Cyrus Taghehchian – Tokenize your engagement How web3 rewards loyalty

Cyrus Taghehchian - Tokenize your engagement How web3 rewards loyalty.

Participants;

JP ( CBO of AdLunam Inc.)

Cyrus (CEO of ShopX)

Welcome, welcome. Welcome to this episode of Diving into Crypto. This is JP from AdLunam Inc. bringing you everything about web3. We on the show, we look at the journey that's taken and made the leaders, the industry specialists, the candlestick watchers, the movers, the shakers and everybody in between bringing you their stories, their journeys, and most importantly, the insights and the gems that they have to share with the Web3 community. This is one of the only spaces the only industry is to be to be honest, where people will share very freely everything that they know. And we really should be grateful that we're here.

This show ladies and gentlemen is brought to you by AdLunam. For those of you that that don't know who we are, we are the first Engage to Earn web3 investing platform, taking projects from zero to IDO, as fast as they can go. And on the show today, we have a special guest who's going to talk to you about tying in engagement with brands and so we'll probably be sharing with you his journey about ShopX and the loyalty that will connect you to everything in the web3 space. Now that being said for and before we begin, I should remind you that you all have emoji buttons on your in this space, which I would like for you to use. As soon as you hear something that is a gem that's dropped or an insightful piece of information drop, tweet this to your friends feed this to everybody so that they can jump in on the show. But also tweet more importantly, what the speaker has shared with you that has been extremely insightful. In this journey, things that you have learned things that you would absolutely enjoy about that you've heard on the show, in case we get cut off the same way that I can get in in case we get or have come back to AdLunam Inc. and you'll find yourself on a building to get back to her and continue this discussion. Towards the end of the hour Ladies and gentlemen, we will open the room for question and answers. But in the meantime, hey, if you have some questions, feel free to tweet them in. We will either take them we can take them up on the show or we can have our speakers more than happy to send you a reply immediately after. That being said without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, let's do a quick sound test for a guest , Cyprus can you say hi to the audience in the room, eager to hear from you.

Hey, good morning, or good afternoon or evening wherever you are on the world. My name is Cyrus Good to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

All right, sorry, as you're coming across loud and clear, so stoked that you accepted our invitation to be on the show today. You know, I know that you are a strategic minded senior executive with over 20 years of being an entrepreneur, someone you know, top notch person in the technical and business execution you are good at Deloitte Consulting arm and Ecommerce and digital marketing. And goodness gracious, you know you've got successful exits. Being a serial entrepreneur, with two successful exits generating over $300 million dollars in returns for investors. That's a phenomenal track. Cyrus, you know, I know that there's much more to you than just a blurb about your journey as an entrepreneur. So please welcome once again, but do tell us and tell the audience, you know a little about yourself and who Cyrus is.

Thank you for sharing that. Sorry, I, you know, I've heard a little about your introduction, and did a little background, you know, about what ShopX does and things that you're building? You know, every step of our journey brings us to a particular point, right? And there has to have been a moment in which as you said, your friend introduced you to Bitcoin, but I'm certain that there was a moment that that thought of thought of making the state and making you say, web3, is the space to be for me. What was that like for you?

Yeah, that's great question, I can answer it two different ways. So I'll give you both. Two for one for you, guys are getting a good deal. This one topic sounds about

You know, the stars that there was a very impassioned jail kale an explanation of what made you fall in love with it? And of course, every love and conjoining of two souls, if you will, starts with a residence and an ability to communicate? Would you think that or would you say that technology is in that way, the communication for rebels?

The communication for rebels? You know, I would actually say it's not the technology, the technology just the means to build the life we want. Right? So technology can be used for good it can be used for bad so I wouldn't say technology as a whole. But I'd say freedom. Freedom is the fuel for rebels, you know, we want to be free and then freedom also comes with a lot of different flavors, but freedom without wanting to harm others. Sounds very libertarian, but it goes beyond just libertarian because libertarianism is more about I just care about myself and nobody else data my way I'll stay out of your way which is nice premise. But I mean, we're social creatures, we want to be able to help each other out there is a lot of fulfillment that comes with being in service and giving back so I think there is this balance but to me, I think freedom is that like emotional driver to rebel against the big tech, the big Corp, the big government looks like my two cents.

