In this episode of the Digital Gold Mining Podcast, Kyle Reidhead from Milk Road discusses his entry into crypto and emphasizes the need to simplify its complexities to drive broader adoption, advocating for a focus on real-world utility. A key insight he shares is the “fat app thesis,” which suggests that future value will accrue to user-friendly applications built on blockchains, mirroring the internet’s evolution from fragmented protocols to dominant platforms. Kyle stresses the importance of building trust with audiences and recommends a long-term investment strategy, particularly in major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. He also details Milk Road’s growth, their acquisition strategy, and the launch of on-chain products such as Milk Road Swap, all of which are driven by understanding and addressing their audience’s need for a seamless crypto experience.
Why do 80% of crypto investors lose money while a select few build long-term wealth?
In this episode of The Digital Gold Podcast, John Paul Baric sits down with Kyle Reidhead, co-founder of Milk Road, to break down the biggest mistakes investors make and how to position yourself for success in Bitcoin, crypto, and Web3.
Why most investors fail and how to avoid their mistakes
The truth about altcoins vs. Bitcoin for long-term gains
How to navigate crypto cycles and build wealth during bear markets
Where the real value in Web3 will be created
Kyle shares hard-earned lessons from multiple crypto cycles, how he built a media brand with 330,000+ subscribers, and why thinking long-term is the key to both investing and entrepreneurship.
Are you making the same mistakes as 80% of investors?
This conversation might change how you think about crypto forever.
00:00 Introduction to Digital Gold Podcast
00:57 Guest Introduction: Kyle Reidhead
01:55 Kyle's Journey into Crypto
06:57 Meeting People Where They Are
07:55 The Evolution of Web3 Marketing
18:05 Integrating Marketing and Products
25:59 The Fat App Thesis
16:22 Challenges and Rewards of Crypto Entrepreneurship
Digital Gold Ep3 With Kyle
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Digital Gold Mining Podcast, where innovation meets opportunity in the world of cryptocurrency mining. I'm your host, John Paul Baric, entrepreneur, Bitcoin pioneer, and the CEO of MiningStore, where we specialize in modular data center solutions and driving financial access to Bitcoin mining worldwide.
Each week, we bring you expert insights, cutting edge strategies, and real-world stories from the forefront of Bitcoin mining. Whether you're a seasoned pro, a curious investor, or someone looking to understand the power of digital gold, this is the podcast for you. Get ready to explore the evolving world of Bitcoin mining, from energy innovation to the latest tech, market trends, and how to build long term value in a decentralized economy.
Let's dive in and uncover what it takes to mine successfully in the age of digital gold. Hello and welcome to the Digital Gold Podcast, where we spotlight the innovators and visionaries shaping the future of digital assets and Web3. Today, we're joined by Kyle Reidhead, co-founder of Milk Road, a [00:01:00] crypto newsletter, breaking down the industry's complexities for over 330, 000 daily readers with sharp insights, humor, and accessibility.
Beyond Milk Road, Kyle led Impact3, a Web3 marketing powerhouse, transforming brands like NFT projects and DeFi protocols into thriving communities. A pioneer in crypto storytelling, he's redefining how trust and loyalty are built in this lightning-fast industry. In this episode, we'll explore the evolution of crypto media, pitfalls in web3 marketing, and strategies for building trusted brands.
Kyle also shares his vision for the next wave of crypto growth and adoption. Whether you're an investor, builder, or simply curious about the digital gold rush, his insights will challenge how you see this dynamic space. Kyle, welcome to the Digital Gold Podcast. Hey man, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, when you first learned about crypto, what were you doing before? Take us back to that first, what is Bitcoin moment for you? Yeah. So, I got into crypto back in 2019. I was running a [00:02:00] marketing agency at the time, still run the same agency today. I'd been in the. Let's call it the creator economy. So, it's maybe the media space, whatever for many years working with like content creators who are building, you know, online courses and who are building like subscriptions and things like that.
So that was always kind of my world. And at the same time, I'd always been investing since I was young, I'd been trying to invest in newer industries. So as a Canadian. I was like early in the marijuana stocks before marijuana became legal in Canada, because I knew that was becoming a thing. I was sort of early playing around at the time.
I was really young, so I wasn't really any good, but playing around with like social media stocks and some of the tech stocks and stuff. And so it was always kind of like part of me to sort of, you know, learn investing and learn kind of the new things that I thought were gonna be a thing in the future.
And then around 2019, I was like, Hey, if I'm going to do this investing thing, I need to Understand economics. I need to really understand what's going on in markets. Cause like, I didn't fully get it. I understood tech. I understood like the products, these kinds of things. I didn't quite really understand markets.
And I was like, okay, [00:03:00] I'm going to go deep down the rabbit hole. And this was again, before I had heard about Bitcoin, what happened was just before I'd heard about Bitcoin. I'd read this book all about economics. I can't remember the name of it now, but it was basically an economics textbook. I think that you would read in like a school and I was just reading it every morning.
So I kind of started to get after a few books to understand economics, to understand this idea of scarcity and things like this supply and demand, etc. And then at one time I was in Mexico and I met a buddy, he works for Exodus, which is a wallet provider in the crypto space. And he was telling me that he worked there.
And I was like, huh, I've heard of this crypto thing back in 2017. Never really got involved. Like what is this thing? Like what's going on? And so, we went for dinner and had a couple of drinks and we sat there for like three and a half hours. And he just kind of explained everything he could. And I just questioned everything.
He got me to download an Exodus wallet. And he sent me, I think a little bit of ETH, maybe Bitcoin, I can't remember. But I think it was ETH at the time that he sent me, just a small amount. And I was like, okay, this is kind of cool. Like this seems wild. I couldn't imagine this idea of like, you know, you could sell these like things that were like stocks, but you could trade them to anyone, anytime.
It [00:04:00] didn't matter where you were. There's no additional fee if you were across borders. It was like, you can do all these payments. And I think they were talking about tokenizing their stock at the time. I was like. This doesn't really make sense to me. So I went home and I went deep down the rabbit hole. I read the Bitcoin standard.
I read basically every Bitcoin book that there was out there, started listening to podcasts and kind of went down that rabbit hole. And so I started buying a little bit of it and then COVID came along and everything went down by 50 percent in like a day. And I was like, what is going on here? Like I haven't been in a space for that long.
It was like late 2019 when I first heard about it. And by the time I started buying, like I had to get my exchange up, et cetera. So I just kind of started buying and then everything goes down. And I was like, Whoa, what is this? And again, I was in Mexico when the COVID crash happened and everyone was getting locked down.
We weren't really locked down in Mexico. And so I didn't have this like stress and fear that all my friends and family and everyone else had. And so for me, I didn't really, it made no sense why everything was crashing. I was like, I don't think the world's ending. Everything's nice. I'm literally living on the beach, surfing every day, even though everyone else is like locked in their homes.
So like I was kind of [00:05:00] lucky to like not be just filled with stress in those moments. And so. I ended up going, you know what? I've learned about this Bitcoin thing for so long now. Like, it's time for me to like really go all in here. I just got this like beautiful blessing of Bitcoin and ETH. Bitcoin was at three grand.
I think at the time ETH was 150 bucks and I was like, okay, I'm going to start loading up and see what happens here. And so I just started buying that day. And then every day after that, the thing just went up and up and up and up. And I was like, what the heck? And so then I got addicted and I went down the rabbit hole at the time.
I didn't really understand ETH. I really, really went down and understood Bitcoin. I didn't understand smart contract platforms. So, over the coming months, I started to like really look into this and go. Whoa, this is more than just sort of decentralized money. They're kind of decentralizing everything, the whole internet.
And I was like, if this works and this is even bigger. And I started to think, well, I have this marketing agency with all these digital creators, right? Who are making money online. They're creating these products online. They're creating social media content. And I was like, I think that whole market's going to change.
Social media is going to change. The way that we monetize is going to [00:06:00] change the way that you have business model is going to change. And I kind of thought, okay. I got to figure this thing out so that I can help my clients understand how the world's going to change now. Web3 and all that didn't come as fast as I thought it would at the moment.
Everyone in 2020 thought, okay, this thing's happening right away. The metaverse, all this stuff. None of that happened. But I began in 2021 to start to pivot my company into working with more crypto companies. In 2020, we started working with Bank less, who a lot of people know. who are in kind of the ETH community.
We actually built a website for the founder of the Bitcoin standard, Saif, and a bunch of other companies. And so that sort of like moved us into thinking more about crypto, not just from the investment side, but like, what does this mean for businesses? What does this mean for content creators? And then today our marketing agency has basically pivoted fully into crypto.
