I sat with Clay Collins, CEO at Nomics and formerly CEO at Leadpages, to talk about how to add product value above and beyond what the market already has access to. A must-watch episode for all growth hackers.

TOPIC CLAY COLLINS COVERS

→ How to add products value above and beyond what the market already has access to

→ He is a CEO at Nomics and formerly CEO at Leadpages

→ What is a zone of genius

→ How does he know something about marketing and growth that was unique

→ Topic: the relationship between personal branding and business growth

→ He discussed the transition from focusing on personal branding to a growing company and creating scalable systems

→ Possible insight: need to focus on running the company rather than growing personal brand for success

→ How does he see the growth of that

→ His thoughts about the blog called Chief MarTech

→ What is nomics and what are the two parts of nomics

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

→ Clay’s LinkedIn Profile

→ Nomics.com

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Bronson: Welcome to Growth Hacker TV. I’m Bronson Taylor and I’m here with Clay Collins. Clay, thank you so much for coming on the show, man.

Clay: Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Bronson: Yeah, you’re one of those names that, like, I should have had you on by now. Like, I just don’t know what happened. I mean, your name comes up all over the Internet in marketing circles. Your name comes up when I talk to people offline. Like, you’re just that guy that people know that he’s doing some really cool stuff. I don’t know how you how you haven’t been on yet.

Clay: Yeah. I mean, I think I transitioned from doing a lot of thought leadership marketing to being more heads down and focused on growing the team and. Creating scalable systems. And it’s hard to be the front man like you don’t see many CEOs of $100 million plus companies tweeting a lot or whatever. We weren’t 100 million plus, but, you know, 25 million plus.

Bronson: Yeah. Incredible.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bronson: So would you say that you would recommend that that at some point you have to run the company and stop trying to grow your own personal brand if you really want to find success? Do you think that’s a good insight?

Clay: I think that it really just has to do with with what your strengths are. So, like, I figured out that I’m my sweet spot is kind of between zero and like 20 million in annual recurring revenue. And I really enjoy that journey. And somewhere between like 15 and 20 million, it’s, it’s less about growing the business or creating the product and it’s more about like creating the business that creates the product. And so you’re managing through people like you’re not just managing people, you’re managing the managers. Yeah. And I think sort of the sort of that the end of that transition is where I, I kind of, you know, I’m no longer operating in my zone of genius. So I think that that kind of stuff, you know, being front and center, being at all the conferences, saying yes to every podcast, you know, doing all that stuff, I think it is really good to do at the beginning to get that initial burst of energy. But I don’t think marketing takes you long term. I think the biggest kind of growth lever in your business really is your product and providing value at scale. And I think there’s a lot of businesses that have really charismatic CEOs that that are everywhere. But and I know a few of them, and I think it is incidental to their growth when they when they get pretty large, when like, let’s say when they get above, you know, 25, 30 million annual recurring revenue, I think it’s incidental that they’re everywhere. I don’t think that’s the reason why they’re growing. Okay. It’s just something they like to do, right? Like they always did it. It’s so personality transition and start focusing on systems and hire people that can take entire parts of the business and just just handle them. Yeah. And and it can’t just be the parts that you hate, right? It actually has to be the parts that you’re good at. Because if you’re dependent if you’re if your business is dependent upon you at any in any way, then you’re not going to be freed up to always have your attention focused on the next big challenge. So yeah, I kind of think about, you know, there’s, there’s working on the business and working in the business. And as a CEO, when you’re scaling, you should always be focused on capacity building. And once you’ve built that capacity, you need to hand it off to someone else. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, I think it’s actually pretty irresponsible for CEOs of large companies to spend too much time on Twitter and stuff.

Bronson: Yeah. No, it makes absolute sense. You mentioned an interesting phrase. You said zone of genius. Is that something you heard somewhere or is that your thing? And what is a zone of genius?

Clay: Yeah. So I’ve I’ve heard people talk about it in different coaching programs that’ll get them to try and focus on their on their zone of genius. I think Strategic Coach is one of the programs that encourages people to focus on their zone of genius. And I think it’s just areas where you not just have like maybe ten leverage, but you have like 50 leverage, 100 X leverage, things that only you can do. And when you do them, you can kind of move mountains is like Archimedes said that if he had a.

