#73: Kevin Xu — Making Zillions on Reddit

I traded my way from $35,000 all the way to $8 million over about 21 months. I was sharing all my positions and trades like every step along the way. I was actively posting screenshots on WallStreetBets and my own subreddit. WallStreetBets is dead. They're basically a glorified Instagram meme page now. Let's blow up the internet from the basement to the higher net. Scrolling, tapping, man, we ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.

Are we all sleeping on Reddit? Yay or nay?

Um, it's my secret growth channel, uh, for all the success that we've seen on AfterHour. I would say so far about 80% of our users are coming from Reddit. And I've heard from a lot of founders. They say that Reddit is the hardest nut to crack. So I think it's a great leading indicator that we're onto something here. Uh, and other platforms should be pretty easy. Uh, I don't— Reddit has a lot of nuance. It has a lot of history to it. I've been on Reddit since like 2005. Ever since like the Dink migration, you know, uh, and I think there is a technique to kind of creating your own community. And it's a, it's a long game, right? Like, it took us 4 years to create our subreddit and grow to the size it's at right now. I think it just hit 92,000, uh, subscribers, uh, but it's a force to be reckoned with once you actually crack it.

Yeah, I've always wondered, how do you actually grow a subreddit from scratch? That— how do people find it? How does it grow? How does that happen?

Yeah, yeah, there's probably a lot underneath the surface that most folks don't see. So my subreddit is called TheRaceTo10Million. And I'll, you know, upfront, I'll disclaim that this was all a very happy accident. Like, I did not go into this thinking that this random subreddit I created in 2020 was going to be like our current and first acquisition channel for my startup, right? I think we got a lot of things accidentally right. You know, it was called The Race to $10 Million. It immediately speaks for itself. It was not branded as, you know, the startup, right? But the origin story for The Race to $10 Million was that in 2020 and 2021, when I was trading a lot and posting all my trades on WallStreetBets, I was Sir Jack a lot, and people kind of grew to know my trades. I found a couple of others that were also doing some crazy YOLO-style bets as well, right? And it kind of became a meme, like 8 digits or bust, like 8 digits was kind of like the goal, right? Um, and it was kind of funny to kind of, kind of think we're like all in at this, in this race together, like this amazing race to, to $10 million. And so, um, somebody else actually, it wasn't me, uh, someone else created the Race to $10 Million and asked me like, hey, Uh, do you want to mod on this, right? I don't know anything about modding. I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll take it. And, uh, that's kind of how it originally created— someone else created it, noticed it was kind of this meme of like us idiots racing to $10 billion, uh, and we just started posting to it. And kind of that's how it kind of grew its first 10,000, I think, subscribers, right? It was just like me posting about it, um, um, him posting about it, a few others kind of started getting onto it. It kind of became like our own like small, small subreddit in that way. Wow. And, and, um, that was, that was 2020, 2021. And then afterwards, you know, you know, when the market crashed and, you know, a lot of people weren't paying attention, uh, it kept growing, kept growing, you know, slowly but surely, a couple hundred every day, uh, until I think earlier this year it cracked 25,000 subscribers. Like, I, I think this is a little secret here, um, that I think 25,000 subscribers is the magic number, uh, for a subreddit to cross, and then it starts trending. Because I noticed as soon as it hit that number, posts would dramatically get like 100,000 views or more. And I'm like, oh, this is reaching like bigger than the subreddit, you know. I think before then, only people that joined that subreddit get those, get those posts. But if you cross 25,000, Reddit thinks like, oh, this is like, uh, important enough, I'm going to show it to people's like For You feeds and trending feeds or whatever, right? And we started getting listed on those like top, you know, 50 finance subreddits or whatever. So like momentum begets momentum. And so more and more people are discovering it. And yeah, I'll stop there first.

No, that's fascinating. You know, I talk a lot about organic growth and starting the subreddit somewhat accidentally, just building a community for fun and then building a startup on top of it. Using it as an acquisition channel. I mean, you know, I'm a huge fan of, of Greg Eisenberg and friends with him and have learned so much about his ACP funnel, audience, community, product. And a lot of the times it happens like you and, and like me where it's accidental, honestly. It's like building an audience or talking about something you love on the internet, yapping, you build a community to hang out with people and then you're like, ah, I should start a product because I love this. I mean, that's literally what I did with Memelord Technologies. I wrote a book about something I love, which is memes and meme marketing, and then made a bunch of friends, made a community, and then here we go. I have a meme marketing app that, uh, you know, I have the product, you know, that solves the problem. So, um, I'm curious for your subreddit, um, how have people reacted to plugging AfterHour? How do you do that in an organic way? Because a lot of the trouble that I face that a lot of founders do face on Reddit is it's very anti-capitalism in general.

