Speaker 1: Airbnb was able to create tens of billions of dollars
by democratizing hospitality. We believe there is a huge opportunity
for someone to make tens of billions of dollars by
democratizing social media marketing and advertising. You take a picture
of your latte and you're going to get paid ten
dollars for sharing that picture or reel of your latte
with your friends on your social media and we pay
you through Venmo or PayPal. The Financial Survival Network now
more than ever, the Financial Survival Network.
Speaker 2: And welcome. This is Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
Carrie Lutz, and well got a really interesting company to
share with you today. The name of it is thumbs
Up Media and that's thumzupmedia dot com. That's their site
NASDAC symbol tzup with me?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: Is there?
Speaker 1: CEO?
Speaker 2: Robert Steele? And I Before I start the interview, Robert,
I just want to preface it. I looked at your site.
I looked at your concept of being able to effectively
get your message out without having to go through a
huge gatekeeper media concern where you pay a lot of money,
you waste a lot of money. And I think it's brilliant.
On that note, tell us exactly how it works and
where you're at in the process.
Speaker 1: Sure, thank you, Kerry, great to speak with you today. Yeah,
So we believe that there is a need for what
we think of as Uber for advertising. So just like
how Uber was able to create tens of billions of
dollars in value by democratizing ride sharing, and similar to
how Airbnb was able to create tens of billions of
dollars by democratizing hospitality, we believe there is a huge
opportunity for someone to make tens of billions of dollars
by democratizing social media marketing and advertising. And that means
opening it up so that everybody can participate and everybody
can make a little money. So with that concept, we
came up with the thumbs Up app. It's currently in
the Apple App Store and it's in the Google Play Store.
So we have more than a thousand advertisers on the
platform where people can go to one of our advertisers
and they can get paid to make a social media
post to their personal friends to the thumbs Up app. So,
as we were talking about just a moment ago, we
have a coffee shop in Los Angeles called the Frenchy Cafe.
So you can go to the Frenchy Cafe and there's
a sign on the counter that says get paid to post.
It's got the QR code for the thumbs Up app
on it. You point your phone camera at the QR code,
it puts the thumbs up app on your phone. You
take a picture of your latte, and you're going to
get paid ten dollars for sharing that picture or reel
of your latte with your friend on your social media,
and we pay you through Venmo or PayPal. And then
also this works for consumer products. So we have a
soda brand called Bossa Nova Soda and soda Bossa Rather
and you can go to Ralph's or Vaughn's here in
southern California and get paid ten dollars to share a
photo or a real of soda Bassa with your friends
on social media. So when your listeners hear that, we
want them to think, Wow, if it's working for that
one beverage brand, it could work for every beverage brand,
And if it's working for that one coffee shop, it
could work for every coffee shop. So we're very excited
about the thumbs Up technology and believe that this is
the future of ad tech and social media advertising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it truly is democratizing it where like I said,
you don't have to go through the huge gatekeeper and
it's much more targeted and it's much more personal too,
isn't it.
Speaker 1: Yes, And we think it's fun. You know, the influencers
are are kind of everywhere in the culture, and so
this allows everybody to be an influencer for a moment.
We're not targeting professional influencers, We're targeting the general public
and we think that it's fun. You know, who doesn't
like to make a little extra money for telling their
friends about things that they like?
Speaker 2: And is there requirements? How many followers you need on
Instagram or TikTok? How does that work?
Speaker 1: Great question? Thanks for asking. So the way that it's
set up right now is that we try to keep
the configuration for the advertiser super simple. But there's an
advanced settings button that you can click on when you
set up a campaign and thumbs up that gives you
a bunch of configurable choices. So one of those choices
is that the brand can decide what the minimum number
of followers is that they're willing to pay for so
that the default setting is fifty five zero. But if
a brand only wanted to pay people that have one
thousand followers or ten thousand followers, then they would just
set that number there, and then the app would tell
the user that this campaign requires a minimum number of followers. Now,
we encourage the brands to keep it at fifty because
what we see is that in aggregate, after a brand,
after a brand or an advertiser gets one hundred posts,
just one hundred posts, they're going to see that they
get three groupings, they get some that are between fifty
and one hundred, they get some that are between five
hundred and five thousand, and they get a couple that
are ten thousand, one hundred thousand more of the professional
influencer follower count. Because what happens is that there's enough
of these professional influencers out there that they run into
a thumbs up advertiser and they're willing to take the
smaller payoff out from us because they actually like the
product and they want to share it with their audience.
So if the advertiser just runs the campaign long enough,
they're going to find that the average number of followers
shakes out to be between two and three thousand. So
the reason why we want them to get the smaller
follower counts as well as the larger follower counts is
because the data shows that the smaller follower counts that
those their friends are going to pay way more attention
to those posts on a percentage basis because they actually
know those people.