Bronson: Lever long enough.

Clay: Exactly a lever, however long enough, he could move the world. So I really think it is about focusing on those things and excluding almost everything else.

Bronson: Yeah. So is your zone of genius the product? Is that why you like that? 0 to 20 million? Because you’re just that’s where you get it. You know how to get the product dialed in, but your zone of genius is not managing the managers. Is that fair enough?

Clay: I so I think my zone of genius is around strategy, which is this term that doesn’t really.

Bronson: What does that mean exactly?

Clay: It has to do with sort of this combination of timing and combining macro trends that are happening in the space with with, you know, picking the right business model, which is hard to correct for once. You’ve screwed it up.

Bronson: Yeah.

Clay: So business model, pricing, macro trends that are happening in the space, you know, competitive landscape and then like finding an opening that you can just run through. Yeah. And a lot of people are focused on optimization and sort of tweaking every last aspect of their business but the truth. As you don’t have to be super productive. You don’t have to work 18 hours a day. When you found sort of a nice point. A nice point of leverage.

Bronson: Yeah. No, it makes total sense. So, yeah. So it seems like your zone of genius. It would only be product if we mean product with a capital P product meaning business model and trends and timing and all that stuff. Not, you know, does the UI look nice? Like it’s like you’re like product big picture in color. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. No, that’s also I mean, you’re like built for the startup game. I mean, honestly, like, it’s the people that have 50 leverage with all the stuff you just said that can play the startup game successfully. Right. Like it seems like you’re built for it.

Clay: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s you know, there’s people there’s some CEOs, some founding CEOs that start out and then they go, you know, they kind of go in definitely like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg would be in that category. I think Steve Jobs probably wouldn’t be in that category. I think he had to get his ass kicked a little bit and then come back older and wiser. But, you know, there’s there’s a handful of people that fit that bill. And then that’s probably on one extreme right, like dedicating your entire life to one business. And then I think on the other end of the spectrum are people who just are these serial entrepreneurs. They like buying businesses, flipping them. Often they’ve got multiple businesses running simultaneously or, you know, sort of their span of the business is 1 to 2 years. And I’m probably somewhere in the middle of that. You know, I’m kind of like a five year person. And the reason for that isn’t that I don’t want to necessarily focus on one problem for the rest of my life. It’s that at some point, you know, if it’s successful, it’s going to grow beyond my zone of genius. And I really do feel like the best thing to do when you’ve reached that point is to fully hand over the reins to someone else. So we have an impressive CEO at lead pages who’s just developed a really incredible team. The CFO came from GoDaddy, is was a CFO for one of those businesses. Our VP of product ran QuickBooks QuickBooks Online for into it like ran the whole thing had full PNL responsibility. Our chief marketing officer done over $1,000,000,000 in sales online. Our the person who runs h.r. Came from house which has raised over $100 million. They’re a bay area startup. So it’s just it’s a phenomenal team. And I think that when you’re a founder, you have a certain level of, like, moral authority. You’ve been there for a long time. Plus you have this ambiguous role of like, you’re on the board and you founded the company, and it’s just best to, you know, once you’ve made that transition to just get out of the way, show up at board meetings, be available, help as much as you can. But but but to step back. And so that’s what I’ve done at lead pages and drip and I think it was the right thing to do. I don’t question it at all.

Bronson: Yeah. Do you think people should feel good about how they do it? So what I mean is let’s say you, the person that has multiple businesses running simultaneously, but that’s what you like and that’s your mode. Or you’re the five year guy like you or you’re the, you know, the Steve Jobs kind of like. Do you think people because I always feel like I feel bad that I’m not like the other entrepreneurs, you know what I mean? Like there’s a piece of me, like, am I doing it wrong? Did I miss that, like chapter in the book on how to do this? Or should I feel good that just this the way I build? It’s fine.

