[00:00:00] Donny: The world is waking up to the power of crypto. And we are seeing this with new NFT and token launches every day, all using blockchain technologies. We’re also seeing huge marketing spends by crypto exchanges and platforms. And so this season, we are speaking to the marketing leaders of those crypto companies hosted by brave software in me, Dani, Devon.

[00:00:25] You’re listening to a new episode of the brief marketer podcast. And we’re excited about the swamp because we featured Dr. Jesse Agros Reich and Aggie. As I like to call him was a chemistry professor before launching a successful career and the educational software industry, where he was doing sales.

[00:00:45] He’s always been a lifelong gamer and Aggie, both played games and created them as a. But in 2016, he started using the blockchain based blogging platforms, steam it to have an immutable place to free write on topics. He [00:01:00] wanted to invest. So then later in 2018 with his buddy, Matt Rosen, they created, and co-founded the splinter lands game.

[00:01:10] And today splinter lands is one of the largest dApps in the world. And you’re going to love this episode because we discuss this splinter lands game itself, strategy versus luck, Have they marketed the game in the early days?

[00:01:26] Lots of word of mouth going on. And then we get into his predictions for the future of blockchain, gaming, crypto, and FTS. This idea of the supply and demand of NFTs. I think you’re going to find really interesting. So now let’s get up to our pick of the week and we want to highlight one of the brands.

[00:01:42] And what we’re going to do is we’re going to stay with the game. Theme of it. And so we’re going to highlight versus versus as a strategy trading card game, and they feature art from legendary artists and you can collect all the art and play the games. And as far as what they ran with brave, they ran [00:02:00] sponsored images to build brand awareness and educate our users about their NFTs artists and games.

[00:02:05] They saw impressive results. CTR across both sponsored image days were above our benchmark brand awareness, increased 70% from pre to post campaign. And we do the brand survey to figure that out and other people who recalled seeing the sponsored image two out of three clicked on the ad.

[00:02:22] Now’s today’s episode of the Bri marketer.

[00:02:33] Aggie welcome to the brave marketer podcast. How you doing

[00:02:37] Aggroed: today? I’m doing great. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to keep doing business with brave and thanks for having,

[00:02:42] Donny: we are so stoked that you are a customer and we’re so happy about the success of your game. And we’re going to talk about that, in a moment, but why don’t we start with just a more general question of, what are you working on right now?

[00:02:55] What’s the most exciting thing that you’re jazzed about?

[00:02:59] Aggroed: [00:03:00] So splitting lands is like this a game we’ve done pretty well. Where one of the biggest apps in the. And, we currently have a single product and we’re starting to shift our focus to be able to support more than one project at the same time.

[00:03:14] So 20, 22 looks really fun. Cause I think that there’s a lot of partners and projects and people that we can get involved with moving beyond, we’ve basically showcased how the technology and the platform and the people and the artwork and the projects that we did. We can build scalable solutions on blockchain.

[00:03:32] And now the question is, who else can we work with to help bring as many people into the blockchain space as possible?

[00:03:38] Donny: how would you explain splinter lands in kind of an elevator pitch and then wanting to go into a bunch more?

[00:03:46] Aggroed: Yeah. So literally this is a trading card game and we’re built using blockchain technology.

[00:03:51] And that enables us to play any time, trade, any time in our, in every win. we have 1.8 million registered users. I have a little over 800,000 paying [00:04:00] customers. our daily active users is like a 500,000 or a little bit more or less on any given day. we’ve played over a billion games. We play about 10 million games per day.

[00:04:09] I’m in 142 countries, I think 10 different languages. And we’re just one of the biggest apps that are in the world. So focus as a company came about, really? Because as I went looking around the world, I realized that there’s a lot of problems with it. and the sort of like problems that the world.

[00:04:26] Yeah, lots of them, lots of them. And I kept thinking like, there’s when I went through it, I saw, uh, there was a lot of war. There was a lot of poverty and this surveillance state is absolutely hideous. And when I started looking for what are the antidotes to. It’s peace is prosperity and freedom. Yeah. Then it became, what are the tools that help do that?

