191. How We Built A Profitable Crypto Business And Our Best Month Ever

Now the bull market is here. This is the moment. This is why this is still around. Going through brutal bear market where you're fighting for even one customer to now.

Have them beating down the door and.

Having to expand the team.

It's kind of mind boggling when you think about that.

The majority of calls are it's going to be around 100 trillion, roughly 30 something X in eight years.

I believe crypto is going to become a competitor or not even competitor but like it's going to become another financial market that the world is recognized that a lot of capital goes into.

I do think this industry will be bitcoin led. Nah man, just a little bit more. A little. Ah.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bennebergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling the leading crypto research company here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to share it around with a friend or family member. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week or leave us a subscribe if you're on YouTube or or follow us if you are on podcast now. Today, Burgs, we wanted to share a little bit of behind the scenes of Collective Shift because it is all happening, mate. I feel as though we finally the sweet vindication of building a business in crypto without taking money on advertising and affiliates. We did it the right way, we did it the long way, we did the hard way and shit is just blowing up, mate. It is unbelievable. The market's pumping. People want quality research, quality insights, quality help. And yeah man, we're in scale season. We're on track for our biggest month ever and things are going all right, mate. Nothing's breaking too much, which is nice.

How good does it feel, mate? We've been training for this for years.

And now the bull market is here and we were kind of reminiscing about. Ben, you did a talk in at AO and it was a confidential talk with a room of maybe 50 business owners and you were talking about what happened with the split acquisition of this business. Things. We went through all the crazy things that happened. There was not a dry eye in the room. A lot happened behind the scenes. A lot of us. Bullshit. A lot of it. Yeah, it was, it was just craziness and to be able to undo that and come out with a thriving business. And when you actually did that talk, the business wasn't thriving. And I remember the questions at the end, they were like, why are you doing this? And even asking me like, you know, you've taken a pay cut, you're a high school guy, why are you still around? And Ben, this is the moment, this is why this is still around.

Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, it was, been tough. You know, people take pay cards but to, you know, lose some staff, like it was, it was difficult to make it through and that's why we don't have any competitors because, you know, no one else could make it through. It was super difficult. Like, we were lucky. We had an amazing team and an amazing member base and I know a lot of listeners here are members and we thank you for your support and seeking bias and I think the quality of the content and the, in the insights and the investments and just generally everything, you know, has been what's kept a lot of people around because we've been doing a great job. But now when the market's ramping up, you know, the, the market cap at 3 trillion, like to see the biggest month ever. We doubled our expectations in terms of revenue, which is nuts. Like we're. The net revenue versus November last year is up 420%. 420. Let's go 4x in a, in a year, which is nuts. And we can't keep up. Like we've just added three more sales people to the team. So we've got four in our sales team now. We've got too many leads. We literally cannot keep up. Our head of, head of Member Success DT has 65 pending calls. He's booked out till December. Brilliant. And it's just, it's just nuts. And it's amazing though to see not only though Burg's, you know, the business growing, but the, the member feedback and retention has never been better. Like everyone's loving the product. We've spent so much time on the onboarding and the product itself and the, and the live calls and you know, we had a, we had a, you know, a master class the other night where we had about 380 people live on this master class. I couldn't keep up with the messages. I felt like, Buddy, you know one of those live streamers where, you know, just going nuts on Twitch, like it was just insane. And, and these are fans, like these are people that are Bennett and Berg's listeners. They're collective shift fans like that have followed Us on social media for a long, long time and now joining the community. It's just such an awesome thing to be a part of.

Absolutely, man. Going through a brutal bear market where you're fighting for even one customer to now have them beating down the door and having to expand the team. And I think, Ben, the thing for you was the vsl, mate. You've, you've cracked ads finally. How do you feel about it, mate?

I feel finished.

Tell people what? Good. Tell people, tell people what it is, what you've done and what it does for us.

So essentially like paid advertising is the, is the biggest opportunity in any business, right? You talk to any online business or E commerce business, usually 99% of the time paid ads will be the way that they made money, right? Running ads and then somehow converting audiences into paying customers. I've been trying to crack this for the last two or three years. Like, how can we take someone that doesn't know us, be educated, learn a bunch about crypto and then essentially, how can we onboard them and help them become a member and, you know, enjoy all of our, our paid stuff? That is very hard to do. And it took. I remember the first year I was having a crack out of Bergs. It spent a lot of money. Bergs had to have an intervention with me because he's like, ben, I love what you're doing. Well done. But it's, it's not working. You're spending a bunch of money. We need to try something else. And I hated that at the time because I'm like, no, I'm so close. I feel as I'm so close.

