If you're not on Twitter, and you're a fan of crypto you are 100 steps behind and it will be very difficult for you to get there. We'll go to Twitter after, let's start with SEO. Travala probably has, not probably has some big big competitors, the Expedia's, the booking.coms. How can you ever beat those guys on anything SEO related on SEO? For those at home search engine optimization, most of the time refers to the first page of Google, how the heck are you going to get on that first page of Google? How are you gonna outbid those guys? If someone if I'm searching for flights to Dubai, I feel like there's no way Travala can get up there. But if I'm searching, maybe flight to Dubai, buying in Bitcoin? I'm sure you guys are number one. But is there any way to get there without the crypto part?

Ben Rogers: 10:27

Yeah, so that's a fascinating question. So I think and like, so I have a sort of experience in this. So Expedia, you know, pre COVID, let's go back to the good old days. In my city alone, they had 20 SEO experts. And then they had content writing teams, and then that was just a small city in Australia, Brisbane,

Matt Zahab: 10:45

In one city?

Ben Rogers: 10:47

That's in one city. And so I'm not sure what area that they're searching for. Right? So let's sort of expand that out across across the world. And one number I saw is that they spend a billion dollars in advertising and stuff like that a year. Now, let's just think about Google. So, you know, Google is a, you know, there are 10 positions on Google, right first page of Google. And you know that there's a great saying that, you know, the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google. Now Google is going to rank the people that deserve to be there in page one. Googles mission is to organize the world's information and give you the best information at the right time. Now, let me tell you, these big companies that have that sort of money to spend on it, and put together the content and build these fantastic big product interfaces. Yeah, they're gonna beat us and they deserve to beat us, right? Because they're spending the money on it. And that's something I come into a company into, when we with SEO, as I say, like, do you deserve to rank for this? And, you know, sometimes the answer is yes. And then there's some technical problems, you can fix up and get that. But in this case here, right? Do we deserve to rank for it with our current stuff right now? Probably not. I wish we did. But the cost to get that to be able to be that competitive and the time to take it in? it'd be ridiculous and the entire exercise, you know, talking about measuring what we're doing and having an ROI, it would basically turn into a hobby, you know, because where we would spend the funds? But where we do have the advantage that these guys dont is we can rank for use case terms for cryptocurrency, where and then you'll be surprised how many people out there are saying like, what hotels accept Bitcoin, what hotels accept crypto, what hotels in this city accept this. We have all the partner tokens we have as well, too. And so a big project we're going through right now is where we're giving all these tokens what I call their travel homepage, which headline is like phantoms one is going fantastic. So I'll talk about Phantom for a minute. So it's like book hotels with Phantom FTM, book flights with Phantom, you know, FTM, book activities, etc. And then on that page, we build out all sorts of use case information about the token about decentralized, we don't talk about the team, but about what they've got going on and how they're growing. As we give this fantastic page that we do deserve to rank for times, like, what can I do with Phantom? Where can I spend my Phantom, can I travel with Phantom and so these kind of longtail terms, we do pick that up. And you can guess who's not working on those terms. It's not Expedia, it's not booking.com. It's not your big airlines out there. They're not focusing on that we are. And so we have this kind of way to sort of flank our opponents, I like to think about a lot of military terms with marketing that they're just not in that game. Now getting to how this can grow into a long term strategy is once you visit our site, you know, we, we have all the marketing stuff, I can know you're interested in crypto, because you've been to these pages per se, I can know that you're interested in, everyone sort of interested in travel, I'm going to show paid ads once you visited me organically, because I'm going to know this better than good chance that such and such when they're searching for, you know, flights from New York to Dubai, that that's one of my people. That's one of my people that I can get there. And that's when I share the ad and I bring it back. So we have an incredibly high conversion rate, with sem because we have that sort of strategy where it's it's literally our sales closer. Once we know who the interested parties are, we're not out there just sort of farming and trying to compete against these big big budgets. We put our numbers out there. So you can track in the monthly reports when we sort of started this strategy. And it really has just been trending up continuously. And the good thing about this is this is always on marketing. So it will keep scaling forwards. I hope I answered your questions that Matt and I went out a little bit. So you've just found something that I'm going to do