[00:04:47] And the strongest, most powerful tool I’ve ever found is cryptocurrency, which isn’t just the specific to anything that splinter lands is doing. But it’s about getting people into crypto and experiencing prosperity comes as we create new tokens and [00:05:00] new environments. And MFDs that there’s peace that when you engage with your neighbor in a commercial relationship, you are less likely to fight with them because you want peace between your,business part.

[00:05:10] And ultimately, some of the ways that you can act with pseudo anonymity or that there’s no centralized power means that you really don’t have that same kind of surveillance, state and enclosed concentrated power of technology. It’s much more open and broad, and we all operate on this same platform kind of.

[00:05:29] Some level of the quality that the centralized services don’t offer. So I really fell in love with crypto, but the problem with crypto back in 2018, when we started was that there weren’t really like a lot of use cases that were consumer-facing at all. And so, as we thought through, what is it that could bring people into this ecosystem?

[00:05:47] We really said that the like super high. Into crypto is gaming. And at the time, crypto kitties was blowing up and we were looking at that being like, Hey, NFTs are awesome. Collectibles are cool. [00:06:00] But what you really need is a game. That’s what can bring all these people into this ecosystem. And then ultimately, that’s what we set out to build, but not just with a focus of how do we get as much money from our user base as possible, but with a focus on how do we build something that can actually support a mass market.

[00:06:19] So fact that we do something like three to 5 million transactions per day on. that to me is a Testament to like how much we can actually grow, how much we can continue to have interaction with what we’re doing. You know, all of the theory of is at 1.2 million per day. So like just our game is something like three to five times the activity of the entire Ethereum layer, one blockchain daily.

[00:06:42] Donny: Got it. And when you think about the game itself,pre splints or lands, or maybe non blockchain, What game would you do? People will think of it as, as the most. Like what’s the comparison.

[00:06:53] Aggroed: I think most of my player base usually comes in and they say stuff like, well, I was on the magic pro tour from [00:07:00] 2007 to 2009.

[00:07:01] I think magic is probably, if not, you know, it’s obviously like a pretty big inspiration for us. The gameplay’s fairly different. Magic was so inspirational to like trading card games and how they operate. so we’ve definitely drawn a bunch from that, but you know, the players themselves will tell you frequently that they have a background in that sort of traditional trading card game

[00:07:23] Donny: space.

[00:07:23] Got it. And for the person that doesn’t know.

[00:07:27] Aggroed: Yeah. So I don’t know magic Pokemon Yu-Gi-Oh the whole idea is that you own cards and you can play games with them, right? So one card has certain abilities, a different card has different abilities, they’ll battle. And depending on who wins, you get paid crypto card.

[00:07:42] and then there’s an entire ecosystem around that because the rules change, your opponents change what’s with teams. You can, you have change. the mana cost of cards change was, is sort of like a salary cap almost. So every single match is going to be different. And, it’s figuring out all these different [00:08:00] cards and, and kind of the meta game.

[00:08:01] And this thing is like, how do I use as little resources as possible to maximize my earnings? through the plate or earned mechanics the higher your rank. the more prizes you can earn, there are daily quests. There’s, tournament’s, they’re seasoned rewards, because there’s so many rewards, there’s an entire rental economy.

[00:08:21] So, on any given day, we usually have somewhere around like a million cards rented. there’s a lot of activity around owning the cards, battling with them to earn or renting them to passively earn. And there’s like a whole ecosystem and community and economy. That’s just around

[00:08:36] Donny: that.

[00:08:37] How much of it is skill versus luck?

[00:08:40] Aggroed: we tried to design with very little luck. it’s not zero. So I would say like matches, maybe 10% of matches are,Just unlock, Our game has to be built in a way that’s deterministic. So every single time that you replay the blockchain, the same team will win every single time for that particular block.

[00:08:58] But if you play the, the [00:09:00] same match, two blocks later, it could have a different result because there’s different inputs into how it has. So there are matches where they can go either way where like, depending on who goes first in that round, which, there could be some point flip situation.

[00:09:16] But most of these matches are very much just skill-based. if it was more random, you would see, uh, a wider distribution of who’s at the top of the leaderboard time after time. But that’s not what we see.it’s pretty clear who the best players are and that’s because it’s a highly skill-based game with like a touch of luck.

[00:09:32] Donny: you know, with COVID and stuff, play a lot of games with my kids and some of them I’m like, This is a hundred percent luck. Like this is no fun for me, obviously. And for my daughter who is six years old, I’m like, come on don’t you want to learn something like the more advanced, the less luck there should be, the more skill there should be.