Yeah. Um, yeah.

Or maybe not even, maybe that's not the word, just like anytime somebody's trying to sell anything. Um, so how have you done that in an organic way that still is fun?

Oh, I can get into, um, the spirit of it, but also kind of the tactical bits. Um, yeah, like Reddit is extremely anti-corporate shill, right? I think they have like strongest nose on the internet for when this is getting astroturfed or whatever. I feel like there's a meme of like, uh, like No one writes like an M&M's that way, you know, or like even like the typing of stuff, they could be like, oh no, that's like a corporate person writing that out. No one actually types that out. But so the tactical bits are interesting. Reddit has this auto moderator feature that I'm not sure a lot of people are aware of and also a welcome message. So if you're the moderator in a subreddit, you could actually go into the backend and automatically send people a welcome message. So as soon as they join the subreddit, they get a welcome message. Essentially, it's a free DM, right, into their inbox. So that's an incredibly, incredibly strong acquisition channel. And, you know, I mentioned the Race to 10 Million, and I do a warm welcome, and then I kind of like talk about this app that we also built that's kind of like, you know, trying to do the same thing, right? Um, and you also set up an auto moderator to automatically, uh, comment on every post that's made. So we also have an auto-moderator set up so that as soon as someone makes a post, it'll leave the first comment, right? And it'll actually sticky it too. But here's one issue. On the native mobile apps, if you're using the native Reddit mobile app and you open a post and it has auto-moderator comment, it's actually folded. So most people actually don't see it, which is frustrating. This was actually like a recent change in the last year or two. So what I have had to do recently is I've had to jump in as Sir Jack and write my own unique comment. I don't use ChatGPT for this. I like look at the post, I try to add my own unique comment, and then I add a link to After Hour or mention you can follow me on After Hour or screenshot After or whatever, and then I sticky it, right? So the conversion rate here, conversion funnel is here is that there's a trending post that's kind of broken out of the subreddit. People see it, they click in 'cause comments are so integral to the Reddit experience. And well, I'm the first one, I'm the first sticky comment. Um, and it's fold, uh, unfolded by default, right? Because it's not an auto moderator, it's coming from me, a real user.

Yeah. Let's double-click on that a bit around, um, actually writing out the comments and posts. My best posts on Reddit, you know, I've driven hundreds of newsletter subs, gotten tons of newsletter subs from Reddit, and it never comes from posting a link. It never comes from, you know, hiring somebody to do it. It literally comes from going to like one of the subreddits, social media managers, and just writing like literally a blog style post with a good, uh, you know, a header and then like a real post and then just at the end, just, you know, a little bit mention. But I think a lot of people think that Reddit is like Hacker News almost where you could just kind of post a link or it's just like, you know, kind of random. But it really is, even though people are anonymous a lot of time, it is humans behind this and people want humans. So when it comes to the comments, like I've seen a lot of startups or seen a couple where like auto replies and stuff for Reddit. And I mean, it can't be working as well as a human, even though it is annoying to have to do that. It works better. Yeah.

I've seen, I've seen two major failing cases. Uh, one is when someone only talks about their startup.

Yeah.

You know, uh, Redditors are really good at going through your profile and digging through your past.

It's so annoying.

All you do is just, yeah, all you do is just copy paste the same thing across like 20 subreddits and comment the same thing. People know that you're not like authentically a part of Reddit, right? You're just like trying to do something. You're probably temporary too, because it's usually like a burst, uh, of a day and then you disappear. Uh, so people really, really hates that and they'll call it out or just downvote you, right? I think that's another unique part of Reddit, which is that downvote power that other platforms don't really have. The second thing is that a lot of startups I see start subreddits and it's only the founders posting on there. There's no reason, there's no other content that's actually being posted there. Like the best fandoms are like, you know, like anime or like Pokémon or like even like Twitch streamers, right? Where it's actually the community talking amongst themselves. There needs to be a reason for the community members to kind of jump in and share their findings and memes and, and, and discoveries. I think ChatGPT actually does it pretty well. I think— I want to say that's an unofficial subreddit, uh, but, you know, people are trying to, you know, share memes and, and talking amongst themselves how they're using, uh, ChatGPT.

Yeah, I'm curious, before we jump into memes, I want to do that obviously, uh, do you still work with the guy that created the subreddit, or do you work with him? Did you end up buying it from him? Like, how did that, how did that work? I, I meant to ask that earlier.

