We dive into the future of web 3 advertising as we sit down with Oleksii, the founder and CEO of Slice, a cutting-edge player in the Web3 advertising space.
Imagine a world where advertisers can connect directly with Web3 users through dApps, creating a more transparent, efficient, and personalized experience. Slice is making this possible, using wallet data over cookies and prioritizing quality over quantity. We peel back the layers on their innovative approach, discuss the core principles driving their mission, and get Oleksii's unique insights on the future of the Web3 ad market.
And to wrap it up, we open the floor for a deep-dive conversation on the mechanics of advertising in the Web3 space. Packed with valuable insights on optimizing advertising funnels, overcoming the challenges of conversion tracking, and the potential of integrating crypto into everyday life.
We dive into the future of web 3 advertising as we sit down with Oleksii, the founder and CEO of Slice, a cutting-edge player in the Web3 advertising space.
Imagine a world where advertisers can connect directly with Web3 users through dApps, creating a more transparent, efficient, and personalized experience. Slice is making this possible, using wallet data over cookies and prioritizing quality over quantity. We peel back the layers on their innovative approach, discuss the core principles driving their mission, and get Oleksii's unique insights on the future of the Web3 ad market.
And to wrap it up, we open the floor for a deep-dive conversation on the mechanics of advertising in the Web3 space. Packed with valuable insights on optimizing advertising funnels, overcoming the challenges of conversion tracking, and the potential of integrating crypto into everyday life.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Crescendo Go to Market podcast, and today we have Alexi from Slice, one of the first Web3 ad networks. Alexi, why don't you introduce yourself and what Slice is? Yeah?
Speaker 2:sure. So I'm Alexi, founder and CEO at Slice, maybe just starting from my personal background. Multimaker year was in research, so I started from doing research in physics and then switched to computer science and eventually ended up doing like academic research in AI. So published a number of papers, went to conferences and been doing it across institutions like Facebook, air Research and Oxford, but eventually felt that I want to apply my knowledge and my expertise to solving real world problems. So shifted to startups, played around for a bit, built a few smaller products, different social products, different media channels, eventually stumbled on the larger idea where, together with my co-founder, we founded our first company called Suggester. It was a web2 company in personalization for e-commerce space. It went quite well. We went with it through IC, but eventually I'll tell you the story, what happened to Suggester but eventually it drove us to Web3.
Speaker 2:So now I'm working on this new company called Slice which, basically, doing very simple thing, solves very obvious problems. As we think about it Basically, we just help projects reach Web3 users and we want to do it the most efficient way, the most transparent way, by using wallet data instead of cookies. Yeah, why we do it? Because we weren't in the space for a bit. We saw the situation with Web3 marketing. We think that it's disastrous. Right now it still replicates the early days of the internet, where people use primitive, not data-driven techniques. Everything was just breaking up and users were no retention, no good metrics around user acquisition, no proper tools, and now we kind of see it's changing and Slice, being on the middle layer of this funnel where we are responsible for the actual traffic, for connecting advertisers to the end users, helping them to capture user attention and bring it to their products. Now we want to power this layer of the growth ecosystem by enabling the most efficient way to reach these users and to acquire Got it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really fascinating.
Speaker 2:All right. So how we do it is basically we built a Web3 native ad network by connecting publishers who, in our case, are the apps, so the Web3 native applications who have existing user bases, who solve other problems like it's going to be DeX, wallets Analytics tools, things like that and bringing in their audience to advertisers. And basically we power this middle layer by enabling advertisers to run advertising campaigns on these dApps, kind of in the basically first time possible, by not placing ads on the media channels or social networks but on the actual dApps. So we kind of enabling it with all the tech around campaign creation, targeting, analytics and things like that. And so far the product been live for quite some time.
Speaker 2:We still quite early, but we already saw good traction, good proofs from the market that what we are doing is actually needed, that we solve a really painful problem which has been proven by really big brands in the space using us even such early days. So now we're working with PayPal, we're working with Metamask, we're working with a lot of kind of bigger brands across BTC and B2B and, yeah, again, being very early product, we already captured more than a million of unique users. So far it's been great, very excited to work on Slice and to help basically shape Web Stream marketing for the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I personally think Slice is a very exciting project.