You were so filthy and you were so hyper fixated on it. I might. Ben, you're literally burning through way too much cash. You did a test, another test, another test. The test results are. It's not working. You're like, nah, man, just a little bit more, a little bit more.

Ah.

More.

Like, bro, we've got to do this another day, another way. It's not the time. Either we're doing it wrong or the market's just not there or we need to throw another X million at it to get it working.

And I was like, fine. So left with the tail. You were so salty.

You were fucking filthy, mate.

But it was, it was not even about like the opportunities, more about the fact that I hadn't been able to solve this problem. It was such an ADHD like thing. I was like, I have to solve this problem. I cannot leave until this problem solved. I couldn't solve it.

But this is the hardest problem in every business. And Ben's just like, I'll come in and solve it with $5.

And by the way, like, I don't have a marketing degree or anything. Like, I'm sort of, you know, I'd say quasi CMO as well in the company, but it's like all about testing and learning. And for me, I love a challenge, but the fact I couldn't crack this was just, it was grinding me, you know, which way to Sunday. But yeah, you.

What's really shown up to us? Well.

What'S shown up in this market is how little people actually understand about marketing.

Oh yeah.

Like, we see a lot of influencers out there that are trying to do similar things to us, but they haven't earned the right to do that. They haven't provided consistent value over multiple years throughout content, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, going to events, speaking. They haven't built up all those touch points and they're trying to skip to, you know, a similar model to what we do. And they're having very, very limited success because you need to do the hard thing and compound over a series of years to then have the license and ability to do what we're doing today.

And it's funny because you and I know how hard it is to build what we've built. You know, in a sense, like as a market leader in a sector, when you're the market leader, you've got to come up with the, with the, the new tools, the new tactics. Like you, you are figuring that out. And to do that requires, you know, a team and resource and whatever. And then to see the copycat competitors, see what it is on the surface and try and replicate. Yeah, it's like, it's funny because then they're doing the strategy calls, they're doing the one on ones, they're doing all the stuff. But it's. The execution is so poor. It's like.

Anyway, that's it. Even if the execution was good, they become a me too brand. And we've already built up so much brand power that we've got a first mover advantage. Yeah, that's a huge barrier for other people. There's hardly any second mover advantage here unless you've been doing this for years. Yeah.

And a lot of our competitors are one man bands. Right. So when you sign up to them, you only get their style of analysis, whether it be ta, fa, whatever. It might be like, you only get their style. But the real true value of collective shift is that we have a team of now 12 or 13 people, you know, four of them and five of them are analysts including me, that have all market opinions and different skill sets that come together to, to, to generate like a, a hive mind sort of view which is far superior to just having one person tell you what they think.

Yeah. And mate, let's talk about. We're all very, you know, we're excited. The moment is here. It doesn't look like it's going to let up for a series of months which is great. Business is going incredibly well, we've structured it well. Let's talk about where the market's going and then the vision for the business as well. So I've seen a lot of reports, whether it's from, you know, we've been put out by real vision or by Ark Invest or just insto reports and generally they all land around that 100 trillion mark. So the crypto market cap is roughly 3.2 trillion as of 20th of November.

The majority of calls are it's going to be around 100 trillion. So roughly 30 something X in eight years. Eight years is very convenient because it's two more cycles, right? Two more halving cycles. That is insane. Like to go from where we are 3.2 trillion to 100 trillion in just eight years, how much larger this space is going to be and how much capital is going to flow into this space.

It's kind of mind boggling when you think about that idea. But also I believe crypto is going to become a, you know, competitor or not even competitor but like it's going to become another financial market that the world is recognized that a lot of capital goes into and like amongst and around capital markets. You need research, you need advisors, you need structure, you need all of these other professional services that are not currently built yet. And that's where the vision's always been for me. Building this company is like the morning star of crypto. Like the go to financial research, trusted independent player in the space where you can get actually quality information to help you with your portfolio. And if this industry goes from where we are now in 3 trillion to even if we get to 20 trillion or 50 trillion, like holy moly, like.

You know, it's going to be insane. And I do think this industry will be bitcoin led and just seeing other companies come aboard and take Michael Saylor's playbook and start buying bitcoin, I think there's seven to 10 companies that are doing it now.

There's countries that are going to start doing it, USA's Bitcoin strategic reserve. Countries are buying gold. I saw this beautiful post. Checkmate retweeted it about how if the USA starts buying bitcoin, has a strategic reserve, all the other countries are buying gold. In 10 years, they will buy all their gold off those other countries and still have a shitload of bitcoin left.

And the platinum members I'm speaking, so we're up to, I think we're at 90 or 100 Platinum clients already.

Amazing nuts.

