Transcript of Earn While You Scroll: Inside Mode Mobile’s Business Model with Dan Novaes

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The most valuable thing that we have as humans is our attention. There's nothing more that's more important, and it's the new oil. It is the data, your data and your attention is it. But what people are really shocked and surprised is that the data is actually by itself not that valuable because companies like Facebook and so much have so much of it. Then you're basically, if the product is free, you're the product. They're not incentivized. But why are those companies worth trillions of dollars? Because of your data. But when you actually put it out, it's not worth more than $100 a year. But when you mix data plus attention, like action, that's worth a lot.

This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next in Cash & Checks? Well, it starts right about now.

Hello and welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about how you could stay right and what is happening now. We could talk about last week, we could talk about yesterday, we could talk about next year. No, it's now, today. Everything's moving quick, but you got to take advantage of the here and the now because you live in the moment, people. That's why we're here. That's why we're number one because you made us that way. You know why we're number one? Because our guests, they're kick-ass, they're badass. They are Dan Novias. He is a co-founder and CEO of Mode Mobile. Topic I love to talk about. Mobile, cell phones. They are the 2023 Deloitte's number one fastest scrolling North American software firm. I got that all in. What's up, Dan? What's up, Ryan? Thanks for having me. Hey, man, I'm ready. Ready to talk mobile, how I make money carrying this thing around. I like this topic a lot, Dan. It goes down a lot of avenues. Number one, mobile. Number two, breakthrough technology. Number three, teaching people how the markets work and how we are in the attention economy. We're going to get some more mobile customers, and better yet, maybe some smart people that will recognize they don't own businesses that need attention, that need to be partnering with you.

That's where I'd say the bigger opportunity is for them and for you. But talk to me, what else is happening in Naples?

Naples is very hot right now. It's a good time. Naples or Miami, always a good time. We used to be based in Chicago. That's where we started the company, and we were sick of the winter. We moved our way to South Florida and hang out all about these areas. I definitely trade the 110 degree heat with the humidity from the negative 30 that we were getting in Chicago back of the day.

I spent one winter in Chicago. That's all this Southern boy needed.

That was it. It's pretty miserable in the winter, but it is a But the cost of living and then taxes, man. At the end of the day, that's also a difficult thing to swallow. Just by moving to Florida, you see your paycheck go up because you don't have the state taxes to deal with.

I can't complain. Nice. No complaint. You're obviously a hustler in the most respectful way. We've made hustling a bad term somehow in America, but it's not a bad word in my book. I saw this story, Flipping $1,000 in birthday cash into a $2 million business by age 20. That was the first thing that got my attention. The first thing I wanted to ask, Dan, is it nature or nurture for guys like you? You just bored of that guy or did something mold you into I would say my first business I started was reselling items and stuff on eBay, and I ended up becoming a titanium power seller, which that time meant you were doing over, I think, a million a year on it.

That was before that whole drop shipping stuff. There's been so many courses, like some last 20 years. I see these people doing. I was like, Dude, I was doing this stuff 20 years ago. But even before then, I didn't know what entrepreneurship was as a word. I don't know, like these Pokémon cards. That was a big opportunity that everyone really loved. I definitely fell into the Pokémon ideology of collecting them. But then I was always looking at, How do I get better opportunities. Then I was always really into Japanese snacks. There was a Japanese grocery store in town in Indiana that I grew up in. My mom brought me there and I saw these Japanese Pokémon cards. They were totally different than the Pokémon I had ever seen. But they had these different holographics. Then I would buy them and then I take them to school. Then I would tell these narratives about what this Pokémon card did. It was all in Japanese, and all you could see was a number. That was the only thing in English writing. I was able to get these kids to trade me their best cards, their Charzards, effectively.

Then I take the Charzards and I'd sell them at the card store for 60 bucks. I did that for a while until some kid in my neighborhood told his mom and said I was taking advantage of them and had to refund them the money because my parents were pissed. I wasn't trying to scam. Here's a trade. You want to do it. That's how my brain think. Another situation where it got in trouble. I think that the entrepreneurship sometimes turns into mischeeviousness is how it's viewed in society, but it wasn't. I wasn't purposely trying to do these things. I'm from Brazil originally, but I grew up in Southern Indiana. My whole life, I would go between these two countries.