Speaker 2: So it's dilution. The larger the channel, the less personal
connection there is, unless you're some kind of celebrity or something,
in which case you're probably not thinking about ten bucks.
But I can see scalability here, right, Robert, Absolutely right,
So what's the goal?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: It looks to me like this is the kind of
thing that could go viral very very quickly.
Speaker 1: Sure well, the way that we position this when we
are raising capital is all say something like that, there's
thirty three million small businesses in the US on average
in any given year, forty five percent of them by
digital ads. That's about the fourteen million. So our goal
is to get to the point where ten percent of
those small businesses have given us twenty percent of their
ad budgets. On average, they spend five hundred dollars a month,
So that math shakes out to about one point eight
billion in AD revenue on our platform, and our revenue
from that would be four hundred million. So if we
can get ten percent of the small businesses of by
Digital Ads to give us twenty percent of their AD
budgets just in the US, then we could be at
four hundred million in revenue. And if we can trade
it five times to revenue, that's a two billion dollar
company right now market caps about eighty ninety million, So
that's a tremendous amount of upside for people that get
involved in the stock. I'll just remind your listeners the
stocks and Moost, Tzup, Tom, Zebra, Umbrella, Paul, and then
we're just now segueing into opening up our major brands activity.
So we believe that this is that we're going to
have household name brands in the thumbs Up platform, and
we've we've been putting out some feelers in that community,
had some very very good initial calls with names that
everybody would know that I can't share yet because they
haven't sign on the dotted line understood.
Speaker 2: And what I also like is the simplicity because when
you go to the big platforms, no matter how sophisticated
a computer user you are, that stuff can drive you nuts.
And also analytics, like basically you need AI to set
your ads up and you need AI to figure out
whether they're doing anything. This is the utmost of simplicity.
Speaker 1: We've had many people look at the at the configuration
for a thumbs up campaign and tell us that they
think that businesses will use thumbs up simply because how
much simpler it is to set up a thumbs up
campaign then to set up a native Facebook or meta campaign.
It's it's just a couple of clicks and you're in
and people are telling their friends about your business.
Speaker 2: The cost of these campaigns on the platform, you never
really know if they're successful or not oftentimes until you
pump a ton of money into it. And the difficulty
so you kind of need an expert to help navigate
through the through the hurdles of placing ads on the platforms,
and then you know they don't always take off. Sometimes
they take time, they don't go when you want them
to go. This seems like almost immediate and you find
out your response like that, That to me is really
really fascinating.
Speaker 1: One of our first clients, a small spat in Santa
Monica said that Thumbs Up paid for itself within the
first two weeks. So as soon as he got in
the app, he started asking people that were coming in
the door how they found out about it, and he said,
it paid for itself within the first two weeks. So yes,
that particular for small businesses, they see uptake right away.
In fact, in the beginning, we had a strange problem
where you know, when things are new, When things are new,
people have different types of psychological reactions to him. So
we had a restaurant in Santa Monica that actually left
the program because we were sending too many people to them.
I remember right righter speaking to the guy and I said,
I said, you know, we're happy to remove you from
the app, but I just want to make sure I
understand that you're saying that the problem is that we're
sending too many people to you. And he said, yes, Well.
Speaker 2: You know, I watched one of your spokesman, mister Wonderful,
talking about it, and one of the questions he always
asks on Shark Tank is what's your cost of customer acquisition?
I know your cost, you mentioned it prior and that'll
probably come down, but your customers there their cost of
acquiring their customers through you. It seems like it's dirt cheap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I give you two different answers to that. So
we're very much in a growth phase. It's still early
days for thumbs Up. You know, we're in the in
the in the thousands of brands and users were not
in the tens of thousands yet. So in the beginning,
it costs money. So the way we do this is
we pay the ouriser. We give them one hundred dollars
campaign to give it a try. And that's very, very
common in ad tech. So Google right now, if you
sign up for Google as campaign, they'll give you five
hundred dollars. Reddit will give you five hundred dollars. So
we give one hundred dollars right now. We're not as
bankrolled as those two companies, so that's a standard way
to get an advertiser started in digital advertising. So that's
a cost, that's a customer acquisition cost. And then we
primarily grow through a network of commission only sales reps.
