[00:00:00] Donny Dvorin: Brands are navigating the new Web three world, and with it comes an opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and engaging consumers in entirely new ways. But where do you start and when? In this new season of the Brave Marketer Podcast, we’re talking Web three marketing and how to market in the metaverse.

[00:00:19] You hear from marketers, from top brands and agencies will help us leverage this exciting moment in. And take our brave marketing moments to the next level. Hosted by Brave Software in me, Donnie Devo. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast, and this one features Andrew Milick, and he’s the CEO and co-founder of Skiff, which he founded After spending years programming in security and autonomous vehicles, skiffs, email and collaboration products are in an end to end, encrypted privacy, first workspace, enabling people around the world to communicate and collaborate more freely and effect.

[00:00:56] Andrew grew up in New York City and graduated from Stanford University [00:01:00] as the Henry Ford two Scholar. I think you’re really gonna like this episode because we talk about advertising in a private world and how to balance advertising quality and returns from your ads while still protecting your privacy and how crypto and privacy connect, including marketing and web three channels, and how market changes are impacting marketers.

[00:01:18] And we get into the crypto market. Now with no further ado, here’s this week’s episode of The Brave Marketer. Andrew, welcome to the Brave Marketer Podcast. How are you doing

[00:01:34] Andrew: today? Good. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

[00:01:37] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, it’s good to chat with you. All right, so why don’t you tell us, the most exciting thing that you’re working on.

[00:01:43] Right. Absolutely.

[00:01:45] Andrew: So I’m a co-founder and CEO of Skiff, and we do privacy first end, 10 encrypted wallet, integrated email communication and collaboration. So if you’re a fan of privacy respecting products, you use email, which I’m sure everyone [00:02:00] does, or you have probably many email accounts, we can offer you a fully private way of using our products to collaborate and communicate and get off of the less privacy respecting options that.

[00:02:12] Maybe using today. Got it. And how

[00:02:14] Donny Dvorin: long you been doing that for?

[00:02:15] Andrew: We’ve been around for about two and a half years. Our products are still relatively recent, so you’ve probably seen a big explosion in the privacy world. Brave being one of the best examples of that. And now, you know, 50, 60 million people or more are using the brave products, and so we’ve seen that explosion as well.

[00:02:33] Yeah, I think privacy has really struck a chord with. People all over the world from the US to Europe, to Asia, where people are thinking about data ownership. They’re thinking about all the personal communications that live on their phones and their devices, you know, far more than live in their, homes and desks these days.

[00:02:48] And so I think it’s one of the most exciting and meaningful places to work as an engineer in the world today. Yeah. And how

[00:02:53] Donny Dvorin: did you pick

[00:02:54] Andrew: privacy? Yeah, I think I have a lot of those same personal experiences and I don’t [00:03:00] know what made you excited about privacy or kind of curious about all the new models that I think Brave is pioneering on the advertising side as well, and marketing side.

[00:03:08] I wake up every morning

[00:03:09] Donny Dvorin: and I go privacy. No, I’m kidding. . But we all, it’s not one of those things. It’s like, Intel inside, right? Like you’re not like privacy , but you know, it’s important like deep down in your

[00:03:22] Andrew: dna. Yeah, I think that’s one of the interesting, I don’t know, dichotomies almost with privacy where everyone is thinking about it at some point.

[00:03:30] Especially, you know, younger internet users, we see them think about it a lot because it’s in the news with how much of their lives is online. But that said, a lot of it is kind of defensive and not really empowering. So you’re like, what do I do? My information’s already out there. And so I think that’s why working on privacy is so exciting.

[00:03:46] You know, I had spent a lot of time working in Asia and Russia and. And you know, actually working on a product that protects people’s personal information was so meaningful to me. And now it gives people like just great ecosystems of products to use. You know, like [00:04:00] private web browsers, private messaging apps, private cryptocurrencies, all that stuff.

[00:04:04] And so it’s been really fun to fit into that ecosystem.

[00:04:06] Donny Dvorin: How would you measure your company’s success? I mean, I’m sure you’re not gonna share your revenue figures with us, but could you give us any stats on to measure your.

[00:04:15] Andrew: Yeah, we’re really young, I’d say in the entire kind of company arc and then also in the privacy space.

[00:04:20] So our biggest product is Skiff Mail, which is end 10 encrypted private wallet, integrated email. Mm-hmm. , it’s about four months old and I think we’re probably, I dunno, over a hundred thousand users at this point, which has been an awesome start right outta the gate and all of that really just, you know, based on a few initial press campaigns we did a few campaigns we did with Brave.