Speaker 1:I think the fact is that there's really not many solutions for good Web3 native advertising and I do think Slice is solving a major problem, and I think ad networks are one of the 100x opportunities in the space.
Speaker 1:So I am very excited to see what's coming and I do feel that advertisers get involved early. Start testing with ad networks that are out now, like Slice, because you will be the first to really be able to take advantage of, like when the next bull run, the next cycle happens, because you kind of need to obviously learn how to use these platforms, like the data is. You know is kind of like you basically have to feed data into these algorithms, right, like I imagine, for you guys, if you're working with an advertiser, and the more data you have, the better results you can get. So I do think it's important for advertisers, even if right now it's not like the biggest volume or even if it's not the most profitable, start messing around with this and start like actually running campaigns, just so you can start feeding data into these systems and be ready for scaling when the time comes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean even fast, kind of just taking time to build out the product. You know work on the feedback, you know, continuously improve it. So when the big wave comes now, we are ready to take it.
Speaker 1:Exactly Now. Obviously you're building slice now, but I do want to take a step back into kind of your journey and especially you know you did Facebook research. You did research for Facebook right Like you basically were helping them with AI. Could you go into that and how that affected your decision to become an entrepreneur and what you were doing there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So you know I went to Facebook right from the school, you can say, and I did my master, but after my master I went to Facebook. So it was my first like corporate career, corporate experience. It was quite interesting. You know I also was in Headquarters in Manlow Park, so it was my first time in the US. So yeah, it was quite, quite big experience, quite new for me from the school to go through all of it. I would say I liked it overall. You know it's a very comfortable place to work, just nice. You know work-life balance, other things.
Speaker 2:But again, you know, being super young, ambitious, kind of, I felt a bit stagnating. And also, you know I wasn't super excited about research at that point. You know the big there was some AI hype before, you know, and but the current AI hype wave hasn't come yet. So it was some kind of, let's say, kind of bear market. But yeah, you know, ai research was just an industry like any other research A lot of science, a lot of mass, a lot of bullshit with like conferences, reviews, was the journals, like academic stuff which really nobody wants to deal with. So you know, a lot of kind of hard efforts for very, I would say disproportionate returns, because now research is really really hard. But you know, I didn't feel that I'm getting rewarded for it like in the right way, you know, for the amount of effort I put into it. And apart from that, yeah, you know, I just started feeling that like, you know, whether it's really something for me, whether I want to spend all my life doing it and looking at all the professors and all the kind of renowned scientists in the lab and it didn't look like a very exciting future for me. And yeah, and I suppose, and because, being in the Silicon Valley, there was this whole world of startups where people actually doing similar things, or sometimes even much easier things, but they solve real problems with it and they capture value much more efficiently. So at some point I got really interested in this whole kind of industry in this market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, eventually I decided to try. You know I had no experience in entrepreneurship. I mean, I had little experience, but like nothing kind of serious, nothing very technical. But I felt like, okay, you know, if not now, then when? Because it was time when I had some savings. You know I was still young, I didn't have family and kind of commitments. It was, you know, my time to try.
Speaker 2:So basically now for some time, for a few months, I just was on my own, you know, trying different ideas using different no-code tools which were quite popular back then, trying basically to, you know, earn money like out of the sea and air, just based on my experience and based on my ideas. It was quite an interesting experience. Nothing out of it, I would say, worked. Yeah, there was like one product which I sold, which was like a news channel, very interesting product which is still alive today and still working, but apart from that, nothing really huge came out of it. But then what happened then? It's very interesting.
Speaker 2:So I got into, like Accelerator, you know, slash Incubator called Entrepreneur First and there are basically a couple of them. It's like Entrepreneur First and Antler. You know, they are very different from typical startup accelerators as we know them because they like to invest like in talent, not in the companies, but just in talent in people. So they kind of they get founders at really early stages without even ideas, without teams. They put them all into like one pool and they, you know, hope that companies will come out out of it and then they fund these companies. So that's how I started my kind of startup journey more seriously. You know already we've got founder, which is Huma Huma, founding EF. Yeah, I moved to Singapore and that's kind of where Suggestor journey started.