Clay: Yeah, I, I do. I really think it’s just about, you know, it’s about doing you and doing you as well as you possibly can. And, you know, there’s always someone else with a different constellation of talents and energy levels and proclivities and good work, you know. And so you just you just got yeah, I think you have to trust your instincts there. You got to know yourself, know your DNA. And and that’s hard, right? Like I think as especially in startups like. I think when you’re running a fast growth startup, you spend like three months doing a good job and then it takes you like three months to figure out that your job is completely changed. And then you spend like another three months relearning your job and then you’ll have another three month stint of like doing a good job, and then you grow and then everything changes again. So you got to, you just repeat the cycle, right? And, and so for me, it, like I repeated that cycle for like three plus years. And so I was used to again doing a good job for three months, learning that it change over the next three months of relearning my job starting all over. So it took me a while to realize that what was happening was just it was a scale thing. It was sort of a sweet spot and like, yeah, I mean, there are definitely times when I was like, Wow, I wish, you know, I wish I could be like entrepreneur X or Y that, you know, that sort of has this sort of full spectrum coverage. But I’m not and I’m actually like, now that I know that about myself, I’m just a lot happier, you know, like I can just double down on where, where I have the most impact.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s awesome. And so, I mean, we didn’t really even get in yet to like what you’ve done. I mean, we just jumped right into like the insights, which is great. So, I mean, you know, you’re the guy behind lead pages, you know, well, the cofounders, you’re the CEO now. You’re, you know, on the board. I mean, I want to dig in the lead pages a little bit because it’s been such a success. I think you said, you know, you don’t like 25 million a year is what you mentioned a few minutes ago. Somewhere around there. Right.

Clay: So like 50,000 paying customers. Wow. Yeah. Over over 25 million a year. Yeah.

Bronson: That’s incredible. So, like, one of my questions, which may not be the right question now was, you know, what’s one of those big growth drivers in your time there, a CEO, you know? And the reason it may not be the right question now is because what you said about the market and timing and product and finding an angle that you can exploit, is it more about you had the right product for the right market, the right time? Or was it really that you knew something about marketing and growth that was unique? How do you see the growth of that? You know?

Clay: Yeah. So, you know, I think I think every entrepreneur has a pattern. So, you know, I think about Williams. So Williams started blogger and then had this podcasting thing that eventually turned into Twitter. Then he moved to medium and started medium and and every single one of those businesses was about content, right? So that’s kind of a repeatable pattern and it’s really obvious with him. I don’t think it’s always obvious with everyone. I think my pattern is finding spaces that are. Early. But kind of at this tipping point where, you know, there’s this expression crossing the chasm and there’s a good book called Crossing the Chasm. But, you know, products and companies can cross the chasm, but markets can sometimes cross the chasm. And I like creating like chasm crossing company that companies that help the market cross the chasm.

Bronson: Yeah.

Clay: So for example with, with lead pages, you know when we came out with that there, there were some kind of lead generation and landing page platforms at the time, but they were really made for agencies and they were really meant to be like either on the, on the upmarket. They were meant to almost be like. Photoshop replacements that rendered Web pages. So they were like kind of really complex and took you hours to do. You might as well just learn HTML and tests in the same amount of time. So that was on one end and kind of downmarket. There was there were just a bunch of WordPress plug ins that were written by overseas development teams and they were kind of run by these marketing gurus that were just looking to monetize their list, or maybe they had a product angle, but they didn’t necessarily understand how to run software companies. So what we did was we were like, All right, we’re not going to focus on the upper half of the market. We’re going to focus on small and medium sized businesses and and solopreneur. And we’re going to come in and we’re going to professionalize marketing tech in this space. And so that’s you know, that’s what we did. We were like the first product that had, you know, full time in-house, like in our office, us based, native, English speaking support reps and software was software as a service that ran on. It does run on Google App Engine and we were, you know, using best practices in the space and like we weren’t like we weren’t going around, we were, we were hardcore. And and so I think that that was a big piece of it. There definitely was a growth playbook. But you know, we did. We did. We did every you know, we did everything. I think at the end of the day, it it really came down to on the product side, what we call our t shirt framework. So that was our product philosophy. So T and t shirt stands for template. All right. So you could start out not with a blank slate, but you could start off with a template that had from the from the very beginning, best practices. With regard to conversion marketing. So that’s that’s the T the S-H was shareable. You should be able to share this with other people. And this was a vision we had in place from day one. So it should be template that you should be able to start with the template. It should be shareable. R The R stands for revenue measurements. You should be able to measure sort of the the revenue generated from this because whoever posts the revenue gets credit for it, right? Like, you know, if you’re.