[00:04:40] And then just user referrals and growth. And so I love talking about email and email marketing and email growth because email, once you kind of build a really good product, can be one of the most viral and self-growth driven products out there. And so that’s been a really strong start. And now we have so much to do on the product side.

[00:04:58] Donny Dvorin: As you know, this podcast [00:05:00] is called The Brave Marketer, and it’s all about

Marker

[00:05:02] Donny Dvorin: people coming on the show and talking about brave marketing moments, a moment in time when they had to take a big risk. When you look at your career, what would you say is your brave marketing moment? Yeah,

[00:05:15] I

[00:05:16] Andrew: think there are probably three pivotal choices that we made at Skiff that deeply relate to how we market the product and who we market it to.

[00:05:24] And so if it’s all right with you, Donnie, I’ll expand to three, I think pivotal moments that I’ve been really thinking about. Sure. The first is choosing to build a consumer product. So email is this massive space where there’s enterprise email, there’s business email, there’s business secure email, there’s antivirus for email.

[00:05:42] And we really chose to go for consumer email, like Gmail Outlook, you know, the big email providers that are really anti privacy today, but that literally billions of people use. So that’s one, and it means that we focus on our communities on discord on. On really intuitive and simple products and content.

[00:05:59] I think the second is [00:06:00] the privacy space where anyone from Brave to signal to others, you really struggle to reach exactly the right people because you don’t want to fit into the kind of Google and Facebook algorithms to slice and dice. Every person in the world, you know, people who live in Western Germany who think about privacy and encryption on the internet.

[00:06:19] We don’t really want that kind of data collected about our users. So we choose to do other marketing forms like working with Brave and you know, an advertising model that rewards users more, or focusing on promoting and producing content on webinars, like technical content. And so we just kind of have to make much more creative decision.

[00:06:38] And then I think finally it’s the intersections of crypto and privacy that we’re so excited about right now from using wallets to sign into a collaborative account for your email address, and then connecting in, this big crypto ecosystem that’s been growing more and more on the consumer side.

[00:06:53] So, I don’t know, is that very different than a lot of the marketing moments you’ve seen these days? Or what would you say fits in pretty much with the [00:07:00] line?

[00:07:00] Donny Dvorin: No, I mean, it’s a line, but the question then becomes, What was the risk for you? Let’s maybe start on a personal level. what was your personal risk I mean, crypto’s been growing for the past, 10 years.

[00:07:11] Yes. We’re in a little bit of a bear market, but you decided to start the company before the bear market. So where’s the risk for Andrew?

[00:07:19] Andrew: I mean, I think crypto and privacy have not been intertwined effectively yet, and I think we are one of the few products that actually offers a real privacy first use case for crypto, and also intertwines like great usability inside, you know, a crypto and privacy integrated product.

[00:07:36] So tens, you’re right, tens of millions of people have. Crypto wallets in their web browsers. They might use them every day or every week for transactions, but you’re really getting kind of pretty minimal utility out of that. Not everyone is buying and selling currencies or tokens or you know, assets every other day.

[00:07:52] And so for the first time now with our product, you can actually use that as an identity. You know, you can sign up for free and completely anonymously for. An [00:08:00] email address, a collaborative account, a way to store and upload files on the decentralized web that’s really never been done before and never been done in a good product.

[00:08:07] I think the last is just ideologically crypto and privacy are generally similar. They overlap really well, owning your own data, communicating anonymously or pseudonym anonymously, but they’re not really the same group of people. So if you think about the traditional privacy lover who shares nothing about themselves on the internet, who self hosts services and uses VPNs, There is a huge overlap, but not complete overlap with the people who like defi and crypto wallets and you know, might be in some more kind of financially motivated terms.

[00:08:36] So I think they overlap ideologically, but they’ve never really kind of had this deep relationship and interaction like they do in our product. So I think those are some of the big decisions we made early on and they’re massive technical ones. Like how are you gonna build storage and identity and authentication?

[00:08:52] And so now that we’ve built all that stuff, hopefully we’ll kind of intertwine them. Seamless.

[00:08:56] Donny Dvorin: got it. Are you at a place where you’re starting to do [00:09:00] core marketing yet, or do you feel like you’re still in like the building of product phase? I

[00:09:05] Andrew: think we’re combining both. So we are producing a lot of content for our users.

[00:09:10] So updates, tutorials, guides, explanations. How does encrypted email work? How does your wallet work? How do they work together? How can you get more value out of that? And so we started to kind of get more and more metrics driven on that content side. You know, sending out surveys on what users, like measuring, our technical topics or GI.

