Founders Feature #033 - CrowdPad
Revolutionising the way we interact and build communities online
Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Joel Alexander, co-founder of CrowdPad, a tokenised community-building platform.
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Here’s what CrowdPad is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
The creator economy is a one-way street, and it's not as easy as it seems to monetise your work as a content creator. For example, roughly 3% of YouTubers actually earn more than minimum wage. Creators should have a way to monetise their social capital beyond existing platforms. Also, early followers don't get to benefit from the growth of a talent that they spotted early on.
The Solution:
CrowdPad allows content creators to issue social tokens on their personal brand for people to buy who believe in the creator's future success and want an active stake in it. You can think of it as a membership. These tokens will be redeemable in the future, and the creator can set what for. For example, you could say 10 tokens are worth an asynchronous conversation, while 1000 tokens might be worth a dinner together. If someone believes in your future success, they're putting money behind your ability to create and curate a community, and so buying the social token truly aligns the creator's and community members’ incentives. This way, community members are promoting their favourite creators while creators finally have a way to creatively engage their community members.
The Team:
We're a team of five. I'm the CEO, with a background in Accounting and Finance, and my co-founder Drishti Chawla is our CTO, with a background in Computer Science. Our Founding Engineer is Harman Bassi, also with a background in Computer Science. We also have another developer and a community manager on board and are currently looking for another developer.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
Over the last 2-3 years, I've been working in multiple industries including FoodTech, EdTech, FinTech, and the Creator Economy. Most recently I was working on a social crowdfunding app, think Tinder meets TikTok for crowdfunding. One issue we encountered here was doing due diligence at scale, and a newly onboarded developer suggested we hold the crowdfunded money on smart contracts instead of in escrow. At this point, I had no idea what a smart contract was, and ended up going down a major rabbit hole and discovered social tokens and social crypto and found it extremely exciting. This is how we landed on social tokens, and now our goal is to bring the next billion users onto Web3.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
We're at an intersection in time where the creator economy is definitely rising in value but there are only so many tools you as an individual can use to monetise your content and community. These are bound to consolidate and I believe we will end up with social tokens. The technology around token ownership has been maturing, and we finally have this mechanism by which we can involve our communities in the growth of our own communities.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We recently got into ODX, On Deck's new accelerator program. I'm so proud of this because the team has been working really hard for a while and it's nice to finally be able to reward them for their success and their progress over the last few months.
We often hear these major success stories about startups, but there are also so many stories of people who worked months on end and never got paid for their hard work. It's also great to have some money in the bank to be able to ship the product faster and keep scaling.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
One of the problems we face in tech right now is that it's so incredibly expensive to hire talent across the board. FAANG companies are paying developers $250k+, so how do you compete with that as a young startup. You either have to sacrifice experience or a lot of the money you have in the bank. So the challenge also becomes convincing people that this is a vision and mission they really want to get behind because, in the end, that's the only thing that's going to bring talented people on board.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
We've made a lot of mistakes, but I really wouldn't change anything. It might have been interesting to be a little tighter on the deadlines for milestones we set, especially in how strategy and product changes and milestones translate to dev milestones.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Back yourself to take the initial leap.
It's easy to start working on things part-time and maintaining a job on the side, but it's incredible how much time that takes away from making progress and actually executing on the milestones set.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
A lot of people have ideas, and the only way you could see if yours will work is by actually executing on it. You're never going to be ready.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Failure is inevitable. The quicker you get used to it, the more likely you'll be able to keep going. The more willing you are to go from zero to one every single time you fail, the more likely it is that you're going to succeed because success is not about thinking a lot, it's about doing a lot, and improving a lot.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
James Lo. He is the co-founder and CEO of Mana, and he's someone I hold a lot of respect for and really admire. He's a great person and someone who believed in me very early on.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Books:
The Inevitable - Kevin Kelly
Video/Audio:
Crypto Startup School - a16z
Founders Journal - Alex Lieberman