So we pay our commission only sales rep one hundred
dollars when they sign up a new advertiser, and we
give that advertiser one hundred dollars in a promotional campaign,
So the customer acquisition costs is roughly two hundred dollars
right now. And then, as you said, but for our advertiser,
you know, they're they're paying us. If they pay the
thumbs up easer ten dollars, we charge them sixteen dollars
for that. So six dollars is our revenue. Ten dollars
is what the user gets paid. So if one of
the user's friends comes to the business, then their customer
acquisition costs was sixteen dollars, and if two of their
friends come, then their customer acquisition cost was eight dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So for local advertising, which now with the demise of
local newspapers of local media, this is phenomenal. But I
see the far bigger play the national advertisers because you
have this behemoth corporation, multi billion dollar company, very cold
and impersonal, and then you've got you know, social media
people saying, hey, I'm recommending these guys. I mean, there's
a certain genius here that I see to this and
it the ease of use. Yeah, okay, so maybe I
can't retarget at this point. Maybe I can't retarget everybody
who who watched the ad, All right, I don't really
care about that, and maybe I can tag it, Maybe
I can do it. But the cost and the value
of the customer, you know what, a coffee shop customer
who's a daily person. That could be two hundred and
fifty dollars a year and I paid ten bucks to
get them. That makes my cost of acquisition like four
percent or something like that. Pardon my math. Ten as
about four percent two and a half percent. I can't
see in terms of cost effectiveness anything that even approaches this.
Speaker 1: Yes, and one of our use cases that we pitch
to larger brands is imagine a sports stadium and we
put a thumbs up offer on the jumbo tron and say,
get paid ten dollars to share a video of your
enjoyment of the latest snack product at the concession stand
from some major snack manufacturer. So imagine having ten or
twenty thousand people in the stadium telling all their friends
about the new flavor of chips at the concession stand.
We can do that. We're pitching that right now, and
we think that's a game changer for advertising and marketing.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about you, Robert. Obviously
this is not your first rodeo. You seem to me
you have the personality we would classify them now as
disruptors that you look at the system, you see it's limitations,
and then you come up with a way to bypass
its limitations or capitalize on them. What else have you
done throughout your career?
Speaker 1: Well, thank you a great, great way to phrase it. Yes,
that's my personality. So been out this a long time.
As a teenager, my parents bought me an Apple two.
When I was like thirteen, I created a business making
game controllers. So in the very very beginning, the computers
didn't even come with a game controller, so I made
them in my garage and sold them at local computer stores.
You know, when I was thirteen fourteen years old. So
that's exactly what you're talking about. I saw something that
needed to be the exists that didn't exist. Then, you know,
next shot at bat was tax processing. Actually, so in college,
I became aware that the government had required a certain
type of real estate business to report electronically and there
was no way to do it. So the government had
created this need and there was no way to do it.
So I wrote a piece of software and built and
sold that company. Not a huge exit, but all those
pieces I created, the software, found the clients with a partner,
and we did sell that business. So that was my
second tech startup. Third was I started with two friends
a computer aided design software business in late eighties early nineties,
and it was very early in computer aid design and
set up some of the first microcomputer based GIS and
systems for local utilities. And from there I became dot
com CEO. So in the dot com era, I was
real early in the smartphone space. So the first time
you could put aol map quest on a smartphone, that
was software that I created. The first time you could
put a Microsoft PowerPoint on a smartphone, that was software
that I.
Speaker 2: Created time ago. Here you're talking Robert exactly funny plus
years yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And then and then from there I got into the
business process outsourcing space. So I went through a period
where I was doing a processing running a company that's
processing a billion dollars in accounts payable for New York's
dock exchange companies. That was all, you know, right when
that was even possible to do all that. And then
from there I was in the copyright technology space. And
that's a public company that I started that had Warner
Brothers and BMG as clients. The technology I created was
used to win two billion dollar lawsuits to protect copyrights
on the Internet. And then that takes me to thumbs up.
So that's a little recap of what I've been up to.
Speaker 2: That's a great story. So obviously they weren't all winners.
You had a few failures along the way, like the
rest of us. You know, tell us you don't have
to be specific about how it failed or whatever, but
just tell us the best lesson you took away from
one of your failures.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, definitely have had some failures, but the lesson
is don't give up that you know, for one of
the I was a dot com CEO, is very early
in the mobile space, and I should have just kept
it up. So you get hit, it's normal. You're going
to get hit with really things that seem overwhelming, but
you can make it through, and it's a it's a
head game, a mind game. And if I had that,
if I could go back to Robert twenty years ago
and say, you know, just pick yourself up and keep moving,
don't give up your your your gut instinct about where
the market is going is correct, and you'll live to
fight a new another day if you just get up
and stick with it rather than actually laying down the sword.
So that's the number one thing that I learned is
just stick with it.
