What makes a blockchain project successful? [Vlad Faraon]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Vlad Faraon, as they will be discussing building and launching successful blockchain projects, from the idea to the growth through marketing and communities. Vlad is the Co-Founder and CBO of Coreto, a project that aims to be THE benchmark of trust and performance in the crypto and blockchain space. 

 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐕𝐥𝐚𝐝:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: www.coreto.io

𝑉𝑙𝑎𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladfaraon/

 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro 

 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

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Episode transcript: 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi there! This is Andrei and you are on an episode of The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Vlad Faraon, who is the co-founder and CEO of Coreto. A blockchain project that aims to be THE benchmark of trust and performance in the crypto and blockchain space. Today, we'll discuss building and launching successful blockchain projects from idea to growth through marketing and communities. So without further ado, Vlad, it's a pleasure to meet again and a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the day going? And how's the market at the moment?

 

Vlad  

Yeah, hi, Andrei. Thank you for the introduction. Really happy to be here. I'm really excited as well to talk about blockchain, talk about Coreto. It's been a long day up to this point, but I still have some energy, I will always have the energy to talk about what we are building. The markets are looking good. If you are too, if you are to have a look at the charts, it looks promising you are on the right track. But we will get there I believe in our on our call right here.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Nice, nice. Okay. Yeah, I know you guys have a lot of things cooking with the project as well. So maybe we'll touch on some of those as much as you want to share. I won't be very pushy. But yeah, I think just to get started and for the audience to get to know you a little bit as a person as well as to get a feel about the project and potentially as well as the blockchain space in general, since many of the people that tuned in today might not be very much into the space, although I know that many of us here on the podcast are interested about the blockchain space, and we have previous episodes. So I think this would be a great opportunity for us to get a bit of insight from you, since you've been here from you know, like for a very long while. And you also have the history of building Colorado and interacting with a lot of projects as well as with a lot of marketing influencers, people, and communities. So exciting times. But first things first. What's your story? And how did you go into the space? How did crypto come about?

 

Vlad  

Well, first, like you said, Yes, my name is blood. I am 38 years old, still young, still in power? I said Yes, exactly. So I am in crypto since 2017, early 2017, something like that. Previously, I spent my last 1416 years in corporate business development. And to be honest, I got sick and tired to be sick and tired. Although  I love big companies, especially big tech companies, as we see that they constantly evolve and develop a lot of useful apps or platforms that we are all using. When I came into when I discovered Well, I know about blockchain, I believe, since 2013 2014, something like that. I had some friends that were mining Bitcoin. And they told me about Bitcoin told me the idea of decentralisation. But at that point, my mind was in a totally different place than right now. So of course, like I believe a lot of people did back then I just ignored them and said, Hey, what's this? Nobody's gonna use that what are you going to do a bit and so on and so forth. But fast forward a bit to 2016? Again, because my friends were keep telling me about Bitcoin and decentralisation, I said okay, let me look into this already, this base was beginning to get some traction going. So, when I started looking into it more, more carefully, I saw the potential of the technology. So first, I saw the benefits of a decentralised network then I saw the idea of not having a central entity. And I will not go too much into a basic description of what Bitcoin or decentralisation is, there is a lot of useful info online. But I got into more in-depth somewhere closer to meet and 2017 so that means that I kind of got on the initial Ico boom. That was the period when crypto winter Bit more mainstream. Now, I will be honest. And I will tell you that at that time, I was just like any other new retail investor coming into this space. That means I had low financial literacy, I had lower knowledge about how to invest and how to determine if a project is good or not. So I kind of went with the crowd, which means that I went on Twitter, also known as crypto Twitter. I went to telegram groups, I even joined some paid channels, all with the idea of finding the quickest route to success. Of course, that ended up bad, because back then, and, I saw that it's still the same issue right now is that you do not know how to start. Where do you start when you want to start? Who whose opinion should you follow when you start when you know nothing? Okay, so you try to find those guys that maybe are in this space for a longer time. Or maybe you can find some way in which you can determine those individuals' knowledge.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So basically, what gives those people credentials to talk about creating? Yeah, exactly.