Indeed, indeed, on that note, very, very quickly, who's the next celebrity you think is going to come out with Bitcoin blink?

That's the liberty with Bitcoin blink. This will never happen. But I would love to see this happen as Keanu Reeves. I think that'd be hilarious. And he's such an iconic internet meme already and you add Bitcoin to it, I think. Yeah, no.

I mean, it will be it will be epic in the next you know, the next installment of John Wick he came out and said of gold coins. You had a president.

John Wick five. Let's go bro. Let's go.

That would be efficacy. Good. All right. So we, you know, I know that it's hard to, as you saying, right? It was always hard to bring crypto mainstream to have that same status as you pointed out a reputable brand in in let's talk about companies that have done that. But when it comes to these brands, right, it's always about people being able to identify somewhere. And for the longest part, or other at least up until now, you know, people have never had the output to say, to say up front that, hey, you know what? I stand up crypto in a way? How do you see this loyalty Building up? You know, in comparison to what mainstream over the years had so many years and decades to do?

When you say loyalty means specifically the ShopX or loyalty to web3 in general, can you launch either web3, in general, with loyalty to web3 in general, you know, literally being able to come out a lot more, vocally, be able to you know, just have federal regulations, and then it not be so in so many ways. So regulated. So, you know, suppress that using crypto is a bad word.

Oh, indeed, and that's one of the things I absolutely love about the space is that, you know, even though even though you don't always have the opportunity to have too many people in the same, you know, in the same space around you, the very fact that you can reach out anywhere across the globe. So find people who are willing to help, willing to share information in you know, actually help build up what you are, what you're doing. And I think that that's, that's an absolute gem. I haven't seen, I've worked across 14 different industries, this this is this is the first one that's actually doing that on a regular basis. Right. And, you know, without expectation, right? So it also in some way ties into it also, in some way ties into the fact that you feel an affinity to, to, to a community as a whole. And I know that at ShopX, you're trying to build something like that. So you've mentioned ShopX twice already. Tell us a little about what it is you're trying to build with ShopX and you know, what is the what is the solution That it brings.

