STEPN’s ambitious move into Web 2 | Yawn Rong

Transcript

[Music] this episode is brought to you by core the brand new non-custodial wallet that offers a seamless and secure experience on avalanche you'll hear more about core later in the show all right everyone uh welcome back to another episode of empire uh super lucky today to be joined by uh my co-host and my friend santiago and a very special guest who i will share in a second i want to give a little bit of a background here there are very few companies that break out of crypto and kind of make it into the the normie zeitgeist right and since i've since i've gotten to the industry i think a couple come to mind right you had crypto kitties in 2017 you had nba top shots you had actually infinity and most recently you had a company called step in right so step in is a crypto web

three app that pays users for one thing that most of us do hopefully every day which is moving around and walking around uh stepping really created the move to earn or move and earn category they finished fourth out of over 500 projects at the solana ignition hackathon in 2021 uh and just had absolute rocket ship growth just six months after launch steppen managed to achieve a peak of yon yon might have to correct me on these uh these numbers about 400 000 daily active users i think uh yes uh we hit about 400 000 after the launch pad after the launch pad so 400 000 daily active users the number i have for monthly active users is 1.7 million they were one of the most downloaded apps in the fitness section of the app

store uh just just amazing growth in six months um today though i think the big question on everyone's mind is can steppen sustain the momentum through the bear market or will they get hit pretty hard like some other like play to earn comp uh brands did in the last 12 months uh there is no better person to discuss that big question that's on everyone's mind plus like the longer term vision of steppen than their co-founder yan rong we are super excited to have you on empire welcome to the show my friend thank you it's my pleasure yeah uh we this this episode is supposed to be about stephen almost turned into a harry potter episode jan told us that he completed a 60 000 piece uh hogwarts collection uh which is honestly more

impressive than steppen that is a feat in and of itself but john we're very excited i think we have to give a quick disclaimer santiago is both a harry potter fan so you got him on that note but also a seed investor in steppen so just want to give a quick disclaimer there john i think it'd be helpful um if you could just we're recording this early july 2022 uh st you guys had absolutely massive growth over the last six seven eight months and now obviously not just maybe the step in price is down but like the entire market has taken a massive turn so i think it'd be helpful to get your framework on like a just like where you're seeing the market today but also how this relates to step in and then we can use that as a jumping off point sure

so yeah definitely we're in the sort of recession as we see you know it's two consecutive quarters of the uh the u.s um gdp win to negative so you know obviously that basically um also affect the crypto market the whole financial market so definitely in the beer market and as you can see everything pretty much went down 80 percent each and so we soon discovered the beer market and we're starting to pivot so we can talk about that later but we are moving now fast to shift our attention from the web street web tool and trying to capture

you know really the price insensitive crowd that in the running community and basically from a just everyday use um on the working trackers or random factors so we'll start to see um changes well made uh in the next couple months plus we also so we pivot two ways one one we pivot horizontally and when when we pivot uh vertically so we also pivot away and start to build a much bigger ecosystem where um the move to earn often people ask what that earned come from so meaning that we have to build something much bigger than the stepping app and then to support the earning bit

which again we can talk about that later so yeah so we are now trying to take this time in the bear market and build a series of flywheels and also web to product and to constantly expand the product and brand awareness and recognitions and then to bring people through steppen so we always see stefan as a user on web street onboarding tools rather than typically like a gamefight project where we're trying to get the webtool user onboarding with steppen and then move them to let's say the dax rebuild then the empty marketplace rebuild and also down the track the social app will build

there's a there's a stat i saw you on that was really impressive which is one third of steppen users had never actually had a crypto wallet before which is just an amazing stat so stepping alone got hundreds of thousands of people to open a crypto wallet for the first time it'd be interesting to hear your take on like what is step in today people think of it as the app that you download you get money when you walk around it's like move to earn verse what is step in look like maybe 18 months from now or 36 months from now today's vision or today's product first maybe the future vision yes so sterpn now as an individual app is really trying to promote a healthier mind and body and lifestyles and uh to motivate people to achieve that type of

routine of uh let's say a little bit exercise every day we do token incentives and and that will also come in two stages one stage one basically token incentives of the gst and then stage two will be the token incentive for the gmt and uh let's say 18 months from now i i would say we don't need 18 months let's say six months from now we will be able to expand with a complete functional of the decks and a complete function of analytic marketplace with the launch pad which the third-party empty could launch through us and we are also branching into a closing brand so building our own