 

Vlad

So just like that, I started finding. So I just started to look for individuals that would look like they know what they were talking about. So when everything was blooming, are booming. At the end of 2017, I got some good investments along the way, I also began to understand even more in-depth how blockchain works and the other thing. And then when 2018 came, right before the bear market began, some of my investments started to go down the road as in going slowly, slowly, minus 20 minus 30, minus 40. And I began to question myself, Oh, how did I get into these projects? I even got scammed. How did I end up investing in such poor projects? And my conclusion was that I follow the wrong people. I based my investment decisions were based on the number of followers a particular individual had, I was very, it was very hard for me to identify a track record of that guy's performance, and past performance. So this was also the time when the idea of Coreto came to mind. In so summer of 2018 and 2019, I sat down with Justina Justina, who is my partner, both in life and also in business. She already was a successful entrepreneur she had to one of the first digital agencies in Romania. So let's say that she had a passion for design and a passion for developing growing debt in general. So after a lot of brainstorming hours, the conclusion was that the problem in the space at that time is that there is no place where you can evaluate the people that are talking about crypto investments, all of them are stating this is not financial advice. But at the same time, it's exactly what they are doing.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So if anything, sorry, for interrupting, but if anything, I think just got worse as the industry evolved, and the crypto became more, you know, adopted, because there's more and more people and everybody that has, you know, one successful investment. Oh, let me tell you how to do it. This is the project I'm following. These are my top 10 things. No.

 

Vlad  

I was full of videos, Top three coins to invest in. Top 10 coins to invest top five coins that are going to the moon. Yeah, so so then we said okay, it's clear that it would be very useful for the retail investor to have a platform on which people content creators that are joining can prove their worth can prove their knowledge. And how could they do that? Well, they could do that by being more transparent with how they work and being more good Let's say they should give more regarding their knowledge, applied knowledge. And this is the way that Coreto came to life Coreto comes from a community reward token. And the same time Coreto in Portuguese means a bandstand. So, this was a nice coincidence, because if we will, if you are to go even more into branding itself, we would say that we can give the stage for content creators and for influencers, to prove their worth, okay to perform for the audience, and the audience will reward them by applause, or booing, get off the stage, you know, nothing. Okay. So, and then we said, okay, so there are, it's clear that this industry, just because it, there is a lot of money in it, and let's not hide behind the finger. But that's the truth in crypto, there is a lot of money to be made. But at the same time, there is a lot of money to be lost. Especially if like we were back then at the beginning of the road, there is a saying in crypto that says never invest more than you are willing to lose. We all say but nobody. Myself included. Yes. So fast things forward. In 2020, Autumn 2020, we decided to go live. So it's when we started to look for ways to promote our project to spread the word exactly about what we are trying to build and what we're trying to do and how. And it was the first time that I was in direct content contact by being on the other side of the fence, I was not just a retail investor looking for projects, I was a project of I was a project looking for investors and looking channels in which I could fairly promote and fairly send out my message and our vision and what we want to do and want to build.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I will not make this a long parenthesis but I think it's relevant to the journey. For people out there that maybe have an idea in blockchain, and want to bring it to life. Or maybe they are, you know, setting up the team. What was your journey in setting up the team and creating this core group of people that have built Coreto then?

 

Vlad  

Well, our core team is made up of four people. Me and Iustina - are the founders. And then we have Vali who is our head of design. And Andrei, who is our head of development. Andre goes back with just enough since the beginning of their time. So they have a long history of working together. They are very compatible in terms of ideas and mindset. So it was very easy for us to send him our idea of what we wanted this platform to do in the end result. And so Andre worked with Justina for more than seven, eight years, something like that, along the way King barley, also the from the agency time. And what we love about volley is that he works very fast. And he does not need a very big brief. So he understands very well, the concept, and very quickly. And that's very important because there's one thing in crypto, which is you need to move fast. There was a saying that one day in crypto is like one month in the real world. So yeah, so this is how we put together the basic theme, the initial theme, and then we outsource part of the development. And in April 2021, we managed to launch our closed alpha version of the platform up to that point. Up to that point. I will get back to how I do the initial idea. Then we're now in the position in which we had to find the right marketing agency to support us although we all have a background in the digital world. It's something else to build for yourself. Sometimes you are very picky in your ideas, you are more of a perfectionist. So we tried to find someone who whether they were freelancers or whether they were agencies that could understand. First, they had to understand what we are building. This was one of the problems that we came across was that everybody was saying, Yeah, we will do A, B, C. D. Sure, very fast. We know how to do it. We did it before we'll do it again. But they did not understand our core values. Having in mind that the main use case for Coreto and its core values are based on transparency on trust in building trust itself. We couldn't use the type of marketing that is, unfortunately, right now being used in crypto, which is a lot of shilling. Are you familiar with the term Schilling in the industry?