Oh yeah, sure, sure. Uh, shout out to IrishDud1 if you see this. Uh, oh, he's a legend. I think he had like a couple million dollars in GME at one point and it all went down. Um, but I haven't talked to him in years. He is, you know, probably aware of, you know, kind of the changes I made to the subreddit, etc. But actually, it's really funny. So getting into the really nitty-gritty of this subreddit moderation hierarchy works as a top-down, meaning if you are the top mod, you can— you have power over the lower mods, right? And so you could kick out, you could, you could remove, you could edit their powers, whatever. It works as a hierarchy. And, uh, since he started it, he was the top mod and I was the second one, you know. And so another reason why I never really did anything in the early years was because, like, you know, if I change it up a little bit too much, he might kick me, and, and that would be, that'd be horrible. Um, and so that, that's another reason why I, yeah, I didn't do things for a while. But then I noticed one day, um, the word inactive next to his name. I'm not sure if that meant inactive on Reddit, inactive on the subreddit, inactive on like using the mod tools and like actually moderate. I don't know what actually what that means. I don't know what the timeline was either. But since he was inactive, I was allowed to bump myself above him. That is so Irish, dude. Shout out, love you. Um, and, and yeah, so that's how I became the top mod. And then I, all of a sudden, I, I felt like I had more, you know, uh, leeway to kind of make some changes.

You got, you got to take the power.

Um, normally, normally the only way to do that is to contact the admins of Reddit itself. I think, uh, WallStreetBets had like a huge like coup d'état, right, where they kind of like had to kick off the top guy because he was being an asshole or whatever. Yeah.

Um, let's talk about memes, man. Um, obviously meme stocks have played a big kind of part of your life and your trading experience. And now, um, how do, how do you use memes for after hour? Are you using them in the subreddit? What's going down?

Yeah, yeah. Um, Memes are just the most effective form of communication these days, right? I think that's just how Gen Z and beyond are just learning about the world. The real genesis for memes and finance to me was finance has always been really, really boring throughout my whole life. You know, actually I grew up in New York, in Queens. And so I had a lot of friends that wanted to go to Wall Street and kind of be in that culture. And I've always felt like they were like really stuck up and took themselves way too seriously. And all they cared about was money and stuff like that. So I actually was never interested in finance for most of my life until I stumbled across WallStreetBets. And I was like, oh, this is like, this, it just felt more like a more organic way of learning about the markets, about learning about stocks or whatever. Like I never read a book, I never paid for a class. I learned everything about the stock market from Reddit comments essentially. And so I think memes are actually a great way to just kind of learn about what's going on.

I love that. It really is a great way to make boring subjects fun. Memes are like the smallest bit order of like transmittable information. And so, you know, a picture speaks a thousand words, a meme speaks a million, right? Like I said that in my book, it's like, you know, able to share a story very, very quickly, which is very powerful. And making—

that's to me, that's what a meme stock is, right? It's a narrative-driven thesis. Um, that's how humans— that's how we act. I think the more serious folks that talk about like discounted cash flow and like revenue numbers and stuff like that, like, that's true, all that stuff does matter, um, you know, for, for a real business to operate and grow and eventually kind of pay off dividends, whatever. But if you're a trader— I characterize myself more as a swing trader. People that play with options are even shorter term and day trade. Or a lot of modern traders trade on catalysts or events. Right. Like, for example, today is Robinhood's Legend Awakens Day. And a big saying in the community is buy the rumor, sell the news, because the rumor, the imagination, the potential of what Robinhood could announce today is much stronger and will drive price action much more than the actual news, which will always disappoint because that imagination, that hype is just way too much. Right. So and then the memes just, just, just, just carry an extra voltage to all that.

Right.

So, you know, me, I bought Robinhood call options 2 weeks ago. I made 160% on them. You know, a huge number in my community. I think someone made over $1 million on Robinhood shares and calls over the last 2 weeks because they followed this playbook of like, hey, you know, it sounds like the meme marketing is going to start rolling. I want to buy in ahead of the rumor, right? Ahead of the hype, ride it up and then sell before the event because, you know, sell the news. That's kind of the other part of it.