closing brand appeals and also building our own beverages so as you can see that we're trying to tap into the everyday items the web 2 people or normal people normies use and really just have the brand in front of them so people drink water every day so we're going to have a water brand and the very closest every day we're going to have our logo on the closings so in a way that we actually reverse integration from the web 3 back to the traditional business and use the traditional item you know just physical items sneakers clothings food drinks and to reverse integrate and have the

brand in front of them and in a way that lets even one percent of them say oh what is step and then the final oh actually this is a webster app and to actually i'm boarding them in a massive scale and effective as well it's really interesting i mean when you talk about it like that you're building this behemoth of a of a really a sports company which looks maybe something like uh like a disney meets nike uh when you explain it like that i think before getting into the decks the nft marketplace the clothing the the red bull like sponsorships that you that you guys maybe plan to do i think it's important to talk about uh just just how it actually works right now for a couple of minutes so there are two important things i think here or

maybe three important things a how do people make money b there are two different tokens right there's gst and gmt and there are two different wallets so maybe if you could just give an explainer maybe tying the three of those together gst and gmt two different wallets how do people make money at its surface it feels like very confusing but i think when i've heard you lay it out it actually it makes a lot of sense sure so um in this current phase of phase uh actually now it's phase four but uh in the current phase people can only earn the gst which is a infinite supply token and the base will implement many of the token burning mechanics uh for example that people have to repair the sneakers every day and people have to people can receive

like a mystery box and open the box they have to um spend a lot of gst and especially that when it comes to synchro minting you also need to gsc so we build a whole range of token burning mechanics which basically to improve on x infinity where except reading the the game token doesn't have much of use and we're trying to build a range of uh use cases where people are more likely to use it like for example that we create this gem system where there's 10 different levels and people can then just upgrade the gems by burning the gst and then the gems will enable them to have a better sneaker down the track and

then basically earn more token or be prepared for let's say gmt earnings so that is to do with the gst but again it doesn't really you know it doesn't uh have a cap meaning that people keep creating the gst and while creating an inflationary pressure and that's the reason that we'll have the gmt earning to counter balance the gst got it okay so let me just almost repeat this back to you to make sure i fully understand the model so to start you download the step in app you need you need an uh you sign up for step and you need a verification code i think at one point you guys were giving out a thousand a day i'm not sure if that's still the model you create a new wallet right a crypto wallet so it generates a 12-word secret phrase um you transfer some solana into your in-app

wallet uh you then head over to the in-app marketplace you pick up a sneaker um and you basically purchase a sneaker once you have the sneaker you can start earning um and different i think different sneakers have different traits if i remember correctly you've got the energy um and you basically have like different levels right so if you have like i think one sneaker you're a newbie three sneakers you're a daily user nine sneakers you're like a savvy user the more sneakers you have the more capital that you can actually earn in terms of the token model there are basically two different tokens tokens so you have gst which has an infinite supply and then you have the gmt which i think there's a supply of like six billion if i remember correctly um and

this kind of dual token model is something that we saw uh axe infinity really made this dual token system pretty popular right made it popular uh i think it's pretty useful model for like x to earn like play to earn or move to earn applications we have one token that's designed to be this highly inflationary reward token that kind of bears the brunt of the selling pressure that uh from users cashing out the rewards that's the gst and then the other accrues the value that's created by users transactions inside the app that's gmt do i understand that correctly uh yes but the gmt also will serve a multiple layer of purposes and we only just released one layer

which should be the in-game utility functions got it okay so once you get the gmt is is this going to be more of a model like do you do do you predict that users will do a model kind of like sweatcoin right sweatcoin is a huge web to almost like a move to earn where they get it's not cryptocurrencies they get just like tokens and then they can use the tokens to buy in-app things on like amazon or nike or whatever it may be do you predict that it's in-app purchases do you predict that they'll they'll sell and and they'll buy bitcoin or ethereum what do you think this looks like um it's really so really we want the gis and gems to be circulating within within our own ecosystem meaning that not only within steppen but uh with other things we create

especially with the gmt which will come in handy where we're having other uh product being built right so if you're sticking gmt you can get different products on the lt marketplace for example got it let's talk about the big question at hand here as we you know maybe seven or eight months into this bear market let's talk about how stephen avoids the same fate as axi right what what learnings did you have just watching the meteoric rise and then kind of fall of axi um what learnings did you have and then maybe wise stepping different from acsi here um i think the the one thing that i think differentiate us is people eventually so maintain a healthier lifestyle is i

think majority is what people want to do right so they want to they want to develop that routine but they always lack that level of motivation so with video game playing that's different so with the gameplay is that okay this this great game that is really addictive and then keep playing and if that pays you money that's awesome but eventually you get a little bit tired of playing this type of video games and you say all right that's it and move on to the next one but uh what we try and what we're trying to offer is something that uh will benefit people uh one if you keep walking outside or running outside you get more energy