Speaker 1:Got it and Suggestor is basically it was like recommendation engine for e-commerce stores. So, yeah, what was Suggestor exactly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. You know there are multiple ways you can call it. It's like we can call it, you know, first part data management solution, or you can call it like a recommendation engine, or you can call it AI for e-commerce. But in the end, yeah, we just took any data which was available on the Shopify stores, you know, from their users, from their storefronts. We pulled it, we put it in our models. You know where kind of I could apply my expertise, you know, to be a building kind of this really smart kind of models which then would spit out like recommendations what we should show to this specific user. You know how to upsell and cross sell different e-commerce items to them.
Speaker 1:Got it and I know you guys got some solid momentum. You guys also, I believe, got into Icompany over that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so after EF we went forward and we raised more money, we went live, we were featured on Shopify homepage. Imagine kind of you work with 150 brands or so. And yeah, we went through Icompinator Winter 22 batch Got it.
Speaker 1:And then what ended up happening with that? What were kind of like the, I guess lessons learned or what ended up? You know what was the evolution of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I mean it was kind of wild decision because on the paper everything looked kind of really well. You know we were growing, we started hitting first revenue, you know Icompinator kind of recognition, good brand generally things. They looked well, you know, and in fact they did go well, you know it. For that point in time it was really kind of good place to be. But, you know, carrying over the US founders, you know we looked at, you know our projections, so where we are heading, and at this point you know we tried different growth tactics, we tried different channels. You know we looked at our competitors, we looked at our client base and basically, you know we felt that you know there was kind of two big problems which eventually led us to shut down.
Speaker 2:Suggestor is that we first we felt that product market feed was not strong enough. So it still kind of was it was useful for our audience, for our users, but not useful enough, you know, to pay a lot for it to make kind of our B2B unit economics actually work. So it was kind of there was some fit but it wasn't kind of, you know, very hot. And secondly, because we operated specifically on this market of SMB stores and kind of mom and pop stores and Shopify, because that's kind of where we saw opportunity, because, you know, of course, Amazon's and big players, they have their solutions in place already. Now our whole thesis was to bring the advanced tools, like kind of advanced personalization, from Amazon to these kind of small SMB stores.
Speaker 2:But then, yeah, look at this market and actually realize that it's quite limited, you know, in terms of, like, their paying capabilities. It was quite small for us to build something huge out of it and, of course, because we developed it by the venture model, you know it, it only made sense to do it for us and for investors if it could be like a unicorn. And even though we had revenue, in terms of, we had traction, we saw that, okay, it will take us either too long or, you know, we won't be able to make it at all to this huge status. And it it made more sense to us to just return the money and say like, hey, you know, here's the situation. As soon as we realized that we cannot fulfill this potential, these expectations, just to turn the money and decided to focus our time and our efforts on something that actually can fulfill this potential.
Speaker 1:Got it. So I guess the issue was that the smaller E-comp stores they didn't really have the budget and it wasn't creating enough of a lift, I guess, for them to justify paying, let's say, like what they would pay for an agency, right, like so, basically, and were you guys selling kind of like a Shopify app or?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it was Shopify app. I mean we could expand beyond that, but in the end, yeah, the issue was that it still was an optimization level solution where we could improve your performance by like a few percentage points. And for big stores, who make like hundreds of millions, this couple of percentage points makes a lot of difference. But for the small stores, they literally have like so many other problems on top of their minds, like with fulfillment, customer support, other things, the shipping, that is, optimization of user experience. A couple of percentage points for from app sales were not such a painful issue to pay a lot for that.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, I mean that totally makes sense and I come from that world as well of like a lot of direct to commerce and I would say that most small store owners are not that sophisticated when it comes to tech and it's just. I can see the challenges of scaling to them unless you're able to go for those big stores that are paying like a hundred million or, sorry, that are doing a hundred million, 200 million a year in revenue. I kind of think that if it wasn't a VC backed venture, if it was more bootstrapped and you also bundled it with an agency model, that would be a really interesting like business model, almost like getting acquired by a large direct to commerce agency, because you give them like an edge in terms of their optimization and then, because it's being paired with optimization efforts on the agency's part, the value of the services become higher.
