Pitch Competition Simon Yu Bitmaker | Blockchain: Out of the Labs

Hello everyone, my name is Simon Yu. I'm the CEO of KCodes and our product Bitmaker. We are disrupting mobile advertising using cryptocurrency. Bitmaker is a mobile app that rewards users free Bitcoin and Ethereum for trying games, apps, and products. Users are rewarded for their time and effort for opting into products themselves. We're proud to say since we launched, we have over 700,000 downloads on our app. All organic, and we grew 300% compared to the year before. Best part, it was all organic, no marketing spend. We haven't raised a seed round yet, and once we launch our iOS, it's going to grow even faster. The mobile app industry is currently extremely crowded. There's over 5 million apps in the marketplace, with a million apps created last year alone. Because it's so crowded, more apps are spending more and more money to try and promote their app and brand. As a result, it's creating a $100 billion industry. An everyday individual is exposed to up to 5,000 ads per day across all channels. Less than 1% is actually retained because you just see ads everywhere. So the ad dollars that you actually spend as a startup or a company, most of it's going down the drain. This is the reason why we created Bitmaker. Bitmaker allows users to opt in for the products, therefore engaging and voluntarily engaging, while for the advertisers, they are getting guaranteed engagement for each ad dollar that they spend rather than paying for clicks, impressions, or views. And as a result of what we do, we help advertisers generate a positive ROI. For example, Mobile Strike, one of our customers, has an LTV, or lifetime value, of $5 when a user reaches level 6. We encourage our users to go on Bitmaker and say, if you can reach level 6, we'll pay $3.50 in Bitcoin. As a result, Mobile Strike generates a positive ROI. Because of what we do, and we drive on engagement, we are able to drive a much higher retention rate than normal ad networks. We solve a 2-sided marketplace. We help advertisers acquire a cost-effective solution for mobile advertising, while for users, they are able to earn a secondary source of income with cryptocurrency during their free time. We collect the spread of the advertising revenue that we collect and the difference between the amount that we pay to our users. I know investors love hockey stick graphs, so we prepared a sexy one for you. So here is our weekly task revenue that we launched in February. Since February, we launched this new app feature. We've been growing 26% revenue week over week, and last week we grew 150%. Right now, this month we're forecast to do about $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and next month we're looking to do $25,000. So we're not a concept, we already have revenue coming in. We have signed up over 500 apps since we launched that feature in February, including Mobile Strike and Game of War, number 1 and number 2 grossing apps on the App Store. And we are planning to bring 500 to 1,000 more apps before the end of Q2. So how big can this get? If you actually look at the reasons why Uber and Airbnb are so successful, it's because people are always looking to get a secondary source of income. Whether it's giving somebody a ride, letting someone stay at your house, the purpose of this is to get more income. For us, it is utilizing 3 billion smart devices across the world, allowing users to earn freely from the app. There is no current dominant market share for someone like this, And allowing users to earn freely from their app. We have an awesome team. I myself am a second-time co-founder. I started my first company when I was 19 because I was forced to drop out of UW, and I sold Korean tacos out of my apartment to turn it into a $500,000 business. I hustled and had 10 employees before joining Kenco's, and our team together, we've been able to move quickly because we're hungry.

Thank you, Simon.

Thank you. So people— so the advertisers pay you, and you pay people to click through or to watch or to what? Why are people being paid? Yeah, so you can watch a video. That's one inventory. But what we really— the task feature that we built in February was For you to actually go in the game and completing level 6 and actually completing a mission that people want. Advertisers, their value is, you know, not just getting someone to click on the advertisement, but it's actually signing up and trying out the app. You know, all these cool companies out there, but then if people just see an ad, they're like, okay, I might try it. But if you actually get them to engage on it, it's more valuable. They have to play the game. Exactly.

And if they get to level 6, they get this Satoshi.

Exactly. And that's why we're able to collect higher revenue per user as well too. What's the initial ROI for the gaming company? If they give you $5, how much are they going to get back from these people that get addicted? So that's the beauty of it. That's why we have so many apps signed up. Some game developers only want to pay 20 cents for each conversion. Some developers want to pay $5. Some people— one of the companies that we work with, a subscription base, wanted to pay us $15 because they get a $15 ROI each month. And so we offer the flexibility of any company to set their own pricing based on their own ROI. Nobody knows their own metrics better than the company themselves, and we let them do that. What's the hard technical problem that you've solved that prevents mobile gaming companies, for example, from just intermediating you and launching campaigns like this themselves? And how do you feel like you can build a moat around this business? Yeah, absolutely. So it took us a while because there's 2 sides of it. One side is setting up the Bitcoin aspect to send to— we have 15,000 users across the world was taking time. And the second side, getting advertisers across the board was extremely hard to do. And there's not too many people in this space that has both sides currently available. But mobile advertising is step one of our phase. We plan to use the seed round to find different ways to have users earn more. And we already have partnerships set up. So we actually— an additional source of revenue we're going to have by the end of this year is A couple of new altcoins that are coming out want more users and they want to be featured on our app as a payment method and pay us every month. That's one. Wallet companies want to be featured so we can pay them as well too. But we also want to let users opt in to share location data or share their CPU, and there's plenty of ways that users can earn more money by doing all sorts of different things.