literally more energy and losing weight you feel better and we also have seen a lot of users do have smoking issues um diabetes depressions and they find their condition being alleviated because they've been exercised regularly and they can see the benefit doesn't really come from the earnings but i also come from the the visible improvement on people's health so i think that that's the key point that is differentiate us so you know even though everything in this bear market price went down i still go out and work an hour and 40 minutes every day and

it once that build into your routines is become difficult to to change and then you just keep going and eventually you'll discover that okay i lose that love handle um i i get more energies um and you feel better i think uh look john i don't disagree with any of that i mean when i first met you guys uh there were two obviously i feel really passionately about healthcare and one of the things that is wrong in the healthcare system is that it's very reactive so you you then think okay there are incentives that we focused on in crypto how can we apply those to nudge certain outcomes and and motivate people to do something i was a long time user with strava and when i crypt i was like wait why doesn't this rob have a token

um the argument that i've heard from a lot of folks when i tell them about step in is they say wait a minute well obviously this is a ponzi because a lot of other people you know you're buying the sneaker from another person right um and that sneaker roughly costs x which is comparable to an actual sneaker like it was at one point like 130 bucks it's priced in seoul i think and so how do you respond to someone that says the current installed base the current user base is very motivated to use the app but is dependent on other users coming and buying their sneakers and when people hear that they sort of say wait a

minute that's a ponzi um and i'm sure this is not the first time you've heard this but what would be your response to someone like that so i think if one word has been overused in the cryptocurrency industry is a pounding word and uh um it you could be very well argued that everything is pounds but we're not going to go down that pathway and uh so we steppen when people are creating tokens and uh we're trying to you we're trying to create a use cases for that token and there will be people willing to pay to buy the token and then for let's say minton sneakers yes you create new sneakers through

tokens which somebody sold to you right that create that token has a value or for more of the intrinsic reasons you say all right i want to improve this thinker right so because the sneaker is my social identity and this is what we see from a lot of the community gatherings that people say oh what stinker you've got i have this like a genesis where i have this essex special sneaker so it become part of your social identity and then say all right this sneaker has more values than a production production tool right to produce tokens you you feel attached and you know if you sell it you if you sell the sneaker you sell part of your identity so

definitely that when you're saying something with ponzi meaning that you create zero value right you simply move somebody's money uh the new commerce money you'll pay um the people come before you the really the counter argument for the policy acquisition is have we create values have really created value so i think we do right so one we create a community where we are hosting a lot of live events we have people showing up you know hundreds of them attending live event just nice social gatherings people talk to each other they do a lab or five laps of running walkings and then they go out and have a good

time either it's a picnic or it's going to a pub have a drink so there are social value being created definitely and the social fire is also the past that we're also discovering down the track and also people do need to buy this nft sorry to buy gst or the tokens of the exchange or of the swap and do things right so i i bought like um today i bought like 500 words of gst just to try and upgrade my sneakers and so when that creates a value for people to move around and get healthier and then to create value and demand for the tokens

and on top of that create social value of gathering i don't think that falls into the category of pounds because value being created right value being exchanged and the exchange is at a fair value right price goes down why because there's less demand than supply um so but it doesn't mean it's a pound z because uh it's being created you know again you know connections been created better being created yeah i'm i'm with you on i i actually don't love the term ponzi i think i will i would um say like the what happened with axi is basically um a multi-step process where investors bought the nft assets investors then hired scholars to play the game using those nfts scholars made money in the

form of a native crypto token investors and scholars then started dumping the token on new investors and that cycle kind of repeated and i think ponzi i i agree with you john i i don't i don't love that word here um but but that model with axi required new investors to keep joining the game to provide exit liquidity for the current investors so kind of everyone was happy as long as the new money flows in it sounds like you would push back that that's not the model to step in yeah so i i think the the key point is that uh people are still using the app and the motivation for them to using that could be different somebody said i want to make my make returns and someone said i just want to keep fit so but

i think the the the value creation part is the key important part where let's say if less people are playing stefan and we have seen the sneaker has been become a deflationary supply now uh because we have released the enhancement which you burn five sneakers got a better quality one so hundred thousand stinker had been burned so um so they will be going through cycles uh doesn't matter it's a sneaker price or the token price but we are folding a economic trend or cycles and you can't call you know things when it's dropped pouncy right or outpounds you become overly irresponsible yeah

