Around the Block With Jefferson Nunn – Interview With Adrian E. Garcia at FynCom

Jefferson Nunn  0:08   

Live from Crypto.new Global Headquarters. This is Around the Block with Jefferson Nunn. And I’m here today with a very special guest, Adrian E. Garcia from FynCom. Hey, man, how you doing? 

Adrian E. Garcia  0:21   

Hey, Jefferson, I’m doing good. Yeah, I looking forward to chatting with you and getting to just have this casual conversation about the future of crypto and how we’re trying to do it in the B2B space. So. 

Jefferson Nunn  0:32   

Cool. Cool. Well, let’s start with that. The future crypto. I know that’s kind of jumping ahead. But where do you think it’s all headed? 

Adrian E. Garcia  0:39   

Ah, oh, I guess it’s kind of impossible to really predict. I really only know my small sliver of the crypto space, which is specifically dealing with the transfer of value from one party to another party. So, in my concept, there’s like two different ways of looking at this. There’s a way to transfer value from an unknown party to another unknown party in order to mitigate spam, which is how I started. And then there’s the concept of transferring value from a known party like a brand to an end user to want to hear from that brand. And so, it’s the idea of having that brand trade value for engagement.

So, both of those are value transfer cases that happen digitally over phone calls, emails, texts, any communication interaction. So, like, I can really only talk about my sliver of the crypto space, which is again, in the transfer of value over communications protocols. So, from that, it’s obvious to me that what’s happening is, we’re getting to this point where the digital communication ecosystem is becoming more and more saturated, and the pandemic accelerated that curve times 10.

So, you know, the number of emails you’re getting the amount of text messages, phone calls, all that is just increasing for a number of reasons population, the ease of technology, access to technology that can do sequences, email sequences, text sequences, etc. So, how does the business now stand apart from all the other businesses that are hidden your email inbox that are asking for your attention, it’s clear that we’re going to get to a point where value gets transferred for you to interact with that business. And that’s the space that we’re focused on. So, in that case, I think we’re going towards the future where it’s going to be normal to expect a reward for responding to an email or engaging in a text message conversation or phone call. And that’s, that’s where I think the future is going in terms of that. 

Jefferson Nunn  2:37   

Awesome, well, let’s jump into that a little bit more, I mean, my inbox, at least on my Yahoo, it’s flooded with all these, you know, hey, you might win a $50, gift card and so forth. So how does your system differ from all of us out there, you know, people trying to, you know, giving money for them for my attention? 

Adrian E. Garcia  2:59   

Well, so the first thing is the brand itself, the FynCom brand has to become known as one that is trusted one that people know. And when you see FynCom become brand new email, you know that that is a trusted engagement with someone who will instantly reward you for your time I get one of the primary differences between those emails that you get now are that you have to take more steps in order to be incentivized, if you’re ever incentivized, right? Most of them are just honey pots, waiting to capture your email, your home, address your information, etc, etc. And eventually, you know, try to get money out of you. That’s what most of them do. There are some legitimate users out there. But the main difference is that when you interact with the FynCom email, that you immediately get incentivized for having responded to that email, or when you in the future, interact with other income services, that there’s an immediate reward that gets delivered to you after you engage with that service that might be clicking the link that might be going through several stages of an online customer journey, when you’re trying someone’s feature. And it takes like five steps, you can get rewarded on each of those steps, when you complete them, and you instantly get rewarded.

So, it’s the idea of instant reward for communicating with somebody. As far as like how the end user knows that this is a real thing. I think that comes down to branding, really, and there’s other competitors in the space that are doing things that are more specific to like, helping mitigate spam. And we’re not so much in defend mitigation business now. Like we still have the comical thing, which is mitigating spam phone calls and rewarding people to block spam phone call. But in terms of email, when we’ve focused on helping businesses that do outbound messaging, to enable them to increase the response rate they get from end users and thus increase the chance that they can get a sale or conversion. So, So, to answer your question, I don’t know if we’re going to address your specific situation. Shouldn’t you’re talking more about how do I, as end user, get rid of spam in my email inbox? We’re thinking more like how do we can calm help businesses, get more customers to respond to them get more and use it to respond to them? So, I guess to answer your specific question, I guess, you know, that’s not a direct service that we’re offering right at the moment.