So how do you prevent Sybil attacks?

I'm sorry?

How do you prevent Sybil attacks on your wallet?

Cyberattacks?

So yeah, so guys create multiple fake accounts to get paid.

Yeah, so we've been pretty— one of our advisors and investors is Bill Shihara, CEO of Bitrix, cybersecurity expert. He helped us. So we have prevention on multiple accounts, so you can't create more than one wallet ID, so you can't run IP addresses. We have all sorts of different blocks. You can use Tor networks, VPNs, or anything. Because one thing is mobile ad networks, they have a sophisticated system already built in, and if they detect the fraud, then they don't pay us.

Okay, and then one more question to that is, so when you go out and negotiate a deal with Mobile Strike, their LTV is across the board, right? That's their average LTV across all channels?

No, so they target specific countries. So they tell us, hey, we only want to target US, UK, Canada, Australia, and we basically show it only to those users that they say. And they could also say, hey, we only want to target age across 25 to 34, because we collect Facebook and Google sign-in information. We can say, hey, OK, we're only going to target those kind of users.

But that's geographic. I'm saying when they— so when you have channels— that's slightly different. When you have channels for incentivized signups versus organic signups, the behavior is different, and the LTVs are different. So are you getting paid right now on— are they saying this is an incentivized users channel, therefore the Rate is going to be lower than our LTV for regular channels, or are you guys on top of the game?

Yes, they can customize. They can raise and lower it. But we've actually delivered much higher retention rate versus organic channels, just because we actually need them to finish a certain objective. And so I know the traditional advertising industry is, if you say incent, it's like a potty mouth for mobile advertisers. But we've proven that that's not the case when we can get them to the retention rate that the companies want. So they pay for what they get, and if they're saying, hey, we only got $1 LTV out of this because there was an incentive, hey, we're going to pay you a little bit less.

Thank you, Simon. So we're going to collect the judging forms. So we're going to have relations here, but can we quickly give a real big hand of applause for all the presenters coming? Also, I'd like to give a special shout out. We were challenged by people within the blog community Chain community to find really strong and like exemplary women founders for this event. So I'd like to think we did an amazing job on that. So I'd like to thank you for all the amazing work you've done. So now we're momentarily going to hand this back over to Jack for some closing remarks.

A lot of really great opportunities out there. It's great to see a lot of these companies now applying the technology to businesses and industries that they know and how they're working. And it seems that a lot of these companies were not necessarily blockchain companies, but they're This company using the technology, and it's really great to see. It seems to be kind of the way a lot of the development's going. It seems like there's great opportunities out there.

Okay, if we can gather everybody up real quickly, we'll do the first ever Blockchain Out of the Lab Chardonnay Awards. Okay, so in the third place, we have a tie for third place, so you guys are gonna have to figure out how you split this. Things I didn't think about. There is no back. So this is a delightful hook and ladder. This is a very good working man's Chardonnay, good midweek drinker. It's going to go to be split between the San Francisco Stock Exchange and Propy. And good luck figuring out how to split this. I guess you guys can collectively do this. It's hockey season. So we have to put them overhead like you just won the Stanley Cup. Let's do the stand. I just won the Stanley Cup.

No, no, no.

Hockey.

Yeah. Let me, let me do the straight. There you go. Excellent. Thank you guys. Okay, next we have Galia with Bencor. So what should you think of that? Very nice. Very nice. Okay, give us the pose.

Here, let me show—

Jeff, you play hockey. Would you please show them how you win a Stanley Cup?

You, uh, you have to take it up overhead, 2 hands, just like that. You gotta really present it to the world.

That's okay. There's probably gonna be a debate back there, so you can maybe give it away. You can do whatever you like with it. Thank you. Okay, I don't know if this is any good. I've never had it before, but it is. It has a lot of good labeling, so it's got to be good. Francis Coppola, and the number one is Simply. Congratulations. Okay, let's get the Not bad. Okay, excellent. Thank you guys very much. Uh, do we have any closing remarks? Yeah? Okay, well, thank you very much, everybody. It's been an amazing event. We're really proud that we were able to put it on. Thank you guys.

Thank you.