[00:09:49] So I’m glad it’s so much skill.

[00:09:50] Aggroed:

[00:09:51] Donny: this podcast is all about marketing moments and the Genesis. So it was always about why don’t we have marketers [00:10:00] come on or business owners like yourself and choose a moment in time where they took a risk and it paid off.

[00:10:07] So what do you think is your brave marketing moment?

[00:10:11] Aggroed: to me, it’s like continuing to build. In 2018 as like prices are tanking. my grandfather used to tell me stories about the great depression and he would tell me about how hard it was and how, there was so much scarcity and frustration and, even things like finding food could be difficult and whatnot.

[00:10:30] And when you go back there, the price correction that was involved in the great depression was a 13%. You know, we initially built on a blockchain called steam and we watched prices decline. 99%. So like, yeah, I mean, it took a Savage beating and we built our game on top of it. So it was pretty terrifying to, imagine how do we keep building when, it felt like,it went from bad erosion of our ecosystem to like complete economic collapse.

[00:10:58] and yet we’re still here. [00:11:00] We still built through it. And that to me was sort of like the scariest time in the history of this business. There aren’t a lot of economies or businesses that can survive through a 99% decline

[00:11:11] Donny: So, the technology is really impressive, like three second block times, there’s no gas fees. there’s human readable account names.

[00:11:19] Aggroed: There’s a entire like marketing and blog. Communication platform where you can earn rewards. And that’s been very vital to us growing. very few companies make it to the size that we have by spending as little money as we have on marketing. And, that’s mostly because we did all kinds of micropayments to our users throughout this process.

[00:11:42] And an example of this would be somebody plays a match. They go fight in this case. And they win the match and they earned some prize money. Then they go put a story about that onto YouTube. So then their YouTube channel is monetizing. Then they embed the YouTube video [00:12:00] inside of the hive blog.

[00:12:01] And now when they blog they’re earning up votes and those upvotes on this platform have actual monetary value. Paid out in the hive cryptocurrency. So now you are getting earnings from splinter land for just winning the match. You get some for your daily quest, you get some for your season rewards, you’re playing some of the tournament and you’re earning money there.

[00:12:22] Some of your spare cards you’re renting and you’re earning money. Then you get some revenue from YouTube because it’s the passive audience and stream that’s there. And then you’re getting blogging rewards. So in a lot of this stuff, you’re able to like triple dip into your activity while growing your audience, growing your base.

[00:12:40] And you know, for most of our players, it’s stuff that they’re just like super passionate about. They really love the game. It’s not like a grind to earn. It’s a real, like, play to earn. It’s like almost competitive puzzle. So.and our guys get totally into it.

[00:12:52] Donny: So let’s shift gears to marketing. How did you originally tell, the original user base about the [00:13:00] game?

[00:13:00] Aggroed: my, uh, my partner who is the lead dev asked me to work with. And I don’t want to trespass into his thoughts, but I think some of what appealed to him was that at the time I had one of the largest accounts on the steam, blockchain had some amount of, clout there and was able to go sort of spread this message to people that were already in crypto, already into blogging.

[00:13:25] some good subsection of that or gaming. And that by having an account that was a big vocal component. We were able to go grab people initially, it’s like Kickstarter and other things, if you have no platform, you can build something really cool, but just building something cool.

[00:13:42] Isn’t enough to get people interested in doing it and buying it and growing it and having it be a hit or a success. if you have already a successful project and then you run a Kickstarter, those are the ones that are going for like, you know, millions of dollars. Typically, I guess my point is that already having an audience makes this [00:14:00] stuff easier.

[00:14:01] And you know, at the beginning of your journey, when you only have like five or 10 followers or something, it’s absolutely brutal to build that. And then as you get up to the like millions or tens of millions, even tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, As you grow, it gets easier and easier to grow further and be able to like pull people in.

[00:14:20] So I think he picked me help lead this in part, because he could see this dude has an ability to reach out, I have like a 10 or 15 year sales background. And so I think that. Could become comfortable that I can take this message to other people and be like, come participate and see what we’re doing it.