Very different places for sure because- Indiana and Brazil.

I'm from São Paulo, Brazil. Top 10 biggest cities in the world stuff. Brazil, it's more chill, more chill culture. You can go, for example, this is the late '90s. I'm 10 to 12. In New York City, they have those little stores on the street corners that you can buy magazine, a newsstand, and they have lay boys there. As long as you have the money, you can just buy it. In the US, that would never happen. I didn't even know where you could get it back then. A friend of mine's dad had a subscription. At that time, I was like, Wow, this is insane that I have access to this. I bought three of them at the time, and then I would sell the pages to kids at my school for 20 bucks each. I mean, 20 bucks in 1990, that's like 100 bucks. You know what I mean?

That's how I use it middle school.

Then finally, when I got caught and got in trouble was this kid traded me for all of them, and he basically gave me a tennis racket plus 300 bucks and a pair of Kobe's. I remember thinking like, Wow, that was such a great trade. Then he got caught because he stole the 300 bucks from his parents. It was a similar situation. Then again, I got so much trouble because then my mom's like, Everyone's going to think it's your dad's porn. You don't even think about that. That wasn't even in my brain. Then I just took a pause. I guess I didn't purposely, but that's how make money up until I was 12. Then I found out about working, the concept of working. When I started working at a Polo store, I was about 15, 16 years old, I had just got in a car. My dad, he was cool because he financed the car for me, but I had to pay the payments. Then any upgrades I wanted to do, then I had to pay for that. It was just reasonable. Then I was like, Okay, I'm going to just work at the Polo store.

I had a factory outlet mobile in my house and worked there for two weeks. It was the worst thing I had ever done. It was a lot of work. I got my first paycheck and it was 75 bucks. I was literally so shocked that it was so hard to make $75. I had completely blacked out I had forgotten all about the Pokémons and the Play Boys and all that stuff. But after that first week, I was like, That's insane. Anyways, but I kept there for another week. Fortunately, I was dating a girl there at the time, so that was another incentive. I was like, Okay, it's not that bad. But then this big tour bus of Japanese tourists came because there was a Toyota plant that was being built in my town, and they bought literally 60K worth of stuff. On a random Sunday, no one was there. The store was about to close. Me and one other dude were closing up, and we handled the entire sale. I'm thinking, Okay, we just ripped 60K for the store. They're for sure going to give us a commission or something. That's a lie. They gave us a $5 Arby's gift card.

I'm thinking, This is ridiculous. The 40% discount that I got, which was a good perk to get, I was like, If I gave them half, I could have ripped 20 or 12K. Then that's when I had the aha moment. Then I was like, Oh, my gosh. You were in smartphones, so you knew. Back Then I had a Palm Trio. It was one of those Palm pilots that you could write and all this stuff. It was the cool thing in my school because very few kids had that. I was taking pictures of everything. Then I'd cross-reference on eBay, and then I found the perfect item. It was this leather jacket. They'd sell it at the LLM Mall for $180 after my discounts $140, $150, and it was selling on their store for $380. You can make $200 a jacket. So I just bought three on my dad's emergency credit card that he had given me in case I ever run into an emergency. But I kept the receipt because I knew we had a 30-day return policy, no questions asked, as long as the tag's wrong. And then I listed them that day and, dude, all three sold in one night and I made 650 bucks.

I was like, Wow, that's insane. And so then I just rinsed and repeated that for three or four months. I had everyone in the store buying those jackets for me. I'd pay them 25 bucks. Some managers were cool with it, some were not. And I left. Before I did, I made like 35K in four or five months. That was my seed capital to get started. I found this opportunity of arbitraging high-end electronic products, iPods, MacBooks, other stuff in other countries. Started selling them in Brazil, started selling them in the UK, Australia. You play with the currency and things are more expensive. It's like a $1,000 phone here, £1,000 in UK. But if you add the currency value, it's 1,600 bucks, and there's usually a lack of when it comes out. That's what I was doing. I started all through high school. Then by my freshman year, I was doing about 2 million a year in a revenue, and all bootstrapped. My mom was shipping all these packs. One of the post offices knew my mom. Fedex people, a lot of stuff, and that's how it all started.