Matt Zahab: 14:31

No, phenomenal answer. Another thing that I love, and I'm going to get to this in one second, remind me to ask you building in public because you guys are doing that on Twitter. I absolutely love that building in public is so here. So what we have here isn't... we don't, first of all, important. Last question about SEO. When you Google Travala, you are the number one paid ad Of course. And then Travala.com is right under that as well. Why does Google make every company do that? Or why does every company choose to do that? we don't bid on our brand terms. So what you have is an affiliate scam. So somebody signed up to our affiliate program and it's doing the wrong thing who is running that ad? They've probably worked out that I'm in Australia and you're in Canada so that I'm not monitoring what goes on in Canada. So that is not us. That is someone who's paying to intercept our traffic. So at the end of this, I might get you to click on that that ad for me and tell me who that is because they're about to get banned. So that is a good thing. Like we don't actually pay for those ads. It is Yeah, affiliates who are doing the wrong thing and scamming us. You got it. I'll send you my Bitcoin address, you can send me a little present after the show, it all evens out in the wash. Going back to building in public, you talked about showing your monthly stats online. That was one of my questions I was going to ask is your partnership program with the coins and how you want these coins to show the utility, the travel utility and how you are the creme de la creme of the travel utility, this all comes back to square one, which is building in public? And how important is that to any brand and more specifically, how important is building public to crypto brands today?

Ben Rogers: 16:06

Um, you know, there are positives and negatives to this, right? There are positives in that we've basically been lucky with shy of two months, during the early days of COVID, we've pretty much month a month, I think we have today beaten every single month before. So it does create some excitement in the communities and does get some things moving forwards. But it does create pressure on us as well. You know, like if we've sort of announced that we're planning to release something, we have a public facing roadmap, we're planning to release something and it's not quite ready, you know, there's the decision of whether we release something that's not quite ready to keep the community happy, we hold back and we've already announced it, and then they're really sort of gonna hold your toes to the fire. So there are positives and negatives to this. My personal opinion is we actually do too much out in the open. And I think that there is actually an organizational factor, we're not getting things as up to the standard that I would like them to before we go out because there is that pressure from the community to sort of deliver the timelines that you said you would deliver. I think people do work under pressure that is on the flip side of that knowing that this pressure is that to deliver I'm sure it does have some ops. The delivering out in the public there are fantastic things that it does have for our token projects as well. So we can see, you know, you join a token, and you can see that they're actually spending with the utility, as we mentioned them, you know, we have the top 10 destinations each month as well, we have our monthly reports, and we will show what tokens are being regularly spent for traveling are actually sort of living on that use case, which for their projects is fantastic. Because that's why they partner with us is to demonstrate that that use case and show to their communities and get that out there as well. So I don't have really a positive or a negative or even my opinion on this question you've asked me changes so much, and whether it's a good or a bad thing, or what's the importance of it? Yeah, there are there are times that I wish we did it. And there were times that I'm glad we did report this out into the community. And maybe that's the thing about the transparency that you sort of like look for in the honesty from accompanies, they all sort of direct and out there. And that definitely does have some big positives. But it does have a negative impact on say, traditional investors or traditional people like I mean, Expedia doesn't have a community or you look at our engagement on Twitter, compared to say booking.com, or Expedia or these other big travel companies. We have so much more engagement than they do them. But that's because those guys don't really report on what's going on internally. They wait till it's finished. And then they release it and they go out there, they have to report to the markets.

Matt Zahab: 18:55

Ben, If I may jump in here, one of the things that I really admire about that is the trust aspect. When you see someone building in public, it's like, hey, these guys aren't just a couple of clowns who are trying to get rich and then do a big rug poll. You know, like when I see that building in public, I'm like, okay, I can get to know these guys, I've seen you inand your partners on different podcasts or on YouTube and I'm doing research for the show. Like I can put a face to the name and I can actually see envision how the company is growing. That means something for me and I know I'm not alone in that.