We only work with sort of DeFi protocols, crypto brands, blockchains, et cetera. And we help with a ton of different things there. And then of course, we have our own media company that kind of explores this world, both on the investing side and kind of on the building side as well. So, you [00:07:00] took the orange pill.
It sounds like in Mexico. Yeah. And you were fully committed to learning more backing the truck up at the COVID crash saying, this is for me. This is something I want to continue to invest in. You saw how it could change money across borders without any extra fees. And how the technology didn't care about your race, what you believed in, and it could facilitate that trade, which is not something that our current dollar has.
So, when you're working with these influencers and we were starting to orange pill other people, what are some of those questions you get that you had to clearly articulate? Why this was a better system or why we're going to, how it's going to change the marketing and change the payment rails that maybe they were using to sell their courses previously and how much of that actually has manifested into reality with those influencers.
Cause I work with a lot of influencers and would love to hear your take on their view on crypto. Yeah. You know. A lot of the [00:08:00] people that we work with now, I never really actually had to influence. There was just a need, I think, for marketing from people who were already in the space that they knew that they loved finance, and they were building some cool products, but they were like, I don't know a thing about marketing.
It seems to be a trend in the crypto space. But at the time when I first started learning about it, I was like, hey, I got to go. And I got to talk to my team. I got to talk to my co-founder, talking to friends, et cetera. And I realized as excited as I was about it. And I think for me, it was just like, it was the perfect timing, right?
I just read an economics book and like, got deep down that rabbit hole. So then to like, understand and learn about Bitcoin, you're like, Oh yeah, this is like the perfect fit. It makes complete sense. A lot of people I realized though, after like a year of trying to go and tell everyone I had heard of about Bitcoin, they were Most people just actually just don't care.
It was wild. I couldn't believe it. I was like, man, governments are printing this money and they're inflating away our currencies and blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone's just like, whatever. It sounds terrible, but they don't worry. Yeah. It's just like they go about their day. Right. So, the one thing I actually really did learn and realize was you got to meet people where they are.
There's a lot of people that I realized they don't care [00:09:00] about. Decentralized money, but maybe stable coins made sense to them, or maybe an NFT made sense to them because they're more of like an artist type, or maybe whatever the thing is made sense to them. For example, one of the things that made me understand Ethereum so quickly was.
In 2019, actually, before I started the market agency, I used to have my own like content creation business where I was actually in the health space, had a podcast and a huge community on Facebook, et cetera. And one day I woke up and my Facebook got shut down. And today it's still shut down. I just don't have it anymore.
This is my Facebook from like when I was a kid, had all my photos and everything, but I had these two huge Facebook groups on there. that were bringing in so many of my like potential clients and I had this like automated thing to sell them on my courses or whatever. It was great. One day I woke up and it was just gone and there was no reason or right.
Like I still don't know today why they did it. And so I was like, wow, this is crazy. And so when I started learning about theorem, I was like, oh, this would prevent that from happening, right? You own your data, you own your addresses, et cetera. And I was like, So for me, if someone explained that to me from the beginning, that would have clicked with me.
But when I [00:10:00] explained that to other people that have never had their accounts taken down, doesn't click with them. So what I always find is like with content creators, that was the thing I went to them with. And I was like, look, what if Facebook shuts their Instagram down today, your business would be done.
Right. And they're like, yeah, that's very true. And I'm like and so think about this world. Think about what's happening over here. And everyone was like, oh, now I'm starting to get it. But if I told that to my mom, she's like, I don't need like. My Facebook isn't that valuable to me, I don't care, right? So, it was very like, it depended on who, what the person's problem was, or their potential problem was, right?
That was the main thing that I figured out over time after like, talking to so many people. So, identifying the user's problem or the influencer's problem, and then to your point, you had to position it as in like, this is now the new opportunity, this is your opt out, because the existing rails, they're great until they don't work.
And when they don't work, you don't think about it. And you have no backup as a creator. If you get deplatformed, you are screwed if you're relying on AdSense. And yeah, well, and a good example was during COVID, some of our staff, [00:11:00] our team for our agency is from all over the world. We're fully remote. We don't have like an office anywhere.
We had two people, one that was Russian. One was a Ukrainian, but that Ukrainian was living in Russia at the time. And so all of a sudden when the sanctions happened, we couldn't pay them. Right. And they didn't really know much about crypto at that point where they were just starting to learn it. But when the sanctions came through, we were like, the only way we can pay you a stable coin.
And so for them, they fell in love with crypto in that moment. Right. They're not even investors. They don't really care about finance stuff. But the moment they learned that crypto was the thing that saved them, they could still get paid in Bitcoin or in stable coins. They were like, Whoa, this is a game changer for me.
And so probably about 35 percent of our team right now is paid in stable coins. Mainly those who live in places like Argentina, Turkey, Russia, right? Like places where they actually can't accept dollars, or if they do get dollars, they're taxed like an insane amount on them. And so again, It's when the problem becomes a reality for people and crypto is the thing that solves it.
They're like, Oh, I get it. This makes complete sense. But like people in the US, [00:12:00] people in Canada, we don't really have problems with our banks that much. We don't really have problems with our currencies that much. So it's like, it's not a huge issue for these people, right? We also don't really have a lot of censorship.
Well, I mean, I guess we do in terms of social platforms, but it's a lot less. It's not as bad as it is in other countries, right? And so, we don't see it as much of a problem, but other places in the world, man, do they ever see this? And it's a necessity, not just like a, this is cool and something to invest in.
It's like, I actually need this to function in my life, you know? And so, I mean, the, to your point, the benefits, you're meeting people where they are versus getting them to. Have to understand the technical aspects of money and what it means to solve the Byzantine general problem and how that's going to change the world I've mentioned you acquired milk road.
Can you talk me through? When did you realize? Okay? I need to build a marketing asset in this space and This is the right one. Were you looking at other ones? Does something fall through? And what's something as you went through the process that you learn that you would give advice to someone else who is going through [00:13:00] the process of, let's say, building a marketing asset in the crypto space or acquiring one?
Yeah, sure. So back in 2022, out of our marketing agency, we launched a podcast and newsletter called Web3 Academy. And the reason we did this is. We found that a lot of the media that was out there back then was either super technical and didn't make sense for a lot of people, or it was like super finance and didn't make sense to a lot of people.
And what we wanted to do was let's discuss what's really being built in this space. And a lot of this space is absolute garbage, right? And we wanted to kind of separate that noise and be like, here's the things that are being built that will exist in the future stable coins. right? This is not going away.
Whatever the fad was back in the day, that's probably not going to stick around. That's just more speculation and whatever. And so, we really wanted to get into the nitty gritty of like simplifying things for the average person and also helping them understand what's real and what's not real. Because in crypto, it's permissionless.
Anyone can build whatever they want. And so you can launch a white paper, [00:14:00] put a token behind it and call it this thing. And like, if you really knew what was going on, there's absolutely nothing going on there. But most people don't realize that when they come in. So We saw an opportunity there cause it wasn't a lot of people doing that.
And so, we did this during 2022. It happened to be the terrible bear market, but we continue to grow throughout all of it. We realized, and this would go to your question about advice is we just solved a problem for a lot of people. There's a lot of new people that came into the space in 2021, and even in 2022, and they just didn't have someone that was speaking to their level, right?
Because again, too technical or too finance. And for people in the web three space that were trying to come in and figure out what's going on, then a tease and tokenizing and all this kind of stuff. That stuff just didn't make sense. There was a lot of jargon. So, we solved the problem in the fact that we just, we spoke people's language, right?
And we were able to kind of like get that noise and all the hype that happens in crypto and just like move that out of the way and just like get to the reality of what's really being built. And so it worked quite well over the time. We ended up launching some products within their paid side to our newsletter.
We obviously had the podcast, et cetera. And we reached a point where we were growing, but it was quite slow. But interestingly, [00:15:00] Milk Road was a company that we were working with for our marketing agency. And they're very similar to what we were doing a little bit more on the investment side, but simplifying things, trying to separate signal from noise, that kind of stuff.
And they actually approached us, the guys that had purchased it off of Sean, who's the founder of my first million is one of the biggest business podcasts in the world. He's the one that founded milk road originally. These other guys bought it. They weren't crypto guys. They bought it at kind of the top of the crypto market in 2021 and realized, hey, maybe we should have done that.
This isn't really for us. And they trusted us. They knew that we already knew media because we were running a media marketing agency in the media world. And they knew we knew crypto because we already had Web3 Academy. We worked with Milk Road, we worked with Bankless and a few others. And so they approached us about acquiring them and we realized, Hey, this is the perfect opportunity because we already have the team that creates content.
It's very aligned with the milk road audience as is. And they're like 20 X bigger than we were. And milk road didn't have any products at the time. They were just a newsletter that made revenue from sponsorships, whereas we already had products. And so when we acquired it. We were able to lower [00:16:00] expenses immediately cause we already had a team and implement a bunch of products we already had that were great products already had product market fit right into the milk road brand.