Yeah, so I like a vision are high level, we live in a day and age now that government or centralized entities are controlling different parts and aspects of our life. Sometimes that's not a bad thing. You know, I always joke that, you know, right now, there's a lot of us that are sitting around and be like, hey, no, centralization sucks. All these big corpse and big tech and big governments, they need to go down, we need decentralization, and 100 years from now I could see a bunch of kids sitting around be like, Hey, we're totally centralized, we need more centralization. So I think it's a pendulum that swings back and forth, and we need to find a balance. But there is one aspect that I truly, you know, passionately believed, needs to be more decentralized, and that is our method of shopping, commerce retail. And I believe in free markets in a free market, you know, money and inventory flows freely, right? It's healthy money is like water currencies. Water is an energy and needs to flow and when it starts piling up and centralizing it gets stale like water. And if it becomes stale, it gets moldy. And then bad things happen. So when too many people just get too much of the money, bad things arise from that. And that's why I really believe that. I mean, why do we have money so we could trade? Right? So instead of fixing the money, we should fix the trade the protocol of how trade works. So ShopX is aiming to build ecommerce 2.0, the free market, or I'm calling it freedom economy, where we are building the protocols and the way that brands can engage with their customers without any other middlemen, interaction or intervention, like a government or even some big corpse are even more powerful than governments now, and they are dictating how trade happens. It's not based on merit, it's based on who you know, or if somebody likes you. And that's kind of where we're seeing what's happening in our, in our commerce markets. And the thing that kills me the most is that small medium businesses dying. I mean, I mean, I mean, COVID even made it worse. So everything is just going Amazon now. And this country, in the US, and just humanity, the spirit of humanity were explorers, you know, even before we started colonizing, we were nomads, foraging, you know, food from moving from place to place, we're explorers were frontiers. That's just the way humanity is. And as, as we built, you know, the US and a lot of other countries were also built off of this might not all but a lot of other countries were based off of innovators, people who were entrepreneurs who wanted to build a business that built a local business for whatever it was, it could be for creating shoes, or a blacksmith or whatever, that that spirit is starting to die. And ShopX is going to ensure that that spirit lives on longer, because that is the spirit of a human and not us becoming a slave to a big corporation, like Amazon going into a nine to five job working and just coming home feeling unfulfilled. That is the not the life of how a American or more broadly, a human anywhere should be living their life. Like I mean, yeah, there are times that you're going to have to do things to learn experience and wisdom. I'm not saying that don't put in hard work. And that's another issue. It's like, you know, again, it's like the fine balance. It's like you have to go through phases of your life to gain that experience and wisdom. And that's what Shopify is doing. So how does Tropics do that? So this is more broadly speaking of our like, our vision, that we're building a free market that doesn't have any intervention from a government or big tech that determine who's successful or not, it's all based on merit. And what we do now is we help brands monetize web3, that's very simple. And we do that in such a way that makes a more intimate relationship between a brand and a customer that they don't have to pay, you know, a third party intermediary or a government or whatever, which will reduce the deadweight loss. That's an economic term. Sorry, I'm a recovering economist, economist. But deadweight loss is just an efficiency in how money works. So let's say if I want to send you $10, but PayPal charges me $1,the dollar just went to waste because of it and efficiency, you know, in our way, we could exchange money and we needed to high pay people to do that. Now, what if I could send you $10 With only a one cent charge, right? That we just reduced the deadweight loss in that whole economy by 99 cents. And there are ways that we could do that with shop X and crypto at large. And that's, that's what we're showing that with the first version of ShopX we've already built, that we can build a relationship between a brand and a customer. And a brand can make money from a customer pays less, because the brand doesn't have to pay a bunch of other people. It's a win win situation for everybody. And if this becomes more of the standard, across more aspects of Ecommerce, we're going to get to a point where, hey, it's not Amazon, Google or the government deciding who becomes a billionaire. It's people deciding who becomes the next millionaire or billionaire or whatever. It's because, you know, the algorithms are set in such a place. Yeah, that's the great word. There you go. There's abundance.

Yeah, spot on. Okay, so, you know, I'm sorry, can you show up? Do you want you want to finish that thought? I want to pick on one more point to expand on exactly what you say. Yeah, let's go. Okay, all right. So when it comes to so obviously, you know, the holy grail for every business, the holy grail for every business is to have loyal repeat customers, you know, for multiple purposes, the practicality of having your steady income stream you know, the fact that you have people who will who will stay with you, you know, for the entire their entire life. Okay, right. But at the same time, you will know that, you know, Lauren T is a fickle mistress, right? It's only assertion that a couple of bad experiences or even something to the effect of, you know, it could be any experiences you can break away that aspect of loyalty. But that being said, in so many ways, how are mainstream businesses today still trying to focus on loyalty with a bent on, you know, innovatively trying to build up loyalty? I'm going to stop there and then look at again, once again, you know, how you are changing the narrative?

You know, that's such a fundamental point and look after with any business, right, you take care of your customers, your customers will take care of you. And it seems to be skewed now, just because of, you know, diktats from Wall Street, say that you increase your bottom line, increase your profits, purely for, you know, a centralized purpose, so to speak. You know, that being said, I'm glad you shared that with me, because I'm looking for more, you know, insights were outside as everyone in this room, you know, very outside as to how the system works. But Cyrus, you're an insider in this entire program, right? What are what are some of the things that you can tell us being an insider when it comes to, you know, online shopping or even building loyalty? What are some of the things that that we should know?

