How Rublix CEO Martin Thomsen grew Rublix to $1.2M revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is david wassen he's an experienced executive with a demonstrated history of successfully managing and operating private companies in various industries he's skilled in corporate finance venture capital private equity entrepreneurship and management and graduate from the london business school in dartmouth college now working on revolutionizing social trading with blockchain technology at rublix with an x on the end dot com david you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do nathan thanks all right so go bit deeper there for us what's the company doing and what's the revenue model how are you sustaining yourself so rublix is a software development company it's our our mother company that develops a lot of products and platforms we build fintech products for traders in the cryptocurrency sector um traders at large we have some advisory and consulting arms of our business we also generate a lot of content our blog and our youtube channel and um but we're primarily focused on our platform called hedge trade and this creates a platform hedgetrade.com oh great okay good domain name yeah so that's uh that's our flagship product that that rublex as a company is building and this this enterprise hedge trade that we're building is a platform for cryptocurrency traders and will expand into other markets and sectors as well for for trading it's a platform where traders will post trading predictions and then users can come onto the platform and gain access to these predictions by purchasing them and unlocking them using our digital token using our cryptocurrency the hedge token and then they can gain access to the prediction see what the trader is predicting and if he's correct then the trader earns the proceeds from the people that purchase the prediction and if he's incorrect those proceeds go back to the purchasers so they get a refund on their money to get their money back so it's a model where you can follow a trader see how good he is um and then if you're interested in unlocking his prediction to see what he's speculating exactly to the to the dollar to the cent um you can unlock it for you know something like five bucks 10 bucks and then if he's got a good track record then you can make the the same bet as him make the same trade and see if you gain as well what's in it for the trader uh if is does he get a porsche if the thing comes out true does he get a portion of all the people that backed him exactly yeah so so he posts one of these predictions so it's something like i think bitcoin's going from 9000 to 9900 and then when he posts this on the platform it's initially hidden so so the user the user base can't see his exact buy and sell position until they unlock it and they have to purchase it using our currency or crypto and then they can unlock it and then they can see that those exact points nine thousand to nine thousand nine hundred and then if he's correct then he receives those proceeds he earns all those hedge tokens that the people purchased it with and then what we do as well is we post this prediction on the blockchain uh so that it's immutable you can't delete it you can't take it down it's not like twitter or youtube where you can make some speculation yeah yeah got it and then delete delete if it's wrong and then the the user can click on his history and track right to see his prior performance see if he's got a good reputation and then unlock the next one that he submits so david how are you making money off of this what's your revenue model so we have a commission model so we'll take a portion of the proceeds if the trader is correct uh and if the trader is incorrect he also has to stake token so he has to ante up tokens in order to post a prediction on the platform so you win no matter what yeah we do yeah uh okay so you're taking a percentage and give me a general range i mean are we talking you know point one percent ten percent what percentage uh it's gonna range from about ten percent to fifty so the higher performance that he is and better track record he can have a lower commission um or we get a lower commission he gets a higher rate and some other some other models around that as well so let me let me repeat this back to you and then i want to move on i want to make sure i get the model right though i post a prediction on your platform uh does it first off does it have to be bitcoin right or can i say amazon's going to go to 500 000 a share by the end of 2020. yeah you can do that exactly where we're headed yeah okay great so i said that um a hundred people uh wanna unlock and see where i'm actually trading so they pay i'm gonna say the equipment five dollars to do that so that's five hundred dollars right um it comes true in 2020. what happens to that 500 what do i keep what do you get and what are the people who wanted to pay to unlock to see my positions what do they get so you'll get somewhere between 250 to 450 of those dollars that they paid okay those people that paid for it they paid you the five bucks so so they lose the five dollars but then they see your prediction and your buy buy in price and your exit price so if they want to buy amazon buy it at your entry price buy it or exit price then and you're right then they won by purchasing the underlying asset uh if they acted on the information after they unlocked and saw my positions you got it yeah they have to act on it yeah and then okay so i'm basically i'm keeping 250 to 450 you're keeping anywhere between 250 and 50 dollars exactly yeah interesting okay um so let me okay first off when did your rubrics company which strikes me more like kind of like an agency in the space now you're building this piece of technology when did you launch the rubrics yeah so rublix started about two two and a half years ago and my background has been in the finance sector so i was working in private equity working at a family office an investment bank and then i met my co-founder pete and he was a trader and we came up with this idea together of building a platform where traders post their predictions and you can copy them replicate them and that started two and a half years ago and we've done a couple rounds of financing how much total have you raised uh initial round of greater than two million then a subsequent round of five million that's extendable to ten based on some hurdles and based on our option and maybe in a year's time it might do another financing seven raised right now five and two yeah okay and where and was that through tradition you're actually selling it you sold equity there in the company or this was a token issuance or something those were token issuances and uh and some debt financing as well okay what portion was debt financing uh maybe in the 20 30 range something like that you said 20 or 30 percent yeah okay so call it like 500 to 700 grand in total kind of debt financing the rest was all you did a token issuance you then converted some portion to fiat and that put caught six million in your bank to fund operations yeah that's real great roughly yeah when was the token issuance um a year and a half ago and another one was about nine months ago okay and then um those two token issuances together what was kind of total volume uh raised through that in before yeah ignoring what you can order to fiat um sorry how much should we raise in the fiat or or in crypto total yeah crypto the the ice the ico or the token issuance total we actually yeah we actually primarily raised in fiat um but we we issued the the purchasers our our token but we primarily raised crypto i mean raised in bitcoin and ethereum but it was primarily fiat okay so how what did the white paper sound like then is it basically saying hey for a hundred bucks you get one hedge token uh and then you tie the hedge token value back to 0.1 of an ethereum token or something yeah yeah exactly some some those were the numbers but yeah exactly a model like that where they purchase our our token and it's converted into their bitcoin ethereum or usd i see okay so um i'm trying to figure out then how you got fiat out of that if if every dollar people paid you you had to then give them a hedge token how do you how do you extract fiat out of that so you can fund your eyes as salaries and your engineers and things like that yeah so i mean people just paid us fiat so we we got checked into our bank account and then we sent them uh our token so so we raised primarily fiat oh i see what you're saying i see what you're saying yeah got it got it that was all that cash was sitting in your bank account and then you essentially set them the token and all that cash is still sitting in your bank so you essentially were 100 fiat from the start yeah it wasn't 100 but yeah maybe 80 80 85 yeah okay interesting all right and then help me understand i mean success metrics right so imagine you're measuring things like you know total predictions to the platform number of traders making predictions things like that what numbers do you care about yeah exactly we care about um primarily you know who has our token like what's the distribution of our token how liquid is it uh how many people are on the platform that have ever signed up how many people um what's that number how many of our total cumulative signed up we have in the in the tens of thousands that have signed...