Jefferson Nunn  5:21   

Well, no, but I think it’s a good comparison in that, rather than flooding the consumers with a variety of different offers that don’t work, it sounds like this would be an offer that would work. So, tell me, let’s say we have a customer on a journey, where if they click an email, they might get every word for five cents? How does Nano or cryptocurrency get involved in all of this. 

Adrian E. Garcia  5:45   

So, we move all the value around in nano on the back end to the business user, it’s quite easy and transparent, we have them just deposit cash into a bin calm holdings account. And from there, they create a rewards campaign, let’s say it’s five sets for this rewards campaign. And then they send an email from their email address they’ve associated at FynCom.com. And they tell Finchem, hey, this reward campaign should be associated with this email that I’m sending out here. So, you received that email, and then you respond to it.

On our back end, we know that you responded to it, we know that your email was part of this campaign and that our customer wanted to work on and so the moment you respond to that, we check to make sure hey, has Jefferson been paid out yet for this campaign? Oh, he hasn’t. Okay, we will listen to him and reward. And then at that point, from the customer’s business account, we transfer over at this point, we do $5 for every transaction that we talked about, with fidelity USD, and convert that to nano. And then from that $5 to Nano, we pull out the five cents needed, we transfer that to you. And then you received your five cents in Nano, you receive an email afterwards that says, hey, you just got rewarded with five cents courtesy of chat funnels. And then here’s how you can log into to like, redeem that money.

So, then you log into app FynCom.com, with your email that got rewarded, and you’ll see your balance there. So, you’re assigned a nano account for your email address, you’re assigned a nano account for your phone number, and later, you’ll be assigned a nano account for you know, other social media profile. Or you can just commingle them all into the same nano accounts. We don’t really know what direction we’re going with that right now, whether we’re going to have a nano address for each specific, unique ID or whether we’re going to have one central nano address that ties into all these unique IDs, and you associate them to your app document comm.com account. But yeah, we moved the value on a nano on our back end. juvies moved through real time and just really easy for us to use right now. So yeah, that’s how crypto gets involved. 

Jefferson Nunn  7:49   

That’s incredible. I think you’re right, probably one of the first businesses to really utilize cryptocurrency to its fullest extent. And that all your financial transactions, at least for the user and business this is all going through that Nano, Nano, Nano currency, tell me, why did you pick Nano currency over any one of the other projects that are out there? 

Adrian E. Garcia  8:12   

So, there were a number of reasons here. And when we first started, I was focused on eliminating the 60 billion spam phone calls that happen in the United States. And so, the concept was basically to send a transaction to somebody, if you’re trying to call them and then to get that transaction back, if you will deem that a good color. And they’re just a little bit more logic and how that works out. But the idea is that, okay, there’s gonna be two transactions now for every phone call. So, I’d be doing 60 billion spam phone calls, he needed, you know, 120 million transactions, like, you know, so like that, that’s kind of the way I was thinking, I tend to think, from first principles perspective, given my engineering background. And so, I started looking for payment protocols that could scale and perform 120 billion transaction and not kill me in terms of fees in terms of time that it takes to settle a transaction. And in terms of the complexity involved with setting up that payment protocol and assigning, you know, an account that each phone number each email, so I had a number of criteria, and it basically came down with the Okay, it’s got to be fee list, it has to work in real time has to be portable, and it has to be easy to use, and attempt to be decentralized is one of the things that I sort of marked down because I you know, got into cryptocurrencies around 2014, 2015, 2013 around that period of So, and I just really liked the idea of end users of people being able to have a say, in the way that our money is used.

And so I do like the idea of owning, you know, having a say in the money that we’re using, so, yeah, that’s why I kind of try to call myself a capitalistic Cypherpunk. I love the whole cipher. Talk mentality, but I am trying to approach it from a perspective where I want to bring value to businesses so that they adopt this cryptocurrency. And then at that point we can, you know, catalyze the adoption of cryptocurrencies in general, but it has to make sense for the business. And it has to make sense for the end user and have to make sense for me the business who trying to make money from this. So that’s why I call myself a capitalistic Cypherpunk.