Speaker 2:Did you ever think about that, or was that ever like a consideration in terms of a potential pivot or we thought about that, you know, when we looked for like potential synergies, when you know we wanted to exit and then it still was kind of hard just because of the logistics of it. You know like code base. You know the whole operations was kind of a bit tricky but still, you know you should understand that Shopify market is quite competitive. You know, first it's small but you know it has kind of its leaders. There are also kind of a lot of different players. There are a kind of, so to say, like developers you know could do a lot of different things together.
Speaker 2:So yeah, kind of you know they can play synergy kind of between different apps. And yeah, again, most money are to be made on these larger accounts which you know. Actually on Shopify you have the Shopify Plus plan, whereas in now it's around like 2,000 stores, so kind of it's like premium Shopify plans for larger stores. But you know there are still just 2,000 of them and you know how big of the market could they make. So that kind of was our concern, that you know like there was limited room to show, even if you would want to scale more aggressively.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's really like a red ocean, Like you said right, like a lot of Shopify developers. While I think the web-free space definitely let's get to that, why did you decide to get into web-free?
Speaker 2:I think it was exactly that reason that, you know, being directed in the photo of this continuous competition and, you know, very small margins on this very dense, very optimized market of e-commerce. You know, looking at web-free from that perspective was like, yeah, completely empty fields where anything you would take just not just would start growing because there's literally no one else doing it yet and, you know, still very obvious, very painful ideas and very painful problems are still yet to be solved. So it looked like, you know, much more like, first, easier play. Secondly, you know, more convincing. You know. So like, oh yeah, I know that I'm solved, something people actually need.
Speaker 2:And of course, you know the whole potential of web-free market also, you know, looked quite exciting, you know, back then when we started.
Speaker 2:Now probably it's a bigger question, you know that is always still belief in it.
Speaker 2:But when we started, you know when the like somewhere goes to the end of the bull run, I mean big motivation for me, apart from just the whole market perspective, was that I saw a lot of very smart people coming into this space and even though you know I was, I didn't really dig too deep into, like you know, economics or the like tech of crypto market, trying to understand whether it actually will be future or not. I just, you know, I basically bet on all these people, all the developers whom I saw, you know, shifting into crypto, into web-free, from all the different kind of areas like you know AI, research, different other scientific fields, you know and it was like it looked convinced enough for me to understand something is cooking and something will be, something will come out out of that. So that's kind of how my interest in web-free market arose. From all these people you know all this movement, all this development which was going on and you know amount of opportunity in the space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when did you start building? Slice, slice it started.
Speaker 2:Like you know, we went through YC in winter. We had the day end of March, start of April. You know, right there it decided to shut down and right there it decided to continue with Slice. Because you know, we had this motivation to just let's continue. You know, I think you know, we didn't want to feel that, oh, you know we didn't work out or we need to stop. It was like, yeah, we make this decision, it makes sense, but we still motivated to continue. Let's continue right ahead. So I think the can you break. And in the May of 2022, when I remember yesterday's when Lunacrushed, basically I started my major in Web3.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it made sense because I think that's around that period is when a lot of the web three MarTech products start started building, because everybody realized, okay, this is going to be pretty big, but everybody also realized that the growth tooling in the space was completely non-existent. There's really no infrastructure for growth and I feel like there was a big cohort of like this last bull run, where you know, a lot of growth marketers came in from web two to start poking around and then you essentially have all of these MarTech startups starting up. So it's really interesting and I'm really glad to see that it's happening. And I do feel like it is the right time, where you know you start at the right time, where it's not too early, where PCs are like why, like this is, you know, not going to be needed, but it's like at that exact position when people are trying to figure out growth and you know there's this conversation. So the timing was impeccable, I think, for Slice.