 

Andrei Tiu  

I am, but let's explain it to everybody. 

 

Vlad  

In short, you see this mouse, the mouse is the best. What makes it the best I say so. So I'm shilling this mouse. And just like me, there are other 1020 30 so-called influencers that are saying the same. And they are getting paid by the manufacturer of this mouse to say that it's the best. And what's so good about it? Well, it has a scroll. Well, this crawl is so smooth. Oh my god is the best mouse ever. So this is something that is happening right now with most of the projects out there. Influencers, unfortunate, unfortunately, a lot of them are getting paid ridiculous sums of money. And the project themselves have no way in which they can track a return on investment. Very few are doing any due diligence on the price of those projects. So that's a big no-no in our book. So we did a lot of tests that were destined to fail. We also ended up paying a lot of money for very low-quality work.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That was in your trying to shape up your marketing, right as a project, initially, when you're setting up.

 

Vlad  

In the project, we're trying to identify the right individuals to work with to find those professionals that are, unfortunately, again, few professionals in this industry and those that are present. Just because they know that in crypto, there is a lot of money. They have huge fees that do not that have a structure. To give you an example, there are some that charge for just the basic ama sounds like five 6000 euros now. It's an AMA okay, but I have 100,000 followers, okay, but how can you prove that those guys are really following you because you are worth being followed? Or they are fake accounts, or they are just in it for airdrops or bounty hunters or sorcerer and so far. And to get back to your initial question. If you guys out there, want to build a project on blockchain. First things first, you have to really look into your product. And, of course, the same questions that need to be answered, answered, If you want to launch it in a traditional industry or if it's for blockchain, they are the same, which is, is it useful? Is it needed? What problems does it solve? What's the def and does it need the blockchain or not? After you have that in mind and said even if you are still at the idea stage, you have to put together your team of course. And then only then try to move into finding some marketing partners. There is a plus right now that there are a lot of Launchpad projects out there. And these Launchpad projects, what they do is that they already have a community behind them or the investors and they can help you out, but all of your ideas on paper, then help you spread the word about your projects inside their community. And with the help of their community, you can have some initial funding to get you started. Once you get started, and once you also your product begins to have a shape to get shaped to get in shape to do whether it's an MVP or an alpha stage, then you can boost your marketing moves in such a way to attract institutional investors. Because there are a lot of institutional investors that are now into crypto because like I said before, there is a lot of money here. And of course, Wall Street is not staying away from money ever. But also you have to be careful. Who do you partner with? Up to this point, we refused any institutional investments, because we wanted to have full control of how we build the direction that the project wants to go. We are strong believers in lean startups. Rather than building on hype and selling false dreams. This is a way that we gained the trust of our community. We were transparent. We are all public. We are not anonymous. So we are transparent. We always kept our promises. We are always under-promise and over-deliver. But just like in any tech startup, there are also a lot of bumps along the way. So we were sure we had to push our deadlines. We had to modify our roadmap twice up to this point. These are things that are normal when dealing with building a tech product or software product

 

Andrei Tiu  

Of course and mainly in a fast-moving industry such as crypto. I mean, it would be an issue if those things wouldn't occur, right? 

 

Vlad  

There are a lot of projects that along the way they had to adapt. And so did we, when we first started, there weren't so many options, or let's say, Blockchain protocols out there, or there weren't so we didn't identify the right trends. Well, that is one thing that I'm proud of is that even now after two years, our product is still needed. The issues are the same, which is it's very hard for crypto enthusiasts to identify the right projects or the right people to follow to find educational materials, quality materials, easily organised and with a good user interface.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So if you were to articulate what Coreto does within one meeting, what does Coreto do in one minute?