That's the podcast. That's our pro content where we kind of give like deeper dives into investment advice. We show our portfolio, et cetera. And so it was just the perfect fit. So we made that move last year and that's grown like crazy now. And it was a great success so far from that. We're very excited about it.
But yeah, it all came out of opportunity. And Kyle, talk to me more about. the numbers here. So they acquire it. Any idea how many subscribers and then you guys acquire it, how many subscribers, and then was there a viral moment? Was there multiple viral moments? Did you hit an inflection point? And then kind of where are you today with the platform?
Milk Road had its viral moment. I think it was in 2021, like late 2021. When Sean Puri, he started it and that went pretty viral. It went to like, it was like one of the fastest growing crypto newsletters in the space. So it went from like zero to a hundred thousand in seven months. It was pretty crazy. I think when the guys acquired, it was around 200, 000 or a little over 200, 000.
When we took it over, it was about [00:17:00] 300, 000. Today we're sitting a little over that 330, 000 or something like that. But more importantly. It's not just a newsletter anymore, right? We've got a podcast, which now has over 150, 000 plays per month. And it's become one of the go to podcasts for investing in crypto, which is really cool.
That's a podcast and YouTube channel. And then our pro membership has grown just significantly. We have thousands of pro members in there. We have a community where everyone can like talk with each other and kind of share what's happening in this space. We haven't really hit a viral moment, let's say since we've taken it over.
But I also think over the last year, there hasn't been a ton of, let's say new entrance into this space. Obviously when Trump won the election, there was a bunch of speculators that came back in. A lot of them were people from the last cycle that just came back and punted a bunch of money and meme coins and whatever.
But I don't think we've had a ton of net new people. And I think that's going to come over time. And so that's kind of what we're building for is more long term. We're not expecting the zero to 100, 000 anymore like they had in the beginning back in 2021. I think the crypto industry is now. It's not going to be as these crazy like [00:18:00] ups and downs.
I think we're more going to be kind of gradual momentum forward and upwards. And so that's kind of what we're building for and planning for moving forward. Are you worried about paying monthly hosting bills or your Bitcoin mining machines becoming unprofitable during your hosting contract? If so, the Manage Mining program by Mining Store might be for you.
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I mean, we've seen these products be added and for influencers to bring in. Really their own products like Mr. Beast Burger, the Feastables for Mr. Beast and other influencers out there. How do you view the integration of audience in products? And you obviously want to keep the original kind of thesis of Milk Road to your point, but you're wanting to add additional value that doesn't take away from the newsletter.
So What advice do you have or what was your experience with integrating those products into Milk Road and what was the feedback? Was it like, Oh, this is a one plus one equals four or was it like, this is a one plus one equals, you know, negative one because it didn't work. So how do you see integration of those products successfully?
I think when you have an audience, one, I think the best thing you can do if you want to build any business is start with just building an audience, right? Because then when you launch a product, you already have a bunch of people that you can market that to for free. Right. And so I think there's no better way to start a business than building an audience first.
When you go to launch a product, the key thing here is adding value, right? So, we already gave a lot of value in our newsletter for free. People loved it. We were educating people. [00:20:00] Our goal with Milk Road is to help people become better investors, right? We want to help them become financially free, to capitalize on the opportunity of crypto, to understand where the space is going.
And so we thought, okay, what products can we build that will help people do that even further? Right? And so one, we launched a podcast that was more just like, we could interview more people throughout the space. So that was one way to connect our audience to more people within crypto. Great. We launched our pro membership.
There's a bunch of things involved in this, but basically it's like. More in depth research to understand what's going on in the space, both from an investment side and a building side. We've got our portfolio in there. So our researchers, what do we invest in? How would we manage risk, et cetera? So all of these were around helping people to navigate their own portfolios and their own investments.
We've also recently launched Milk Road Swap, which was, again, we noticed a problem with our audience. Every time we told them about X token that we thought was really good and you could buy this thing, they go, well, where can I get it? And they'd be like, do I got to look on Coinbase? Do I need to look on Uniswap?
It's funny. The most like foundational thing in our industry is to swap tokens, right? [00:21:00] Trade from one token to the next. And a lot of people just still don't even understand how to do it. It's 2025, which is wild. And I think the reason for that is confusing. There's all these blockchains, there's a gajillion tokens.
There's so many ways to swap. So we launched basically like an aggregator where one user interface and you can click Ethereum based tokens, Solana based tokens in a bridge all in one spot. You don't have to go to Uniswap and then Radium and then this thing, just like it's all just right there. It's not a big deal.
What we made, it's literally just a webpage that integrates existing DEXs and people are loving it, right? Because just making everyone's lives easier in trading. And so again, we just listened to our audience. We ask them what their problems are in this space, and then we go and try to build things to solve those problems.
And I think the more that we do that, the more our audience is just like, hell yeah, like, I'm loving being part of this milk road community because you guys keep making my life easier, you know? And I think ultimately If you're an influencer, if you're a content creator, you're building an audience, just speak to your audience, right?
Try to create some sort of community where you can actually have conversations with them. One time, I just literally did for [00:22:00] a full month, I just did one on one calls with our audience, back to back to back. I probably did 50 calls in like two, three weeks. And as exhausting as it was, it was probably like one of the best learning experiences I've ever had, because I got to like, Actually, just like this one on zoom, like chat with these people know where they're from, who they are, what jobs they have, what problems they're having, what they think about our brand.
Cause I have an idea of what I think people think of our brand, but until you actually speak to your audience, you don't really know, right? So that to me was probably the best thing I've ever done. And that's really helped us to level up and just like keep building for our audience and keep launching new products.
And you're hitting an interesting point here where there is other tools where people can swap and you're not unique in the swap ecosystem. You may not even be the best, most efficient swappers, but that's not the point. And the point is that. People trust you. People trust milk road. And so when they go through this portal, they are accessing the confusing crypto space through a milk road lens.
That's going to almost protect them. [00:23:00] And one of the questions that I have on that is, how do you balance? Information, integrity, and also like the value of investing and number always have to go up and telling people of a coin when maybe it's overinflated versus if it's 200 EMA, like how do you guys knowing that people are going to take this advice and most likely allocate capital to it?
How do you balance that versus them missing out completely? And I know there's nothing you can do in the future. You don't know where the coin's price is going to go when you suggest it, but how do you meet them where they are? versus getting them rug pulled like a Facebook account, right? That's a great question.
One of the things with Milk Road you touched on already was trust. And Milk Road has had a lot of trust for a long time. And that's the reason why we wanted the company, the reason we wanted the brand. And the most important thing for us is like, no matter what, we just want to keep trust with our audience.
Because honestly, that's not a thing that comes very often in crypto. Like how many companies have gone bankrupt or shut down or scammed their audience or whatever. So like trust is huge to us. And one of the ways that we sort of [00:24:00] teach the way that we invest anyway, is we're very much long term investors.
We're not traders. We're not in the trenches, trading meme coins and dumb things. Like we're looking at the space kind of globally and we're saying, okay, what has real value here? What do we think we could put money in today that would hold or grow in price 10 years from now? Now there's not a lot in the space to be completely frank.
That would do that. There's Bitcoin and then a few others. Okay. So there's not a ton. And so like. It's just being very upfront with our audience. Like everyone's like, well, what are those token? What are those token? What are those token? But guys. We don't care until it becomes something more vibrant that that is really solving a problem again, kind of like what I just said about how you build a business.
That's what we're looking for is in crypto, who are the companies or the defy protocols or the whatever that are solving real problems in the space. And when you can locate those and then also understand the tokenomics, make sure they're not like 90 percent owned by the team or something. Then at some point you can start to find an investment thesis there.
We don't invest in a lot of tokens. I know there's a lot out there that are like, they're in different tokens every day and whatever. We hold a portfolio of around like 10. [00:25:00] They're very long term. We're looking like multi cycle here if you want to call it cycles. So we're trying to teach our audience because I think what happens, especially in crypto, but more for any retail investor is They think that you got to trade all the time.
You got to be in and out of markets and you sell and blah, blah, blah. And you jump from token to token. And I mean, that's just not how you do it. That's not how you succeed investing, right? Like all the best investors in the world are very slow long term. They hold for very long term, right? Warren Buffett, the best in the world guy holds companies for decades.
And so one of the things that we try to do at milk road is just like help educate before you go look at our portfolio, understand the foundations of investing, understand the foundations of crypto. And that'll help your kind of just like see the world a little bit different, see the markets a little bit different.