Yeah. Stock prices are a lagging indicator of memes. I truly believe, you know, I have ignored meme coins completely for the last few years, actually, which is weird because like everybody assumes I'm super deep into meme coins, but like I'm just deep into meme marketing, like, yeah, using, you know, memes for marketing brands. But yesterday I bought my first meme coin. I admit it. I did it. It was really fascinating. I don't know if you've heard about this. Some like researcher dude started one. Yeah, bro. Like AI agent started a meme coin and now this meme coin has like a $200 million market cap. And there's like Marc Andreessen sent this researcher $50K and there's all this rumors and it's growing and growing. And I feel like I bought it last night. It's up, you know, 20, 30%, whatever, you know, today I didn't buy too much. I was just fucking around. But I was like, I feel like there's this rumor and it hasn't hit the real news yet. Like, it's in the, the rumor mill of like a non-Twitter rumor mill, but it's not in like the— it hasn't hit Robinhood Snacks, which it will eventually. And you're right, right, that's the time to sell, right? Because eventually it's 100%.

Yeah, 100%. That— I think that's the hard part of especially playing on momentum or, or the, the meme virus, right? Which is both trying to guesstimate how long the cycle is and where we are in the cycle. Like you said, like it started off on probably 4chan or Discord, right? Some like really esoteric niche area. And now it's crossed into Twitter and then later newsletters and later CNBC. And so this is, the story has huge potential and, you know, yeah.

Yeah, 100%. I'm curious, would you mind regaling the audience a bit about your meme stock days and, uh, any, any fun stories about that? Uh, what went down? Yeah, yeah.

So, uh, I guess I got famous on Reddit as, uh, the Sir Jackalot. And, uh, very convenient, uh, name. I actually made that name, uh, 10 years ago back in college just because that was so funny, and I got to reuse that username. It stands out. And, uh, I traded my way from $35,000 all the way to $8 million. over about 21 months, uh, from February of 2020, basically the start of pandemic, to November 2021. And the main thing was I was sharing all my positions and trades, like, every step along the way. Like, I was actively posting screenshots on WallStreetBets and my own subreddit. Um, and people really, I think, uh, like, they, they're following because I was so consistent, right? They knew they could trust me. I was just pumping out screenshots every day. So like, there was just like no time to Photoshop. And yet when I was trying to look at other people that I could trust, uh, I didn't know who to trust, right? Like, I actually created one of the earlier, um, GME chat rooms, uh, because this was, I think, October of 2020, so still a few months before the January craze, right? And I put $1.3 billion into GME, uh, and I found a couple other GameStop whales and, and, and kind of people who've been on the play for a while, and I created like a chat room with them. And it's just so much different. It just hits different when you know you're talking to verified shareholders of a stock versus just like some randos on Twitter. Uh, so I think that, that helped, that really credited like, you know, us holding, you know, through all that kind of madness. I actually sold it, I kind of missed, uh, the madness. Uh, but that's a story for another time. I, I say I took the long way around, like, uh, maybe GME was a rocket ship, but I took the kind of the longer scenic route. So over the course of, you know, 50 or 80 trades, uh, my style was really, really simple. I would go all in one single stock at a time. Like, it was incredibly simple. No margin, no options, no crypto even. Uh, I would just— I just had one thesis. I like the stock. I would just put all my money in and just watch it like a hawk, like every minute. Uh, you know, I would just have my phone, or I had like— I had like these two monitor setups, and I'll just be watching the stock chart like every minute. And I had a thesis, and I just wait for it to play out. If it, you know, went up, great. If it didn't, sell, find the next one, right? And so, so yes, that's kind of my trading story. But that was kind of the thesis for like for After Hour, really, which was that being able to trade in public, be able to see how other people are trading and, you know, you could trust these people because they're like legit, radically transforms how much you learn. I call it like learning via trading in public now. And so we built an app that lets you connect your brokerage and we have over $300 million of shared verified portfolios now. And we've just started implementing some copy trading abilities as well. And it's just, it's a fun time. Like you have these folks with a million dollars in HOOD, a million dollars in like RXRX. And when you're talking to them, it just hits so much differently than if you're just talking to some rando.

Yeah. I actually have thought about this for the Indie Hacker World of it should have your Stripe MRR because so many people lie about it on Twitter. Like, oh yeah, I want it.

Yeah.

I want it verified on my Twitter. This is, you know, Stripe verified. MRR. Maybe, maybe there's even an app there in that of like a community where it's verified because you just don't know who is making this shit up, man. Like you really don't. There are people just photoshopping screenshots. I literally actually in a recent podcast, I had Alex Lieberman on, founder of Morning Brew. We were tossing around silly business ideas. I was like, somebody should make a fake MRR screenshot.

Oh yeah, I think it's— wait, wait, wait, dude.