 

Vlad  

Okay, so just as I said, Coreto also means the bandstand. So we are building the stage in which content creators, are not afraid to be transparent with their knowledge and with their portfolios, and also with their own trading. They are not afraid to put it out there and say, Hey, this is what I'm doing. This is my past performance. You can follow me or not, but I'm doing it for myself, we are building a platform that wants to be fun. We are building a platform that is intended to also be engaging with the community because we are building our own community at the beginning right now. But we plan to open the doors and if we have time, I'll talk about that as well. So we are building the stage for you, the content creator for you, the trader, if you are bold enough, come on, collect on building your profile, post your content, and then our users' followers, your followers and so on and so forth. They will have other metrics to decide if you are worth being followed or not other than just your number of followers on Twitter or in your telegram groups. So we are helping the content creators prove their worth and the knowledge

 

Andrei Tiu  

Those people that are analysing the projects right? 

 

Vlad  

Yes. We are helping the retail investor, so to say, to identify those sources that work being followed. And we are also helping the project teams themselves, to reach new communities to help them build awareness around the project, to also claim on the official page on Coreto and directly interact with the community that is being built here. And also have a place where they can find content creators whose history can be verified. In short, we want to be the main go-to platform when it comes to due diligence, whether you're doing due diligence on projects, on your next trade or on which influencer or Trader deserves to be followed. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

One measure here for the people that maybe are tuning in today, but are not active investors, or maybe happened in occurred, like these struggles haven't occurred to them yet, because they weren't active in themselves in the crypto space. Basically, one thing that I know Coreto does, and I think it's really cool. And He does that by using Blockchain. So you mentioned blood that is verifiable and their experience and expertise. Anybody can go and look at their performance in the past and say, Okay, this guy's legit, or this guy doesn't really know what he's talking about. Basically, Coreto is using Blockchain so that it can track how many times people were right in the predictions that they were putting forward.

 

Vlad  

In time, if let's say you are a content creator, and you love doing trading, maybe you don't necessarily share your trades with the idea of building a following. You just share them because you yourself are now a successful trader, and you like the crypto communities and you want to give back in a way or not. And what we do is that your entire track record, we stored it on the blockchain so that it's immutable right now over there. And it's also transparent because this is another issue that we came across. And I'm sure I'm not the only one is that guys posting on Twitter or on Telegram, something about a new project or an existing project and potential I know, Bitcoin trade, that opinion is being lost in the newsfeed or even worse, it can be deleted, if it went south, or this is most of the cases, if they get it right, they will praise themselves, oh my God, how much they will praise and says, Look how good I am. Look how much money you could have done with my code, join my pain, my paid group and I will make you rich, no, that will not happen. Okay, so there is no easy way to do well, actually encrypted there is a get rich, fast way. But it's not necessarily the right way. So that's why we aim and we work on building a crypto reputation. This is exactly what we are doing. And our future plans are to take our algorithms of reputation building and implement them into third parties platforms. And up to this point, there is one partner that we can freely speak about. There is one forward protocol, they are called and they are building courses. We've also been in a lot of fields. And through our help, we will help them build the reputation of their content creators and of their teachers, let's say based on how their community interacted with their content based on their feedback based on real-life use cases, and so on and so forth. This is something still in development. But we are very eager because they were the ones that approached us. And they were just the first we are also in talks with other two big projects but can say more now. But yeah, our announcement channels and new news will come.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I know one of them. I mean who it might. You guys follow Coreto will have the links in the description of these episodes. So there's a couple of things cooking there. Also marketing-wise. So I don't know, Vlad if you are up for it. We can look at what you guys were doing lately and some of the plans that you have for the future. Also, a couple of announcements that I know are cooking in the background. So maybe if you want to share a bit of that, just to get give people a feel of how Korea has evolved. So from when you were having those initial marketing activities, so fundraising and then launching the platform in closed alpha, how did the product evolve? And maybe, what should somebody consider when it comes apart from the delays? And obviously, the things that have to do with developing the product in itself? I think it is super important to note that Corrado is actually one of those projects that is life now. So people can actually go in and they can be active on the platform, there is a community around it. But moreover, how are you looking to scale things up, as we were talking, about at the beginning of this episode, briefly, the market seems to be favourable now. So it may be a good time to actually, together with, in this case, correct, or there's going to be a lot of other projects that will claim to be the best, and they will claim to, you know, be the next big thing. So even more than maybe a couple of months ago, people will need, they'll want to get into the space will need to be able to research. And then, of course, it's an opportunity for careers to be there to help them research better in the projects that they want to get into. So what are you guys planning now for growth?