And instead of like, every time some news headline comes out thinking, Oh shit, I got to sell. I got to get rid of this. Or price goes down 20%. I got to get rid of this thing. It's like zoom out. Right. And that's like everything we write, everything we do is just helping people try to zoom out. Cause I feel like in today's world, it's so hard to do, right.
We all have ADHD, just running around, you know, it's just an education thing. It [00:26:00] is really what it is. And then we do that to try to help build trust as well. As you mentioned, I think it's a balance of getting the new information in their hands, but then also letting them know, like, don't need to trade every day.
And actually trading every day is a sure way to lose money. You need to trade. Once a month, like what's the best trade this month that you can make? And then how are you going to sit on that cash portfolio so that you don't say, Oh, I put my 10 K and it's down 90 percent upgrade and I have a thousand dollars now to go and invest.
Like that is one of the hardest things with crypto is just losing that value so quickly because it is so volatile. And maybe the liquidity isn't there for some of these smaller caps. Or you don't need to trade once a month at all. And it's just, if you found something that works and something that's good, you just keep buying it.
Like there's not a better move than just continuously dollar costing, averaging into Bitcoin over the last 15 years. Bitcoin's boring. I don't want to just buy Bitcoin. I don't get it. This is the thing that we try to teach people. Boring is actually the best thing you can do for investing, right?
Investing, everyone, people try to complicate it. And my advice is always do less. Right? It's just always just do less is the thing I repeat to [00:27:00] our audience all the time. It's like, yes, Bitcoin might be boring, but the thing goes up 150 percent per year on average. How is that not the most exciting thing you've ever heard of?
Like, if I get a chance to compound 150 percent gains year over year for 10 years, I'm through the roof. But then you have people coming in because like in the TradFi space, like if you invest in the Nasdaq, you're maybe getting 10 percent per year on average, right? Bitcoin is 150 percent per year on average.
Like for TradFi people, that's unheard of. Yeah. Crypto Nah, I don't want 150%. I need my thousand percent this year. And I'm like, guys, manage your expectations. That makes no sense. And so a big advice that we give to investors is like, listen, 80% at least of your portfolio needs to be in the majors, right? It needs to be in things like Bitcoin and not in these small caps or all coins, because at least like the thing I would hate to see is for someone to be in crypto early.
And not make any money from it. A funny story that I always teach people is when I first got into crypto, as I said, I went around telling all my friends, I got a bunch of them into crypto. And we went through that cycle together, the last cycle, [00:28:00] 2020, 2021. And most of them ended up with less money than they invested at the end of that cycle.
And I was like, that makes no sense. This industry literally 10 X it's market cap. Even at the bottom of the bear market, it is still way higher than it was back in early days, 2020. And yet most people that I know lost money. And it's because they went down the risk curve, they levered up and they lost their money in Celsius or an FTX or whatever.
And it's like, guys, some basic things, just hold the majors. Don't use leverage and custody it yourself and you have no issues. And so, like I was actually the only one of all my friends that came out making money that cycle. And I was like, that is insane. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to start wanting to acquire milk road because they were preaching the investment side.
And I was like, I got to help people just understand the basics of investing. Cause I know everyone loves crypto. They want to come in. They want to buy this stuff and it's fun and it's exciting. But like, if you just get the basics, you can do really well and go have fun playing around in whatever Trump coin you want.
But as long as you get the basics right, and you get most of your portfolio in something that you know is just going to go up long term, then [00:29:00] do whatever you want with the rest of your portfolio. And I think one of the key things you highlighted on is that You don't need to be focused 100 percent on crypto and digging into it and learning every single thing and trying to keep up with all the news because the reality is like, it's great, but it moves so fast and it's like, what sticks and most of the stuff doesn't stick.
Most of the stuff is going to be going to go to zero versus Bitcoin. And so, it's like, what really is going to add value? And from what I've seen online, you have a thesis called the fat app thesis. And can you talk through why you think maybe people are over allocated to other L1s and L2s and the application theory?
And we've talked a little bit about it with like kind of the swapping function through milk road already. But why is the fat app thesis important to you? And then how are you, I guess, investing or making, looking at product, looking at apps and products to capture that are capturing some of that upside?
Yeah, for sure. So when I think about the crypto market, there's sort of like a few buckets you can call it. [00:30:00] There's money. That's your Bitcoin, right? Store value, money, call it whatever you want to call it, right? Probably more store values are the way to term it. And then you have blockchains, which are selling block space, right?
These are smart contract platforms. And they're what's enabling a lot of the decentralized applications. Okay. So you have blockchains. X Bitcoin, and then you have apps. These are all the use cases that exist. This is apps, which could be like your DeFi protocols, like Aave and Uniswap and Maker, whatever.
These are stable coins are considered use cases or apps, even like Coinbase and Kraken exchanges. These are technically apps in the crypto world, right? They all work because of, and on top of blockchains. And so for the last, I mean, 15 years of crypto. The first five, 10, it was all Bitcoin, basically. Then when Ethereum came around in 2015, everyone was like, okay, Ethereum obviously dominated for a while there.
And then it became all these other chains, right? Solana and BNB and whatever. And so, if you look today, most of the market cap of the crypto space is in blockchains. And that made sense for a long time there [00:31:00] because we actually didn't have a lot of apps. And there was this idea of, well, everything's going to be put on blockchains.
And so, these things are going to be worth a lot of money. And so, well, I think that's true. If we look at what happens in other technologies, like let's take the internet, for example. Early days, it was a fight of like, which protocol is going to win? Where are we going to build the internet on top of?
Right? And then if you look today, now that's not a battle anymore. We know where it is, HTTP, et cetera. Now all the value accrues to the applications that are on the internet. Facebook, Google, right? Amazon. These things are trillion dollar companies. And that's because. They are front facing to the user.
They own the user, right? And so when you own the user, you have all the leverage. They can go to the things behind it, the protocols, the companies that they're building on top of and be like, hey, I want you to charge me less because I got a million users or a billion users in Facebook's case. So, they have all the leverage, right?
Because it's like, if you know, AWS isn't going to run my cloud service, I'll go over to Google or whatever, right? So they have the power there and in the crypto world. [00:32:00] Everyone has thought for a long time that the smart contract blockchains are what has the users, but in fact they actually don't. It is the apps that have the users, and more and more what we're seeing is once apps become Successful, they go and they launch their own chain.
Now it could be an L2, could be a version on Cosmos, could be whatever, but you see it with like Unichain, for example, Uniswap, the best app that's existed in crypto today has now launched its own chain, right? Coinbase, right? Probably one of the biggest apps in the U S they've launched base, right? And you see Athena, which is one of the most innovative and new stable coins in the space.
They're launching Athena chain and so on and so forth. You're seeing this a lot. And so what's happening is the blockchain world is actually becoming a bit of a commodity, right? There's going to be. Thousands, millions of chains. And again, are they going to be L2s, the L1s? Doesn't really matter to me. What matters though, is where's the value going to accrue?
And I think that's actually going to be the apps, the thing that's closest to the users, just like what happened with the internet. And so I think there's a big opportunity. And really, I think the best way to explain it is, if you look at what Coinbase is doing, I'm extremely, extremely [00:33:00] bullish on Coinbase.
And I think that's because they own the users. They probably have the most users in all of crypto outside of Binance. And if you think of what they've done, they've built base. Right. And now they've just in their app, they've integrated what's called Morpho, a lending protocol. And so, what they've done is said, Hey, instead of going on chain and getting a MetaMask wallet or whatever wallet and going, doing lending with your Bitcoin on Morpho.
Instead, you can just do it right in my Coinbase app, right? And so now who has the leverage? Well, Coinbase does, not Morpho anymore, and definitely not the blockchain underneath of that. And so Coinbase has the power to go to Aave and be like, Hey, right now we're using Morpho. We'll use you guys if you charge us 10 bips less, right?
And so you can see where the leverage is going in this space already. It's going to the apps, the thing that's closest to the users. And so I have this feeling, and it's not yet, The market is way too allocated to blockchains and not yet enough allocated to apps. Now, to be fair, there isn't a ton of really good apps in this space yet, but it is coming.
We're starting to see it. There's [00:34:00] starting to be apps that are generating real revenues, getting real users, have good tokenomics. Mainly it's the ones that have been around for years and years and years. And, or it's the equities like Coinbase, even Robinhood, right? It's those that have the users. And I think they're going to start to accrue a lot of the value in the coming, like probably starting this year.
I think we're already starting to see it. And so I think we're soon going to see, and maybe it's going to be in a year or two years or so on, we're going to start to see a lot more value go to the app tokens and the app layer instead of the blockchain layer. My timeframe on when that happens, I'm not sure, but I feel very confident that this is going to happen.