I love this. Amazing. Story number one. I liked you before we started. Now, I really like you. I just like very resourceful people. If I'm in a bunker somewhere, I want the most resourceful people with me. Dan, Navaes, is invited to my bunker. If we're ever in a bunker, hopefully never, because I have a feeling two of us could do some damage. The reason I asked this nature of nurture, I'm curious because I have four boys and all smart kids. A couple of them definitely have that entrepreneur side to them. They figured out they're resourceful. They have a good life. We don't give them everything they want, but they don't need anything. I'm not saying I don't know this. I'm not saying whether you did or It doesn't matter if you grew up with money or even having anything, but your parents were giving you a decent life, it sounds like, regardless of you. Where does the want to come from? This is a common theme for me lately. I like to get into this nature versus nurture thing. Can it be taught or I think you know where I'm going with this.

I never had to scrounge for food. There was always a meal at my table. I would say I grew up in a middle class, probably middle class to that upper threshold.

You weren't the rich kid, but you weren't a poor kid.

That's a luxury. That's an extreme luxury to have that because I only had to focus on myself and I had to focus on them. My parents, they weren't entrepreneurs. My dad worked for a company. I was just always very curious as a kid. I'd ask weird questions to people, not in a weird, awkward way. For example, when I was playing baseball, I would ask one of the dads was driving the whole team, and I was noticed that because we were van shopping and I wanted to get the best value. I was like, Hey, I noticed this is the luxury Windstar, like the four Windstar. How much does that you back? Did you get this used? I feel like he's like, You don't ask that question to adults. He actually said that to me. He scoled me. I'm just trying to figure out how much the monthly payment is on this car. That's just how my brain operated. One thing I started realizing, it definitely started to creep me out much more through later high school years, is that if I were to rely on my parents, I have limitations of what I do. Then when you start that first job, even though it was not a long period of time, that one week or two weeks at Polo, really put a shock into me where I was like, Dude, that was so hard.

That was so hard for me to fold clothes, do all that stuff. It was back-breaking work. There's a lot of that. There has to be a better way of doing that. Then in college, I then had another realization of that. I went to business school, and all my friends were getting internships, and it was the hype thing to get an internship at Goldman Sachs. These name brand consulting things. I got all of those because I had very good grades and I a business. Everyone's like, Why are you even applying? I was like, Well, I just want to make sure that this isn't for me. I had a nice interview and all that stuff, and I got it. The first week where they wind and done you, excellent. But then when you go in and actually do the work, I was like, Dude, this is horrible. I'm just sitting around doing PowerPoints all day, and I'm just getting hazed because I'm just an intern. It sucks. Then I really came to that realization. I was like, Hey, I think I'm an entrepreneur. I think that's what I need to do with my life. I came to that realization really as, I would say, coming into my senior year, junior to senior year of college, where I really fundamentally do it in my soul.

That's what was my destiny. That's what I doing because where I get my most energy is idea and creativity. Mark Cuban says it's like, he likes the sport of business. Some people are really passionate about certain things. They really like to play music or they like to paint or whatever. My passion is I really like entrepreneurship. I like creating That's my version of art. I think that that nature... Then there are things that you nurture. I think the downside of my personality of people that are innately entrepreneurial is they have to learn the lesson of thinking long term and scaling, and you will make a lot of mistakes. You might have all these ideas on stuff, but then those people tend to be solopreneurs. They have limitations. They think they know everything. They don't think they have short term gains. There's a lot of hustlers that can't get out of that. I call it zero to zero point one. It's like, fine, you're doing okay. It depends what you want. Then I also learned, wasn't it just about money. For me, I thought up until I was 25, I was very focused on that. I like to have money, but that's not what motivates me on a grander scale.

I think you learn these lessons. I like it.

I think that's important. Now, let's talk Mode Mobile. I see security token sales. I see all this stuff around tokenization, raising capital. Right around COVID time, I'd be curious. Number one, what formed the idea for Mode Mobile? Then to enlighten the audience with a little bit of that story of building that company.

Most people think that you're going to come up with some grand idea and you're just going to scale it and everything so then you're going to fly off into the sunset.