that that makes a lot of sense who do you think of um as your as you start to build out the app and all these experiences who do you think of as your biggest competitors here is is it the straw like santiago mentioned straw that strava nike sweat coin is is that the group that those your main competitors i i think we were able to grow this fast uh was really because there wasn't much of a competition uh going around because uh i think we we were lucky that we're in this very sweet spot where um we on the mobile end so we don't need to compete with all the invites um and also um with swag coin with uh

you know a whole bunch of other moves and will earn to earn sort of uh project out there uh i think we add we make i think we make a good balance between the game and financials part uh you know is some of i think with uh sweatcoin it uh it it becomes a little bit boring after using it for for a bit right so it doesn't really offer any interactions i think that's a part and also um interaction with the app and the user and also between users among users what we're trying to facilitate is more on the offline event

and that's where we more like strava to facilitate you know the face-to-face interactions to build the social connections um but again strava doesn't have that earned beat or game b so uh we we really tried we actually tried to piece all these together and create something that uh um more attractive um uh than this the traditional sort of uh you know in in this old category called like a free earning apps you know that's that's sort of where it belongs uh before this like extra urn become really popular i wanna maybe talk a little bit about your bd plans um you've done some collaborations

with our which i think are pretty interesting uh sneaker brands but also with crypto native communities um like board apes so the elp realm is pretty interesting i'm curious if if you can talk a little bit about that um you know how does that enhance the value that within step in and and what are other kind of future like where do you see these collaborations going in the future uh with the ape realm we basically airdropped uh so this is where we draw the learnings from the you know we create this realm system where we basically um open identical games on different blockchain or on the same blockchain with a

different theme that enabled us to sort of give a reset and uh also to attract users that wasn't able to attract before and uh and for that particular reason we draw learning on the bmb channel which was not enough snicker at the first at in the beginning it's only a couple thousand pairs so this time we dropped to all the four-leaf holders and also all the genesis sneaker holders plus a whole bunch of ruffles uh and also drawings uh in and out of the app so i think we are um because each blockchain so with solana with bnb chan and now on the sim chain um

if we are not on that chain we cannot tack into the that chance uh cool users only that when we extend to ethereums we'll be able to tap into the you know a lot of the sort of the blue chip nft holders and then we'll be able to grow our ecosystem uh bigger and basically to influence them and then to have them to refer to their friend and so on and so forth basically to expand the ecosystem and that that's sort of the um the the one of the main objectives for us to build uh newer realms and to grow and to to to to increase our sort of uh

brand awareness and eventually um again to break into the web tool and uh um get more users down the track speaking of users just uh let's i want to take a moment here to just talk about a couple of stats that are pretty interesting on your on your website you show these live which is pretty great so to date uh there have been close to 70 million miles that have been logged by users uh that translates to roughly 4.3 billion calories burned uh and some carbon offset attached to that one of the things that uh when i was talking to you guys uh was sort of the scalability problems that you were facing in solana and then you had to go to another chain

how does you know you guys have gotten some very early success with a phased rollout because there were so many people that were pinging me for codes and i said guys like i only have so many codes uh you have released a very methodical kind of way of every day i think your discord you release certain codes i think it's a thousand and then that allows the next set of users to join um how how do you think about scaling this to potentially billions of users like uh is that possible with the current infrastructure um and how do we get there i think it's possible because uh i think a couple months ago we have upgraded the server basically to be able to accommodate not billions

but at least tens of millions easily every day basically so base will do future server upgrade and once we see needed and again we believe that with user we really cannot grow too fast and if you go too fast it created a lot of issues because nfc have been produced by users and if user growth is faster than the nft being produced you can see that the price went up to the sky and then that caused issues so we want to really pass it out to have a set number of users to join every day and just to smoothly increase

our users without impacting too much on the nft and token prices so as we again step into the beer market and we actually are trying to [Music] again move our focus uh on more of a traditional method of of growing and the activation code or invite code i think is one of the key i think key reason that we'd be able to scale you know i always try to use the sort of the covet metaphor basically uh kovi basically is that you

you affect the close contact you know friend of families and with stefan we're also trying to do that basically you use it you feel that you know it's a great app and you want to introduce to your friend families and with your activation code when you have that code they always know who to ask question from and that created that social bound all right folks this episode is brought to you by our friends at avalanche and ava labs they have just dropped a new crypto wallet called core you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the coming months you can now be one of the first to try it out here's the reason i'm excited to partner with them on empire right now crypto wallets and browser extensions they feel clunky they feel non-intuitive that's why ava labs