I just don't know exactly when yet. So, it's something I'm really following, keeping my eye on and really trying to understand. So, I mean, our portfolio is still mainly in the majors, which means the blockchains and very small to the apps, but I think we're soon starting to figure out when can we start to allocate more over here and be ahead of that?
Cause I think the industry will figure that out and we'll see that soon. And eventually the capital is going to move that way, but for now, it's just going to take some time. And while you're speaking, it almost reminded me of like the neo banks and kind of like this [00:35:00] revolts and SoFi and chime that built on top of this banking layer.
There was standardized, it was built for many, many years. But they didn't have the overhead of a traditional bank and they were able to go out and collect users and get understand what their cost per user was and then put marketing behind that and VC dollars and really grow that user base and create a massive value chain.
When it comes to the fat apps and blockchains, I mean, a bank isn't paying you. Hey, you know, a 5 percent of our fees go back to users. Like I've never seen a bank do that. So like, but apps and the apps like Aave we just saw with protocol and incentivizing and you mentioned like protocols like Moonwell or Aerodrome, which are apps on the base blockchain that they are incentivizing users.
How important is it to have a buyback mechanism to have some sort of burn mechanism when you're looking at one of these fat apps and then how does a user kind of look at the tokenomics and say, okay, this is. something that is actually a good investment versus this is just going to be not really [00:36:00] seeing daily active users, not seeing any give back to the community.
Uniswap may be a good example because the Uniswap token holders didn't get much for holding that. So can you talk more about what's important to you when it comes to analyzing a fat app to make sure that the value does incur to users and to token holders? Yeah, absolutely. So first, what's interesting is the dynamics we're seeing right now is if you think about the last couple of years in crypto, All L1s have been racing to lower their fees, right?
Solana, Ethereum, all the L2s, every chain you can think of, their whole goal right now is lower fees as much as possible because that will attract more users, right? So their revenue and what they're trying to do is actually go in the opposite way. So that's kind of like a commodity, right? Whereas what apps are trying to do is one, they obviously want to deploy on these cheaper chains.
And as they continue to get cheaper and cheaper. That's just more opportunity for these apps. Now there's going to be more activity. And so these apps are actually trying to find ways to create more and more revenue. Many of them starting to do it. I mean, you have maker in sky, which is like a, a lending protocol with a stable coin making over a hundred million [00:37:00] dollars a year annualized, right?
They're absolutely printing money. Are they, a lot of these defy protocols have been around for a long time are just printing money. And. When they have this much money, because you got to remember DeFi protocols don't have a lot of employees, right? Once it's code on chain, and then it just kind of, that's it, right?
It's not like a fintech company that has to hire hundreds of people and have this huge corporate office, etc. And so not only do they have way less expenses, DeFi protocols, because they're just basically the expenses to transact on chain, which oftentimes the user pays for anyway, they also don't have a lot of employees.
So their expenses are next to nothing. In fact, Sky's goal by the end of this year is to have no core expenses. That's just like unheard of, right? Absolutely unheard of, but they have basically sub DAOs and these like, they call them stars, which are like kind of building on this. And these are people that own the token that are incentivized to work on the protocol rather than the protocol paying the expenses itself.
So there's this whole weird new dynamic. And so in that world, when you do generate revenue, you have next to no expenses. It's like, what do you do with that profit? Right? And the early stages, these protocols These [00:38:00] apps, they should be paying for growth, right? They need to go and incentivize more users.
They need to do marketing. They do all that stuff just like in traditional world. Once you get to a point where, okay, I've got all this profit and I don't know what to do with it either. Just sits there. You could put it in stable coins and get some yield on it. Or what a lot of companies do in the trad world is you start buying back your own stock, especially if your token is at a low price, right?
Or your stocks are always at a low price. And so we're starting to see that play out now in a lot of apps. Sky does it. Ave has just recently announced a proposal to start doing it. Athena has also launched a proposal to start doing it. And so what they're doing is now buying back their tokens. And what's interesting here is a lot of people, when you invest, you got to think to yourself, who's going to be the next buyer of that token?
Who am I going to sell that asset to in the future? Right? Like you buy a home, you live in it and you're like, well, I got to sell it to someone in 20 years so I can buy my next home, right? Like who's my next buyer. And so the same is true. And I know a lot of people don't think this way, but you should, when you buy a stock, when you buy a token, it's like, who's going to be the next buyer, right?
Bitcoin. It was like, well, corporations are going to buy [00:39:00] this thing eventually. And then sovereign wealth funds are going to buy this thing hopefully, right? Like. You kind of had this idea with all these apps. You're kind of like, Oh, I don't really know. Is retail going to come in and buy this? Maybe institutions will come by this.
What's really interesting is apps that are generating value. The next buyer of the tokens that you hold is the protocols themselves, right? They're so profitable and they're using that profit to now buy back their token. Well, it doesn't matter if prices go up, price go down. They're just consistently buying.
And so, for me. I'm looking at, okay, what are the apps that are generating real revenue here that have the leverage, meaning they have the users and the control, and they're going to use that leverage to generate revenues and then buy back their own tokens. There's not a lot of them in this space. And also, because with the previous SEC, they weren't allowed to do this.
It was just like illegal. Right now, I think that's going away. Basically every big lawsuit in crypto with the SEC has been dropped. And so it's kind of like. Given the green light to a lot of these protocols that are making good money to start buying back their tokens. And so pretty much for the first time in crypto, we actually have [00:40:00] real apps.
Generating real revenue, solving problems for real people, real businesses, and actually decent tokenomics. Yes. It's not the Bitcoin where there's only 21 million. It's either that where they have a finite supply, plus they're now buying it back every day. Right. And you can see how much they're going to buy back because you can track the revenue.
Cause it's all on chain. So it's transparent. And so for me, it's this kind of whole new thing that I think is going to take the financial space by storm. Right, right now in the finance world, we got to wait every three months for the, the quarterly earnings of all these companies to see how well did they do?
How much money did they make? How much stock did they buy back? And it's like, I can go look at sky right now and watch it live every day. I can watch it by these tokens. And I'm like. That's pretty freaking cool. And I got a feeling that's where the future of the financer space is going to go. And so again, I think the way that I look at these apps, I'm looking for those that actually have leverage, they can drive revenue, and then they're actually buying back their token.
To me, that's a great place to park some capital. And it's not only that you can see the buyback, but you can see all beyond chain activity. [00:41:00] There's great dashboards like I think it's called Dune out there that has the ability for anyone to make their own dashboard for a protocol or for an app. So that does change the name of the game.
As you mentioned, it allows us to get way more insight on what's happening on the ground. Oh, so it was so funny. We launched milk road swap just a couple weeks ago. So this was our decks I was talking about. And so our community and our audience is starting to use it. And we built a Dune dashboard just to track like transactions and volumes, et cetera, et cetera.
So we could see how people were using it. What's interesting. We also can track like, what are they trading? Right. So if there's been a sale or a swap, like what are they swapping? And so the other day when markets tanked, I went and I looked and we had all this increased activity. I was like, oh, what's going on?
And I could see our audience buying the dip in real time. It was like USDC to ETH, USDC to CBBTC cause they were buying Bitcoin on base. USDC to this token. I was like, oh my God, I'm literally watching our audience in real time. By the dip, I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And so, it's really, really cool to be able to watch this stuff transparently and just on chain.
And that's the beautiful nature [00:42:00] of on chain protocols. I think there are a few other people pitching the fat app thesis. I'm pretty sure I've heard like Mark Yusko back then out of Chapel Hill, he preached that back in the day. And so it's taken a while, but into your point, a lot of it hasn't been tech, but regulatory uncertainty, and that now has cleared the path.
So a lot of these protocols can now do things that. Maybe they couldn't do before or they definitely couldn't do before in the U. S., but opens up the door. So I think maybe the meme coin craze is going to continue to die down and this might be a new craze that we're jumping into. But more importantly than a craze, but a real value creation mechanism because users and attention, as we know from Facebook and Google.
That has real value no matter what investor you talk to. Yeah. I do think a, whether you want to call it a narrative or whatever, that's going to come moving forward is these token buybacks. It's like when people start to understand, like you have these crazy profitable protocols with no employees buying back their own tokens every day, to me, that's not just a narrative that's going to spin with your average investor.
It's like. [00:43:00] Institutions are going to be like, Whoa, that's super cool. I want to do that too. Do you know what I mean? Like, so I think it is going to become a big deal. Will meme coins go away? I don't know. Like I don't ever do anything with meme coins. I always, I wouldn't say I hate it, but I don't love it either.
I think it's a net, let's say maybe negative for the space. But one thing I've realized after being in crypto for a long time is traders are going to trade. Speculators are going to speculate. DGNs are going to DGN. And so whenever we have animal spirits back in the markets, I got a feeling, I know everyone's saying mean coins are dead.