 

Vlad  

Up to this point, we had a private talk earlier today, and I was we're talking about what is the crypto investor type as a person? And, unfortunately, more than 70 80% of the people that are into crypto give to don't give that much importance to what is that project actually building? They just want to invest $100 now and maybe tomorrow have 1000. We also had that type of user on Quora. They were they did not understand why don't we do marketing like other projects do, which means a lot of hype, and a lot of influencers that are talking about us. A lot of bad, no promises, we're gonna do that. We're gonna do that when we talk about price. Talk about nice changes. So we had a totally different approach on that. We wanted, as I told you to have a Lean Startup, which means that our marketing efforts weren't that much focused on hyping the idea of Pareto, we wanted to keep our heads down and build. It was what we did. The committee that we have right now understood that, and we have people with us, even from the beginning of time, that understood the concept understood our vision, and also understood our way of doing things. And this was by being transparent. By always being in the community and talking with them. It was how we managed to gain the trust. And now that we have a product that, as you said, it's life and it's launched, although it's in closed, closed alpha, it means that you can join only by having your sport reserved on a whitelist. And we periodically onboard users because we use their feedback and a lot of their feedback to improve our product. So the point that we are now we are even closer to a better launch. But up to that point, we want to open up the gates a bit for coding, we want a bit more people to come to see it, to test it to see its advantages. And we thought of doing that by launching a referral programme. The referral programme is somehow a basic marketing tool, but it's very powerful. Because through the word of mouth and just through a referral link, you can organically grow much faster. So this is one feature that we're about to launch in the coming weeks. So up to this point, we kept our heads down and worked. We improved our product. We have now somewhere close to 2000 users, early adopters that are using and testing the platform. And very soon we are going to launch our referral programme. It might sound like it's the basic marketing move, but sometimes it's good to go Get to the basics because it will give you the best results. By always, we always know, tested. And we always listened to our community. It's also a way for which we can show them that their opinion is important. And their feedback is implemented. And we also actually have an exam there was one user that gave us feedback saying that, hey, it wouldn't be nice if I could have correct or something like my trading journal. And that was something that we will take and implement in the next updates in a way in which you can see exactly what was your journey up to this point, as a trader, you don't have to be an influencer, any user can create opinions on quality. But it's a way in which you can also track your growth. Am I a better trader now than I was a few months before? And Going back to marketing moves, we, as I said, we don't do necessarily what crypto does, and we want to take it slow and sometimes slow is good, and sometimes fastest, even better. So we try to combine these two.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, actually, I think, this referral programme that you mentioned, it makes a lot of sense for the community, since you are a community fuelled type of project, having your friends there with you, you know, analysing or challenging yourself or each other on the platform and having this community feeling to it and the social element, which I know you guys are following through with until the end, I think it's that thing that can make it fun and makes a lot of sense to have it. So looking forward to that I guess he's going to be some incentives attached to the whole programme.

 

Vlad  

Yes, if we are to speak, just briefly about the referral programme, we didn't want to build up a programme just like okay, here's my link, just subscribe, and get a discount maybe to some subscription-based content developed by a certain content creator. Being early in the platform right now, we did not yet publish the monetization modules for content creators. So that means we are still in the stage where you will benefit from Coreto through the learnings that it provides row. So basically, if I invite you, it will help me even more, if you do some tasks on the platform, one of the things that we are going to put a lot of effort into in the future is the gamification part. Everything has to be fun. In order, especially what we are building it's a community or based platform, it's a community-driven project as well. Word of mouth is very important. So if you are to go and talk to your friends about Coreto, it has to also be fun. So we'll put in place a lot of gamification mechanisms, one of them right now is already in place is one of the features that will help you build your reputation. It's called our staking of opinion pools. In short, you have an opinion, another guy has another opinion. Maybe I come along, and I do not agree with your own opinion. So we will create a pool of opinions based on a particular trade, and we'll let the market decide who's best insured. Okay, so like a trading challenge or something like that.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so that sounds good. And then I'm just going through our discussion right now, what it seems to me is that the way that Coreto differentiates maybe from some of the other projects that are launching or are just, you know, just not really adopted as a, at a very large scale is that as opposed to those projects that go for the approach of like the traditional crypto approach of having the influencers, do all the hype, sell the coins, etc, and then build the product or whatever that platform is this interview guys being built. Yeah, it seems as if you can just rock and roll then you necessarily need that many people to invest in the coin and so on. So this is cool. I think it's maybe you taking it a bit, not slow, but you taking the time to do the work before talking about the work rather than talking about the work before doing the work. puts you in a very nice spot and probably the people that you mentioned are with you from way back That's why they are still with you. So probably waiting for, you know, for you to talk a bit more broadly about what you're doing. And I think from that perspective, I think the referral programme would actually be nice because it will just enable people to work and see the utility of what you guys are doing at the moment.