Rock it to Mars.

I'm not saying it's not possible. It happens, but not in my experience, for myself, at least. But I've only seen that happen to Mode was born out of a series of pivots, I would say, and I think that's my number one skill in life is constantly pivoting. The better I've gotten at pivoting, the better I can dial in what actually complements my business and is able to cut the scale. Mode really came out with this idea. We had launched... I got I got into software after college. When am I where I was got robbed? And then it almost took me down. But then I got into software and I was like, Wow, you can really scale this much better way without all that cash that you need to basically have these items. Met my co founder at the time he was in high school, and I was in college in five, six years apart. Started building a of apps and never had a major exit. I would say we had a lot of small little 500K app sales. Then we had this big idea in Mode, this is where it was born. We had a user's product that basically were aggregating a bunch of music services into one place, did not get any traction, but we had one type of person using it.

It was lower income people that had a lot of time, not necessarily money. They liked the fact that we were aggregating all these music services in one place and didn't have to pay for it. We had interviewed them. She always talked to your customers. Then effectively, we were like, Well, what if we paid you to listen to music? I guess, how interesting would you be? Would you do tasks for that? They were like, Yeah, for sure. We threw up a banner, Get paid to play music, and had 300,000 people a month to sign that up. We launched it. Then we noticed it was really hard to make money off of paying people to listen to music. We moved into other stuff, playing games, shopping, charging. The business started scaling from there. Then as you mentioned, 2019 was the first year we generated revenue under that business model. This is maybe slightly under 100K total revenue or something in that range. By 2022, we had done just over $25 million. That's where that 32,480,1% growth rate comes. Throughout that time is when that really development of this idea came to fruition. We started seeing it like, Hey, what we're really building is an earn OS, is what we call it, which is an operating system for everything you do on the phone.

People are spending a third of their waking life, and in younger generations, a half of their waking life, there's 168 hours a week. If you're sleeping 8 hours a day, there's 112 left. Then if you look at your screen time, it's about 30 to 40 hours that people are spending on average on their phone, and then younger generations, 50 to 60. If you add this up, it is insane. The cost of these devices are going down. The service is getting better and faster. The first screen is now the phone screen. It's not the desktop screen anymore. It just made sense from a standpoint of the business. Then we basically launched that app where you can take your smartphone, turn it into your phone. Then I had this idea, Hey, we're going to launch a phone. Everyone's like, Don't launch your phone. That is a very bad business to get into. How do you even do that? I just flew to Hong Kong. I didn't even have an appointment. I just hit a couple of people up.

I would have told you not to do that, too. I'm curious if you still think you did the right thing. I don't know, but I would have told you not to. I think it was necessary to get where you wanted to go, even if it wasn't perfect, then fine.

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I thought about it at the time was we were living in a very low interest rate environment, effectively zero interest rate. The biggest issue with hardware is just putting up the capital to do that. The market's very much changed over the last five years. I was like, Look, we could run a test and we get our users to buy this service. The thesis I had was people will use a phone that will pay them more than downloading an app. I use this example quite often. When you're at a restaurant and a waiter brings a water versus you ordering an Aquapana or a Pellegrino, you're more committed to the Pellegrino and the Aquapana because you spent four bucks on it. It's like a token amount. But people will drink more of it than they will the tap water. The thought process I had is if you buy a phone whose premise, because all phones at about $100 price point were the same. It's like you can't really differentiate. They're all the same thing. But one phone pays you, one phone doesn't pay you. Which phone are you going to choose? The one that pays you, especially if you're budget constrained.

If you're dropping a $2,000 on a phone, you don't really care. But most people aren't. There's like 1 billion iPhones out there. There's like 5 to 6 of everything else. So I was able to figure out how to launch only 5,000 phones. We sold out of that first batch, did another one. And then I was like, okay, yeah, maybe we're going to do these phones. And I was like, well, actually, it's really hard to make a phone. And you need to get it perfected and all that stuff. And all of our money is made on the software. But what I really needed to do is I need to prove out that the model was possible and that the numbers made sense. And we were able to prove that out. The retention was much better, people earned way more. And so now we're in this business of starting to license this technology to the motorolas and the Samsungs and the Verizon of the world so that It can launch earned phones and launch basically the world's first free phone plans. That's where we're going. All signals point to free, and it's possible. We're the closest company to making it possible.

