How Witness'd Network CEO Bobby DeMaria grew Witness'd Network to $1.2K revenue and 5 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is bobby demaria he is building witnessed.com help creators monetize using blockchain bobby you ready to take the top absolutely all right make this real for everyone that is like they're nft and blockchain they don't know what either of them means make it easy for us yeah so basically um nftm blockchain it's really just a way to be able to store digital assets um using your computer online in a way that's immutable and can't be changed so it makes them very unique it's a difference between the mona lisa being a one of one versus a printout of the mona lisa interesting and when did you launch this idea first line of code uh first line of code was last october okay so fairly recently and what's like how do you make money off this that's what i don't understand how do folks like you that create make money yeah so i mean there's a number of ways i i do it through two different methods both through uh recurring revenue so my model is to charge people a monthly fee to be able to sell their art and music not their social videos their social videos are free but you know we can talk about that later so there's a recurring revenue component and then the other piece is just to take a portion of all the transactions that go through the social marketplace and last month which one made you more money well i mean we're just an open beta right now so um what made us more money last month was the recurring revenue but that's not what i expect will be the case long term so what do you charge an average of the referring fee so we actually have two different sides for the artists we charge from 20 dollars a month and they can upload unlimited numbers of art and music and then um the other side of the coin is the businesses so the people that are actually buying these um we're not just doing it for collectibles we're doing it for business as well so the point there is that businesses can come to our site find um authentic created videos especially the social videos and utilize them for their digital ad campaigns so and how many of those do you have right now using the platform uh only a few people again open beta for that so how many like five yeah but um uh yeah about five people okay five people and how did you find them those are the hardest five to find right yeah well you know um the cup the first few people i found were mostly um just through the blockchain community that i use um a couple of those guys jumped on as artists and then um the rest of it is just through social media so you know obviously i have a couple of social media accounts you know with um facebook instagram you know twitter and so i have have people starting to use that the social side of that now so robert five times 20 months is about 100 a month in revenue you're just getting started but like how are you support how are you supporting yourself while you you know scale a startup yeah literally just getting started so savings um i was i was consulting for a long time um and now i'm just living off a savings now that i've gone at this whole time okay well that's like a big jump everyone's listening rather people don't have your courage yet but they're saying i'm going to jump at some point how much savings do i need in the bank right in terms of my life expenses before jumping in and doing this how did you think about that um well you know i figured it just like anything else in life you can overthink it if you want to um at some point in time you have to just go ahead and do it now is really a prime time because the nft nft marketplace is just exploding i mean if you see what's happened with openc just recently um it's just blowing up so you know if i if i continue to consult that's fine but i wouldn't be able to spend as much time um focusing on growing the business one way to get more leverage here is to keep your personal expenses super low so you have more personal life runway can i ask like how low have you driven your all in monthly personal expenses i mean you know rent and food that's basically it but how much is that like where are you what's it cost i mean you know it's higher than i'd like it to be but um you know it's you know probably five thousand dollars a month give or take okay so are you in like a major city yeah i'm just outside of philadelphia oh okay okay got it so yeah got it so you have plenty of runway there now how do you bootstrap this or did you raise some money completely bootstrap doesn't now although with a business like this i need to be able to grow so i'm just now starting to finish up putting together my pitch deck and starting to reach out to investors how much you want to raise i'm looking at raising two million and how like building a company like this how how do you actually raise two million it's not like a traditional raise right um well no it's not a series a i'm looking for more seed funding through convertible notes okay but my point is so they are actually buying equity in a like delaware like corporation it's not like they're buying tokens on a blockchain and buying about part of the community no it's more traditional i'm not doing an ico or anything like that i see what you're saying okay god and now are you building this yourself we have a team i am one man show i love that so where did you get the idea from were you like a rock and roll star or something in your my background was in film and television and then i got into tech you know over 20 years ago um and so this is kind of just the culmination of technology and tv i worked in tv news for for a number of years as well um so you know the concept of tv news being able to access authentic videos was kind of the start and then obviously rolling in just what people are doing with user generated content now for their social for their you know ad campaigns um just gets laid on top of it robert are you do you have a spouse i'm separated separated okay got it i was gonna ask like you know a lot of people like they're on board taking a big risk but whoever they're with is not on board of taking a big risk without getting too personal like that wasn't the cause of the separation was it no no no not at all okay good many years separated at this point okay good good so you're like a free man you can take a lot of risk here because you're responsible for just you i mean i have a child as well but yeah okay how old are they i have one one daughter who's 12 years old oh okay so you get to be dad for a couple more years before yourself to college absolutely and i'm trying to enjoy every moment that i can that's amazing they say what they say you only have 18 summers and they forget you forever you know true probably not she's almost a teenager she doesn't really care about that anymore yeah that's so funny okay very cool so building building buildings so where do you want to get what are your goals end of the year i mean end of the year funded and getting this company into a massive growth mode i mean we're going to have to be able to hit the market in time do you have a lot of expenses with the business you talked about personal expenses what about business expenses not a lot of them right now okay got it so 100 bucks a month in revenue but you're not really spending on your break even right now where are you getting your next 20 hours a little bit more than that because just like all the services that i'm using but it's not a big deal yeah yeah where do you get your next 50 artists and musicians to sign up oh that's great question i mean word of mouth social media my open beta what i'm running now is uh three if you sign up now between the end of between now and the end of august you'll hear your first three months free as an artist or musician so getting them in there to get people to start fill the mark filling the marketplace with the collectibles because we're two sides of a coin right we're a social marketplace so there's a social side and then there's also the marketplace side where the art artists and musicians load up all their stuff for guarantees so to get that side fill it's gonna be you know it's just through running this promotion of you know free access for 90 days um and then on the other side of the coin for the social videos piece it's just uh pushing it as hard as i can on on social media i know the network side so on your website it says sign up for our social network and get paid to post and explore the world around you what does that mean so it's a location based social network where when you post a video to the network that video gets turned into an nft and then gets promoted to the place that you check it into so let's say you're at a restaurant and you have a great meal and you shoot a video about it and when you um when you're done loading the video it'll ask you where you are to look at the location around you tag the location you're at and then it'll actually automatically create a video gif and send it to the to that place to that location to that restaurant this example and say hey we've got this social video that you can use in your digital ad campaigns come to...