 

Vlad  

Exactly. We were very careful. Also, for our token, we wanted to give it use cases, not just a coin or a token that can be traded or exchanged. So it will have a lot of utility within the platform itself. And now, our committee or coding committee, they, of course, they also began to question, okay, when are you going to get out there and let people know about what you've been building, and we've won their respect and trust because we constantly delivered on our promises. And right now, we are also one of the strategies that we want to follow, is to reach out to certain content creators or traders that are not, let's say, they are not the tier one influence that they don't have hundreds of 1000s of followers because they will not be so willing to start joining to join a platform and start all over because everybody starts from scratch when they start on Coreto. So we'll be reaching out to certain content creators that we've been studying and we saw know, how they communicate and how they interact and what type of content they are putting out there. And we will be inviting them to claim as an official product profile on hereto. And that will also help them to bring their communities on board. And to prove them once again, although they may be they already done that, they cannot now prove through a clear track record stored on the blockchain, that what they are preaching is also what they are doing and using. So that will also come as a plus. And once that, people will get to see the utility and also the that it can be fun to learn that itself would be a catalyst for new or user onboard things.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So going in, like judging from a marketing perspective than it can be, just to try to crystallise a bit in front of somebody that is maybe considering maybe they have this idea or are considering applying the blockchain technology to an idea that they had a business and they can see the utility of using Blockchain rather than not. So there are two popular approaches that they may go for one would be that of building the hype and just having the same community gathered, which is the root 90% of blockchain-based startups or businesses go for. And then using that money, whether that is from retail investors, private investors or investment groups, to build a product and to actually do the work and lounge properly. Or it can be the approach that you have, which would be the cloud, the more classical if you want a business approach, which is okay, let's build the product. And then let's market it and make it lousy to do a better fusers and then to the whole mass market. Right? These would be the two main approaches. Okay. But then, there's another thing that tends to be, you know, is not the right thing, but it happens. So many people use the price of a coin. I mean, every blockchain project has a coin. And then when people are looking at the projects available out there, maybe he tells investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Many of them follow the graphs of the coin, increasing in price or decreasing and, you know, judging a lot a project by that specific price and opportunity for growth and taxing their investment and so much, you mentioned just investing 100 today having 1000 Tomorrow, if not, I'm not happy with that. So how do you feel that impacted Coreto? Because obviously, it seems you didn't bring a lot of users and you didn't build that hybrid before building the project. That impact is a bit of fluctuation of the coin price I would imagine and also maybe where you are right now from a maturity standpoint as a project as opposed to other projects that are maybe in the same price ranges core.

 

Vlad  

Yes, the way that your price charities look, it's important as well. If when you receive when you research for a project, of course, that you also there are two options, either the project is about to launch. So it's something like pre-launch. So there is no price history, or there is a project that you discovered in your own ways. And you are seeing its price chart. And if you see something like there is a flat and then is a bomb, and then a flat as a bomb that well, that's something that could lift up some question marks, but not in the wrong way in itself. So when you identify that type of a project, then you have to go more in-depth and search for the fundamentals of that project and see why. How can you explain that flatline and then just a few bumps, then you can, you can discover that the project was, wasn't marketed very much? And there are a limited number of holders, and there are so many trading volumes. But if you look in-depth, and you see that that particular project is about to launch certain features, or he's about to announce new partnerships, or it's just about to burst, well, that's the best time to get into. There is also something that if that particular project only has a few weeks or a month as history if it's a parabolic growth, and then it goes down. It's something that who would want to stay away, from because it means that that was a hyped project. And then the market itself did its job. And when self when you look into new projects, it's good to see the perspective to have a steady growth to see that it goes steady. But still, it's in an uptrend of price action. It's somewhere that we are at ourselves. So we did not focus on the price itself. A lot of users were constantly asking us why the price is not going up. Why aren't you going? Why are you constant? Well, it's because we do not want to hype the token based on false claims. So we want to prove that the product is good that is needed that it works, and then level up our marketing efforts. And that's the point that we are at right now, like I told you.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So from the discussion that we had just before the show, I know that you mentioned the big focus over the next couple of weeks is going to be so you have the launches coming up the referral programme. And then there are another couple of features that you guys are working on for the platform in terms of marketing moves that are important being in this space right now be one the focus on community growth, so ensuring that you bring the right people into the project, not only the ones that look for the get rich, quick type of investment, but rather people that are interested in this, you know, the values that you shared, like transparency, and then traceability and so on. And people that will be able to benefit from the features that you make available in the platform, such as you know, staking of opinion polls, and sharing just information that is