Would I do it again? I probably just would have launched one phone. I wouldn't have launched two. I would have partnered with someone on the second one moving, going back in retrospect. You learn, live and learn these lessons because it's totally different than the core business. Our core business is a software business. Then you have to think about logistics and shipping stuff and just all the support that comes with it. But ultimately, it still brought us to where we are today. I'm happy that I down that path. But as markets change, you have to pivot as a business as well. That's why in 2022, our growth was insane. It's because it was this idea of growth at all costs. That was what the market was rewarding. Everyone was IPOing, everything was booming. Then now the market is really focused on profitability. We're focused much more on profitability. You learn these lessons as you go, and they ultimately bring you into the right place. Everything, I think, is meant to be the way it's supposed to be. There's not any good or bad. It is what it is, and you'll find the bigger picture if you keep looking.

It's a fascinating story, and I want to focus on the business model for a moment. You think about how much money over the years people have spent for cable TV and direct TV and all these things for the right to watch commercials to get sold, and you spend $100, $200 a month. What you're doing is the equivalent of people didn't pay cable and they got paid to watch cable. I'm saying the right analogy, essentially that, because attention has gotten so valuable and so scattered that this is what people will do. They want people doing these things. There wasn't a question there as much, Dan, as making sure, validating that I'm explaining to our audience to understand this correctly. But here's where the question lies, and it's this, where's the arbitrage here? Because whether it's music or games, and they're willing to pay for people to listen or to play, if it's motivated for them to pay or play, it doesn't mean that they were naturally interested in it to begin with. They get paid, you get paid. Why do those publishers or games makers want monetary motivated audiences to play the games? Where's the arbitrage lies?

Is it because eventually they'll get addicted to it and they'll stick with it and they'll spend money?

That's the idea. It's not necessarily they have to spend money. It's like, look, just because people don't have any money or have some money doesn't mean they don't have any money. There's a big difference on the two.

But the game makers want them playing in hopes that they keep playing.

Exactly. It's the same thing like why free samples were. Send someone some lotion and then they get that lotion.

They might have never bought that lotion. But once they tried it, they kept using.

It's the same component. We're like, why you get a three-month free trial to Apple Music? What do they want? They want you to keep paying after that three-month is. That's the thing. We're optimizing to some target that that advertiser has that aligns value in some capacity. Robin hood is an example. Robin hood, what do they want? They want you to deposit $5 into a broker's I think that's their minimum deposit to open up an account. That's worth 100 bucks to them because they have some calculation on their end what the LTV of a user is and some payback period that they know. Basically, it's okay, if you're willing to pay 100 bucks for someone to deposit $5 into an account, then we might give 50 to that user. Then now that person depositss five, they get 50. Robin hood also will give them another 25 or 30 bucks in free stock. Now this person has an $85 stock portfolio, but Robin hood hit their goal in the 100 bucks. Now you're incentivized to buy stocks and see your portfolio grow and get involved in that. That's the idea is why the incentive mechanism works. It's not going to work for every brand.

I'm not going to see Louis Vuitton run a campaign inside of our product. I would be really shocked. But it'll work for most things, most everyday things. Then what's happening is that we're also seeing more of an affluent audience because we now open up this crowdfunding concept where anyone can invest in the company. But the people that are investing, they're more fluent. They're not necessarily my target market. We have a lot of older individuals, 50 and 60 plus, especially that 60 to 70 demographic, like those boomers, like my parents' age, they're not using my product. They are not my target customer. It's not my biggest age distribution, but they're actually my biggest investor base. Why is that? Because they've seen what the smartphone has done for their kids, their grandkids, it resonates with that audience, and they see the opportunity and the potential because the world has completely changed over the last 20 years. Smartphones were introduced. We started thinking about it. I was like, Okay, well, what is our core business? If you really distill down what's my business? My business is I'm in the business of helping people earn to save money. I'm not in the business of just the smartphones.