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the question is perhaps more on that habitual part which is how many of your users do you think will stop logging and using uh step in uh if the price kind of collapses um and and do you think that you know are you kind of focused on that um or do you think that users will naturally just say look i'm gonna i'm gonna use step in the same way i use strava but i just have maybe it's just a very marginal incentive and nudge because you're earning something which could be a token but could also just be you're attached emotionally to your sneakers and you wanna you know that sort of badge of honor the same with the go people go to ironmans and have medals to

show for in in their walls you know when people go to their houses you know so i'm curious how you think about that relationship of the different kind of users that are coming to steppen now because you know at the very beginning people would be walking to lunch and they would pay for the lunch with earned tokens that that's you know i don't think you and i and all of us three here can agree that that's sustainable but the question is are people gonna keep using and be motivated enough to come to step in and set up an onboard if they know that they can't make as much money okay so is two um two point all right one is all in the executions and uh because we were so we've seen that we have a surge of inflation of the

sneakers basically too much things are being produced and then we soon have the solutions basically to do the enhancement basically burn five you have higher quality a better quality basically and we can suddenly see that a huge amount of token being burned sorry a sneaker being burned and now we are looking at the deflationary supply of the sneakers and uh yes people do walk away and uh because oh you know we we i have i bought the sneaker price too high right and uh i don't feel that i'm going to make my money back and they walk away and this is normal but when people looking at a sinker now the roi is pretty much pretty um

consistent where because those are always a new entry well see okay there will be able to make the roi in two weeks uh two months of time and when they can sustain that and they will basically motivate it and when people are vote at the top unfortunately we've seen that people say oh just keep walking because uh why not and we do see people walk away but i i the point i want to make is that people want to i want people to see this as a a long-term project because uh once the gmt earning has been enabled

you know so the thing will starting to change because uh it is the gse that single side selling pressure on the jc costing issues once we have the other side um things will be much improved i want to ask a very basic question before we keep going down this path which is it was a question that i asked you at the very beginning when we first met we just wait a minute how does someone not game this um you know and and i think you mentioned something about the accelerometer in the phone but my first question was my first initial reaction was okay somehow somewhere someone's gonna find a way to pretend like they're walking and then just remember this put it on a treadmill put your phone on that's right yeah we've all seen the meme of like this

this guy with like 100 phones right and like pretending to walk um how do you from a technical standpoint can you just explain to listeners like how you can you actually detect when someone is like faking it and can you fake it we are at the rollout of the first generation of the smack which is the stamping anti-genie mechanics and we have the first generation came out one month after we made the public beta and then we spent these amounts of time to build a much better and complicated um algorithm

to pick the uh cheating um you know there are different ways of cheat right there's one way is basically you pack a full bag of mobile and then you run at once then you earn nine times of what you're supposed to earn and the other the other type of cheating is basically what we see very common at the moment when you do the replay attack is that you run you record one section of your actual running and then you'll keep replaying that and trying to game the system so it is difficult because uh with the artificial intelligence you need a huge amount of data set

in order to say okay to distinguish between the cheating with the normal runnings and we have changed uh many many many ways basically to trying to optimize that without interfering people's user experience because uh i think we see the the third uh ai we roll out um it will verify every run and then that causes massive issues and now we are using a more of a background mode basically to [Music] not really actively detect users but if we detect they are

being abnormal users then we are having an internal call touring score uh reduction and then they will they won't be able to do any in-app interactions after that then they have to run normally to restore their touring score so we are using several algorithms based on the machine learnings to basically detect if this is the actual person's running so we now are very good at it because before without the um a lot of data set um sometimes you'll have people argue say all right i'm actually

running while you detect me as a bot and now we're very confident and say if we detect us about your bot yeah and uh and we actually can prove it and uh uh on the next range so we keep so basically there's no stop on improving the technology and giving another example is that uh i think on the second donation rebuild we can only detect uh if you carry uh say four or five phones and as we're gathering [Music] the ai become more smarter we can now narrow down to three two and one so basically we are trying to tighten up

now uh with the newer algorithm so yeah that's the current stage and then moving forward we also uh trying to implement what we call like edge computations so that's another way that we trying to have the anti-cheating done locally at users mobile meaning that we don't need to collect their gps data and meaning that uh with a lot of the privacy issues uh with the gps data there will be none so there's always that uh we're trying to anti-cheating is always like the biggest um

sort of topic uh when we come to sort of a dev talk um so we have a whole team basically looking after uh on the ai side so um not only collecting the diameters uh also the gps and also the steps uh of the step counter and then we basically run the algorithm and say all right uh are there mobile at the right place um you know they cannot be like three meters high from the ground uh you know these type of things and uh what kind of you know many of the python people trying to tweak especially the replay attack is when uh they think they can fake a sort of uh disguise