[00:14:39] And so

[00:14:40] where

[00:14:40] Donny: did you find those people from steam and you brought them over, or did you have like an initial marketing campaign per

[00:14:45] Aggroed: se? I mean, we’ve done almost no marketing. It’s almost embarrassing how little that we’ve done. So, we’ve tried a bunch of ways to go do like standard marketing.

[00:14:55] Here’s some Facebook ads and YouTube and Google. And like, we haven’t had a lot of success [00:15:00] with that. But what we have been incredibly successful at, which is really even more sticky than that is word of mouth advertising that it’s like, the players are telling other players, Hey, you need to check this out.

[00:15:11] Hey, you need to participate in this. Hey, you need to do that. So they’re the ones that are really like. helping to spread this game and helping the, to get this thing out. So, what we’ve done is try to build a big community so that there’s lots of people spreading the word. And so for us, it has a lot to do with building a discord.

[00:15:29] We’re up over a hundred thousand people now. And, we do a fair amount to vet it. So it’s not like billions of bots, but it’s actually like humans that are in there. There’s a ton of engagement. There’s like 50 different channels. People are chatting and all of them language channels, the sun never sets on the splinter lands.

[00:15:45] So, we have, a lot of engagement and a lot of that engagement is from extremely passionate players. guys that, they go to the comic shop and in the basement, there would be like some magic, the gathering tournament, COVID happens. So there’s not a lot of in-person.

[00:15:58] So now you see a lot of [00:16:00] that same kind of spirit of the like hardcore . Nerd that loves these games. They’re in our discord, arguing about certain ability combinations, which one’s better, which one’s worse. You know why this card is a good airdrop, what we should do next. part yelling at each other part, yelling at us part, just shooting the breeze with each other sharing their opinions about this whole ecosystem and just kind of hanging with us

[00:16:23] Donny: as far as marketing that you’ve had to pay for.

[00:16:27] Have you seen any success with that?

[00:16:29] Aggroed: there is one, one nice exception to the entire failure. You’re going to be happy to hear this grave, all of this other stuff is like, it’s a great way to lose a lot of money. You know, one of the only places where we have any kind of success at all,

[00:16:44] the core gaming audience that we have are people that play games and love crypto. those two dudes they’re kind of the same. You know, you go to likethat hardcore magic, the gathering convention or store or tournament. And you see those like really intense [00:17:00] people, but they don’t every single rule set every single card, every single ability.

[00:17:04] They’re like super detailed focused And there’s like a nerdiness to that, the same person that loves all of those stats, abilities, combinations midmaxing and all of that. They have a lot of affinity towards cryptocurrency. It’s perked gaming, but now it’s this financial aspect of gaming. You have the, a lot of the community that overlaps, but it’s using a part of your brain.

[00:17:27] That’s, you’re so focused on,complexity. Now you’re not talking about ability combinations. Now you’re talking about consensus algorithms. You know, now you’re not talking about, stats, but now you’re talking about like block times. there’s a lot of the complexity overlap between these.

[00:17:43] That make your hardcore crypto guy and your gamer guy, it’s the same nerd. So that’s the core of our audience. And we have an easier time convincing crypto people to be gaming with us. Then we can convince gamers to do [00:18:00] crypto with us. that still seems to be a bigger barrier of entry.

[00:18:03] What brave has done a really nice job of is getting all of these crypto house. I like wrapped around this platform and utilizing it and building a community here. So I think that we do a better job, getting people out of this community and being like, come play our games. And that’s like a pretty low barrier of entry and we get lots of people by doing that.

[00:18:24] it is a lot harder when we’re like, Hey, you guys are a gaming community. Come do crypto. still a much bigger ask just in general. And I would blame government and regulations for that more than anything. but that’s, I think the state of where are the sentiment and player bases.

[00:18:42] Donny: on our side we couldn’t agree more. I mean, we. 50 million users about to be 55 million users. We just hired a CMO. So, soon enough, let’s see if we get to a hundred million users, what we do on our side is we run surveys and we just ask people, just tell us about yourself.

[00:18:59] And there’s [00:19:00] no reason for them to lie and three and four of them. So 75% of. I have treated a cryptocurrency and the past month. So it’s like, boom, you’re right there. They’re crypto people. And then separately, we asked a gaming question. Do you consider yourself a hardcore gamer in one? And two said, yes.