I was like, Sure, yeah, that's what we do. That's the vehicle which we use to make that happen. We started thinking like, Okay, could we create products that are interesting to more fluent individuals? Because everyone wants to earn to save money. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or not. We started really think other opportunities to offer solutions for them. They don't have to start to do it through our phone. Maybe that's through email and through other mechanisms that we do that. That's how the business has started to scale in other ideas and how we're also getting other advertisers that are much higher end, I would say, interested in our audiences and how we're expanding our business line. But that's not something that we had even two years ago. That's something that's new over the course of this last 6-12 months, I'd say.

For brands, is this... It's a marketing channel in a way. It's a very unique I don't even know if marketing is the right word. It's a trial channel in a way. Trial. Should they think of this as a way to grow existing audience or as a way to tap into new audience? I. E. Demos, things like that, obviously.

Yeah, I would say probably new. It's like the campaigns are just... You need to structure them a little bit differently. We buy a lot of it.

What does campaigns look like?

What does campaigns look like? It might be something along the lines of if it's a game, for example, it's going to be tied to a certain amount of a level you get to, or it might be a reward. We don't pay you to install an app because what would happen? You'd install and then you stop using it. Never play. We might pay you over the course of a week to play a game like a Candy Crush. We get every day some amount. You want to basically give them enough, like a little bought in, and then they might find an interesting product. But we also get a lot of information on what people are doing on their phone. We know, Hey, this person has Bank of America installed. Chime has a $400 offer. If you open up, I'm just making this up, but a $400 checking account offer, I'm pretty interested. If I'm banking with Bank of America and I can open a free checking account and get a $400 bonus, that's pretty interesting to me, even me as a person right now. I know a ton of those opportunities available. The idea here is how can you take your directing that attention.

That's what you were saying, the most valuable thing that we have as humans is our attention. There's nothing more that's more important, and it's the new oil. It is the data, your data and your attention is that. But what people are really shocked and surprised is that the data is actually by itself not that valuable because companies like Facebook and so much have so much of it, and then you're Basically, if the product is free, you're the product. They're not incentivized. But why are those companies worth trillions of dollars? Because of your data. But when you actually put it out, it's not worth more than $100 a year. But when you mix data plus attention, like action, that's worth a lot. Because now you are taking an action to get involved in that. That's what we've gotten really good at, is mixing those two, knowing what are you interested in, what do you do? Then here's an action that you could take if this product is interesting to you based on the things that you're already buying or doing or seeing. Then that's worth a lot to brands. That's how you can make thousands of a year without necessarily having to spend money to do so.

I keep coming back, is this Thumbtack or is this a little bit of... My head gets in these weird, a little few different spaces. I think you know what I mean by that, because it's Thumbtack is the marketplace where you get paid for your services or whatever. Service here is giving away as attention and or data. Is it a marketplace for that? My head gets scrambled a bit on all that.

I think it's microgigs. We can hear a lot of it. Uber did this for cars, Airbnb did it for home, but not everyone owns either of those two assets. But everyone owns a a smartphone, effectively. Giving people opportunities, these aren't full-time jobs. It's on that, I have to be a handyman to be able to qualify for that. Not everyone's a handyman. Not everyone's willing to look around.

You have to have a skill.

Yeah, you have to have a skill. Here's the thing. There's a lot of people that free time. Also, there's people that are in situations where down on the rock, something's happening at the time, and then here's an easy win. Momentum is everything. A small win transforms a bigger win. It transforms something bigger. We create those opportunities. Is Mode going to fully supplement missing income if you just lost your job? But is it capable of paying for your phone bill? Is it capable of paying for gas for you to get to work? Is it capable of being able to be a meaningful addition, especially given that we are at the highest amount of credit card debt this country has ever seen? It's no better overseas for many of these countries. Inflation is really hitting that lower middle class and lower. People don't have a thousand bucks in their savings account. This is a stat from 2022. The economy was good in 2022 for the first half, where 52% of people or 56% of Americans don't have a thousand bucks in their savings accounts. It's even worse now. It's not better because we had just all that COVID stimulus money.