Ben Rogers: 19:27

Yeah, and like 100% sort of agree with that and like you look at some of our more like customer community managers. There was a segment that loves that we put everything out there as a segment that even though my light was something or it isn't quite right, we've got to spend some time absolutely love it and understand it and get it and then I probably like you and me because it because I feel the same way but it does create some trolls as well.

Matt Zahab: 19:52

Yes 100% I want to keep talking about some fun stuff here. I'm absolutely loving this marketing stuff and then we can get into the bread and butter of Travala. Social media. We just talked about Twitter, you guys are absolutely buzzing on social media, you have over 100,000 followers. As we discussed, Twitter's the bread and butter of the crypto verse. How the heck did you get to 100k? followers? What's the secret sauce, you got to give me some

Ben Rogers: 20:14

Yeah, rinse and repeat. So regular posts, we leveraged the communities and stuff we have. So the other partner tokens there as well, we leverage the product that we have. So you will see we regularly putting posts out for all, you know, we'll feature one token and one fantastic travel product that we have there as well too. And the communities love it, they get behind it, and they push it forwards. We have sort of giveaways that we do from time for getting involved with it. But we're not a giveaway channel in any means shape or form. So we have all that that quality content that we do. We treat all of our projects and partner projects in their communities equally, regardless of their size, or how high up you know the coin rankings they are as well with all the activities we do. And I think we get a lot of appreciation from that, that we are out there sort of walking the walk. And you're right, we hit 100,000. That was like two weeks ago. And I think we hit 110 like like a week later. And my personal goal is that we take booking.com's number by the end of the year on Twitter. But look, it's just continuous small things. Going back to what we do, we measure stuff as well too. So if you will mind through our Twitter feeds, you might notice there was some things we're doing quite regularly. And in the beginning, they were working and then over the time, they kind of diminished and then they went away. We're evolving the channel as we go. We're looking for new big ideas to keep going on. We're well aware of what our costs are to acquire new followers as well. And so if we were doing any sort of paid or sponsored activities, like I know the number that you need to kind of promise me you're going to hit for me to say, you know, that's what I'm doing. Be a consistency, and quality, quality, like I don't like it when we put out tweets, and I hope there won't be too much in there. That isn't interesting, that doesn't have a nice picture that isn't gonna make you kind of stop for a second and take an extra look. And this probably goes into how I like to game Twitter's algorithm a little bit. So we talked about Google, you know, wanting to be the best information for the best people, Twitter, Facebook, these platforms, what they sell is people's engagement, and they sell them to advertisers. And so if you're putting posts out there that people aren't engaging with the people don't looking at that they're not stopping at Twitter's gonna show you stuff less and less and less, because they're taking care of that business model, which is getting eyeballs on that platform. So they can sell ad space, right? Fundamentally, that's it. So we have the travel. And we have these communities. So we kind of get to sort of micro zoom into all these little parts of Twitter's machine, that means we stay relevant and interesting. And as we get more tokens on board that scales up for us, as more people keep being engaged with these contents in their various little pools, that scales up for us as well.

Matt Zahab: 23:04

And you also have the ultimate ultimate cheat code, which is being a travel company. So you get to post these beautiful luxurious photos of beaches and villas and just the craziest, the most incredible travel spots around the world. That's got to be a nice cherry on the cake.

Ben Rogers: 23:20

Oh, yeah, that's fantastic. That's much better. You know, like most crypto projects get to short candles, we can show a beach.

Matt Zahab: 23:28

That is that's huge. couple more questions about social here. Everyone is jumping on to tik tok train. I know Tik Tok has banned a lot of crypto folks as well. What's your take on Tik Tok? Do you think it's here for the long run?

Ben Rogers: 23:39

Yes, I think Tik Tok for the long run is one of our fastest growing channels. And we're doing nothing about it really, like we have a password and things but people are out there reviewing either our token or our project and the engagement there is insane. And then those videos are coming across to other platforms and engagement there is also insane. I think it's Yeah, I mean, the only thing that would sort of stop it down as if you know, there was some kind of regulation that shut tik tok down but it's Yeah, I think Instagram scared. I mean, Facebook's even scared about it as well, too. They haven't been able to sort of evolve to match it. Yeah, it's part of the future. And it's part of the media mix now.