[00:19:20] and then, the Venn diagram is like, to your point is pretty good. So if, like, if you’re a gaming company that I’ve blocked chain, like there is, you know, there’s other places to advertisers, but like, we are the place for that. So it’s good to,

[00:19:35] Aggroed: and we just, we put a bunch of money into the platform.

[00:19:37] Cause we see, this is one of the best opportunities

[00:19:40] Let’s talk about the future a little bit. Where does blockchain gaming go? Do big gaming organizations start adopting blockchain or is it too late? Because their codes already been written. how do you see the future of blockchain gaming?

[00:19:56] We are so freaking early, it’s unreal. I [00:20:00] mean, there’s still people that are still have no idea what an NFT is that they don’t, they can’t get past the NFT and just ownership.

[00:20:07] And they haven’t really understood that NFTs are there. Ultimately, initially they start as digital deeds. They show you that you have ownership of this. But then pretty soon they go into programmable assets, like fungible tokens can be programmable money, but these are things that could be programmable assets.

[00:20:27] that to me is a technological leap forward that nobody on this planet really has a full grasp of just how big that can be. every thing that you own touch, taste, smell, feel could have a programmable aspect. and I think that,the human ingenuity that we have in order to have, if then statements that can create any kind of experience any human would ever want.

[00:20:52] It’s going to begin and end with NFTs and gaming in particular, the number of [00:21:00] things you can unlock in the real world is fairly limited. It’s confined to the things that actually. But the things that exist in virtual spaces, Mehta versus game worlds are completely infinite and have none of that kind of like real world tangible, limitations in terms of supply.

[00:21:20] So there’s just so many more places where we, as people and designers can make NFT experiences, particularly in worlds and games. And I think they’re going to be some of the most sought after assets in the entire world for generations

[00:21:37] Donny: to come. I think about NFTs. So there’s like 12,000 different cryptocurrencies.

[00:21:45] And so there’s a lot of supply out there, but there’s only 21 million Bitcoin. But then when you look at NFTs and you think of them as like their own mini currency, it does become infinite and you have this incredible amount of. [00:22:00] Supply. So how would you prices of investees continue to rise if there continues to be so much supplier in, in a way printing of money out there.

[00:22:10] Aggroed: So it’s not just money, you know, scarcity is a hell of a drug, right? So yes, they’re infinite, but in certain projects and in certain spaces they’re not. I’ll put this into terms that maybe splinter lands players. So we have,two main assets that are out there beyond are fungible tokens.

[00:22:29] We have the NFTs and that are part of our game. And we have this new class of NFTs called. And with the game cards that we put out there, we’ve told their players time and time. Again, every single year, we are planning on doing another like series of cards. And part of the reason to do that is to keep inexpensive cards coming into the market so that we can constantly get new players.

[00:22:53] And so it’s not quite just inflating cause inflating this. There’s no cost. If we just like handed these [00:23:00] things out, that would be like a real drain on the economy. Whereas like when you sell them, it’s not the same type of inflation, but that’s different. well, IR eardrops can just be completely inflationary if there’s no purchase on the other side of that, then it’s just an inflation of a different.

[00:23:17] So it’s easy to obscure and sometimes they’re worth it and sometimes they’re not, we do some of that, but it’s about doing that for promotional reasons. Not for like economic overall, like balancing of some sort let’s compare what we do with the cards of trying to make sure that every year there’s an inexpensive way to access and get into the game with.

[00:23:38] We sold 150,000 plots of land. And we keep saying, it’s extremely unlikely that we produce more land. Maybe there’s a couple of games zones where like it’s a PVP zone and there’s some land that you’re fighting over in that. imagine if there’s like a pirate ship game or like a worship game, you know, maybe there’s some land tiles that are specific [00:24:00] just for building worships.

[00:24:01] So there could be like little mini pieces that are spun off, but, in terms of land, we really don’t see, you know, maybe once a decade or something, we’ll release some more, but if we want to keep that ridiculously scarce. And so as a consequence, we think that’ll be pretty premium. an example would be we sold it for 10 bucks and we’ve seen it.

[00:24:19] So as I, as, a thousand dollars per plot, because there’s just not enough for every. So scarcity is power and yes, there’s an infinite amount of all kinds of NFTs and all kinds of, sports things, and non-sports things and fantasy. But in this one world that is populated by lots of people.