I'm pretty sure they're going to come back and we're going to see a bunch of dumb stuff. There's always a room for the casino, right? Right. There's yeah, there's always going to be the younger people, or I don't know, it's probably not even younger people at this point, but like people always want to go and punt these crazy stuff and try to get their thousand Xs.
That's just part of the world we live in. It's why, I mean, sports betting is one of the biggest things that are out there. Right. It's just like, kids love this stuff. They just want to bet and try to like. So for these thousand Xs, I don't do it personally, instead take a long term view, but I think that's always going to exist.
And so I got a feeling meme coins are going to come back just as they were before, which I don't love, but it just [00:44:00] kind of is what it is, right? Like you can't put your emotions or your opinions on the market. You just have to let the market be what it is. And traders are going to trade. That's just how it works.
You can't stop them from going to the casino, but you hopefully can be the one like holding the sign or the books outside. Like have you heard about Bitcoin? Yeah. Like this is how you can. Yeah. Really. Part of the ethos, I mean, the Bitcoin ethos is like, let this, everything be permissionless and decentralized, right?
Like we shouldn't shut things down. Right. And so I hate the idea. There are people that saying we should shut down meme coins. I'm like, you know, I disagree. Like let people do what they want. Let's have some regulation if we could, or at least some like laws. Like, obviously if someone's doing crime, they should go to jail.
I don't care if it's on a permissionless thing or not. They need to go to jail. Just like if you're laundering money using Bitcoin, still a crime. It doesn't matter that it's on Bitcoin. Right? So blockchain. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, it's like, there should still be like rules, but ultimately people should be allowed to do it.
I understand there's sanctions in certain parts of the world, but like. Bitcoin exists to give people the ability to move value no matter what. Right. And I love that. And I think that should never [00:45:00] change. Even though I don't agree with what people are doing with their money, you know, so it's, I mean, that gets into a whole nother, like, if we were to talk about the Bybit hack, right.
And then using Thor chain to take money that was stolen, but Bybit Thor chains, like we're a protocol. We're not going to sanction that, that it gets into this deep nest of like, what really is politics, ethical versus state owned and. To your point, as a big corner, it's like, I don't want anyone to control my network.
So we'll step out of that, out of that conversation on fat apps. I really appreciate you explaining that thesis. Talk to me more about entrepreneur life. How do you add impact to the milk road community? How have you built the team around it? What's important to you when finding good writers and good content editors.
Talk to me more about that. What's the. Future vision for milk road. Are you launching your own app on the blockchain? That's going to compete against aerodrome or Aave but love to hear more about that side of milk road. Ready to earn Bitcoin at a [00:46:00] 60 percent discount with BitVault. You can get access to the most efficient Bitcoin mining machines for as little as a hundred dollars.
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Like I love it all, but it is, it's not easy, right? I've been doing this for years and years and years, and it's had some crazy ups and downs. And what's interesting is building a company in [00:47:00] crypto is. even crazier. You think building it, like building a normal company as tough as is doing in crypto, where you have these like crazy cycles, where you have millions of new people coming in one year.
And then the next year you have everyone leaving and things falling apart. And it's been doing this for a decade and a half now. It's a whole different beast building in crypto. I would say that, but I love it. Right. I absolutely love building in this space. I love crypto. I love what crypto represents and what it's bringing to the world.
And my goal since day one is like, I want to drive this forward. I want to help people use it. I want to help. Build products in it. I want to make sure people understand it. I want to onboard people on chain. So like it's totally worth it for sure, but it has caused a lot of stress in my life. Let's say that, but I will say this.
The most important thing when building any product is your team. And finding the right people in your team and getting them in the right places. There's a really good book called good to great. A lot of what I've built around these two companies has come from good to great, which is like just finding the right people, even if they don't, you know, you don't know what role they're going to be in yet, but if you find someone who's [00:48:00] the right person, get them in, help them find their role and build leaders.
And if you can build leaders. It allows you to 10 X your output. Like if I didn't have leaders in my company, I wouldn't be able to run two companies like I do now. It only exists because I have leaders, people in my company that I've been working with for years and years and coaching who think like I do, but also they think in their own way a little bit differently and I can trust them.
And that only comes from long term just like I talk about long term investing. It's like, you gotta be long term with your team, put every piece of energy into your team, because every person you get that all of a sudden can like run on their own. And be their own leader is like cloning yourself. Right.
And so like, no, one's ever going to work as hard generally as the founder of a company, but if you can get people to start to do that as well. Companies can just do incredible things when you start to build a really, really good team. And so that's something Jay, who's my co founder and I have focused on since the beginning is just like building leaders, focusing on growing our team.
And that is easily the best thing that we have done by far. So absolutely. [00:49:00] Like I think just something for everyone to focus on and read that book, good to great. It really like helps people kind of understand how to do that. So I would say that's like my biggest advice around the entrepreneurial side of things in terms of milk road.
We want to do a few things. So we're focused on growing our team, of course, and just getting smarter people getting better at what we do. Right. We find that the better we can get at investing, the better we can get at explaining what we're thinking, whether that's through video content or written content or audio content, the better that we can get at that, then the better our audience can like understand what we're talking about.
Right. And ultimately that keeps people around that gives us the retention where people keep listening to our podcast, they keep reading our newsletter, et cetera. So, we're focused so much in just like becoming better researchers. Becoming better investors and then figure out better ways to explain it to people.
So, like, that's our constant daily grind. And then of course, we're looking at what can we build? What other products can we build? And. Milk Roadstop was our first, let's say, on chain product that we built, right, where it actually requires someone to have a wallet, and they can go do things with their finances.
And we really enjoyed that. And our audience really enjoyed that. And I [00:50:00] think we're going to continue to find more ways to build a better UX for crypto. So one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on what Coinbase is doing is I see Coinbase is kind of like the Apple of crypto. They're basically controlling the UX of everything you want to do in crypto.
So right now, when you go into Coinbase app, you can move your fiat into crypto. You can buy Bitcoin. You can take out loans on your Bitcoin. You can buy ETH, you can buy SOL. If you want, you can go on chain and you use Coinbase wallet, right? And then on Coinbase wallet, you're using the base chain where they have whatever apps on there.
And so it's like the whole experience of finances. Is basically done in this Coinbase brand and they control that whole UX, which I think about is what Apple's doing, right? And they've done with the internet. It was like, okay, you get your MacBook back in the day, and then you're going to use iTunes is what it used to be.
Now it's Apple music, right? And you're going to use iCloud and everything is i something, right? And it made the experience of using the internet so much easier because it was all one brand. And everything integrated with one another, right? I see Coinbase basically doing that [00:51:00] right now for crypto. And so what we're trying to do with Milkroad is something kind of similar, which is we have this trusted brand, as we talked about at the beginning.
And what I noticed is people still struggle to do things on chain. And so milk road swap is our first thing swap, very basic, but we're trying to think of like, what's next. We got a lot of people that want to use stable coins and get yield on their stable coins. But again, it's very daunting. It's hard. Do I go use this DeFi protocol?
What's my risk, et cetera. And so we're kind of thinking like, how can we build the front end, the UX for DeFi and for like, just your average person, your retail investor to like manage their finances. Right now, it's very easy now to swap in the milk road brand. Well, what about also getting a loan or holding onto a yield bearing stable coin?
Like all these kinds of things, we're trying to think about how we can better integrate that and create that for our audience. And then of course, combine that in with also still learning about investing and learning about where the space is going. And so, it's like, if you're going to learn about the stuff, you might as well write in that newsletter or write in that piece of content.
Be able to do the action on chain right there. Right. That's one of the beautiful things about [00:52:00] crypto is like, it allows you to just integrate it all into one place in the trad world. It's like, I'll learn over here on sub stack, but then if I want to go and like buy some stock, I got to go and get my Schwab account or whatever.
And I've got to go KYC and then like do everything over there in a different spot and it takes forever. Whereas I think we can start to integrate social media or like. Social content let's call it and on chain or finances right into one, and you can just do it all in one spot. And that's really what we're trying to merge and bring together and create the kind of a seamless UX for all that.
So how we're gonna do that, we don't really know just yet. We're obviously like experimenting and innovating and strategizing every day on this stuff and getting feedback from our audience. So the idea is we'll build some sort of platform, some sort of like experience for our audience, but we just don't know exactly how it's going to look just yet.
You guys want to be the view, right? The New York times where everyone wakes up in the morning and learns about the world. And with milk road, I feel this similarly where it's, I want to be the portal. To this future of crypto. And one of the things I find [00:53:00] interesting when I help people that are in trade five managed portfolios, have tons of real estate, no filing taxes for a hundred companies, no problem, but lending against my Bitcoin on Ave.