[00:09:29] Repo are they getting engagement and really leading back to the product itself. We’ve also done some marketing with Brave actually, where, in kind coordination with our email launch, we’ve gotten to know a lot of the brave team, especially the Brave Wallet team, so people working on privacy, on Brave Wallet security, on Brave Wallet, encryption, decryption, and a lot of the browser team.

[00:09:49] And so we were one of the first brave, decentralized app partners, I think three or four months ago. And so we ended up doing some marketing with the brave team as well, which was awesome. Cause it’s this [00:10:00] whole new model for, user data respecting privacy.

[00:10:03] Donny Dvorin: Yeah. Do you remember what you ran with us and how it performed?

[00:10:06] Andrew: we did, I believe a few sponsored images, some in Europe, maybe one in the US as well, and definitely in the UK on launching our wallet integrated end 10 encrypted private email. And that was exciting. And also just say, I mean, I don’t know if you kind of follow and click on Brave Ads every day, or you’ve tried a lot of them.

[00:10:26] But I think it also relates to that comment I made earlier. You know, wallets aren’t just for exchanges and buying tokens and selling them, but they can also be used for so much more. And so it was so exciting for us to be able to present that to, you know, users who may often see ads that are like, buy this or sell that, or connect your wallet with this and actually give people a big utility out of that.

[00:10:47] And if

[00:10:47] anyone’s interested to see the skiff sponsored images that Andrew’s talking about, there’s a great site that a fan of ours created called brave.photos. and you’ll be able to see every single sponsored image. [00:11:00] That has run probably for the past, maybe a year and a half or so, This is awesome. I’ve scrolled through this side a bit and a lot of really cool images, a lot of awesome stuff from cars to search engines to, defi exchanges. So it’s cool to be there on, you know, a market like email, which I also just love building on emails such a complicated, interesting platform.

[00:11:21] Just imagine like the volume of emails coming in, the problems people have organizing their inbox, and so it’s been an awesome technical problem and also marketing.

[00:11:30] Donny Dvorin: Great. So why don’t we switch gears a little bit outta Skiff, a little bit out of, you know, what you’ve been doing with Brave and more onto kind of the general crypto market.

[00:11:39] Let’s start there. What, what are you seeing in crypto land? Have you been attending a lot of, uh, conferences and stuff? What’s your general take on what’s going on both from a currency standpoint, a crypto marketing standpoint, a crypto development standpoint? Like what are you seeing out

[00:11:56] there,

[00:11:56] Andrew: Andrew?

[00:11:57] Yeah, I think we’ve been reasonably well [00:12:00] involved in certain aspects in the crypto market, and those include crypto identity, so wallets, ENS, domains, dot sol domains, unstoppable domains, and also on decentralized storage. So ipfs, the interplanetary file system, R Weave, et cetera. I think my main thoughts right now are that people are spending a lot of time building products with higher utility.

[00:12:22] So, you know, we’ve seen a lot of partnerships actually emerging on all of these sides. Ethereum naming service, a lot of naming service, unstoppable domains, integrating login, brave integrating IPFS support, integrating Unstoppable Domain support. So I think it’s an exciting time to see tons of wallets that we’ve also spoken to from Meta Mask to Phantom for so.

[00:12:43] To Kepler for the Cosmos ecosystem, I think we’re seeing wallets and products start to think about traditional user engagement. So not just what’s the volume of tokens day after day, because transparently that’s gone down a huge amount in the last year. Many of these [00:13:00] companies were printing money and now they’re bleeding money.

[00:13:02] So it’s cool to now think about the traditional user metrics that we might also consider. So, you know, are people coming back to your product every day? How can we build integrations and get more usability outta them? What are your thoughts though on the general market changes that have been going on?

[00:13:17] Yeah, I mean I think

[00:13:18] Donny Dvorin: that we see cyclical changes in the market in general in the sense that, you know, we’ll have this bull market followed by, you know, a sharp bear market. Then we tread along the bear market for a while and then we slowly creep back up and all of a sudden crypto prices are wild again, and people are like, Where did this come from?

[00:13:38] Like, I didn’t see this bull market coming. It’s like, yeah, it’s been hanging out at this low part and it’s been ticking up as you’ve been, you know, sleeping and you should have been dollar cost averaging this whole time . And unfortunately, we’re in one of those kind of bear slumps right now. I don’t have a crystal ball, but like eventually in the next, you know, six months, a year, year and a half, two [00:14:00] years.