 

Vlad  

yeah, right now as Cornetto, although it's a search hub, it also works as a social platform. Of course, there is a lot of content that can be created either through posts, or social posts, articles, reviews, and so on. But from a marketing standard standpoint, we are now focusing on attracting quality users. At first, we want to focus on attracting quality traders and content creators, because they are the ones that will attract the retail investor, Indian. Being a social platform, of course, your user base is very important. It's one of the reasons that we did not start with one open as far as anybody could join. And we wanted to focus on having people that will test and that will provide feedback. Of course, we had a lot of people that joined and did nothing. Well, we got rid of those and we onboard new people in the stage that is about to unfold right now. We will reach out as I told you to certain content creators, invite them here give them certain perks of course, because what's in it for them in the end, and with their help and with the content that they're building, and also with the features that we're having, and the person to give me vacations and everything, it will make it fun for them to share their opinions on in the social media, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok. It will, it will be like a snowball effect is all we all know the phrase build it and they will come? Well, although I do believe in it, it's also important to give them some boost to help them, to let them know that we've built it. And how can we do that other than through committees, as Coreto is built for crypto communities, it will help it it is also a way for which we are now looking to expand. So we are also searching for projects out there, whether they are already well-known projects are also our projects at the beginning of the road, they will go through our own due diligence because of course, we cannot partner up with somebody that we know it's not trustworthy. And how can you know that? Well, the first sign is are you public, or are you anonymous. It's not a rule of thumb that if you are anonymous, you also have bad intentions. But that's one of the first things that come to mind when people see an NFT or an emoji instead of a public profile page. Now, so to give it a wrap, it's like, we will use the power of community to spread the word about  Coreto, which is a community platform. Because we work for we It's why we are building we are building this because we went through the pain of being robbed, pooled beings can be taking better investment decisions. So at the end, when you yourself are working on solving a problem that you yourself encountered, and for all the feedback that we're getting, we can see that we are not the only ones. And there are a lot of statistics out there. And a lot of media saying that a lot of scammers in crypto are very dangerous is very risky is very volatile. It's something that through Coreto we want to do work on and to provide that needed help that everybody at the beginning of the road really needs.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So, very good stuff looking forward to, you know, seeing the platform evolve, I've already made an account. So you probably already know that. So  I know it's working, I'm just cool. Looking forward to seeing a lot of activity there soon. Now, coming to the end of this episode. And I know you're a busy man as well. So I will let you go soon. But just want to pick your brains on a final thing. And that would be for the people out here that are you know, are building towards projects. What would be your top three tips or advice, pieces of advice that you'd give them when shaping up or launching potential blockchain projects.

 