Bronson: Inside.

Clay: Revenue, someone else is going to report revenue and then they’re going to get credit. And you should you should report revenue. And in the last T was testable, you should be able to sort of test these things against each other. So so I think we professionalize the space. We came in with a seizure framework. And then I think a lot of it from there was we probably like the third leg of this was we decided like there was a lot of information, there were a lot of info products being sold on how to grow your business and do various things. And we thought like, what if we hired or created these courses for free, gave them away the courses and the information their courses stood on their own. You wouldn’t need our products to, to to make use of the information in these courses, but you could sort of implement the learnings from these courses very quickly, you know, in a very short period of time if you had our products. So we gave, you know, we gave away like a $500 or $1,000 course away for free. And then we monetized that with with the product and the course showed you how to use the product if you wanted to. Yeah. And then you know, and then we did a lot of, we did a lot of webinars. I think people credit probably too much of our early success to webinars. I think a lot there’s, there’s always this seduction to find like the one thing so people can just write it off and say like, oh yeah, it’s webinars or oh, it’s, you know, paid media or like whatever it is. But it really was sort of those, the three legs of the stool. And then just like running as hard as we could through, through every single channel.

Bronson: Yeah, no. I mean, it’s interesting, you know, I ask you a question about growth and you talk about product, you talk about the framework of the product. You talk about education that helps you use the product like. And then you say, Oh yeah, and we might on some webinars and some other things, but none of them alone are to, to, to say was the success. It really shows where your head’s at like, yeah, it’s about the product. Like I think that’s the way you see the world. It’s really about the product. And then a lot of things can work if you don’t screw up the product.

Clay: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, I think there’s, there’s like this fork in the road when you do your marketing, you know, there’s a lot of people like there are the companies that are the subject of major PR pieces in in magazines. And then there are the companies that advertise in like Taboola or whatever, but they’re like advertising around it. And I think that it’s really important that you be the company that is providing so many value, value that you’re worth talking about. And you’re not you know, you’re taking the money that you would have spent on a huge paid media budget. And you’re putting that instead on on on the product that gets you word of mouth. You know, I think a lot about like net new value, like is, is your product providing net new value? And I think there’s a lot of companies that are essentially doing the same thing, but they grow a little bit because people like, Oh yeah, I relate to that person or Oh yeah, their story sounds right to me. Or, you know, their branding is, is meant for.

Bronson: Who I am.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For like women in their early forties or whatever. And so you end up having all these like vertical versions of the same product that are created for all of these different niches. It’s like, Well, what if you could just have the whole thing by being smart about it?

Bronson: Yeah, well, you know, you’ve heard the quote where it’s like, if you can’t do something better, don’t do it right. Is that, is that the idea of net new value? Like, is this fundamentally magnitude better or is it just another slice of a vertical? The same thing.

Clay: Yeah, it’s I think it’s like, are you bringing new value above and beyond what the market already has access to? And I think it’s really important to do that, I think, at the end of the day. You know, downmarket, you know, where they’re like nascent businesses or, you know, businesses that that aren’t really making revenue yet or aren’t cash flow positive. I think for those businesses, it is about like, do I identify with this guru or can I relate to this person or does this make me feel good? You know, and I think it’s always good to make people feel good. But I think when it when you’re you know, when you have a real marketing team and a real marketing budget, it doesn’t really matter if someone’s speaking to you in a way that speaks to your like specific demographic. It matters like, is this product solving my problem better than any other product? And I think that, you know, in economics, there’s a lot of talk about like rational actor theory. Are people rational actors? And when it comes to voting, when it comes to deciding what to buy individuals. Are irrational. They will make decisions based on a whole lot of factors other than, you know, maybe a critical assessment of what’s needed. You know, like I’ll leave politics aside.

Bronson: Yeah, exactly.