Okay, I have some fun little tips for you. All right, I'll give you one really funny one. So you being in commerce, and I've been doing this for 15. Maybe longer, yeah, but 15 years. And what I've noticed is that every brand is out there just to get your money. It really is. And at least that's the way you should train your mind. Yeah, I have my passion. I love certain you know, things like I have like a mountain valley water die love to drink or freedom water that I have now too. And I have like, you know, my Greek yogurt and all that kind of stuff I love to buy. But I know that no matter anytime I see it anywhere. The purpose of the market, the marketing, or the literature, or rhetoric, or slogan, or anything I see is about programming me to buy more of that stuff. So if we understand that, that's fundamentally how the system is working right now. And I don't know that that could be a good thing and a bad thing, right? It could just be go both ways. But you just need to be careful as a human and you'd be critical thinking to be like, Okay, do I want to do I need to buy this right now. And if I do buy it, but if I don't, then it's just all noise in marketing. That being said, a lot of people a lot of brands are now getting smart with the way they market. So let me tell you something. If you go to any website, and you want to purchase something and you put it into your cart, and you don't purchase it That is called an abandoned cart. And that is a metric that a lot of brands follow. Now, why is that relevant? There's something in marketing and commerce called retargeting, meaning you retarget somebody you already targeted. So if somebody went to your website and put something in the cart, and abandoned, then you can retarget that person. And what a lot of brands, I won't say all but I would say 90% It's a very high number, it's definitely in the 90th percentile of times that it happens, you'll see that a brand will send you an email saying, Hey, we saw that you left something in the cart. Here's 10% or 15% off if you come back and buy it. So if anybody wants to buy anything a little cheaper, test this out, wow. Send me a DM, whatever you want to buy, go put it in the shopping cart, don't buy leave the website, wait two, three days, and within two, three days, you will receive an email saying, Hey, we noticed you left something on the cart. Here's a coupon if you make a purchase now and then you go buy that I have done that I least 20, 30 times a year. I mean, I don't buy a lot of things anymore. Just I'm trying to live you know, in a lean consumer lifestyle. But that when I do buy certain things, I'll just go leave it in the cart. And I sit down there and I laugh and I'm like, Oh, I know what you guys are doing. It's the oldest trick and an Ecommerce right now is retargeting abandoned carts by sending them a 10 to 15% coupon just if they make the purchase then so I hope you guys get a good laugh out of them and saves you some money. But that is definitely one of the tricks of Commerce today.

That’s a gem ,that's a real gem yours. Tell me something, Does it work? Does it work if I tried in a supermarket too?

No, I haven't. I haven't seen the supermarkets retarget except Amazon. I've seen them work on Amazon. So if you do your shopping, and if you're living in the United States, and you know Amazon bought Whole Foods, and if you're using it that way , this only works in digital commerce or in digital retail. Right? Like if I walked into a store, there isn't the mechanics to retarget you IRL, I guess there was there. I mean, they did it back in the day. If you think about it with coupons, right? If you go to the supermarket, they know who you are. And they'll send you a coupon book and you look at the coupons. You'd be like, Oh, I could go buy this, but it wasn't as targeted. But that was I guess that was the first version of what we were seeing that would happen to IRL and they just built upon it and made it bigger and quote unquote better and meaning getting people's money by retargeting the abandoned carts with emails,

okay, okay, this is something definitely I'm certain that every one of us are going to try. It doesn't matter if you're shopping with us and gentlemen, just go ahead and try it. Because like you said, it's an algorithm that, you know, a lot of them would copy and a lot of them will follow. And hey, you know, if you're empowering people with the knowledge and information, why shouldn't they use it? Right? Yeah,

exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's a brand that said it was okay, they programmed it in there. So you know, if you know about it, might as well go use it. If you don't someone else is going to use it. Right. So why would you get free money away? And unfortunately, what that does, yeah, that just increases the price of goods. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, yeah. Because then brands are getting smart. They'll be like, Okay, well, now that I have to give 10 to 15% off on a certain percentage of my sales, I need to factor that into how I price my product. Right. So this is where the inefficiencies of Ecommerce come into play. Like if we're building, if we're fully on the full ShopX ecommerce protocol, framework, meaning and ShopX is like, shopping isn't a website. It's not like amazon.com. It's like the internet for shopping. So think of what the internet that for websites. ShopX is the internet doing it for ecommerce Store, server, all the back end piping to make sure that all of the inventory and all the money and all the marketing is fair. And there isn't any type of nefarious bad actors, there isn't anybody stealing your money. And there isn't any, you know, big players like Amazon, Google or Facebook determining who gets to make money or not. So that's what topics does. And we build that through that piping of who on the back end, we build that free market that we're able to use. So just like you used to like we're using the internet today to talk right we don't see that the packets is called TCP IP, the transmission control protocol for inert. There's a bunch of little data packets that are getting sent between my phone everybody's phone on this thing that we're all hearing and everybody has a different type of phone. So the packets have to be normalized meaning the packets show up one way and they get transformed into something that every phone could understand. It's like a language, it's the universal language for computers to talk, ShopX is building the universal language for all of the brands to be able to communicate with each other. And if you do that, then you don't need Amazon anymore, because all of the brands are connected to one another. And he could create really cool stuff, economies and collaborations with that sort of technology. And I'm really excited that what Shopify is doing, and what they're bringing out, you know, for, you know, what we've already done for the past three, four years, and what we're going to be doing for the next 10,

Cyrus, thank you for sharing that with us. Because my next question to you was, you know, how do you envision this landscape changing over the next five years?

Yeah, I mean, I talked about a little bit earlier. And I think this is a point, I'll say, again, if you didn't listen,

the financials that I'm putting for myself and my family. So that because after five years, I don't know what's going to happen. So I just need to be able to have the optionality to protect myself and my family five years from now. And I think everybody should be thinking that way, for the next five years.

Oh, indeedindeed. It's something to think about now. Sorry, I know that we've come to the end of the show, but I can't let you go without asking you this one particular question, right? You've, you've shared with us thoughts about brand loyalty, macroeconomics, you know, Bitcoin, and then of course, movies. But I have really have no, right. What's your personal philosophy? Mate? What keeps you going?

Yeah, you know, my curiosity. Really? Okay. But my curiosity and ambition. You know, it's not just one thing. It's curiosity, ambition and kindness. So curiosity is the catalyst that kind of, we live in a world, you know, it's a playground, go have fun, right? The world is meant to have fun. And if you're not, if you're not enjoying the world, for all of the treasures, and everything it has, then I think you're missing out on the point of life. So it's just going having fun being present. And then being ambitious and ambitious, doesn't necessarily always have to be make more money, have a purpose, your purpose, because I want to start a family, it could be that I want to build my clothes, it could be, you know, I want to become Elon Musk and build a Tesla and SpaceX and go, you know, build cool gadgets, whatever it is, have an ambition. Yeah. And, and keep that discipline. And, and the last part is, no matter what you do, be kind, like i That's why I have my username the way it is. And that that is one thing that I have, you know, that's driven me to have much better experiences, life is kindness, and more importantly, be kind to yourself. One thing I can if everybody takes away, it's normal, how you're feeling right now, whether if it's good or bad, everything, everything comes and goes, time will pass. So wherever you are right now, just give yourself a pat on the back and be like, I made it this far. And that means something it really does, you are in your life right now, because of the choices you made. And, you know, you came into this world with nothing. Right? And you have something now and you're already in the positive, right? And then you're gonna leave this world with nothing. So it's just being grateful for everything that you have, and being kind to yourself and others and having fun while you're doing it. And just you know, stay curious. You know, life is an experience. Yeah, have fun.

Indeed, Cyrus, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your thoughts on the show. It was absolutely an absolute treat speaking to you. I know, we started with a few glitches, but we've, crossed the line. But I was, you know, I'm completely delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you today. And I'm certain that our audience listening now and those that are going to be listening on Spotify later as well. You know, we'll find a lot that they can resonate with. So once again, thank you so much for being on the show today. Yeah,

thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. And hopefully you all take something away from today. It makes sure you go put something in the cart, leave it for two, three days and you'll get an email for a discount. And then, you know, come tweet at me or tag me or DM me, you know, just tell me your story. I would love to hear it.

It's super rare. You've heard it here ladies and gentlemen. You know you can please follow ShopX as well .You can drop in your questions to him I'm sorry we're out of time, but I'm certainly gonna find some time to answer them. Thank you for being on the show today everybody this is JP from AdLunam Inc. bringing you everything about web3. Have a good one. Cheers.