Oh my God. I don't know where to start. Right. And then it's like, they write down the rule, like, you know, just walking people through this, through this, who is the audience of milk road? Are they the trade? Phi? Are they the younger generation looking to make their first million? Are they. Your mom and pop, who would you say the audience is?
Obviously, everyone can be a Milk Road subscriber and It's interesting, it's tech savvy people. So people that usually work in tech, but are not crypto native. So there are people who are like, okay, I'm a finance person. I'm either tradfi or like I was born in the crypto world and I'm a degen and like You know what I mean?
That's I speak in that whatever tech jargon. And there's people who are like, I work for Google. I work for Apple. I work for AI startup companies. I work for whatever in tech. It's like, I'm very tech savvy and I love crypto. I want to invest in it. But like. It's not my life. I'm not a crypto native. I'm [00:54:00] not an anon with like a NFT PFP on Twitter or whatever.
It's these people, which is, I would say more mainstream retail type investors, people that have a lot of money, right? They make good salaries, but their life isn't in crypto, you know? And so that's why again, We do such a good job of just simplifying and saying, okay, here's everything going on in crypto Twitter, which is a complete shit show.
And most people, you probably don't want to read that because it's so confusing and the memes and the things don't make sense and we're like, okay, let's take the things that are important from that. Digest it in a more simple way and then give it to the mainstream people. Right. And so that's sort of who we are.
So, I would say we're more like the adult in the room, right? Where the 30, 40-year-olds have good jobs, maybe have a family and can't spend 24 hours a day trading and like diving into the on chain world. But I still want to have my hand in it, right? I still want to know what's going on. I still want to.
Allocate some of my capital to it. And so I would say that's who the milk road subscribers mainly for. So switching to like impact three, what's a product that you've helped build that maybe our listeners might've heard or [00:55:00] listened to and help market for them, even if it wasn't building it. And then what have you taken anything from like a case study there or a project there?
And how could you tie that back to milk road and maybe using it in your marketing with that entity? Yeah, sure. So, when we first started in the space, we focused only on media companies because media is what we knew. So we worked with Bankless, we worked with Milk Road, we worked with, as I said, Saif, and we worked with just tons of, most of the media companies and big YouTube channels on the space.
So that was kind of the beginning of our days entering in crypto with Ebec3. Now what we've done is moved more towards the protocols, which has been, I think, quite interesting. And those building businesses in crypto, so they're not media. They actually have products. One of them in the Bitcoin world is called meanwhile.
Meanwhile is like a life insurance, but instead of paying life insurance in dollars, you pay it in Bitcoin. Really, really cool product that they have. And so when we come in, they're like, Hey, we have this great product. We don't really know how to market though. And so we go, okay, that's what we do. And so we go, we take over their social media accounts and we start creating content for them.
We start simplifying their content. We build their web [00:56:00] pages for them. And so that their message, one of the biggest problems, I think in crypto is people struggle to write a good message, right? You go on any crypto website and they're like, we're the decentralized blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, L2 of this and that.
And I'm like, man, nobody knows what that means. Nobody cares what that means. It's like when you go on Amazon, they're not saying like. What technology they're built on. They're just like, yo, we help buyers match sellers for anything in the world. Right. With everything store and crypto just really struggles at doing that for some reason.
I think it's because this industry is built by a lot of tech nerds, right? Marketing is not their thing. And so, we have to find protocols that are doing cool things like meanwhile. Meanwhile is not really a protocol, but they're a product, let's call it. And then we'll come in and just say, hey, here's how you should do your message.
Here's how your branding should look. Let's get you on other podcasts. Let's get you some content across Tik Twitter or whatever. Let's get you more active and out there. And then we also do some like stuff where we connect. Their founder to go on podcasts, or we connect their brand to go on YouTube [00:57:00] channels or in newsletters, et cetera.
So let's call it like PR type work. So it's kind of like a full house thing where like, Hey, you're a crypto company. You got a great product. You just need people to know about it and understand it. You come to us, and we'll sort of hit everything depending on what you really need. So the most important thing though, as kind of one of the questions you're saying is like, it's all about messaging.
It's all about your branding and like helping people really understand what your product solves, what it does. And I think not what it is. No one cares what it is or what it's made of or what chain it's on or this and that, that does not matter in 2025 that mattered in 2020. Right. When we had all these like tribal wars and it was, well, today it doesn't matter.
Just. If you have a product that solves a problem for people, then Promote that, say that, make sure your website shares that, right? That's the key thing. And I think that's the thing that most people struggle with, not even just in crypto. I'd say probably anywhere. There's a bigger problem in crypto for whatever reason.
Well, in crypto, there's just more layers of abstraction from the, what I know today [00:58:00] than what is the reality. And meanwhile is actually. I've heard about them might have been from your marketing and for people that are listening in, it is this Bitcoin denominated life insurance product where rather than paying your premiums in dollars or having your life insurance policy grow in terms of dollars or like borrowing against your life insurance policy in terms of dollars, that all happens in Bitcoin and your beneficiaries get paid out in Bitcoin.
So that's one of the key things that separates it completely. It's a tax advantage strategy, not sponsored, but to go and get that Bitcoin exposure and life insurance. These unique opportunities come out in the Bitcoin space like the Bitcoin health insurance that came out and I forgot the name of it, but those are amazing things that are built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners.
So I'm glad to hear that you are doing the part of getting more Bitcoiners aware of these tools. Anything else in your portfolio that you think Bitcoiners specifically should know about? Oh, I saw EBTC on Impact 3, and I know that's like a WBTC, CBPTZ [00:59:00] competitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got, so BadgerDAO, which is a protocol basically that again, allows you to lend Bitcoin and ETH and get yield on it.
And they have their product EBTC. So again, another product that's great for people that know about it, understand it. But again, they struggled with, I mean, they're a DAO and they're a massive DAO. And so there's just a lot of. Disorganization. And so we were able to come in and say, look, you guys focus on building your protocol and we'll help you guys just like get this out there.
Right. And like help people understand it. So you guys don't have to worry about that. And so, yeah, that was another one that we did specifically for the Bitcoin community. Now there's, that's not just Bitcoin, actually. There's ETH and stuff that you can do in there as well. We also have BakerFi, which is a place where you can go and put your ETH in.
It's like a DeFi protocol to put your ETH in and earn yield on. And they sort of do like a good risk adjusted way to earn yield that's higher than just staking. So yeah, we kind of look for like, what are good protocols? What are good things that are solving real problems? And then let's see how we can help.
Spread that to either the Bitcoin industry, the ETH industry, the crypto industry, or what we're really looking for now is like, we want [01:00:00] to find products that we can spread to mainstream. Like we want to start marketing, not to the crypto native industry anymore. It's so small. I think that's what a lot of crypto still does is like, let's just market to crypto people.
And I want to be like, let's take these products that are crypto underneath, but they don't know it. And let's market to the world. Right. And let's bring them into crypto, but they might not even know they're using crypto. That's the kind of things that we're starting to, we want to try to find those kinds of clients because we're finally getting to that point where we have apps that solve real problems in the real world and all the technical components are abstracted away.
Right. So that's kind of where we're hoping to get to and the clients that we're looking for in the future. And to your point, The, it's so easy to talk in the eco chamber, but the stable coins are such a great tool to allow humanity to transact without permission, without borders, and without the knowledge that those exist, people aren't even going to get a taste of what crypto is.
And at this point, we're trying to even abstract, okay, I'm using crypto, but this is just a way better product experience. [01:01:00] And wow, this was the right thing for me at the right time. And that's one of the beautiful things about marketing is showing people the path so they don't get distracted and lost, but also let them not even know what their.
The bridge they're working, walking on, or the protocol they're using. 'cause that, to your point, most people don't care. They're care about what's my problem and how are you solving my problem. Yeah, exactly. And the friction needs to be removed. Like we're not gonna get billions of people on chain in the way that crypto exists today.
It's gonna happen, in my opinion, probably from existing companies, existing apps, let's say Twitter and Robinhood, et cetera. They're going to be the ones that actually onboard everyone on chain because they have the good UX and they already have the users that they just need to integrate stable coins in or integrate whatever, like Stripe integrating stable coins is absolutely massive, right?
Like they move some of the most volume in the entire world around for payments and they've now integrated in stable coins. That's just absolutely huge, right? And you don't even really know, need to know what stable coins are. You just look and it's like, it's cheaper. And it settles [01:02:00] immediately. Okay, I'll do this.
Instead of waiting three days to get my payments and paying whatever fee, I'll just do this thing. Why wouldn't I do that? Right? So again, we have, I think in my opinion, stable coins are the best use case we've created in crypto outside of Bitcoin. And again, somehow the world just doesn't know about it.