Clay: But but when it comes to businesses with a growth mandate that are buying software that’s sort of like live or die based on this thing that they’re depending on.

Bronson: They don’t care if it resonates with them. They don’t care if the guy on the ad looks like them, like it doesn’t matter. They’re trying to grow the revenue or whatever.

Clay: Or doesn’t like turn them off. You know, you can’t get it your own way, but you can.

Bronson: Mess it up. But it’s not going to make an important thing.

Clay: Yeah, like. You know, when you think about companies that exist today, you know, Salesforce, Google, Apple, you know, just you can do Dropbox, you know, intercom like.

Bronson: There’s none of the value.

Clay: Yeah. None of these are like, you know, speaking in these sort of vertical sized ways and trying to build cult followings. They’re trying to, you know, deliver a solution.

Bronson: Yeah. No, it’s very interesting. And just, you know, it makes me think that like the old way of, like, physical goods, it’s very much about the brand because physical goods become commodities so quick that you need the Nike. Yeah. Like you need a Nike to speak to a demographic. You need, you know, you know, Crate and Barrel to do that. We’re Internet companies. It seems like it’s more fundamental. Human needs. Net new value, not branding to a vertical. I never thought about that before, but it’s just kind of an idea. My head right now, the spark. That’s really cool there. You said something earlier that I think might be the inside of the interview, which is markets can cross the chasm, right? Yeah. I think a lot of people are familiar with, you know, you know, the book Crossing the Chasm. And when I was thinking about you before this interview, I didn’t put in those words, but that’s exactly what I thought. I thought Lead Pages was something that was a market dominated cross the chasm nomics with, you know, cryptocurrencies. Like it was a joke a year ago. Now it’s on the cusp of the chasm and it might cross it of the mainstream. Like my friends that know nothing about technology and currency are asking me about Bitcoin. That’s showing me there’s a chasm on the horizon here that might get crossed, you know? It’s like, Yeah, and I know that we could just say, Well, that’s your zone of genius and you’re able to see those markets. I would actually say this it’s bigger. I think if you want to be an entrepreneur, you better get this in your zone of genius, because I think it’s like part and parcel of doing this thing well, because so often you see the early players way before the chasm die and they just teach everyone else what not to do right? Even though they might have been geniuses, even though they might have been ten steps ahead of the market, they’re actually just educating the real players what to avoid so that you can go and cross the chasm with the big market and get to 25 million revenue. Do you agree with that?

Clay: Yeah, I do. You know, I think like being too early is the same as being wrong. And there are so many examples of people having the right idea at the wrong time and and failing. So like Webvan is an example of that or Google glasses, right? Like great idea. Yeah, but but we’re just not there yet. And so I do think timing is is really important. And so, yeah, I would agree with what you said that that that does need to be in your zone of genius. You know, I think there are if you’re going to start from scratch, I think it needs to be in your in your zone of genius. You know, I think there are really fantastic CEOs where they you know, they take businesses that have crossed the chasm and they kind of take them further. So like Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn is probably a great example. You know, he came in after Reid Hoffman and, you know, Facebook was already around and Big LinkedIn had it start. But they really just needed like. Kind of a bad ass to come in and just like, you know, run shit completely on point. You know, it like to run that over like Switzerland, man. Like the trains are on time. Like, everything’s just, you know, a well-oiled machine. So. So I think I think it really just is stage dependent. I think if you’re early stage, you have to have that because, you know, by the time markets are really developed lot. It’s hard to be bootstrapped or it’s even hard to be venture backed and make it like a lot of these companies now, like we’re lead pages and dripper in the marketing automation space and clicks for the term. Marketing automation are like 45 bucks because you’ve got you’ve got companies that are willing to spend literally the first two years of what a customer would pay for a product to our customers. So customer acquisition cost is like the first two years of that person being customers. So they’ve got a two, two year payback just on the customer acquisition cost.

Bronson: You can’t play that game. I mean, the public, you know, you can’t play that game.