Somebody literally made it. Because like, it's— people are doing it and it, and it drives sales. It, it does drive sales when you post this stuff. Um, and, uh, it's just fun.

The main, the main thing is that, um, I think finance is still pretty taboo, especially like personal finance.

Uh, it is.

That was one— that was— and like when I was at Google, when all this stuff was going down, like I wanted to share my trades, I wanted to share my thesis with the broader Google community. We had like these investing Slack channels and Google Groups. but I just felt afraid to do that in case a coworker to actually see this and be like, why is this idiot in GME? You know, like, and it might affect my work or whatever. And so I felt like pseudonymity was actually extremely important to this kind of discussion. If you think about it, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, a lot of the crypto community as well, a lot of it is pseudonym first, username first. And so I felt like that was really important to this kind of discussions. That's why After Hours is primarily username based. And a lot of previous attempts at this, missed the mark because they led with their real name and, uh, real profile pictures and invite your friends, etc. And I'm like, I don't want— I don't, you know, I think there is something fun to that if you have like a really close group of friends. And we have some group chat features coming up that lets you kind of share, um, your stock trades with each other. Uh, but broadly, I think the, the broader community is, you know, more, uh, pseudonymous.

Yeah, I'm curious, did you see any world where Reddit would start integrating, you know, their, their Robinhood, like, or verified there? And, um, or could you see them like buying you? Is that like a thing that would make sense?

No, not Reddit. Um, well, that's the strangest, the strangest product decision that I think Reddit has made is over the years how much they've de-emphasized the user. So now if you open the Reddit native app The header just has the subreddit name. And so on the Race to 10 Million, you'll see, you know, the Race to 10 Million title, whatever. Right. But you don't know who posted it.

Oh yeah. I haven't really thought about that. Yeah. 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then, which is strange because you follow it because, because I follow sometimes these YouTubers or other creators who create their own subreddit. And I'm like, did this post come from them or from someone else? Right. And another problem is you can't get alerts when someone makes a post.

Yeah, I know. It's so annoying.

When I was trading, people ended up downloading and paying real money for like these sketchy third-party apps to get alerted when I made a post because Reddit doesn't have that feature built in.

Yeah. Yo, that's, that's how you know you're on some shit in the markets. Yeah.

Timeliness is really important, right? Like I make a trade, it's, you know, an hour left in the markets and, and you gotta, you gotta move fast. Um, and so that's kind of a core feature of AfterHour, that you follow someone, you get their trades in real time.

Yeah. What's your thoughts on, um, Autopilot, the Nancy Pelosi tracker? I actually did some street interviews for, uh, for their team. I walked around New York interviewing people. Do you think politicians should be banned from stock trading? Funniest answers, man. Like, most people were like, no, but then you'd have the guys who are like, yeah, like, let's go get that.

I love I love Chris. I just chatted with Brian a few weeks ago. Um, I think they're doing great things. I'm not just saying that, like they started off as Iris, you know, they built a social finance app and, and grew that in 2020 and '21. Um, and they've complimented me in terms of like how, you know, we've kind of approached it, uh, the autopilot. They mastered meme marketing, right? Like, like, like, like that's just hands down across Twitter, across TikTok and Instagram with the insider traders and kind of latching onto these bigger names, right? Like Nancy Pelosi, Warren Buffett, Kramer, etc. Um, you know, we also experimenting with something similar. We want to create like a Nancy Pelosi bot you can follow in the app, and like she can like reply to you and make posts whenever, uh, they make a trade. Um, uh, the, the main, the main thing I think is just like, it's, it's, it's— that's— I think that's, that's the simple route. And I think there is this even bigger group of people that just, that just view finance as entertainment, right? Like, I think that's— it's a great tool what they've built, and it's really, really simple. But what I'm after is my thesis, my vision, what I've seen is that finance has kind of crossed the cultural zeitgeist in a way it hasn't before. It's like, you know, people basically just waste their time with finance, similar to how people used to waste time with sports or celebrity gossip or whatever. And so, like, I mean, when Jay Powell speaks, it's like, you know, it's like a Super Bowl. Or like when Nvidia has their earnings reports, you have like the seasonality. So it's like this reality TV show. And so I think it's really important that for people to kind of just be a little bit tuned in. And so that discussion, that entertainment is not happening on CNBC anymore, right? It's happening on the internet. And there really isn't a big winner in this space. And right now, After Hour, like the biggest compliment I get from folks is that After Hour is fun, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

The bell opens, everyone's here, people are sharing their trades, people are helping each other. People are jumping into chat rooms. Um, it's like Twitch chat for stocks in a way, because we basically have this live stock chart on the top of the screen in the chat room. Uh, so instead of watching someone play a video game, you're watching the stock charts and chatting with everyone in real time.