[00:24:40] If you want land, there’s only 150,000 of them. There’s not enough for everybody. Please push and shove. So that’s how you have an infinite supply of whatever anybody’s mind can. Correct. But if there’s scarcity in the thing that people actively want to do in this one ecosystem, that’s where your true scarcity should come [00:25:00] from.

[00:25:00] not as a measure of every little NFT and every single token that could ever be created, but you’re really looking at the supply and demand of this. Just one project, that’s one type of NFT. what’s the availability of that? And that’s where the scarcity comes in. but the benefit of that is.

[00:25:18] Instead of like real estate and Boston, where there’s only so many people that want to own a house in Boston. Now you’re talking about digital asset ownership in this metaverse, which is accessible to everybody in the world. So you still have that same kind of constricted supply, like you might have for housing in a certain market, but now you’re not limited to just the people that want to live there or rent there.

[00:25:44] It’s literally open to anybody that has internet access. And so for that reason, I hear you about, well, you could just, somebody else can mint another NFT. That’s okay. that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s any value there. You’re still talking about just these projects with. [00:26:00] production rates and I think that’s what makes those things so freaking valuable.

[00:26:03] And in fact, I think will ultimately NFPS will be a bigger asset class than real estate because you will have a global audience fighting over a limited number of scarce assets. And those assets are programmable and can earn you money in ways that like your house can’t because it’s not a digital programmable asset.

[00:26:25] last couple of questions. I call you Aggie, but you go by road. Where does that name come from?

[00:26:30] it’s a gamer handles. So, you know, I was born as Blair Wrike or Jessie Reich, but,a couple of years ago, I guess there’s so many more than that.

[00:26:37] Like 10 years, 15 years I started playing. And I have an ORC warrior, and it’s a, it’s a tanking term. you agro things. So it’s the past tense of to agro, but I like it because there’s an inertia about it because of my own journey. You know, I’m a, I’m like a PhD chemist. I had a nice life. I was doing all the normal things and, government had to sort of like agro [00:27:00] me to the point where I was like, okay, I will do something.

[00:27:04] Donny: Because I was like sort of happily swimming down that stream. And then I started looking around being like, if something is wrong with everything but I had to get poked to get out of my comfort zone. if you were to recommend one person that I should interview for the brief market or podcasts, who would you rate?

[00:27:20] Aggroed: it’s probably too self-serving to say this, but my co-founder is probably one of the. economic geniuses in this space. Not only is it amazing programmer, but his mind, is just so freaking sharp and part, because he’s able to go sort of absorb all of the best things that are out there and try to figure out how do we build the economies that work for everybody.

[00:27:43] any last words for the, uh,

[00:27:46] so if you guys aren’t playing splitter lands, I would ask you to come join us if you’re here on brave.

[00:27:51] I think you’ll find that there’s a fair amount of overlap between the mission of these two companies We’re a crypto gaming business and our focus is on bringing other people into [00:28:00] crypto. And we’re hoping that through mass adoption of cryptocurrency, we’ll see more peace, prosperity, and freedom in the world.

[00:28:07] If that sounds appealing to you, I would ask you to support our mission, by our cards, player, game, communicate with our community members, formed friends and be entertained the whole way through. Thank

[00:28:19] Donny: you so, so much for being on the podcast, Aggie.

[00:28:22] and lastly, how can listeners get in touch with you directly?

[00:28:24] Aggroed: just through discord aware, discord that splitter lands.com come hang out with us. And,I’m always in there. My door’s always open. Just send me a direct message and, happy to talk through folks through.

[00:28:34] Donny: If you like what you heard today and found it valuable, it would be super helpful. If you took one minute to leave us a short review in apple podcasts, every review counts and helping us get to our show and more ears on one final note, if you have a brand product or service that you’d like to get in front of Braves over.

[00:28:53] Million users. Please email us@adsalesatbrave.com. And let us know you are a podcast [00:29:00] listener to lock one of two perks. If your budget is under $10,000 a month, we’ll bump you up to the top of ourselves, certain waiting lists, or if your budget is $10,000 or over a month, you’ll qualify for a 25% podcast listener discount.

[00:29:16] Again, email us@adsalesatbrave.com and finally a huge thanks to. And brother for all of the music that you hear. And until next time .