Matt Zahab: 24:25

Any advice for kicking off that algo because, again, I don't know if this is true or not, but I've read some stuff. And I've heard some crazy stories that they're actually like, a couple, you know, 10 20 30,000 employees, who when you get on to Tik Tok, they actually look at what you watch, and then you know, punch in some code or punch in a bunch of keywords themselves that then triggers the algo that's part of the reason why it's so popular again, that could be sly. I could be reading too much of the onion or whatever, some folks new site, but any tips or tricks to gamify that Tik Tok algo

Ben Rogers: 24:57

I'll be very honest with you I didn't know much about Tik Tok. No, I don't know much about how it works beyond what the platform does. I haven't done any sort of deep diving into that one yet.

Matt Zahab: 25:08

So you're literally just throwing out content and it just catches like wildfire

Ben Rogers: 25:12

It's just people are creating content for us for free and it's catching like wildfire. It is purely organic driven growth that we have on Tik Tok is insane. And so there's the part of me that's like, I don't want to stuff up something that's working.

Matt Zahab: 25:26

Very interesting. I respect the angle. I feel like if my feet were in your shoes, I'd be triple and quadrupling down on that. hammering it away. But hey, you seem to know what you're doing. Last couple socials to talk about, discord, and telegram creating communities. Without a community in crypto, you're toast, you're burnt toast. What's the secret sauce for creating communities?

Ben Rogers: 25:51

Have a great product. You know, attract great people who really care about it, who really see where it's going and believe in it. Put the legwork in the beginning to you know, to keep growing these people keep bringing in some other things. They call them true fans, you know, keep growing these true fans. And then the community will take care of itself. I have another saying that's not there which is like I'd rather sell to one person and 10 people 10 people than 100 100 than 1000. Right? Yeah. Because at some point in time, you lose the ability to be able to personally go out, sit down with someone hear their pain points and explain how your product will fix the grant. In the early days, you've got to have those small conversations and create those advocates, because then that will scale forwards. And then I think which is fascinating with this too. You'll even end up with people who if you've done a good job, and they really believe in what you're doing. They will be more passionate about your project and maybe you will.

Matt Zahab: 26:50

It's very true. But there's I forget who this is. And I'm shooting myself in the foot for this. I should know it's one of my favorite podcasts the Tim Ferriss show. I want to say what I'm not going to try but anyways, the 1000 true fan rule. It's in his book tools of Titans. If you have 1000 true fans and those fans will buy anything you put out, say listen to anything you say do what you do, you are set for life. Once you hit that 1000 true fan mark, you're off to the races. Imagine a crypto project and there are probably 1000s of them that have 1000 true fans and then they tell another 10 and those 10 tell another 10 it's off to the races and the rest takes care of itself. Speaking of going off to the races, if you are a betting fan or a poker player, you got to check out coin poker the world's premier revolutionary blockchain technology based app that was developed by an incredible team of poker lovers and sports gamblers. They use USDT as the main in game currency and $CHP is in game fuel. $CHP is pretty much like a stable coin during a little crash to three months ago, it stayed and held its course and it's still doing great. Coin poker also offers instant and secure transactions using tether Ethereum Bitcoin or $CHP tokens. And one of the best parts if you want to fly under the radar, there is no KYC takes two minutes, throw your info in and you are dancing enrollments and you're off to the races. And my favorite part personally is probably the mobile app. When I'm on the go, I can whip up my phone, play a couple hands of Texas Hold'em or bet on sports, great spreads, razor thin spreads and the best part again instant secure transactions quick payouts and no KYC. Head on over to coin poker.com and do check them out. Ben, your poker guy at all? If you and I are playing Texas what two cards you want in the whole?

Ben Rogers: 28:32

Oh pocket aces,

Matt Zahab: 28:33

Pocket aces all day. You're a math guy. I love that. I am very excited to finally jump into Travala. Now before we get into it, this is probably an obvious question. But I do love the name it really rips and rolls off the tongue. Is there any meaning to the name? Travala besides the fact that it has travel, and it just sounds awesome.

Ben Rogers: 28:53

I had exactly the same question when I joined the company for the CEO. And I'm going to give you the same answer he gave me. We just thought it sounded good.