Speaker 2:It was quite all right. You know, and even right now we feel that we are in this kind of cohort of new companies, like MarTech companies who started around the same period. You know, these are attribution tools and these different CRMs, you know, and surprisingly enough, there was like nice and pretty serious before, or nice and pretty new come-ups comes up after. So, yeah, you know we are moving together in this cohort, you know, basically talking to each other, seeing how we can develop this market, how it will grow. You know, kind of basically creating it from scratch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting. And I'm curious with Slice so far, how much volume have you seen? How much momentum have you seen? I'm just curious, like, what does the early stages of a Web3 ad network look like in terms of revenue or, like, I guess, spend by customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for the volume Also, volume for us is a bit of a vanity metric, because volume is very easy to get you know and it's very easy to get to the big number, but it's not always good, and I'll tell you why. Because you know the incumbents. We work against is, like you know, mostly you know where can you place ads. Now, mostly it's kind of media platforms like news websites, magazines, coin trackers, things like that. They don't have world connection. They had a lot of kind of organic traffic from all the different sources and, yeah, I mean their technical capabilities are quite limited.
Speaker 2:So when advertisers place their ads there, some of these, you know, biggest websites can have up to like 100 million of monthly hits. You know impressions, let's say. And then when we look at the diaprador, you know we see around 2 million of monthly active wallets on chain. So you know, and then you kind of get two and two together, seeing like that okay, we have two wall, two million of wallets, we're actual users who do something in crypto and you have 100 million of impressions which you serve to you know who knows whom, basically making kind of 98% of this spend completely relevant and go into waste.
Speaker 2:So far, you know it was kind of our mission from the one to just at least to cut off this irrelevant traffic, you know, and focus only on this kind of core audience or hardcore users. So you know, and yes, it's small, but you know it generates like 98% of the value. It's kind of, it's very skewed kind of this market and even now we don't try to scale a crazy, you know, diluting our quality. You know, on contrary, we moderate. You know, as we grow we must be moderate even harder. You know we curate our publishers even more strict just to ensure that our you know quality of this traffic, of this audience we want they look to this number.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So essentially it sounds like you're optimizing far more for quality and conversions versus just pure graphic and numbers.
Speaker 2:Yes, but was there was actual numbers? How can you represent it? Well, I mean, it's growing, you know, and like there are different months, you know we had months where we would double it, but right now we see some somewhere around two and three million of monthly impressions, and then it's not like it's a big part of this market. But you know, there's still still room to grow. But we kind of feel quite comfortable here. But we know that. Okay, we, we go to this point. But we are sure about our publishers, about our traffic. We tried more publishers and whatever didn't work, we filtered it out. So yeah, and you know, we only want to grow and increase this number. Even we find good publishers again, good traffic sources, which will make sense to add to this network.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. And how do you view, for example, gaming when it comes to your, both your publishing and demand demand side right? How do you view a vertical like gaming?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in the reality is like we don't see much of gaming, like, like you know, it doesn't happen, that doesn't come to our eyes, specifically on the advertising side. Because you know we also would expect that, like, yeah, we have three, we, you know, we sort of different verticals and we have publishers across DeFi, nft, gaming trading, things like that, and you would expect it. Of course it would make a lot of sense for web three games, like why are we three? What three gamers? Yeah, but surprisingly we don't see much of my marketing spend in our life, marketing efforts happening in the gaming space right now. And this is what we see, you know, in the web stream, native tools.
Speaker 2:Because also, kind of what we realized to this point, you know, being on the market talking to different players, is that for web three games, most of them, you know, would try to appeal to much wider audience of like general, general audience of web two users where they would abstract the world away. Like you know, they don't want to focus just on the metamask users you know, who made like a couple of millions of the whole audience. They would try to make just a good game. It would appeal to anyone in web two, and then you know it allows them to go outside of web three, advertise on, like meta, on Google, acquire just regular web two users, probably a fraction of the cost, because they don't need web three users. Yeah, and that's why I mean, and it makes sense for us. You know I would feel bad taking money, you know, kind of charging them for very expensive web three traffic if they don't need it. So I'll say, you know, in something like like us, like slice or in other web standard tools, they do make sense.