but in the eye of uh machine learning's algorithm the it is a it's anomaly so basically we're trying to compile all the data set together and then to deconstruct and then trying to reconstruct if it doesn't make sense meaning that it's cheating yeah yeah because i think when you were talking about that i just thought okay if you have an event say a marathon well there's it could be up to thousands of of runners uh and that could be perceived as wait someone's cheating right because there's so many people logging at the same time the same gps like kind of location you're kind of triangulating because the way i think location data is gathered it might be

like the algorithm might say oh this is cheating and so does that limit would you say that like the fraudulent score goes up during events where there's like multiple like people gathering or can you tease that out no no so when people gathering you only well see uh they are very close up uh of the gps but gps is really only one metric everybody have different height they put their phones at different part of their body pocket you know holding on hand meaning that do the elevations will always be different and then their pace will be different so there are so many things people are different so

you cannot have two people even they hold hand in hand they were still showing up different in the eye of algorithm yeah speaking about this um what's next like uh for the the company that built the game uh or you know is is uh find satoshi labs you built what is now applicable for walking and running jogging do you see yourself doing other type of applications or different type of sports i'm curious how you think about branching out into other other kind of verticals or activities to tap into this health conscious um type of app uh

we use walking running because there is a way that we can verify uh if that's a actual human but with a lot of other sport is uh very difficult because for example biking i cannot distinguish if you are riding a motor bike or actual riding back or you're only or even driving a car because uh you know there's no movement you know with walking running you actually are moving up and down and also forward so it's it's verifiable we have yet found any other type of sport we can easily verify

their motion is genuine so if you cannot verify that token could be mass produced by cheating or or about and eventually the token was much much much less than what it's supposed to be because uh again you know it's infinite supply um because there's no cost i think the the point i'm trying to argue is if you are actually moving yourself uh you want to put a price tag behind your work right so say for this distance i want to make how much money and

but if you are running about you can run massive like both farms and uh there's no cost right so we let's say with that actual human say okay if if the two the token reward is too too too little i'd rather not working today you know when they are not working no token being produced sale pressure reduced we start to see the price rebalance speaking of this um what other avenues and you've hinted at this during the conversation you see out there that can accrue value back to kind of stabilizing the ecosystem maybe in that equation do you see like insurance companies getting interested other brands getting interested

uh you know events like the new york marathon or you know iron man like i'm curious how you think about the evolution of the ecosystem from a cash flow perspective and having what we call syncs right reasons for people to use the token not just immediately kind of swap it and clock in again the ultimate what we picture ourselves is become sort of the billboard of web 3 where people can do the sponsorship of their marathon through our uh our mars mode and with realms partnership for example that to bring their part of the bargain for example their ip or their users

you know um so there's many many ways we're trying to bring external parties uh to be part of stefan and then we build something together and uh create more values so um i know or to use stefan as a way to advertise uh so basically you know the typical example would be say if they want to access the premium sort of web 3 users that focus on their own health and are well off and then they have to come to us and then we become the gateway and then we say right we'll charge you x x amount of money and then this extra money portion

of them then go back to the community john i think it was chris dixon who coined this phrase back in maybe 2015 2016 come for the tool stay for the network right uh right now step in feels very much like a tool less like a network i would say what's the plan to maybe build social features um santi mentioned strava so i'll go back to strava right on strava you can share you can comment you can give kudos on other people's runs there's a leaderboard there are in-person events i know you mentioned that you guys might build marathons yourself or build this network of marathons what but what's the plan to to build the network less less building the tool so that so the social part i think is is increasingly

difficult to tackle especially you know in in the webster world that everybody says social fire then how do you put the fight into the social uh without get gamed you know the the main issue is let's see if we create a chatting group and say reward people to chat and then immediately have a lot about trying to say gms repeatedly so we need to have a verifiable way um to encourage people or incentivize people to go social but at the moment we can't find any maybe we'll find that in the future so our uh direction with building the network is building offline networks and also i think that's uh

one thing that uh a bit of lacking on webster everyone on twitter and on the discord and they don't go out and meet people much and we're trying to build a vibrant offline community at least for now and to build uh ambassadors that could take the responsibilities to organize offline event and so and gradually run that into a like a dowel structure and and then we want to see how that takes us you know we don't know what gonna happen but let's see if we have various of hundreds of like say citadel or city running group

uh while that creates uh more synergies and what you know that could create new opportunities for us uh we just have to work toward that and see and find out yeah there's another thing i want to get your your take on here yawn uh there are a lot of people who think that gaming is one of the best ways to onboard folks into defy um previously step in swaps went through orca right uh you guys launched your own decks about three maybe four weeks ago it's already the most popular decks on solana if i'm looking at the right numbers here by uh by a decent chunk what is your plan um yeah i think 65 of all decks daily active u yeah are now are now on this uh