Matt Zahab: 29:05

I was thinking in my head I'm like, am I gonna get me something good here but honestly, yeah, that's it sounds great. It's comes up on SEO. It moves the needle. So that's all it is. We haven't really fully got into what Travala does, however, I'm sure I guess are fully aware of it by now. But just in case. Give me the lowdown, give me the 32nd elevator pitch on what exactly Travala does.

Ben Rogers: 29:27

Yeah, we're an online travel agency for hotels, flights activities. I think we have millions and millions of products. We let you book with crypto as well as credit cards. Our rewards program is powered by our in token $AVA., and yo get discounts as you go up th tiers on your travel purchases We also have a top tie concierge service, which is fo crypto whales looking fo private jets and service ove price those kind of drea vacations and we can provide yo with absolutely movie star typ trips. So yeah we're a trave platform for crypto

Matt Zahab: 30:04

So if I wanted to use my crypto and when I do some traveling, I will definitely use Travala. You won't be getting my Bitcoin or my Ethereum, but any other coins, I'm more than happy to send your way, hoddling most for life. So it is what it is. But let's say I want to go to some, you know, nice hotel in Dubai, or in Paris or London wherever the case may be. Now, when I booked through your site, if I'm paying you and let's call it tether, is that hotel accepting the tether that I gave you? Or are you accepting my tether and then paying them and their local fiat currency? How does that work?

Ben Rogers: 30:40

That's exactly it. We're accepting the tether and then we're paying them in fiat. So they're able to accept the booking as if it came from anyone else

Matt Zahab: 30:47

Has any hotel or maybe, you know, lodge or group partnership, have any of them been like, just give me the crypto? I'll take it?

Ben Rogers: 30:55

Yeah, we're starting to get suppliers who are interested in taking the crypto depending on what it is like it's a really sort of early conversations we're starting to have with them. We sort of signed the supplier this week who actually was happy to take the crypto. But look, it's a new thing that's coming, it's a new thing that that's coming out. Hotels still have to pay their staff, they still have to pay their bills, they still have to be able to put the money in and you know, be able to account for it for taxes. So for these businesses to accept crypto, there's a lot of sort of legwork behind the scenes that needs to go into place. But I believe as we go along, we will see more and more who will kind of say yeah, we're happy with the crypto

Matt Zahab: 31:37

How do you in the team deal with the volatility of crypto? Because that must be a little bit of a shit show.

Ben Rogers: 31:43

So the type of transaction you've just spoken about there, the moment you sort of buy it, it's basically an exchange transaction. So we're swapping for, we're giving you the value that we can get on an exchange for the crypto and the transactions happening immediately.

Matt Zahab: 31:55

So there's really no exposure on your end?

Ben Rogers: 31:57

There's no exposure on our end. We do hold some crypto ourselves too. We've put some of the the company's Treasury into bitcoin and stuff as well. And then that kind of has been less than a happy story in the last couple of months but we seem to be getting back to where we were but yeah, that's the only exposure we would have.

Matt Zahab: 32:14

Nice that's a treat.$AVA., when I looked at the char for that when this first came o my radar a couple months ago was shooting myself in the foo because you're all time low believe was I want to say nin cents and we are north of $2 no and why quick math, whateve that is a couple 1,000% of al time it's a tradable coin is great coin. Now at the top eigh use cases of $AVA. You have th smart program, payment, bookin repurchasing plan spend in shop you can pay your bills with $AV. rewards program, sorry, t e review rewards which is comi g soon, And travel ads, which I love is also coming soon. If I am talking face to face wi h you, like I am right now telli g you I should buy some $AV

Ben Rogers: 33:01

Do you like traveling?

Matt Zahab: 33:02

Often. You got me.

Ben Rogers: 33:03

Yeah. Do you want to pay less for the same hotels as he would pay on Expedia?

Matt Zahab: 33:08

Of course.