I love it, man. I do feel like a lot of— I mean, obviously like the trad finance stuff is boring, but even like some of the newer stuff's a little boring, like Robinhood. They could have been more fun. You could have had an Irish Robin Hood character and made some funny shit about that. But like, I feel like even that's a little boring. And so really love what you guys are doing. Like the entertainment—

credit to actually, you mentioned Greg Eisenberg and his late checkout agency. They actually helped design the After Hour brand.

No way. That's awesome.

And our logo and our purple.

Yeah, dude, I love it.

I mean, I had to go shout out to Greg, right? I had to go to the guy that that preaches community because we're a community-based app.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. What was, what was the process like designing or like, you know, coming up with that stuff and, and, uh, everything? I'm curious.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually went through a few other, uh, brand designers, uh, cause I knew I wanted to get this right early on. You know, a lot of founders like say, oh, who cares about the logo? Who cares about all that kind of stuff? But I felt for consumer, right? This is like ultra, like, it's like super consumer. That matters because you're joining not just an app, you're joining a movement, right? And so afterhour.com, you know, that was the first step. I went through so many names. Oh, I should probably find the chat logs. It was like, we were almost like, like zillions.com or like, like wealthy, like a wealth selfie or something like that. But afterhour.com was just like a little bit mischievous, you know, like what's happening at dark, right?

Oh, I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of connected to the stock market. Yeah. Um, uh, the domain was available to buy. Uh, it was like a, like a buy it now kind of thing. I think it was like only like $5,000 or something. And yeah, the, the branding process, I think, you know, I just wrote up this brief of like how I viewed, um, uh, WallStreetBets. And I mean, ultimately I just needed someone that if I said like, make it like WallStreetBets but better, They just get it.

Nice, I love it. Um, have you, uh, do you still take part in WallStreetBets? Like, what's kind of that community like these days?

Yeah, that's the most unfortunate part. Uh, WallStreetBets is dead, you know. WallStreetBets, I think, died after GME because they, they're basically a glorified Instagram meme page now. Um, there, no one's posting their positions, no one's actually chatting and sharing updates, and only the memes, uh, you know, kind of trend, right? But, uh, the, the problem there is the Reddit algorithm. You're not getting updates fast enough. Uh, you're getting memes that are like 1 to 2 days out of date. Uh, so in terms of, you know, my community, uh, they want to actually follow people, and you can't do that on WallStreetBets. Uh, so I haven't heard much commotion from them in a long time. I think they're still, you know, the biggest subreddit, but Mm, Race to $10 million is getting up there.

Good, man. Good. I love it. I'm curious. So if you're a founder trying to either build a subreddit or grow on, on Reddit, maybe you're just plugging your stuff. You don't have your own subreddit yet. Um, or do you actually, better question is, do you think every startup generally should have their own subreddit and should they be trying to send people there? Um, like how, how, how does that even work? Like, how do you even get people there? I'm still. Going back to my original question, how the hell do you even get people to find out about it?

Yeah, I've heard of other, you know, there's a couple of AI apps now that lets you astroturf and spin up, you know, a dozen Reddit accounts that reply to people and invite people. Um, I mean, you could DM people, like, I, you know, I guess a growth hack could have been you go to WallStreetBets and you just DM, you know, 100 people from there every day, be like, hey, I think you'd like this subreddit too. So you could kind of just brute force it for a while, but it's gonna take you a while to get to 25,000, I think. And you could probably try to leapfrog and grow a Discord or grow an Instagram page, try to get people here to your subreddit that way. That could work. But I think the, the crucial ingredient here is like, are your users or are, is the broader, is there something for the broader community to actually post and talk with each other about? Right? Cause it can't just be about your, your startup. Um, and so like, Anything consumer-based, like, you know, fashion, memes, video games, uh, art, like those do really well in these kind of subreddit communities. I think the most interesting case study is probably for like the enterprise world is probably Notion, right? Uh, because they have a very large community of people that make templates and talk about their productivity hacks and whatever. And I'm not sure how they, they started that because it has, you know, a smell of like, oh, this is like corporately and like self-benefiting, right? Uh, but at the same time, it's so aesthetic, it's still kind of useful.

So I feel like that's how Notion has managed everything is just like good aesthetics. You don't really care if they're marketing, cause they just look so cool.

Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the vocal. You mentioned like, how does, how do I get through all the noise that people are like, oh, you're just like a sellout and, and, and shilling after hour. Right. And like, I mean, when Nikita Beer's rule number one of the internet, just post through it, just post through it. Uh, that's one naysayer, but every day is an opportunity for thousands of new people who never heard your story, who never heard your app, uh, to hear about it for the first time. And, you know, I think ultimately we're benefiting the community because, uh, this verified, uh, community of traders is so much better than this trash that's out there right now on Reddit and Discords and Twitter. Like, I've seen people get scammed every day and it's like really disgusting stuff. So no one's getting scammed on AfterHour.

100%. So I'm curious What does, uh, your employees' kind of roles look like when it comes to either community moderation or growth? Do you have people who just focus on— are they on Reddit like all day? Is it— are they posting stuff? Like, do you have people who are just posting on after hour? Like, how does that work? Uh, obviously you're doing a lot as well. Um, just naturally being the founder and being somebody who's super online with that stuff, but. How do you like instruct employees to like do that kind of stuff? If that makes sense.

That's a great question. Cause no one on my, yeah, I'm the only one doing all that stuff. My team is solely engineers and designers. And so I'm the one that's, yeah, like you said, terminally aligned on every platform or replying to people, uh, also on the app, creating all the content. Um, I mean, you could argue this is the, the, the hard mode on hard mode. Like we didn't take any shortcuts. We never spun up any fake accounts. We never used AI to kind of auto-generate content like I guess IRL did where you're like, oh yeah, you know, you're friends with 100 people automatically. We never took any single shortcut. Everything's been brute force and manual. And I think that's important to kind of keep your nose to the ground. You kind of build an intuition of what messaging works, what doesn't. And you know, you can always scale later.

Yeah, yeah, I got you. I just figured you maybe had some people commenting or posting and stuff like that. But you should— I would love to make an intro. Do you know Jack Raines? He's a super funny finance writer.

Yeah, he actually used to work for Liquidity.

Yeah, yeah, he keeps it on the DL, but he ran the biggest SPAC subreddit during the SPAC days. And so he's very deep in that stuff, or was very deep in that. I feel like you guys would get along. Nice. On that Casey Finance stuff. Um, and, and what about Twitter marketing? How have you found that, um, you know, different from Reddit in general?

Yeah, Twitter, despite, you know, people, um, talk about FinTwit or at least the glory days of FinTwit, and it is still the destination for a lot of, uh, people that, um, it's not been great for, for conversion rates. You know, I think people are just doom scrolling and they're not really interested in clicking on something. Um, like really the only thing that I see take off these days are AI demos. Like these videos and these flashy AI demos are always a cherry-picked example, uh, do really well. Um, but in terms of other stuff, I don't really see anything else taking off.

Interesting. Okay. Interesting.

Yeah. Especially because you're not allowed to put a link in the first link, you know, no one really clicks through the second link. It's like a huge fall-off there.

I feel like some of the entertainment stuff, some of the marketing Case studies or crazy marketing examples can still pop off every now and then. Um, but the AI case studies or the AI demos is everything. Everything.

The main thing, and I'll always quote this tweet, um, I forgot his name. He's a YC founder who built this like 3D visualizer for like, um, PCB circuit boards. Really cool thing. Really impressive visualization demo. And he'll always say that there's a tweet where he says, uh, don't confuse Twitter virality for product market fit.

100%. Yeah, I, yeah. And don't confuse virality with sales either.

Yeah. Yeah.

100%.

Good for the halo effect. And that's about it, which is important. You know, it's good for branding, it's important for fundraising and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you need your raw numbers.

Yeah. When you were fundraising for AfterHour, I assume VCs immediately understood the value of subreddits and Reddit and that kind of stuff.

Right. I don't think so.

Really? I thought like VCs would get it because of Alexis and stuff like that.