Clay: You can’t. Yeah, right. They haven’t they haven’t posted a profit like all this stuff. So it becomes really hard to compete I think, after a while. So so I think if you want to I tell you, if you want to get big and you don’t have like a pile of cash somewhere that rivals your competitors or even perhaps needs to be bigger because they already have market penetration, then you do need to find these waves and ride them.

Bronson: And what you just said is most early stage entrepreneurs, I mean, that’s why I think it’s so important for just people to if you’re not the kind of person that can time markets and when they going across the chasm consider if you should be a different role or a different place in the lifecycle of a business because I don’t know how you can succeed as an early stage art mature because we just don’t have piles of cash. Yeah, I know that.

Clay: That’s totally true. And you know, I think about like in the market, in the marketing technology space, there’s a really interesting blog called Chief MarTech, and they publish this annual infographic that kind of slices up the space. And like every year for the last four years, 4 to 5 years, the number of logos on this kind of map of the MarTech space has been doubling, like doubling. So I think it’s I think it’s hard if you’re a SAS entrepreneur in particular and you come into a new space and there’s already a bunch of established players there and you’re like, Well, we’re going to build a better product. And it’s like, you know, I mean, almost any industry, industry, it like it just it doesn’t matter. There’s all there’s usually a lot of people there. So you do need a new angle. You need to have a vision for the future. And I think you need to like double down on that bet rather than just being like, we’re going to be operationally better or like incrementally better with some product.

Bronson: Yeah, absolutely. I know we’re running out of time. You got a hard stop in a few minutes here. Let’s talk about nomics, right? You’re nothing. I know nothing about it. Like what is nomics?

Clay: Yeah. So there’s there’s two parts to nomics. There’s there’s the front end and the back end. So the back end is our API. We’re essentially an API service as a company or API services as a company business start an API is a service company. And so like other companies, these in that space are like Twilio SendGrid, you know, those are, those are the two big ones that, that come to mind. But there are a lot more, especially when it comes to developer products. So we’re selling access to an API and it’s priced on a metered basis. That API is indexing the entire crypto sphere. So we’re we’re capturing every every trade and every order placed on every single exchange. We’re even capturing orders that get placed that aren’t filled. So if you put like a limit order or, you know, something on a complex order and there isn’t a there isn’t someone else on the other side of that order, we’re indexing all of those. So rather than having to integrate with a whole bunch of exchanges to get this data, you just integrate with our API and you’ll get it. And I think like, you know, the way we’re thinking about this is that, you know, is analogous to Google. So what’s what’s impressive about Google is not. There their algorithm you can get provided that you have a good enough dataset, you can get a lot of data scientists together and come up with a pretty good search algorithm. What’s most impressive about Google is the fact that they’re indexing the entire Web multiple times a day like that is a the.

Bronson: Breadth of data.

Clay: That’s just that’s really hard to do. So, you know, we’re indexing everything right now. You know, the space is more than ten thing every year. So, you know, five years from now, we might be the only ones with all this data. Yeah. Adding to that transaction analytics and analytics for individual blockchains. And so we’re going to combine that. And so what’s going to consume that API is the second part of our business, which is the consumer site, which aims to be like the Yahoo finance or the Google finance of.

Bronson: How you want to slice the data and give back visualizations, give back, you know, the piece of the graph that you needed.

Clay: Yeah. So I mean, we’re kind of our own customer. So the website is.

Bronson: A version of what you can do with the API.

Clay: Is just going to be one of several customers for the API and we’re going to sell the API to like hedge funds, family offices. Absolutely. Institutional investors, people make apps.

Bronson: So are you going to it’s going to cost a lot to, you know, get access to the API or are you going to go in, you know, where’s your price point on this thing?

Clay: Yeah. So it’s it’s not fixed. You know, I really like the business model of, like, Amazon Web Services. You know how much you know SendGrid? Yeah, it’s almost free if you’re an engineer and you’re just making a version of the app for you. But once you’ve deployed that into production and people are using it at scale, Stripe is another example of this kind of company. Once you’re using it, using it at scale, yeah, then it costs you real money. So, you know, when we were building lead pages on Google App Engine, it was essentially free, you know? And then later it’s, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month, right? Yeah. So it ended up being a big contract for them. So that’s that’s that’s the way we like to like to price. And, you know, I guess I saw the benefits of that when lead pages acquired Drip or Aqua partnered with Drip. You know, one of the cool things about the Drip business model is there is no ceiling on the amount someone can pay us. So, you know, like with lead pages, there were there were three tiers and there was an enterprise tier, but there was a ceiling on how much can people can pay us with drip. You know, someone has 2 billion contacts. They’re going to pay us more than someone with 1 billion contacts. Right. That really is a ceiling other than our ability to scale the platform.