Ben Rogers: 33:08

Then buy some $AVA lock it up. And you know if i we keep engaging and gettin more people in the world, I' not going to speculate on price but just take a look at ou growth for the last year. An imagine that continues 10 year time. You know, you coul unstake that and then think bout what that might be worth

Matt Zahab: 33:26

I think that's a video that needs to happen right there, little pitch for for the folks on the internet. Exactly what you did to me right there. That's a great one, like, you know, you get a cartoon going, are you in someone else? Do you like traveling? Again? I've never met someone who doesn't like traveling. And do you want to spend less on travel? Yes, boom buy $AVA.. Well, that seal the deal right there. Tell m more about the review reward and travel ads, which are comin soon

Ben Rogers: 33:50

They're still a fair way down the pipeline, this was something that was sort of promised, in the very early days. The top level plan for the review rewards is that instead of using things like trustpilot that we do now, we would use sort of outline, and we would sort of like, you know, incentivize people to give an honest review, there's this talk that we could potentially be proving that people were at the hotel as well. And then yeah, you would be giving a review, you know, there would be some kind of reward there. That's the one as well. Travel ads one, again, sort of a top level pitch of where that would go that will allow sort of hotels to get themselves higher up our search results and sort of be able to power that with $AVA. and again top levels and no promises her with where that would go There's ideas being throw around. Potentially the hotel themselves would becom customers I would say of th token to sort of like buy thos ad units in places

Matt Zahab: 34:50

Wow, that's hockey stick growth right there.

Ben Rogers: 34:52

Yeah, yeah. And then yeah, it's a long way down the line. It's still in the white paper was still talking about it, obviously. So it hasn't been something that's kind of been ruled out as too hard or no viable or there wasn't market demand for it, there is. Yeah, that will be joining us at some point in the future.

Matt Zahab: 35:11

You are one of the few people who have a very deep understanding of crypto and marketing. And I'm very curious to ask, Where do you think money and time is being wasted in crypto projects. More specifically, how are people wasting their marketing budget and crypto projects?

Ben Rogers: 35:28

Influencer marketing, you know, like, if you have real influences to get out there and move the needle, it is fantastic. But it seems like every man and his dog can just be an influencer and claim stuff and claim to have a lot of followers and, you know, obviously measuring the benefits on what things do like going back to my things that are about if you can't measure it, you shouldn't do it. That's definitely a big waste there as well. I do think like, there is so many people who just think that to do marketing, you know, you got to do social media and the definition of that to them, is have a social media account and just share anything and everything. Like that, that to me, you're just damaging, you're spending money on it, whether it's your time or someone else's time you doing it, you're just damaging your rankings and your reputation in the algorithm on whatever channel it is, and reducing the chances that when you do have real news to put out there that it's going to be seen. They would be the the two biggest sort of wastes that I see are, the other one is probably more of a product waste. I see a lot of people out there who may be going into crypto early, have done quite well for themselves, and are now trying to start their own projects. But they don't know anything about product. They don't know anything about sort of UX user experience. They're not open to the fact of sort of listening to ideas that maybe they don't really agree with. And so I see a lot of crappy products that are coming out from there, this misconnection between one sort of skill set and what can be delivered. So the summarizing that I think a lot of money is wasted on design and development that's not properly planned out. And while it, you know, might seem like not much money, that not much money does add up to a fair bit, and particularly if you have to go and get a rebuild on something, you've probably wasted a lot of cash, mistakes I've personally made as well, by the way. So on that last one.

Matt Zahab: 37:30

That compounds in negative way. You have got the pleasure of working for Google, which is you know, top five company, arguably one of the best companies to ever exist. What are some of the things that you learned at Google that you brought over to Travala?

Ben Rogers: 37:44

Really learn how to sell stuff. It's also sort of in a sales role back then. I like to sell stuff. Yeah, I was I learned how to... the difference between like influencing and selling and those things to try to get ideas of stuff that you wanted to do through or how do you get people who have conflicting priorities to you but you need them to do stuff to move the needle. So there's a lot of sort of business interpersonal skills, It's the right word, that I sort of picked up and learned from. I've been mainly a huge fan of G Suite, right. Like, I know, they still made office like Microsoft Office, I guess they do. Someone told me they did the other day, right? So I haven't used that for like, like 10 years. And no, It was fantastic. But now look at what it wasn't really sort of any technical skills that I learned it was a lot about more about how to conduct yourself in a workplace to get stuff done.