Speaker 2:If you know, there's been a lot of sense for products that need experienced web's native audience. You know who has wallets, we have some assets, we know what to do with them, how to trade them, how to exchange them. Yeah, and if it's the case, that's the most straightforward and the best way to acquire such audience. But if you don't need this users and all this prop, with all these properties, then it doesn't make sense to overpay for it. So maybe that's why, partially, we don't see so much gaming, and now the fact that I believe it's not being very active right now. So not so many games are launching these days, so it's also probably a factor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I think a lot of the Web3 games they're going for more Web2 users and I do agree that it seems like probably the niche that Slice is really tailored towards is perhaps DeFi, maybe a bit of social Fi. Would that be relatively accurate?
Speaker 2:A lot of DeFi. Nft also kind of is quite specific niche. We have some NFT analytics tools, we have some minting tools, but again for NFT we see kind of a similar picture where, even though we had some publishers, we didn't see a lot of demand for it. So again, how many collections have been launched and have been minted these days? Not so many. How many of them are actively advertising? Not so many. So we didn't see enough demand and in the end at this point of time most of our demand, of our customers, is coming from DeFi world, all kind of not like infra but like utility tools, like different wallets or security tools or things like that. But yeah, not many like specific consumer facing applications like NFT or games.
Speaker 1:Got it and what do you think is the most successful type of funnel you've seen so far in Veptery? Because obviously, as we get into ads, you're not just talking about ads, you're talking about what people do after they click on the ad, and a funnel, for those who don't know, is basically the landing page and the page after that. So would be interested on your thoughts on the best funnels you've seen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to talk about it because we don't do so much analytics on the actual page of the product. Now we work with attribution tools who help us with that, because we do want to account for this date and for this conversions, but it's a whole different product to do this kind of analytics. So what you know but of course we see stuff, you know we go through different advertisers, different campaigns I clearly can tell you know what doesn't work so clearly it clearly doesn't work is to send traffic to the discord. It doesn't work to send traffic to Twitter. Yes, again, and conversions are much lower from web to mobile apps.
Speaker 2:Because now, if it's like extra step of, you know, going to App Store, we can separate, you know we can segment traffic which would come from mobile. But again, doing this funnel, that like mobile browser and then mobile landing page, then going to App Store and downloading app, is a bit full of friction, so it doesn't work as well. Also, and yeah, the best funnels are the simplest, the most straightforward funnels where users get on some landing page, where there's very clear CTA straight on this landing page, whether it's going to fit in the form or maintain something or signing up, and that's so far you know, and it's all the same stuff from web to. But yeah, things like that work. And then, if it's all over, the steps. So basically, minimizing the number of steps and optimizing each of these steps separately produces the best results you should make sense, and are you, with Slice, able to track conversions back, or how do you deal with attributions and conversion tracking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean it was like a lagging couple of minutes, but I mentioned that we do work with attribution providers. So we have something on our own which we integrate now just to track clicks and kind of very basic information, but the whole attribution is completely different product which needs its own kind of analytics. It needs its own kind of integrations, data sources. So what we do, yeah, we partner with attribution providers with kind of other apps, you know other kind of players in our cohort and yeah, we exchange data with them because for them it makes sense to report, you know, also advertising spend, advertising impressions and things like that, while for us, you know, we capture all the data related to advertising. But we also want to know what's happened, what happens after. So we do show conversions in our dashboard, in our analytics page, but usually do it with help of other providers.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And final question, the trick question, the most important question what do you think is the vertical in Web 3 that's going to really take the crypto and Web 3 world mainstream?
Speaker 2:First of all, yeah, it's a really tricky question.