In a world like that, you need solutions like this. I think that that's the thesis of where the business is going and what we're able to provide and always going up in the sense of attracting more fluent customers with other types of solutions. Also, we're starting to acquire a lot of assets internally and building them into our ecosystem where instead of us sending them to a Candy Crush game, maybe we send them to a solitary game that we own. Then now we're able to capture revenue there as well and the lifetime value that comes with that. That model really works really well. It's the PE playbook That's something that we're applying into our business and it's going quite well for us.

Is the future OS or Fiverr? Is your future an app or is it as an OS?

We built the ecosystem on top of Android. It's almost like a UI on top of Android, I would say. But I think the Fiverr component is always going to be into it because how do you generate the rewards? There has to be an action that has to be taken. I think it's not one or the other. I think that it's more what we'll see more of is us using distribution through partnerships in various different countries, through phone brands and carriers around the world. That'll be much more of a focus. More as like an OS, you might see a Verizon on your phone is what we would love to see. We're powering that for those brands in multiple countries. Then we have our own direct consumer solutions. Then we have a suite of portfolio of products that we own, mostly in the mobile space, but some in other medians as well as newsletters and web properties that make sense with our broader model. That's where the future of the business is really heading. It's a mixture between the PE playbook and the venture capital growth and LTV to CAC model. But we want to build a profitable business.

We're really focused on profitable growth and not growth at all costs. That's my one takeaway from running a business up until 2022 because it almost killed our business by growth at all cost. That'll be a big focus as we still continue building the business into the future and ultimately for a potential IPO that we have our eyes set on.

I know a few people at Verizon, probably already talked to a few. They always had indirect channel and also set up their mainstream mind. They had to pay as you go for credit challenge. Then, hey, the earn as you go phone.

We own the trademark for that, by the way. It's funny that you say that. I basically own every trademark for anything you could think of, like earning or a phone that makes money or anything like that.

Why earn versus save? Did it get weighed? Did it get weighed at all? Save as you go, save phone?

Yeah, it didn't sound as good. They do say earnings and savings, but yeah, it's just a mouthful. We might own something around that, to be honest. I think we own 12 different marks associated to that.

Because you could do a spinoff that's exactly the same thing. Some bank or it could be your IP or anything like that. They just want it to be all about kids growing up. Hey, not the earned phone, it's the saved phone for younger adults.

Yeah.

College fun.

We have actually a lot of people that get the phones and then they give it to their kids to earn a little bit extra change. That's smart.

It makes it. I see a million. This is This is so brilliant and so smart with where things are at, where attention is the currency of today and a way to give back to people for taking actions and putting a little money in their pocket. Kudos to all your growth and success so far, man.

Yeah, man, I appreciate it. Thank you.

I keep up with everything that's going on, new advancements, where they can get themselves earnings and savings phone.

They can check out our apps, obviously. It's called earn app in the Play Store. If they put earn phone into Google, they They can check out our website and it's in best buy and stores like that as well. If they're interested in deeper in the more the business side of the company and becoming a shareholder, joining the 50,000 or so shareholders that we have, they can check out invest. Modemobil. Com. We have a lot of information on the company and what's possible there. Even have some programs where we give out $15 in free shares in the company. I have a very unique model that we got qualified where people can become shareholders with their points, even that they earn. Maybe they don't want to invest. That's where they can learn, but they do want to invest. Those are the opportunities. Our has raised just under about $60 million through crowdfunding. We're one of the largest crowdfunders in America. That's the best place to keep up with the news and our webinars. We have a lot of interesting guests. We had Steve Wozniak a month ago, and so it was cool to talk to the co founder of the world's largest tech and phone company.

Microsoft.

Yeah, a little company. Yeah.

It was pretty awesome to chat with him and learn all about some of the Steve jobs' early days and how we thought about Apple and some of the perks that we give to our shareholders.

We'll have all the links of that in the show notes and on the website. Dan, it's been a pleasure, man. Let's do a V2 down the road. We could get underneath a few more topics, but I really appreciate your time. For sure.

Thanks for having me, Ryan. I really appreciate it. Enjoying it.

Hey, guys, you know where to find us, rianisright. Com. You'll find highlight clips from today, the full episode, the YouTube link, and of course, links to earn phone. We appreciate Dan for coming on the show. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time, Right About Now.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a RADcast Network production. Visit rianisright. Com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.

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