Well, um, Alexis, I'd love to chat with you. Um, I, um, credit to, um, my first check was from Nico Panazzo at General Catalyst. Uh, he took a big bet on me, right? Like this was, um, mid-2022. I had barely built a functioning prototype and I basically shared him my story and what I did. And my vision. And he's like, this sounds amazing. I've been looking for the right founder to do this. How much money do you want? And it's like the best, uh, you know, conversation you could have with a, with an investor. Um, I think I, I score really high on founder market fit, right? Because of my story, because of my background in, in building products, uh, my obsession with the internet. And, uh, there's a certain type of investor who is willing to take that, that leap of faith and be like, this could be a new market. This is kind of controversial. 'Uh, this is like a niche sub-community that could become a bigger thing,' right? Uh, not every investor is like that, and— but I think the best investors are because those are the outsized opportunities, right? Like, it's incredibly small percent chance versus another, you know, AI SaaS tool. Um, but, uh, if we, uh, get this right, I think we are on, on the cusp of a multi-generation company. Because if you think about finance or fintech or all these credit cards and brokerages and, and other stuff Um, they're becoming more and more commoditized in my opinion. They all look relatively the same. It's just a different splash of color, it's different marketing techniques, and no one's really innovated on like the daily active use case, right? Like, I think it's actually really important for, uh, everyone to be engaged with their finances on a daily basis, right? It could be how much you spend on DoorDash. It could be making fun of, you know, your friends and how much they spend on DoorDash. It could be the markets, which is kind of this, you know, natural thing that's happening every weekday. I think you become a more informed, financially literate person and ultimately wealthier, you know, in the long run. Like, no, no other fintech app is measuring DAUs, right? How often do you open your Bank of America app, etc.? And so I think the social use case where you're there for the content, for your friends, for the community, for the memes, for the occasional learning, I think that's a great initial wedge into kind of broader social finance. And so the, you know, the kind of fintech services and products and our eventual kind of vision to kind of be a multi-billion dollar company, like, I, you know, sells itself as long as we could keep growing and, you know, 10x from here, 100x from here. Yeah.

Oh, I love it. I love the idea of, uh, or just how you're speaking multi-generational. You think about, right, Amex, uh, or Wells Fargo, those are like 250-year-old companies, right? Or 150-year-old at least. Um, so why not, you know, building new versions that are cooler?

Exactly. They're, you know, trad fi or, or whatever you want to call it. Um, they're not speaking to the younger generation. They're just there because they're, you know, they, they have incumbency power, uh, which is great. Um, but yeah, finance, it just still feels stuck in the Web 1 days. If you really took a look at, look at the lay of the land, like Bogleheads is still a PHP BB board and people are still like manually sending like newsletters via like PDFs and Word document files, WordPress websites and all these kinds of things. Like it's surprisingly like no one, no one has done this right. And also when I ask my investors like, why, why did you invest in me? A lot of them also say that the other, you know, founders, it feels like they come from Wall Street. They don't come from the internet.

Ooh, I love that. I love that. Are you guys thinking about creator marketing, like hiring a creator, you know, hiring creators, putting them on staff to make videos and, you know, stream and stuff like that, sponsoring streamers kind of thing. Like, are you guys going down that path?

Yeah, we're starting to experiment with it. You know, I'm starting to make, you know, my founder videos every day. Uh, I have, you know, 5 to 6, uh, creators currently helping me just kind of pump out different type of hooks and, and, and, uh, experiment with, um, with short-form video essentially, right? Because I think it is a quantity game. Uh, that seems to be the current meta. I think the big 10x here is via creator economy tools, right? I think a lot has been said, especially on tech Twitter, around consumer social and the death of friend-based invites on iOS 18, blah blah blah, go Nikita Beer. Um, the— my bet, my belief is that the current meta is OnlyFans. My belief is that how do you incentivize an army of creators or whatnot to basically market for you, right? And so they need the incentive and they will do the 1,000x different hooks and variations and indirect kind of marketing, uh, that way. Uh, and so I think OnlyFans for stocks, it pitches itself.

I love that. I mean, sort of what I'm doing with Meme Lord Technologies where I give people affiliate links and you just align the incentives. It's really that simple. Like memes are inherently viral. Here's your affiliate link. Just drop it under your viral memes. Pretty damn simple, right? Affiliate marketing has definitely made things easier for aligning incentives.

And, uh, if there's any good affiliate marketers out there that want to talk shop, um, we'd love to, we'd love to chat. We're just starting to spin up a lot of these work streams. Uh, so we're also just trying to figure it out, but I think we have a very unique, uh, use case for this.

Yeah, I've got one who might be good. She's a really funny copywriter specifically and has been my number one affiliate actually. So I'll, I'll send you a DM after.

Thanks.

Cool. And yeah, where can people find you? Wrapping things up, where could people find you and get started on After Hour? How do they get started as soon as possible?

Thanks. Well, first, yeah, definitely join the app and follow me there. The app is called After Hour. My username is SirJack on the app. I'm probably the top recommended user. If you want to contact me, Kevin Xu, I go by I'm Kevin Xu across, I think, everything. And, uh, or you can just email me kevin@afterhour.com.

Sweet. Sweet. Thank you so much, Kevin. Uh, this was a lot of fun.

Thank you.