And it's like, there's so many people that are sending money to their families back in other countries, paying like 30 percent remittance fees with like Western Union. And it's like, man, if you just use stable coins, it'd be free. As a marketer, how the hell do you get someone using stable coins? Western Union to use stable coins.
You're just going to stand outside Western Union with like a sign saying like, did you know there's a better way? Cause that's such a big gap. It's huge. Yeah, a hundred percent. Look, it's creating good content. It's, I mean, we run a lot of social media ads for clients to reach a broader audience, but ultimately it's like making noise, right?
Like. The thing that I think a lot of people don't realize you create a product and you're just like, okay, come use it. People come use it. And it's like, that's not how it works. You need to get loud. You need to create content, and you need to create content every day. And a lot of businesses don't do that. [01:03:00]
And some of the best businesses in the world, they happen because they just have people that. Consistently every day, create content and like every once in a while, that kind of, it's going to go viral. Right. And then it's like, now go on podcasts, get in newsletters. You just need to be everywhere. That's what marketing is these days.
It's just like, go be present, right. Get attention. And it's hard thing to do, but it's all about consistency. Right. There's no, just like. One thing, I mean, I guess the Superbowl commercial would be your one thing to just like reach most of the world. And so that works too, but obviously there's a big budget that goes with that.
But otherwise, like we live in this world where social is free, right? You can write a newsletter, you can go on podcasts, you can create content on Twitter, Instagram. Anytime you want, and it's absolutely free to do it. And I think every brand, every company just needs to double down. That's like the Gary Vee special, right?
He's been preaching this for like 20 years and somehow still brands aren't doing it. But yeah, it's free. Just go and create content. That's the best thing you can possibly do right now. Content is leverage. And to your point, it's free and everyone has this leverage, but one of the hardest [01:04:00] things, at least for me and in creating content is sitting down every day, we're just.
Even once a week, creating that space and time, because to your point, Kyle, it is so easy just to be busy. It is so easy just to trade the memes or trade whatever token and to keep yourself occupied. But as. a leader, you're not going to be able to get direction, get into, you know, see intuition, feel what you're really experiencing and what you need to decisions you need to make, or conversations you need to have, or marketing ideas that are going to resonate with other people, unless you're in the silence there.
So when it comes to your ending out here, with your content routine, Your writing routine. Do you have a set time and space for that? Can you talk more about how you get into the flow of of generating content or generating these marketing ideas? And are you the main guy that really goes behind the impact three brands and says, this is how we're going to market the, the, the life insurance policy, or is there other people on your team that you rely [01:05:00] on that are good leaders to do that?
I've got some amazing people on the team that do that. So, I don't, thankfully don't have to, it used to be me every day. And now we've got a team that handles that. So, I don't have to be so involved. I'm now more. able to go and create content for milk road and for impact for other people to learn about here, but like going on this episode here today, in terms of like how I create content first is like in the mornings is best for me because like my mind is clear.
And before you go on Twitter and before you go, you know, open up, we use discord or slack, whatever, before you open all that stuff, like you can just, I feel like I can write so much in the mornings. And so like when I'm going to write a long form newsletter, that's when I plan to do it as before I kind of start my day.
So that's one. The other thing is like, I find sprints works well. So sometimes like I want to be tweeting a bunch because I want to grow my presence there. And it's like, like you said, you just find other ways to get busy. And so like, I was at goals. I'm like, okay, this week I'm just going to tweet like 10 times a day.
I don't even care what it is. I'm just going to do it. Right. I actually did this a couple weeks ago and I had my best week ever on Twitter in terms of like impressions and new followers, et cetera. And from that week, [01:06:00] what was interesting, I was just tweeting anything and everything. And at the end of the week, I was like, holy shit, I just learned so many new strategies.
That I actually went to my social team. I was like, Hey guys, have you guys do this? Or what about this? Like, and had a bunch of ideas and like, Oh, that's smart. Blah, blah. And they've started doing it. So it's like, sometimes it's like, just make it a focus of yours that week or that month or whatever. And you'll notice it's like anything, right?
You playing sports. If you like really, you like shoot a foul shot every day for the next like month. You're going to be a lot better at foul shots that day than you were the month previous. Right. And it's just the same thing here. Just go and tweet anything and everything. And even if it doesn't hit, you might miss a bunch and that's completely fine.
Who cares? No one remembers the tweet that didn't go viral. Right. But you'll start to see which ones do because you'll hit some and you'll start to see the tricks and what's working. And then all of a sudden it just becomes like, it's like developing a skill. Right. And I really do. My advice for anyone who's running a company is like founders should be present online.
You look at any company out there right now, even the biggest companies in the world, let's say Coinbase. Who do you see on Twitter all the time now? Brian Armstrong. Look at Elon Musk. That guy's on Joe Rogan all the time now. He's obviously the most used [01:07:00] user on Twitter right now, obviously because he owns it.
Mark Zuckerberg's all over Facebook now. Like he's going on podcasts. Like the biggest founders in the world are finding time to create content. And that's because It's a great way to build trust. People love brands, but people love people more. Right. And so as a founder, you got to find time to go and build your presence because it's a great way to drive people to your products or to your businesses because people love people.
And if you can relate to your users. They're going to relate to you more than like a logo. Right. So it's a very powerful thing. We're starting to see a lot of companies do it. And I think we're going to see that even more, which by the way, I know it's not easy. This is part of like what we do at impact three is we'll just do this for you guys.
We sort of like ghost, write your guys content for you or. Help you guys come up with more ideas, right? Cause I do understand there's struggles there and you're busy trying to run your company. And so, we sort of take a lot of that off your guys plate, which is can be also quite helpful. And obviously even myself, I have my team helping me do that too.
So I'm not a one man show that's for sure. And that's the key to any good company is the [01:08:00] team. So you can focus on building the future. And I guess that's one of my last questions I want to. I ask you Kyle, which is beyond financial success, what deeper purpose do you associate with your work? And what legacy do you inspire to leave within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, within the crypto ecosystem?
As you build these two brands and in your personal brand. Yeah, I think for me, the most rewarding thing is growing our team and seeing these people, we hire a lot of young people actually, and they have not a lot of experience from various parts of the world. And we sort of find it's a way to give them an opportunity to work for a company.
That's like a Canadian company that earns in us dollars, et cetera. So we have a lot of like Eastern Europeans, we have people from South America whenever, and they're younger. And so like we spend a lot of time coaching them, training them and seeing them like grow and gain experience and like get raises and make more money and like start to build a life.
And I'm just like, that to me is like the most rewarding thing ever. We do a retreat every year where we bring our entire team somewhere in the world. This year we're going to Croatia. Last year, we brought everyone to Canada the year before that we did Portugal [01:09:00] and like to meet everyone from all around the world in one place, we fly them all out and just like have real conversations with them and like, see how.
Them working here has sort of changed their life and improved their life. That is the most rewarding thing for me. And so like, when I think about building, making money is great and creating these cool products is great. I love all that stuff, but the thing that like really gets me going is just like seeing our team get bigger and seeing all them make more money and like.
Establish a life as a result of that. I didn't know that's what I loved when I first started the company. I actually didn't even think I really wanted a team when I first started coming. It's just like, I'll just do it all myself and that's it. And then as you grow, you're like, okay, I need help. And then you start to build these teams.
You're like, okay, this matters to these people. Like how cool is this? And if I can get them to buy in and like really want to drive this company forward to, we're sort of like together, we're all building something right. And to me, it's just, it's exciting and it's fun. And I think our team feels the same way.
So that's the most rewarding thing for me, for sure. I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing. And to your point, similar with running mining store without the [01:10:00] technicians, without the customer success staff, without the accounting team, I could not be able to have these opportunities to host the podcast and spend two hours during the day recording and, and going to conferences and meeting new people.
So. The team backs both of us up. And that is an amazing thing. Kyle, where can people connect with you online? What's the best way to, to stay connected? And is there any last things you want to shout out before we end the show? Yeah, sure. So probably best place just follows me on Twitter. It's just my name, Kyle Reidhead.
Maybe I'll have it in the show notes to find it rather than me spelling it out. But that's the best way to get to like anything that I do and keep up to speed with what I'm doing. I'm quite active there. And then obviously if you love crypto and you want to learn about investing crypto, go to milk or.
com. If you need help marketing and you're in the crypto space, go to impact three. co. That's our company there. That's kind of the best ways I think to get in contact with myself or with our teams and kind of how we can help. Otherwise, like my advice, I always just like zoom out. If you just zoom out, think more longterm, then life's going to be so much easier.
And I mean, this is an investor as an entrepreneur. That's [01:11:00] basically anything, right? If you just zoom out and think more long term, then that's the key to success in almost everything. Well, thank you for Kyle for coming out. And as a listener, make sure to zoom out, hold Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin and mine [01:12:00] on.