are now on this decks that you guys built what is your plan for basically a like onboarding folks into d5 and b how do you think about it's almost like this traditional question of build verse buy right using other people's d5 applications versus building them yourself how do you think about that um i think this is the part where we're going back to the uh the thing we discussed is using stefan as a user onboarding tool and once they take it on board um they familiarize of how everything works and then we can say all right what you know you've tried the nft you know with steppen especially for the people that never sort of got into crypto before right so these people have no idea what taxes and uh but they'll be part of the

community and you know within the community they can they can be educated and they'll find out what is tax and can they add liquidity and create lp pairs and you know et cetera et cetera all this traditional sort of deck stuff so it's uh we're trying to this this is the part that uh we're trying to onboard user when they are ready when they're ready to say transform from like a stepping user to a web three users you know they're gonna need to know how to use stacks they're gonna need to you know how to use empty marketplace and centralize exchanges so on so forth so we're just trying to build these different stage of flywheels and then when they're ready you know here you go

you know that's the decks and when they're ready i have the marketplace and uh i i you know we we we were thinking about building music platforms social platforms down the track so when uh when they are need when when they need um sort of uh wave 3 tools or infrastructures you know we have something there so trying to build like a semi-enclosed ecosystem where people will be within the ecosystem and then using same token and exchange values yeah i mean ultimately everything really is an attention game and i think in many ways board 8 was the first instantiation of what

started off as a lot of people that had never had no interest in crypto came for the first time then they've layered on so many things around that in the same way the wechat did it back in the day um i am curious what kind of if we can spend a moment talking about like the the behavior that you're observing from all these users um obviously i'd be really interested in in getting more insights from what you found interesting on that like are people like do they take do they immediately start logging dude it takes three four weeks um for the user to kind of gradually work their way up like what kind of like user insights can you share you can share with us um that you're seeing

i think we are seeing um i think user behavior are pretty much uh the same uh they're trying to maximize the um the returns right the return could be in different forms but uh um many of them trying to strategize right so as soon as they get into the game they discover that there's different paths with the success and then starting to quickly analysis analyze on which pathway they should take for the long term holder or the users you say all right i'll having a gmt sneaker park them at level 30 with some of these gems inserted so within the moment when gmd earnings started

they can be the first one to you know dig in and they also are the people that are trying to really get the return on investment pretty quickly right they're trying to strategize on different levels you know i think they're the people posting their own guide and say all right do do level 9 to level 19 and don't go beyond and then you have you know they did really really down into this calculation game and i think that's what we find very fascinating is they become sort of um a game between the developers and the users right the user trying always trying to find the best way to game the system and we're always trying to patch it up

and create more token things and and then they create a very very interesting dynamic uh between the the the app and then the users it is really trying to um have something uh for people that uh let's say for for the mentors um at one time that uh we discovered that uh there are many uh particular person are holding a lot of sneakers just keep minting and then that's when we started to install the meeting scroll which means that you can only get a meeting scroll by running and so meaning that when people are making profits through

just purely minting without any exercise they have to buy this scroll from people that are doing the exercise so so the profit goes from the minter to the runners and so once that happened we started to see people strategize their way to maximize the maintenance growth and uh trying to discover you know what type of what level of mystery box containing the meeting scroll and trying to explore so it's uh it's constant uh i think it's a constant evolving um on user behavior and you know for us you know we really want to get people engaged and keep them get

them keep using the app and for the user it's always trying to maximize their returns and the and of course the perfect side effect of that is you whip into shape which uh that has always been one of the biggest criticisms around gaming it's like you're just kind of a rotten potato in your couch in this case people are moving and you know obesity rates are up to the right and that's pretty interesting uh do people log their weight in the platform do you collect other types of data because you know and strava and others like you can monitor this stuff to kind of like correlate it to the activity i'm curious if you thought about people do post yeah people do post um how they feel and also they do post pictures on twitter so you know you go search you can feel find a

whole bunch of them and uh not only the weight you know it's always also the mental state people are improving you know there's many cases that also can find on twitter so things overall improving so people don't discover this after they realize how much they have uh uh changed their shape and you know that that's that's when you sort of say oh hold on a second my troubles become too big to hold my belly what happened you know you lose weight uh and that's where they realize that uh you know the app is effective so last question for me well so when will i be able to go to my insurance provider and say

listen i'm using this thing called step in uh i've lost weight i've become healthier by all these like markers metrics can i get a lower premium can i get some sort of discount on my insurance policy uh can i get a lower rate with doctors like do you see that um um and and if that's on the roadmap when do you think that is is going to be a possibility we do have this type of ambition but uh it becomes something that you're probably going to need to work with the government side in order to push something like this and we certainly don't not gonna see this uh in the near future uh but i think uh what we're gonna do is

that we're gonna [Music] have to prove to the market that we are a very much sustainable project with true impact to people and also working on virus of the bd really to um really to demonstrate right you know as the level of execution we can put out um the level of partnership we can create and the level of users we can occur and uh really not only uh get users but also retain them and uh not only getting the web 3 users but also the normies as well i think that's truly when we starting to

