Dan Novaes
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dan Novaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So we just have a lot more people in those countries. You know, if in worldwide, I think if you, look, it's like, you know, 1.2 billion devices or so are iPhones and there's like 6 billion of everything else, right? And so it's just like a lot more people are using Android devices. And so, you know, there's nice arbitrages to be made because some markets are more efficient than others, you know?
that yeah it's for sure like that and you know even countries like canada uk australia it's still like 80 of what you get in the us generally um you know it follows that pattern you know so you've gotten some you've gotten some joint partnerships or some deals done with some big box brands i mean some big companies i mean that spy and walmart and those things how did you get those deals done
Man, honestly, it was every which way, I think, is the right answer here. Because it was like not something I had, you know, I guess like take a step back. Like, you know, the thesis behind this was, you know, we started out as a software company and we're still a software company.
You know, I think one of the misconceptions that we're a hardware company, I think the main idea behind the phone was like literally that when it came to that conclusion that what we're doing is effectively an earn OS. And what I wanted to test out is kind of like, if someone bought a phone, that's value proposition was like, Hey, you're going to get paid to use your phone.
Would that change the earning habit of someone? Right. And also the time you first open up a device, there's all these new apps that you install. Right. And each time that that happens advertisers have to pay for that. Right. So as opposed to when someone downloads our app and you already have Facebook on there, there's no way I can monetize that action. Right.
And so that was like the thesis behind why we launched our phone. And yeah,
know we launched the first one i literally we only made 5 000 devices and we just launched into our own users and we sold out of it we didn't have it in any stores i know nothing and it's not like you know we we just try to do in the most scrappy way possible um we then in the second device i was like okay this one we want to get into stores and uh the main reason why we wanted to do that is just to also show that the model is possible because you know our vision as a business is actually not to be it's it's more to be like roku if you're familiar with roku service
What Roku was able to do in 2015, they had seven attempts to go public and it failed every time. And then in 2015, they really hit it. And what they did differently, and now they're 10 billion plus billion dollar business, is effectively they licensed their software to TV makers like TCL, Panasonic, et cetera, and they get access to that distribution.
So let the people that are great at manufacturing distribution, and then they do a rev share on your streaming habits and things of that nature. And so that's what we wanted to do. The problem is that anytime I went to a big carrier or phone maker, it was just such an out-of-box model that people just didn't believe it was possible. And when they see it's an app, they're just going, eh.
I don't really want to do that. Yeah. And then they were just like, it just didn't have any credibility. So we're like, oh, we're going to launch it into the stores like Walmart, Best Buy, show the data, show it's possible. And that was the whole thesis. It wasn't to get a ton of distribution because of those 45 million, we're talking about tens of thousands of devices.
We're talking about tens of millions of installs, right? And so the play there was just to show, hey, look, this cohort user, this is what happens when you have an earned phone. This is what happens even with like our device, which is definitely not as good as like a Samsung device from our device, because I haven't been in manufacturing for like 30 years.
But you can show that people are interested in it. And that's really the future of mode. You know, it's really kind of this idea
where we're going to see things like an AT&T-earned phone or a Samsung-earned phone or a Motorola-earned phone or in other countries where there's phone makers that you've never even heard of here in America like Oppo or Vivo that are literally like insanely like tens of billions of dollars business, but they're the market leaders in India or they're the market leaders in Africa.
And so that allows us to license that to those people. They then launch earned phones in their own country. And that allows us to really kind of take over that model and be basically the creators of that earned phone idea. Just very similar to how Roku did for smart TV.
Well, I mean, Apple is, um, you know, they're not really, it's, it's kind of a different core market, I guess. Um, cause you know, people that have iPhones, like they're not as much cost. I mean, if you're spending your entire month's rent, like a flagship device, right. It's like, it's like, you know, okay, cool. Like I can, yeah, you use this product for the entire year.
Uh, you know, you'll, you'll be able to pay for your iPhone. Um, and that stuff, and obviously it's a good market. Like don't get me wrong. We have solutions that we're thinking about actually of what we want to launch for iPhone.
uh that category but it just wasn't our focus area and even on the android side i think that um you know the general idea is like to build this business and to do it in the way that we've done it it's it's very complex it's not an easy business model to to actually operate in because you're effectively creating money out of thin air but i think the way that we also went about it was like i don't see other reward products or uh survey apps or whatever as like competitors
My goal as a business is how do I create the most value for you through earnings and savings and value? And because those people want our users, they're going to pay money to us that allows us to increase awards. And if you can earn from their product, great. You should definitely do that.
And so that's how the thesis of the business operates and why we see that other companies want to work with us as opposed to compete. Many people have tried to do this model. It's just not very easy. to make actually work.
Yeah. Um, team members, we have a little over like 60, uh, 65 or so employees. Uh, we have a lot, a lot of more part-time people as well. Like, you know, we're very, we're fully remote model. So, um, you know, after COVID we decided to fully operate in that way. Um, and so, you know, we, we operate super lean, you know what I mean? I think that that's the,
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