Matt Zahab: 38:47

Interesting. That's, yeah, that's interesting and thought provoking and shout out G Suite. Man, like, I just think of my work day, like I'm looking at the tabs I have open right now. I have a sheets tab open. I have a docs tab open, I have three different inboxes and two different calendars. And that's just Google, like, the absolute best. That's man Oh, man, just one of the things that no one's really greateful for and it's free to, you know, I'm like, Yeah, come on. He doesn't get much better than that.

Ben Rogers: 39:18

Its fantastic tool. I mean we're on the paid versions and stuff now as well. But like, Google has it set, you know, you get people using great products for free. And then when they're ready to buy them, you're still not taking a huge amount of money from them. It's all very reasonable. So I never feel like I've been ripped off by a product that I've bought from Google.

Matt Zahab: 39:40

RT that. Couple more questions and and then we're done, Ben, but this has been a treat. Thank you. The future of crypto and travel. Of course, Travala has something to do with that. But Travala aside, maybe some of the fundamental aspects. Maybe some of the qual and Quan. Where's the future of those two intersections look like?

Ben Rogers: 39:59

The future of, so blockchain and travel and the technology that's going to come out I think there are loads of things. I think travel is a space that blockchain makes a lot of sense for. You know, I could see inventory management systems for hotels eventually being blockchain based when you have multiple places where you can buy particular rooms, I've been in the situation where I think I've bought a room at the same time someone has at the other side, there hasn't been a second one and the transaction went missing, you know, confirming that that room was booked, you know, there's a fantastic use case there. And then applies to sort of like flight seats. We're seeing and I know this there's two sides to this argument. But I'm seeing like blockchain used as a way to sort of have COVID passports as sort of people want to reopen the world and get there and prove they're vaccinated and and allow governments to reopen and tourism industries as well .I see that as sort of an immediate benefit for crypto as we go into the future crypto as well too, it's it's much easier to sort of cross borders with crypto in your wallet as well too, it's kind of in the cloud, then you want to use to have to pass you had to declare how much money you had access to in a bank account or how much cash you have as well to those sorts of questions and days are going to be gone when everyone's money is effectively in the cloud as well. So that's going to have some big changes to the way we move around the world. I think even passports in general there's a case for being able to prefer, you know, prove that a passport is genuine, when you sort of crossing border checkpoints and things as well which will have fantastically positive things for security of nations and stuff as well. And, you know, definitely will make espionage harder, you know, to sort of sneak into countries around the globe when you know they can just charm a border security guard that literally This is a new you know, so I think it's a space where we're gonna see lots of innovations coming out in the next 10 years. I think air traffic control towers stuff like that as well like locations or planes you know, making you know maybe even making plane crashes impossible if someone works that out. But there's lots that can happen with blockchain and travel

Matt Zahab: 42:17

Ben, this has been an absolute treat. Before I let you go here any questions for me?

Ben Rogers: 42:22

When are we playing poker?

Matt Zahab: 42:24

Hey, we can get a little coin poker account going and I'll play any time. It has to be, we'd have to find a healthy median time because it's almost 9pm for me and I'd assume 9am for you and that makes a little tough but I'd rather go meet you in Brisbane and see in person and play a couple games poker

Ben Rogers: 42:45

Well maybe we'll have to schedule that in the future we'll make a little pact here that next next five years we'll we'll play hand in person.

Matt Zahab: 42:52

100%. Ben, absolute treat learned a ton, had a blast. Appreciate you coming on and round two in the near future is penciled in.

Ben Rogers: 43:00

Thanks, Matt.

Matt Zahab: 43:01

Folks, this was Ben from tovala.com. Hope you had a blast listening to this episode. I certainly had a blast speaking with Ben learned a ton big marketing fan, tons of knowledge and tons of tidbits, actual tidbits that we can take away and use it this as always, we're dropping episodes on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the summer. We'll be back to three episodes a week when September rolls around. Appreciate y'all love y'all hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. Great Day. Great evening, great afternoon. Wherever you are, love you stay safe and we'll keep in touch bye.