[Music] i think a stand out and then be able to working with more sort of a higher level of collaborations yeah and i think i just have one last question to wrap this up which is i'd love to just hear your reflections on building a crypto app that almost that kind of bridges between web 2 and web 3 and like what what is what have been the limitations of of maybe the infrastructure and there are a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to this and folks who are building in crypto so you guys obviously chose to build on solana like what are the limitations what would have been the good things the bad things what do you wish existed on the infrastructure side of things that maybe could enable you to to 10x or 100x step in i think again i mean there there is no

shortcut on this unfortunately we we all you know we tried but you know really you really have to have something that is functional and uh operational and also uh interesting to play so we spend a lot of time basically just thinking every day and also uh talking and brainstorming i think the limit is really your imagination um we always trying to find where we can maximize the impact with the minimum effort i think that's always what entrepreneur want to achieve right so uh and we're always trying to find out sort of a weak link

and to to improve that as well so i think people especially for the sort of for the startups um they really have to find that sweet spot before they move because uh if they just pick any of um area and it was the wrong area or wrong directions and you know certainly the more they work and the more they spend their effort on the the the further they're going to be aware from uh success so that that's one and two i think uh you know when we first designed the app we are far far

different from the original uh concept so you know that's when we discovered the um the market and also the user demand and you know we're starting to pivot right so i think every day we are looking at um the stats and we say is there a better way we can deal with this right uh do we need to pivot to something else do we need to open another branch um you know to attract more users so i think we we did a lot of trial and errors i think we have to do it so one way that is uh you don't know until you try it right so it doesn't work we quickly will

pivot again to something else and say all right well that direction works um so i think for the journey that we we you know we've been through almost a year is that we never really give up um you know if one way doesn't work we try the other if that'll render or you know we just keep trying uh until we'll find the right way and then we'll just push through and we'll have the exponential growth and then if we're probably going to hit the bottom neck and and then we'll push through again and uh i don't you know so i don't think um we can stay

still right so we always have to keep trying keep building and expanding pivoting you know just um to adapt the market you know especially in this current stage basically you just adapt and survive yeah and yeah wait wait for that full market so awesome well john it is uh tough not to root for you and to root for anyone who is helping to move this face forward um it's been an awesome conversation appreciate the time um and yeah like i said i think we're all rooting for you here okay on i guess before we we go um any perhaps one where can people find you learn more about step in and two maybe some parting thoughts or words you want

to impress upon our listeners sure so i think i think in this particular market condition we spend a lot of time just keep building and recruiting developers i think we peop really people shouldn't um i've seen people sort of get really frustrated about this premarket and then so you know step out i think you know been through the last beer market which is really super depressing for me sometimes people just need to hang on there and and eventually things get better and i think people that stayed through the last the last two bear market could

agree with me um so you know for the people that first get into cryptos for this cycle um this could be difficult but uh i do believe that uh you know um the whole industry will get better absolutely and what better way i mean i think your bear markets are for shredding and so i think this is a perfect opportunity for people who've been in their basement not doing anything to get out get moving and i think everyone can everyone can sympathize with this idea that you always typically feel better after exercise and so no matter how bad things you you think are by looking at charts our day or your portfolio i think we've we all can benefit from an

extra walk or an extra run and and you know endorphins make you happy not to go legally blonde but i am coding legally blonde and so exercise stimulates endorphins and endorphins make you happy so at least you know we can be in a bear market but we could be happy by uh exercising so i'm brutality yeah i know i'm i showed my true skin here i i'm quoting legally blonde but nonetheless uh yeah and this is great i think the next evolution of apps really will show the world of the positive influence that creative systems that have better incentives whether and applying that to things that really move the needle and the health is certainly one of those as the world kind of struggles with health crisis is something that is is some is

fascinating experiment and i think it is working to some extent and so uh as jason said rooting for you and uh you know definitely you should check up uh on you guys over the next you know uh in some time see how you're doing but otherwise thanks for coming on the pod and sharing this with with everyone thank you [Music] you