[00:14:00] We’re gonna see the bull market come again and we’re gonna see prices of Bitcoin surpassed $65,000. We’ll see them go past a hundred thousand dollars. This is not financial advice, and we’ll be in another bull market followed by another bear market. So that’s what I think about the market in . General. I think that.

[00:14:17] You know, the original L one s are changing, you know, things like, people were complaining a lot about Ethereum for so long that, you know, it was so expensive and it was so slow, but it was so much faster than Bitcoin. But now everybody switched it over to Solana and then. It’s like, okay, Solana had, you know, hacking issues.

[00:14:37] Maybe it wasn’t directly Solana, maybe it was just the Phantom wallet, but like, and now people are looking at other protocols. Maybe it’s near, maybe it’s somebody else. And so there’ll be constant like changes of like, oh, what’s the best, you know, L ones, you know, to use for transactions and low fees and speed and everything like that.

[00:14:54] And as far as the companies in the space, I think, you know, every day there’s new, crypto [00:15:00] ideas and new things that are starting up. What’s a little bit unfortunate is that, you know, there were ideas that I was seeing back in 2016 and 2017, and here we are five or six years later and they’re still not like mainstream.

[00:15:12] Like the simple idea of. You know, you could get rewarded with crypto if you go for a run and you beat like your friend’s personal record or something like that. or you know, you don’t need to do real estate contracts anymore. With paper, everything’s gonna be crypto and the shipping containers that go from, you know, London to New York or whatever, everything’s gonna be recorded on the blockchain.

[00:15:35] Like it was just like idea after idea after idea in 20 17, 20 18. And you’re like, For sure by 2022, by 2023, all these ideas will like, they’ll be in the mainstream. Everybody will be talking about how their company is like using blockchain technology as like a center part of their business. And here we are.

[00:15:55] And it’s not like that at all. And so, I don’t remember the exact quote, but like there’s this quote [00:16:00] from Bill Gates and he coined it from somebody else that, technology will come and everybody will like think it’s like, you know, faster than it is and I’m totally butcher. But it will eventually come, but just not at the speed.

[00:16:12] Everybody thinks it, it’s gonna come. And so that’s kind of like my view on, on the crypto market that all these things will happen, but they’re just taking time.

[00:16:19] Andrew: Yeah. I think I generally agree with that. I will say though, I think huge progress has been made, you know, now hundreds of millions of people are involved, where it might have been a fraction or a small percentage of that a few years ago.

[00:16:32] I think we’re also seeing, you know, crypto focused browsers, operating systems, phones and devices come into play, and at that point, you know, it’s just built into kind of this fundamental layer of the technology people use. So I think that part is exciting, but I also agree that these sweeping, massive changes where crypto kind of displaces huge markets and infrastructure.

[00:16:53] financial products haven’t completely been realized yet, but I don’t know, I think an immense amount of progress has been made [00:17:00] and also just forks in the road have come, you know, who could have imagined the Defi explosion or the NFT explosion or you know, those spaces changing. Whereas like some of the other stuff that might have been more obvious that people have always been working on again and again, like combining decentralized identity and off chain and on chain identity, you know, a lot of those kind of real world upsetting ideas I think have been a little slower to, I.

[00:17:21] Yeah. And it’s

[00:17:22] Donny Dvorin: crazy how fast, you know, we’re talking about bull and bear markets, but there’s like many bull and bear markets within, like, NFTs as an example, like that had like a huge bull run and then crashed, right? The defi had a huge run up and then kind of crashed. And the same thing with like high yield.

[00:17:39] people were like talking about, you know, these mechanisms where you would get, 250% aps, right? And, that was like crazy for like, I don’t know, six or nine months or something. And then it just went away, right? Like in a second. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, Celsius voyage or [00:18:00] Block Fi, I mean, all these guys just started, you know, crumbling.

[00:18:03] Yeah. And so there have been pockets of explosions, in a positive and negative way. People say like, oh, my company blew up, blew up in a good way, or blew up in a bad way, . So there’s been like these explosions that have happened within the crypto market that have been like both, you know, good and. Do you come from a traditional marketing background?

[00:18:24] Like what do you think about marketing in general? How do you think marketing has changed over the past 10 years? Yeah,

[00:18:31] Andrew: I would not say I come from much of a marketing background at all. I’ve been an engineer my whole life. And then I think starting our company, skiff has pivoted that to thinking a lot more about growth and product like growth and marketing and product marketing.

[00:18:44] I think it’s interesting given that our company is so deeply invested in privacy as the core part of our platform. I feel like maybe we’re on this leading edge of the entire marketing industry in certain ways, or a lot of the changes from, you know, iOS 14, 15, [00:19:00] 16, a lot of the changes in ad blocking and browsers and brave Firefox, safari and Chrome extensions.