Speaker 2: It's the Winston Churchill cry never give up, never give up,
never ever give up, ten most important words in the
English language. So now you got this amazing concept in
your seeking acquisitions and you wind up getting into crypto.
There's a synergy there that I know is there, and
of course it's a humongous industry and it'll grow a
thousandfold from where it is now. And I realized you
got ongoing discussions and das and securities regulations that prevent
you from really telling us the entire story in broadbrush strokes,
tell us the crypto strategy.
Speaker 1: Sure, so thank you, Kerry, thanks for asking. And everything
we're going to discuss is publicly released. So what happened
was that we successfully got thumbs up on the Nasdaq
stocks to the symple Tzup. Had the honor of ringing
the bell at Nasdaq in November of last year, and
very exciting walking down the hall seeing photos of Steve
Jobs doing it and Jeff Bezos doing it. You know,
it is definitely a high, a great moment, but it's
also game time. It's very serious that now shareholders are
going to expect significant revenue and significant revenue growth. So
the reality is that it has taken us longer to
get to the level of adoption that we had expected
on the core thumbs Up platform. So we started looking
at acquiring some digital agencies. I was signing NDA's in January.
The idea was to buy a company that had eight
figures in revenue and that already had the types of clients,
major brands that could pay for the thumbs Up technology.
So in that process, we had raised eight million dollars
in our reipo to Nasdaq, and we bought a million
dollars of bitcoin, and we got more interest and exposure
both in the press and on social media from that
one action than anything we'd ever done before. It was
really phenomenal. We got listed on the Total seventy, which
was we were approximately the seventieth public company to adopt
a bitcoin treasury strategy. Now I think there's more than
two or three hundred. So the timing was really great
for when we chose to do that. It gave us
some unusual visibility. So then we bought another million dollars
in bitcoin. So that led to a series of events.
One of those events was that Donald Trump Junior bought
some of my stock personally from me. That created visibility.
Then he is an advisor to an investment bank called Dominari,
and so then Dominari became Thumbs Up's investment bank. They've
since raised US fifty six million dollars and they also
a part of what happened was we got introduced to
a acquisition possibility called doge hash Technologies. So we've signed
a definitive agreement to acquire dough Shash Technologies, which is
in the doge mining business, the crypto mining business. So
that's very very exciting. So that came about not because
Robert was a super strategist. It came about through a
series of very interesting events that all started with a
crypto treasury strategy Bitcoin treasury strategy. So now if you
look at what we've filed publicly about the dough Shash
technology story, you might imagine that very soon our shareholders
might get a mailing where they get to vote on
participating in this transaction, I will certainly be voting for
us to participate in this transaction. So what could happen
is that Thumbs Up Media Corporation could become dough Hash
Technologies in name, might get a new stock symbol, and
the company's business strategy going forward should be crypto mining.
We've already released the dough Shash Technologies has four thousand
crypto miners at various levels of implementation. And if you
ask chat GPT how much money can a company with
four thousand acik doge miners make, you'll get an answer
a somewhere around twenty million a year if doze is
about twenty cents, So we're going to have a credible
shot at having eight figures in revenue. And this business model,
we add more equipment and revenue should go up. So
we already have fifty million dollars in the bank, so
you might imagine that we buy several thousand more doge
miners with that. So that is the strategy going forward.
We think that that strategy can build a billion dollar
business and we're very excited. Thanks for asking.
Speaker 2: Hey, so you're wearing two hats effectively or you will be,
So you got to have a team in place with you,
tell me about your team.
Speaker 1: So Isaac Dietrich is our CFO. Isaac has helped his
companies that he's run raised more than one hundred million dollars.
He started a company called mass Roots that had an
app in the cannabis space, that did a pivot to
become GreenWave Technologies, start company from scratch, built a technology,
did a pivot, took it public on the Nasdaq himself.
So right now the management team is myself and Isaac
here at thumbs Up. But we just put out a
release today that we've added a board member, Chris Enzi.
So Chris has a great career, a very very strong executive.
Did some time at right Blockchain, which is in the
space that we're getting into. So we're starting to bring
on some accomplished talent in the crypto space. So stay
tuned as we get farther along on this acquisition, and
I think you might see some more very very talented
people come on board.
Speaker 2: It's really exciting here. That's honor to work with you,
and I suggest everybody out there go to Thumbsupmedia dot
com that's th m zup and sign up for notifications
so you find out when the renaming is going to
take place, because oftentimes with renaming and refocusing, revaluations take
place as well. Links in the show notes of this interview,
and of course, the ticker symbol on the NASDAC is
TZUP and Robert, it's been a real pleasure. I can't
thank you enough for coming on the show. We'll talk
to you again real soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks, carry have a great day. The Financial Survival Network