So, yeah, those are the criteria fee free, real time global attempt to be decentralized, and it’s easy to use. And so, I looked and looked and looked and looked, and I’ve been in the payment space since 2000, in 2012 or so 2010 or so like, I started using PayPal, Braintree. When I was selling from Craigslist, I’ve been buying and selling things since like, 15 years old, I’ve just always have done that. So, experience a lot of payment protocols. And yeah, just came across Nano came across IOTA and came across a few other free routings, oh, one more criterion. It cannot. It cannot have a minimum fee, a minimum balance per wallet. That’s like having, you know, $1 in your checking account, right. And I never liked that concept. I’m like, why? Why, like, why do we need that in the main reason is because in order to bring someone else in, not in the cryptocurrency space, to have them think that they have to put $1 in or have some money that they never get back. It just felt odd to me, it felt like this is gonna be a challenge to bring on, you know, everyone else. So, I need something that doesn’t do that. So that that ruled out some things like Stellar and Ripple and other sorts of things like that. So, so that was the six criteria there. So those two criteria. 

Jefferson Nunn  11:41   

Yeah, that’s fascinating. It’s actually really interesting to get your perspective on this, because I’ve heard developers working with everything from Hedera, to pick something. And you’re right, every one of those always has some kind of a random limitation, where nano is like, well, here, go for it. And I’ve been on MANA for quite a while actually only because like you say, it’s beatless It doesn’t cost me any money to do anything with it. So, I don’t have to even worry about desk for that matter, right? 

Adrian E. Garcia  12:15   

Correct.  

Jefferson Nunn  12:15   

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve locked up in Ethereum wallet because there’s, you know, a whole bunch of zeros and then a one in there. It’s like, well, I’m never going to touch that one. So, which is really interesting. So, that’s probably I was thinking about the future. And I asked about the future of cryptocurrency. And I think the future of cryptocurrencies is gonna be more where this fee list world, I think the fees that we’re seeing today are rapidly gonna go by the sidelines, I really do. Much like in the early days of dial up, it was expensive for internet, right. But now, I mean, it’s barely a thought and you’re on the internet. So, it’s so pervasive.

So going back to the rewards campaign, I think it’s really interesting, I know, of a lot of onboarding campaigns that tend to be difficult, right? Where a consumer signs up for something, you know, you got into the first gate, but then they don’t do anything after that. And it’s like, how do you get them through to next gate? And I think this reward campaign might be a rather than a $20 coupon, which they’ll never use, you give them $20 of an incentive, and I think they will use it. So, what do you think about motivating consumers? Is this a better way to motivate them?  

Adrian E. Garcia  13:36   

Well, economically, you can have an argument for that, while it may be a better way to motivate them, you do end up giving them real assets, which you cannot retrieve. One of the things that gift card industry has been a term called breakage. This is when you give a consumer purchases $100 gift card to say, Starbucks, and then it sits in the drawer, and they never ever use it. And so, Starbucks now has $100 in their balance account, but they never had to give $100 worth of products to the end user. So, they can write that off on their taxes, as you know, is breakage. And after a certain amount of time, it’s just money that they made without having to sell anything. So your coupon example is a great example to because, you know, it was probably quite cheap for them to acquire that $20 coupon and they may not even have to have to purchase it. It may be a $20 coupon to their own services. And so, you know, if the person never uses it, that’s a net positive for the business, right? So, economically, you can make an argument for okay, this is this is, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna lose more money by doing this.

But then if you look at the number of people actually using your service, that’s for the other side of the coin comes in and you say, okay, well, I may give up one money, but I got the person to actually try out my service. And now they’re a loyal customer and you’re using this and bringing me more money than I say by giving them that $20 coupon instead. I just gave them this $5.10 reward. And now they know how to use the product. And they really love it. And now I understand that, what do you call it when that cohort of customers that came, where I can find what people would just like that person who loved this thing, and they’re using it, and I understand my product market fit more, I understand the kind of people that you just want. So I think from a philosophical perspective, yes, you are spending more, but you’re spending it to understand your product market fit to understand the customers that are going to use your product and service and create more loyalty and basically expand and grow.

So, it’s the cost of doing business, I do think it is a better way of getting people to experience the customer journey. I just think the challenge is educating businesses and how they can easily use this inside of their existing customer journeys and educating and users and that, hey, you’re going to get rewarded for having completed this. So, that’s like teaching a new thing to an existing industry, on both sides of the property of customers and the end users, that ultimately, the challenge that we have, in general, is like teaching a business that, hey, you can instantly reward somebody for performing some action. And you can do it through different rewards campaigns, and data and other sites using the end users about hey, you get rewarded for doing this. So that’s like the major chicken and egg problem that we’re solving at the moment here. Probably like the biggest challenge we have in front of us at the moment. Yeah. 