And to see these people, these are sophisticated people, these are business owners. These guys and girls understand money, they understand depreciation, they understand diversification. And a lot of these people have businesses that are now looking at ways to place their capital because they're getting rotter than the banks and nowhere even the even buying property. Now I do believe that buying bitcoin and property is the best way to do it. But like, if you've only been property and no crypto, well, then you probably miss out a lot of gains too, because you're only getting whatever the yield is on property, right? Or whatever your property is yielding. So just, just by holding bitcoin, you know, you're outperforming pretty much every other asset class without taking that too much risk. So more and more people are getting, you know, sophisticated. The U.S. you know, and Trump is electing, not electing, but he's appointing crypto pro. You know, people around him in different sectors in the US and government. So it's all tracking the way. I mean, I don't think, I didn't probably realize it could happen this fast, but it's all happening pretty quickly.

You were very excited and like, your bull case for this wasn't even like 50% of what's actually happened.

And the speed that it's happened, right, like, it's crazy.

It's like people have hope now. Like, they, they feel like the reins are slowly starting to come off and there's opportunity for innovation and investment and to make money.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. So, yeah, the, the, the, the next, you know, point for us is continue to, to, to scale everything. Like, we've got our own collective shift summit coming up, which is going to be awesome. We've, you know, adding a couple more people to our team just to build everything up. But ultimately, like, you know, we've got an amazing set of analysts. The platform is working well. We're over a thousand members now, you know, on the, on the, on the platform. So even the B2B side burgs you've been leading up like we spoke to one of the largest crypto exchanges in New Zealand the other day. Like they're looking at coming on board. Like it's, it's awesome.

The impact we're having, it's incredible, man. And all the other B2B partners are scaling up with us as well, which is just, it is go time.

Like we are, like we are now integrated, you know, amongst, you know, Coin Spot, SwiftX, there's a couple others that we, we haven't quite announced yet. That's gonna be pretty exciting once we do like we pretty much fucking cracking one.

Jesus. We've gone right to the top.

Big as it gets.

Yeah, yeah, I can't wait to announce that one. That one is bloody exciting, mate.

Yeah, so look, I think overall, like, you know, it's trending in a great direction and our job is just to continue to push, put out great, great research, great content, help people, you know, do what they do. And yeah, as long as the industry keeps growing, which we firmly believe it will, there's going to be happy times for everyone.

Absolutely. And not sure when this episode will go out, but you can catch us at Oz Cryptocon, mate.

Yes.

Might have already happened by the time you're listening to this.

We might be cancelled already. Let's see. But if you're. Yeah, if you go to ozcrypto Con this weekend, we'll try and get this episode out before then, so we'd love to see you. We're going to be on Sunday, Sunday afternoon live. Ben and Bergs, come and come and talk some with us. We've got some exclusive Alpha merch. It's gonna be fun. We're hungover. It's gonna be great. We're talking about crypto. It's just gonna be a good time.

That's great. We'll have a collective shift booth there. Ben, you've got a keynote speech, mate. On the Big Boy keynote stage. You can have your big boy pants on your fancy shoes or socks with sandals and sandals.

Big Boy, Big Boy pants and sandals. On Saturday afternoon. Yeah, I'm doing a keynote on fixing your portfolio and profiting from the bull market, which is going to be awesome. So keen to deliver that then we've got a community meet up for all the collector shift fans and Benneberg's fans. On the Saturday we've got a booth, we're at a party on Friday night. It's all happening. So, yeah, keen to see you all.

It's gonna be sensational. Can't wait for it, mate.

It's gonna be good and. Yeah, and then boat party Sunday, mate. Apparently that'd be interesting.

Going on a yacht. That's very crypto, isn't it?

Very crypto. Hopefully I don't get bundled up and shield some bloody shitty project in the corner of the boat we can't get on.

And to be clear, we've not hired a boat or like bought tickets or anything like that. We managed to cop a couple of comp tickets to go on a boat, so we'll see how that ends up, mate.

Kol life mate.

I hate that. I hate that. I have not seen, like Kol anywhere else apart from in crypto. Maybe this is a key opinion leader or something. A thought leader. Global interplanetary luminary, Ben.

Just like AI and Kol. If anyone says that on their bloody crypto project, just get rid of it.

Oh, or the post with emojis. You know, chat. GPT's written it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, amazing.

You can have. You can have a Kol shirt, mate. King Kol. You can have a Kol off. All the live streamers are going to stream.

The only Tasmanian Kol.

Oh, God.

Gross.

Disgusting.

Oh, dear. But come say hi. Come and say hi to the booth. Come to the Benneberg's live podcast. Gonna be awesome. Like, love to see you all there. And yeah, we'll see you on the next episode.

See you then, champions.