01:27:42 · Steven Schwartz, John Coogan
[01:27:42] S9: Completely agree. Yeah. I mean, you look at the amount of small businesses that they service today, many, many, many millions per month. And I think the whole world is still underestimating how many more small businesses will be in the future. Even at a few million a month, it's actually not that many. There should really be billions of businesses each month. And these are not just tiny businesses, and Shopify has so many examples of Gymshark, random drop shipping brands that they grow to billions and billions of revenue. Skims doing billions and billions of revenue. And I think that they view our platform very similar in that the the winners can really, really grow and scale on the platform. But obviously, we serve slightly different types of businesses. So Sure. Yeah. I'm very, very excited about about getting to work with Toby and the rest of the of the team. They're fantastic. [01:28:41] S1: What What are some of the new categories that are growing quickly on WAP? Like, what's the new meta? What's the new meta?
01:28:47 · Steven Schwartz
[01:28:47] S9: Yeah. Well, we're actually working on this trends page right now, and it's been really crazy to look at. We're really trying to drive the specificity home specificity home of all these different micro markets. So when we first launched, was literally just sneaker bots. I think that everyone was kind of like, okay, well that's a tiny market, really niche. I don't even really know what it does. But when you start to stack all these micro markets up, it becomes really, really, really big. And when we started to get our classification upgraded, we're seeing explosive growth in home services businesses like plumbing and roofing and pool cleaning. There's kids in Oregon that have home renovation and kitchen renovation businesses. We're seeing like emergency tree removal businesses in Canada in highly populated forest areas. We're seeing a lot of fraternities and sororities start to use WAP. We're seeing people sell backyard greenhouses on the platform. We have really fast growing platforms for truckers, you know, like Bill Pay and ARAP platforms. We obviously have a ton of UGC growth. There's some really large people, not large people, really notable people that are launching marketplaces around UGC craze still. And I... Yeah. I mean, I think the fastest growing category right now is actually AI business training for small businesses. So they'll go in to different businesses and help teach how to do automations, how to get the best AI stack and so on. And that is in incredibly high demand. But again, I think a lot of these markets deserve to be a 100 x bigger. And I think that that road ahead of us is pretty obvious on how we can 100 x each of these micro markets, which collectively kind of brings the whole platform to another another territory.
01:30:34 · John Coogan
[01:30:34] S1: A lot of people laughed at Charleston AI. We took it seriously. We, you know, we had a fun interview with the founder, but we recognized that this was, like, a real business, and it seems like it's spreading far beyond that one viral clip of the gentleman showing how he set up a physical store where you could go and get AI training. It's happening on WAP as well. What what what does top of funnel look like for when some of these new new capabilities, new markets pop up? Like, I'm thinking about, like, tree removal. That's great that someone could come on board and say, I'm willing to remove a tree in a remote part of Canada, but how are they finding their customers? Are they doing the promotion and then the transaction happens on WAP? Or are you doing marketing to brand WAP as a place where someone could go for all sorts of home services? Like, how customer is finding that talent?
01:31:29 · Steven Schwartz, John Coogan
[01:31:29] S9: Yeah. So, I mean, our mission is to deliver everyone a sustainable income. So I think one way to look at our platform is to take all these markets that have traditionally been a little bit more concentrated on the big guys getting all the business. And then maybe the big guys would go and delegate out and find some contractor to go and actually perform the treat removal services. But what I think the promise of the internet allows for is really to decentralize all that power. And we try to think about making each of these markets very open and very efficient. And what that looks like is bringing scale economies for not just payments, but also advertising to people like these tree removal services. And when you give them the power of Nike, that they have an advertising product that Nike would use, and you give it to a guy cleaning cars in Kansas, who's making a $150 a week, it gets pretty nuts. And that's the type of thing that people are using WAP for today. And you can look at the services we provide. Really, selling more efficient, better payments, and more efficient, better advertising. [01:32:41] S1: Got it. [01:32:41] S9: And we wrap all that up, and embedded into our home screen, and tell businesses what they should do next, and say, alright, you're just starting out, Halloween's coming up, maybe run a sale for Halloween. Maybe get some ads launched for Halloween. [01:32:56] S1: Yeah. [01:32:57] S9: Yeah. So, that answers your question.
01:32:57 · Steven Schwartz, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:32:57] S9: Yeah. So, that answers your question. [01:33:00] S1: No, no, totally does. It's so interesting that you can come to WAP with a product, a service, anything. And then you're not just the ecommerce platform, you're also going to connect them with marketers, help them. It could be they hire a clipper on there or someone to run digital ads. Like, it's the full stack solution for like, a solopreneur kind of in any type of business. That's incredible. Yeah. It totally [01:33:24] S0: Are you are you already distributing through neobanks and and, different, like, consumer finance platforms? Because consumer finance historically was like, hey, here's your net worth or here's the checking account. But nothing in these apps helps you really make the number go up. You have to go elsewhere to do that. I feel like WAP is like the number go up platform for like a generation of new entrepreneurs. And that feels like a place where somebody's like looking at their bank account, they might not be happy about it if they want to do something about it. That's like an interesting moment.
01:34:01 · Steven Schwartz, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[01:34:01] S9: Our mission is definitely not to save you money. It's definitely to make you money. And you know, businesses on our platform, they grow an average of 300% after the first year. And that is very much our goal. We try not to deal in any anything less than a 100 bips of growth for businesses on the platform. And, yeah, I think we we're not... We're probably... There's a lot of low hanging fruit for distribution in other apps. We we have not... We have we have 10,000 people trying to make businesses... Creating businesses each day, and many many many more tens of thousands of users signing up to buy things. So we have our our hands full with our existing customers before I think we turn on some more pipes for for for extended distribution. So not quite yet, but the the neobank stuff is pretty pretty fascinating. I think, again, like our goal is to to bring a lot of competition to traditionally very difficult to enter markets. And we have a crazy cool stablecoin infrastructure that allows people to do things that they previously haven't really been able to do from a fintech stack standpoint. So, yeah, we're really excited about all that. [01:35:14] S0: Yeah. It was funny. When I was starting my entrepreneurial journey, I always thought it was funny that like my business didn't have a home. Like if you weren't building an e commerce store, like, and you could just go to... Like Shopify is the home for your business. [01:35:26] S1: Sure. Sure.