Vlad  

Now, after you get everything done in terms of your team, initially, maybe you find some advisors as well. It's really helpful to find people that are involved in the space that are connected. Networking is very important because it's the way that we will be able to build up partnerships. One thing that I like in crypto is that most projects are very open to partnering up if and this is very important. You bring value to the table. There are a lot of I see community partnerships. They do nothing they just say we partner up with x coin Congress. Okay, but how will X coin help me and how and how will my project help X coin so attending different crypto events. Luckily, now, face to face events are beginning again. So attending live events that will be first because it's a way in which it will be easier for you to network. Also, mingle, always be communicative. Always try to speak your mind in different ways. groups, it's the way that you will see that you can build relationships online. I mean, in the end, come on we are in 2020. Anybody can build up a relationship online. And especially if you find groups of founders of crypto project founders, and there are some out there picking their brains. Well, how did you do that? How did you do that? If I were to start over, it would be this is something that I would do more carefully and more thoroughly. And which is building a network. Just like in any industry, your network is very important. So once you have your network built, then start talking about your vision and your project and your ideas. Because by talking about it, you never know, who is whoever will have a moment like, Hey, I could really help out these guys. I really like their idea. And based on my experience, and the people that I know, I'm certain that I could really bring value to the project. So never be afraid to talk about what you are building. It's okay to have doubts, and it's okay to be unsecured. Again, that's the life of an entrepreneur. I, myself had my own. But thanks to my team, and thanks to the people that have my back. That is something that I managed to move past. And the third one, and I believe that once your project gets some traction, this is the most important one, do not believe everything that is promised to you by different service providers in this industry. There are a lot of scammers among service providers as well. There was one fun fact, there was one marketing agency and crypto marketing agency that did approach the approach us and they said, we can help you build your community, and we have a lot of experience. We've built hundreds of 1000s of communities, they build communities with hundreds of 1000s of users. Okay. And of course, my first question was, please share a portfolio. And I had a pleasant surprise to find our logo in their portfolio blog. And that was like, wow, we already do work together. And this is one case, and there are others that say, okay, I can get your project trending on different sites for the small fee of $5,000. Really, how will that help me to just bring some hype, it will just maybe bump my price a bit. But once those new users that are coming into my project will see that I still have some work to do until I will fully deliver my project. They will sell as fast as they bought in. So that's also a big no-no. So to sum it up, be very careful when people approach you offering services. Again, based on the network that you are building, use them to refer different service providers in the industry. Have in mind that crypto, the crypto industry, unfortunately, also attracts a lot of scammers. So you have to be very careful out there. Okay. And of course, it will be another one. Be careful what you're doing with your private keys. private keys to your wallet are very important. There is no I forgot my password button. There is nobody that can give your funds back. Okay, so this is something that really has to be careful on the security side of both of your platforms or your project or wherever you're building. Make sure that your security guy knows what he's doing. And also this part is also very important based on recommendations. Okay. So I believe this will be my three and a half vices.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Let's move the last one to the first one.

 

Vlad  

I think it's very important to always take care of your private feed. Never share.

 

Andrei Tiu  

super glad it was great having you on the show. Thanks so much for being here. I know it's a busy time for you guys so appreciate you taking the time to come over. Really cool. Where people I mean what would be the best place obviously, I know you guys have the Telegram, and it's the place to be for following crypto projects. So your telegram we have here for people watching the show, it's t.me/coreto. For you guys tuning in for streaming platforms, you can find Coreto following this link. Vlad any other platforms that you think people would be worth following?

 

Vlad  

My direct messages are always open.  I'm always active in our group, you can find us on our on Twitter, if you go on coreto.io, you will see in the footer, all of our social media groups and channels, you can contact me directly on Telegram, LinkedIn on Twitter. I like to talk. So I hope that if there is anyone out there that has any questions for me or is at the beginning of the road, I will be more than happy to give you some of my own insights. And if I do not know, I will do my best to recommend somebody that can help you in this journey.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Appreciate it, and things. Finally, I know, we said we're gonna wrap it up. But I think these are relevant. So a question, can people now come on the platform, even if it's even if they need to be approved? It's open, right? So anybody can create an account if they want to first question. And the second is if people with projects are listening, and they would like to claim their project page, can they do that on Coreto? Or what would be the best approach to doing that?

 

Vlad  

Right now, they cannot create the profile directly from coreto.io. What they can do now they can whitelist their username on reserve.coreto.io. And we will onboard them. This is now but once our referral programme will go live, maybe they will get an invite link from some of our existing users. So the answer to the first question is no, you cannot create a profile right now you need to reserve your spot and your user name using reserve.coreto.io. And the second question, the project module is still in development. But I would encourage any project out there to reach out to us and we can talk and see exactly what they are building and what their stage is in. And if we find synergy between us, we'll find a way in which we can work together in the future. That's for sure.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff! Okay, Vlad, that was it. Thanks so much for being here today. Keep rocking it. and looking forward to catching up soon. Guys, thank you for staying with us till the end. Looking forward to your questions. If you have any as always, post them in the comments. If you're watching this on YouTube or otherwise, feel free to tag us DM us on social or write us at our email address. And as always, we'll be happy to answer as well as maybe you know if you need to put you in contact with Vlad although his DMS are always open so we will link those industries from the description of this episode as well and take care of your crypto investments.

 

Vlad  

Always do your own research. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yes. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.