Jefferson Nunn  16:22   

Well, one of the things I’ve always struggled with when I work on marketing campaigns, is trying to educate the business about the lifetime value per customer. And because it’s not so much about churn rate, I’ve always made the argument that churn rate doesn’t matter. I had one company that was actually enormously obviously successful, but they kept focusing on the churn rate. And the churn rate was typically after about six months. And it just, you know, the way it was for the business is about a six-month customer journey, you know, with the with the product, but I kept trying to say you know what you want to focus on it, that lifetime value of that customer. And during that six month of time, try to increase the lifetime value of the customer by offering additional products and services. Think about it this way, you had the customer for six months. Don’t worry about that you lost them after six months, you have them for six months, what can you do in six months, a lot. Most customers or most companies would love to have a customer for six months, let me tell you. So, that really changed your thinking. And they never knew the lifetime value to customer. Which when I got there was like around $400. And by the time I left with like $900. So, we more than doubled.

You know what we’re striking to the customer over the same amount of time. Just by you know incentivizing the customer. We did a variety of couponing campaigns and everything else. And it worked. We also dumped a whole bunch of old inventories that we didn’t meet. Hey, that worked. So that’s what I’m saying. A lot of times, companies don’t realize the asset that they’re sitting on. I think that is just another way. Another great way to incentivize customers. And I think you hinted at other ways of incentivizing customers, are you looking to expand into other digital domains to increase the incentive position, right? 

Adrian E. Garcia  18:15   

Yeah, so actually, at the moment, we’re working on reviving our Zapier integration, and we really had this Zapier integration where you could use FynCom as an action for any Zapier trigger, or if you don’t know, Zapier is an online platform that lets you connect any application on Zapier to another application. So, you can create a trigger for an application and then respond with an action for another application. If you ever use If This Then That (IFTTT), which is one of my favorite tools. When it was still free, then this is like that, but on steroids. And so yeah, we’re working this week on reviving our Zapier integration. So, you can use our rewards campaign on FynCom and attach it to any trigger on Zapier, as long as you got an email from that trigger, so yeah, that’s like what our first two customers wanted to use. And when they tried to use it, we just we just, we weren’t ready. And we had a very simple, simplistic action on there that just didn’t work for all the use cases. But now without rewards campaigns, it just opens up so many doors. So, I’m really excited about that.

Jefferson Nunn  19:14   

So, that’s great. Well, I really learned a lot on this call. And I love talking about marketing. That’s one of my passions. So, do you have any other thoughts or things you’d like to share with our audience? 

Adrian E. Garcia  19:28   

Yeah, definitely. You know, in terms of understanding how to grow your marketing, I think that I just want to reiterate what you said about the lifetime value thing is it is kind of eye opening to hear you describe it that way. But ultimately, yeah, that really is what it comes down to like increasing the lifetime value of your customer. And if you can do that through you know, you would use an incentive before me using what’s available to you now was available to you then. So, So, yeah, I just want to hit home on that like that’s a really cool point you made and Um, I just helped me personally to understand how to talk to my future customers and existing customers about that. So, yeah, nothing else to share beyond that. Just saying like, that’s a cool point. Thanks for bringing that up. 

Jefferson Nunn  20:11   

Awesome. Yeah, no, I like it. I love marketing. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. And it just, I think like, like you say, a lot of people don’t realize there’s a lot of metrics around that, that we have available to us now. But a lot of times they focus so heavily on for example, CPA, you know, that sometimes it’s better to have a loss leader, you know, to get them in the door, because now you have him for a long time after that. So, yeah, it’s that marketing. And customer behavior is extremely fascinating. 

Adrian E. Garcia  20:46   

It really is. It really is. 

Jefferson Nunn  20:49   

So, yeah, I’m glad to have you on the show. I’d love to sync up with you again, maybe six months. Around the line and see, but often new and exciting in your world. And it was great to have you.  

Adrian E. Garcia  20:59   

Thanks, Jefferson. Yeah, I’d be happy to come back on. Great talking to you too.  

Jefferson Nunn  21:03   

Thanks.