[00:19:07] A lot of the privacy. Kind of respecting plugins and changes people are making. So don’t track across apps, block ads, block cross site cookies, all of these changes to, you know, email tracking as well. I think we’ve kind of operated in a world where a lot of those exist or they’re almost requirements to how you do business.

[00:19:24] We would never have a Facebook pixel on our site, for example. So I think when people are talking and shouting, How can we make advertising more efficient? How can we operate in a, you know, more private world? It’s almost like we’ve been operating in that world to start, so I wonder if that gives us a huge advantage because we exist with these constraints and we really thrive or get excited about them, but it also means that everyone’s becoming more creative.

[00:19:48] And so email marketing has. Gone through a renaissance in certain ways and you know, people are trying to find all these other ways to track users and web browsers and across apps and in emails. I dunno,

[00:19:58] it’s this interesting kind of cat and [00:20:00] mouse game of advertising quality and returns. And then also the privacy side and let’s say we’re straddling a bit of both.

[00:20:07] Donny Dvorin: got it. What do you think it takes to be a bold engineer right now? How do engineers stand?

[00:20:13] Andrew: Great question. I think we see really good engineers have an immense devotion to detail and being on top of, and taking ownership of difficult projects and also on making tough orthogonal changes if something isn’t working.

[00:20:29] And so what I mean by that is things constantly break, and I’ve seen this on the marketing side too, where the data. You know, isn’t leading to what you expected. A product has been shipped and you see it breaking in the data, and there’s often a kind of crisis of responsibility where people don’t take ownership, or there’s a difference between building something in a vacuum for yourself, testing it on your computer, and actually having 10,000 people try out.

[00:20:55] And so just being super, super upfront about grabbing ownership, [00:21:00] making a change, reverting it, you know, investigating what’s going on. I think that has been the biggest. Kind of best quality we’ve seen come together on the team. And the same is true, like you can invest weeks into engineering something and it just isn’t making the progress you need.

[00:21:14] And sometimes you need to just honestly wipe out that project and try a different direction, or someone else should work on it or we’ll do it a different way. So I think just knowing when the data says to cut a project off, that’s just so important. Got it. Cool.

[00:21:29] Donny Dvorin: Can you nominate another brave marketer to be on the.

[00:21:33] Who shall we interview?

[00:21:34] Andrew: Yeah, my most interesting, I think marketing in a similar space would be finding someone from the Signal Foundation, if you’re familiar with Signal Messenger. So they do end to encrypted messaging. They’re probably one of the best, most respected organizations that does it on the planet, and they’ve had some awesome marketing campaigns where they’ve actually turned micro-targeting.

[00:21:57] The micro targeters, so you know, [00:22:00] Facebook ads that say you’re seeing this ad because you are. 41 year old dad who works in the insurance industry. So basically showing ads that almost reveal micro-targeting inside of itself. You know, really creative Twitter posts and influencer posts. So I’d love to see someone from Signal come on, and I know they’d fit kind of right in that privacy niche.

[00:22:22] So it might be two outside the wheelhouse, but they’ve really pushed the limits of what you can do on these platforms. Got it.

[00:22:29] Donny Dvorin: Great. Any last words for the

[00:22:31] Andrew: audience? Nothing in particular. Thanks so much for having me. Our products are available on skiff, S K I f.com, and we’re always around in Discord, Twitter and otherwise to give feedback.

[00:22:43] And Brave’s been an awesome partner on the wallet side, the security side, and on the marketing side as well.

[00:22:48] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, and we’ve loved having skiff as a partner. We love your products. We love the privacy centric approach. So Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the Brave Marketer Podcast. It was great to chat with you today, and we’ll be in touch

[00:22:59] Andrew: and talk soon.

[00:22:59] My [00:23:00] pleasure. Thanks so much, Donnie.

[00:23:02] Donny Dvorin: Thanks so much for listening to another episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast. Four quick things before you go. Number one, if you like what you’ve heard, it’d be really awesome if you’d. Or write us a review on your podcast player, and if you didn’t like what you’ve heard, then don’t worry about it.

[00:23:19] Number two, if you would like to advertise to Braves 60 million users and have a budget of $10,000 or more, simply email us@addsalesbrave.com. That’s ad S A L E s@brave.com, and let us know you’re our podcast listener for a 25% discount. Number three musical credits. Go to my brother Ari Devor. And finally number four, go use brave@brave.com and we will see you next time on The Brave Marketer.

[00:23:49] Her.