Speaker 2:A lot of people, you know, talk about gaming, you know, and though I believe like there's a lot of kind of good game being developed, I'm not sure how much they will help Web 3, right, because they actually we see that they tried to abstract it away, so how much it will affect I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I honestly believe in integration of like crypto in daily life and it's kind of been topic, you know, a long time ago, when people don't think what's that much, but we still see, you know, even with our clients and what people advertise, we see very interesting traction, you know, coming to these platforms where they allow to spend crypto on their physical world goods, different tickets or, you know, to pop your phone or things like that and, again, super primitive idea, but we see interest to that and I think you know, as a number of such opportunities, such ways to actually spend crypto and use it as actual fiat money, you know, indistinguishably, yeah, I think it can help with adoption for most consumer because, apart from that, yeah, a lot of things which we saw, they were based on speculation, so it's not really sustainable.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, there should be kind of utility and in the end of the day, you know, utility should come kind of from not just experts but regular users who can spend crypto in their daily life and use, you know, their MetaMask just like as I used to come maybe PayPal now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I've seen a lot of startups for that, like I think lowly was one that I recently saw and they're doing kind of like, I think you get Bitcoin back when you shop at different stores, and I believe they're getting a lot of success with that. So, yeah, it's really interesting to see these different I guess IRL use cases right, and then you also have these decentralized networks like for computing and you know, I think there's obviously helium for Wi-Fi and like connectivity. So, really interested in tip in like a decentralized infrastructure that uses blockchain. That's really interesting. And one question I do have is how can customers work with Slice? Do you guys have a minimum spend requirement? How do they reach out to you to learn more?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we just roll out our social interface, so something we will present gradually to more customers. But we are available by all the means he can reach us. Now, probably the best would be our website and there is kind of our email and our contact us form. That would be the best to start with, you know, for both publishers and advertisers. So I know for the. I mean for to clarify to people that we work as two-sided marketplace, where we have publishers who place advertising and whom we help to monetize by paying them, and we have advertisers who, whom we help to, whom we help to tap into audiences of these publishers by placing their ads there. So there's kind of a way to acquire users and advertisers pay us for the traffic and we pay publishers in the end. So for both publishers and advertisers we're happy to discuss, happy to meet new people contact us form would be the best way to start from there. Again, probably we would offer to open a call just to chat first to see what the needs, how we can help, if it's really a good fit, you know, if we can share more data from there. You know we have some kind of metrics and some new diligence information to share before we start, and then you basically kind of be shared that into the platform where they can start playing around and set up their campaigns, you know with different segments, with different filters. You know to control their CPM, their spend and things like that. For the minimum spend, I mean it changes with time. So I don't want, you know, just to be one number and the big one that after. But I would say I mean it probably makes sense to start like above $1000. Even smaller. It's hard to kind of make it work and even to see representative numbers, because the display ads is basically numbers game. You need to test a lot of things, you need to get a lot of traffic even to start seeing first results.
Speaker 2:So again, and I'm not really worried, you know telling that, even though it will discourage some potential users, because the worst we can deal with is the kind of too high expectations, when you know when Webstream marketers who never did marketing before they're like come to us and say, hey, here is $100. They want kind of 100 whales, can you give it to me? And you know the answer is no. You know, in fact, we just published on Twitter one research from a research company which showed the price of a cost of user acquisition for major kind of protocols through airdrops, looking at the retention of the few months at the price of token, what actually cost to get these users to use these protocols, and the minimum price is kind of above $1,000 for a single user. You know, for optimism, for Bitcoin, for protocols like that, it goes in thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, this pool is too small. The users who actually active users in Webstream, they are very valuable because they are willing to spend, they are willing to invest, they can generate a lot of value. But also advertisers need to know how to work with them and they need to be ready to test, to approach their marketing strategy seriously, you know, and not just to hope that they will, you know, just buy like whales for $1. So, yeah, I mean it will start probably somewhere from $1,000 and above, and you know. But there you have all the tools to actually measure the conversions. This is a measure, the CPC, the click rate. Try different creatives, try different formats, so it's all kind of possible and only this way it can actually work and be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So guys go check out Slice S-L-I-S-E dot X-Y-Z I think definitely one of the more interesting Web3 Martech products out there.