Bronson: Yeah. You know, nomics sounds incredible because I’m just thinking about like right now, all we have is what is the price of this cryptocurrency today? That’s usually the insight most people have, like, oh, it crossed ten. Okay, let’s talk about that. But they don’t know about the unfulfilled orders. They don’t see the things that are asymmetrical below the surface that can give you a future indications of what might happen. You don’t see the individual players that should hold sway and influence what you do and what their moves are. When we have that kind of granularity with the market as a whole, like we’re mature enough that we see that more we know. When Warren Buffett makes a move with cryptocurrencies, it’s kind of hidden. So I mean, I just absolutely love the idea of what nomics is and I love the idea of what developers are going to do with it. I mean, there’s going to be tools that do incredible things using this API, and people will never know that using your API, they’ll know the brand name of that tool, and they’re going to pay a lot of money for that tool. And you can be behind the scenes supplying all the data the whole time. Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. I mean, it shows what timing the market looks like because it’s not there yet, right? Like this doesn’t make sense today, but it will.

Clay: Be back in the API part.

Bronson: Dave Yeah, yeah. You know, but, but it will like it’s getting there.

Clay: Yeah. So there’s a lot of things, I think that are behind the scenes that that we want to bring forward. You know, for example, the economic policies behind a lot of these tokens. So, you know, with Bitcoin, people tend to know a lot. But even with, you know, some of these other top ten currencies that are now in the, you know, multiple billions of dollars in market cap, some of them only have like 20% of the tokens mined. So, you know, you have 80% left in terms of inflation. That’s really important for an investor to know, right, that what they have is going to be diluted significantly in the next eight years. But like people don’t really know that kind of stuff. I mean, smart investors do. But to make this available programmatically, I think it’s going to be interesting. So there’s a lot of things like that that we want to provide. I also really like the idea of being this like this, this behind the scenes utility company. We don’t really care if mobile’s the next thing or like search on Alexa or everything goes voice or if it’s like some version of computing in your car.

Bronson: Yeah.

Clay: You know, we’re going to be behind all of that in the back end, powering it. And so I kind of think about Amazon Web Services as a tax on the Internet, right? Like, whatever happens, like they’re getting a cut of the Internet’s growth. And I think that’s an interesting way to to build the business kind of with these good old boring utility companies that the power things.

Bronson: Absolutely. I mean, you know, I heard it said so often that the boring stuff is what should get us excited. You know, if there’s too much sizzle, you’re probably doing the wrong thing. You know, there’s something to that. You know, that boring stuff sometimes just tried and true, you know?

Clay: Yeah, I think the back end tends to be that way. It depends on where you are in the in the application snack.

Bronson: Most people are in the back end. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the back end is where, you know, the select few are. All right. So we’re going to wrap this up. I got two final questions here for you that ask everybody when they could be short answers. But one, what’s the best advice you have for anyone trying to grow a startup and maybe some? You already said, you know, what advice do you have for that person?

Clay: You know, I this is a little I’d say meditate every day, you know, sit down for 15 minute, set a timer, don’t read any fancy books, just set a timer, sit your ass down, don’t have your phone near you and meditate every day. I really think that’s the best thing you can do.

Bronson: Awesome. And second question, what are you doing right after this interview is over, no matter how boring it is?

Clay: Oh, that’s a great question. I am getting I’m I’m preparing to launch our podcast for cryptocurrency investors.

Bronson: That’s not boring at all. So it sounds awesome. So. All right, good stuff, Clay. It is a privilege to have you on this show. Your insights are nonstop from the time we started until now. That is unique. I hope to have you back someday. Thank you again for coming on the show.

Clay: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Bronson: Absolutely.