How He Built a $300M Empire by Paying You to Use Your Phone | Dan Novaes | EP 66

Speaker 1 This is like when you're a true entrepreneur, you kind of like, you know, have to kind of think, what are you good at? You know what I mean? For me, I've always been a consumer marketer.

Speaker 1 And I started thinking, I was like, well, how do I reward?

Speaker 1 How can I reward them? So I was like, well, what if I gave my consumers shares in my business? And then what if I started to get and I got into crowdfunding and started really learning a lot about it?

Speaker 1 And that's kind of what got us here. And so it took me one year to kind of actually execute on this because you had to get audited financials.

Speaker 1 You have to do all this work that most people don't want to do. You know, there's a wonderful,

Speaker 1 and they won't do it. That's that's actually, I think that's a different most marketers won't do it.
They'll just want to, they want to start a funnel and go through.

Speaker 1 I'm willing to go through the work of it, but it's not trivial.

Speaker 2 What is up, the entrepreneur DNA family? I am back with an incredible guest. This young entrepreneur has built an empire of over $300 million.

Speaker 2 You are going to want to listen to this. He's totally changing the landscape of technology, mobile phones, etc.
He has actually created a funding structure that is revolutionary.

Speaker 2 He has actually been named number one software company back in 2023 by Deloitte. My man, Dan Novias, is on.
What is happening, bro?

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me, Justin. Appreciate it.
Looking forward to it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're doing something really special. As someone that in my space, I have raised.

Speaker 2 tens and tens of maybe not $100 million over a 20-year career or so, but you're really changing the shape of how entrepreneurs raise capital.

Speaker 2 Talk to us about that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I think the model really came down of like, you know, there's really two ways to kind of raise capital, you know, and well, traditionally, you know, people have thought about it in like, hey, like, you know, I'm going to have to go out raise angel round, then it's a VC round.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of like you're following a specific pattern.

Speaker 1 For me,

Speaker 1 you know, the way we kind of got here is, you know, I was a marketer.

Speaker 1 I knew, you know, we had a consumer-facing business and then we saw this really interesting opportunity about how do we make our consumers actually investors?

Speaker 1 And then also, if you know how to, you know, bring traffic onto your site, how can you get everyday people to also be a part of that mission?

Speaker 1 And so happy to dive into that and also like all the extra benefits beyond just the capital that you get when you really kind of take a crowdfund to like the next level.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to actually start. You're young.
I call you a young Thundercat, right?

Speaker 2 You're under 30, substantially under 40. If you don't mind, you're 36.
But, you know, you've built an empire, right?

Speaker 2 There's not many people walking the streets at your age can say you have built an empire of 300 million dollars.

Speaker 2 And as someone who's done very well in my life, I can tell you that didn't come with its own set of challenges.

Speaker 2 Let's maybe start by talking about that journey that you took, where you're today, but then what it really took to get to where you're at today.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a lot of trial and tribulations, I think, like most entrepreneurs. But yeah, I mean, I'm happy to kind of start at the beginning of how we got there.

Speaker 1 But, you know, we initially got into this space and the whole thesis of the business is really,

Speaker 1 you know, it wasn't actually, the idea didn't come like, oh, like this is actually our idea. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 What ended up happening is my co-founder and I at the time had built a music streaming service. It was kind of a dud.

Speaker 1 And we've done a lot of different entrepreneurial ventures there. We fortunately had a couple of small exits along the way.
And but it was kind of a dud. It wasn't really working.

Speaker 1 But we did have one cohort of user that was using it. And we went to go talk to that, you know, those people.
And then they were like, you know, why are you using this?

Speaker 1 And what we found is that they tend to be more budget conscious consumers.

Speaker 1 They were not willing to pay for subscriptions, but they were using our service because we were aggregating a lot of music services in one place.

Speaker 1 And so, what we learned is like, hey, what if we were to pay you for your attention and monetize you with ads? Would you do tasks to do that? Right. And people were like really interested in that.

Speaker 1 So, we just randomly put up a wait list. Like, we didn't even have the feature bill, but we had like 250,000 people sign up to this.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, just kind of like you remember the early days of like Dropbox or when Robin Hood launched, like, they would do those, like, you fight a friend, skip the line.

Speaker 1 And so that was, it was the the time of that, right? The late, the late teens of, you know, 2016, 2017, 2018. And so we launched that service.
It started doing really well. And then

Speaker 1 it was really hard to make any money because music is like the worst business to actually be able to pay. You know, usually it's like the companies are going bankrupt, you know.

Speaker 1 So what we did was like, oh, well, what if we move into like them to do other tasks like games or shopping or video, things that actually require your attention. And

Speaker 1 that's really kind of actually where we started moving into this idea of kind of rewarding people for their everyday things.

Speaker 1 And the more and more features that we started building, the more we were like, oh, like what we're really building is kind of like an earn OS, like an operating system for earning. And

Speaker 1 then we had this crazy idea that was like, hey, we're going to launch a phone that pays you as you do it.

Speaker 1 And then I flew to China at the time and it was right before COVID and, you know, figured out a way to launch 5,000 phones, super scrappy.

Speaker 1 But we had all these users and I was like, worst comes to worst, like, you know, these, these people will just hopefully buy these phones because obviously they're earning already.

Speaker 1 And we sold them out very quickly.

Speaker 1 And then that's kind of the idea of what was, you know, got us into EarnPhone. And we had this insane growth from 2019 to 2022.

Speaker 1 And things were going great. You know, we're like, you know, we, you know, obviously we hit number one fastest growing company.
We had like a 32,481% growth rate.

Speaker 1 And everyone thinks, oh, like, you know, you're going to sail off to the sunset and and all the things. Great.
And then we got hit really hard with a bunch of nonsense, you know, which would say,

Speaker 1 yeah, as you do, you know, and

Speaker 1 in 2022, what ended up happening was

Speaker 1 we were generating a ton of revenue from

Speaker 1 a lot of crypto companies, a lot of fintech companies, because the way that our business model operates, so for people that are, you know, a lot of people are entrepreneurs here, so I think they'll understand this relatively quickly.

Speaker 1 But, you know, generally the way the business model operates is like, look, there's 168 hours in a week, 112 if you're sleeping eight hours a day, and people are spending 40 to 50 hours a week on their smartphone.

Speaker 1 What are you doing on that smartphone? You're reading the news, you're listening to stuff, you're watching stuff, you're listening to podcasts, and there are brands that want your attention.

Speaker 1 And so, what we do is we basically partner with brands that want your attention, and then we share a percentage of that revenue that those brands are essentially getting to your attention.

Speaker 1 And so, it's just about aligning incentives. Our audience tends to be a bit more budget-conscious, as I mentioned, and that's the vast majority of people, you know, 6 billion of phones out there.

Speaker 1 But in 2022, where we saw this amazing sweet spot was like a lot of crypto companies and neobanks were going public, you know, or crypto companies were just popping.

Speaker 1 This is pre-SBF, like, you know, really taking the entire market and the Terra Luna bus that happened. And out of nowhere,

Speaker 1 you know, we were basically just like having,

Speaker 1 my number one client was Voyager. If you, I don't know if you at the time, and they went bankrupt and, you know, they owed us millions of dollars in capital.

Speaker 1 And we were one of the biggest creditors in the suit as a marketer, at least. And then suddenly my business literally flipped because we were growing insane.

Speaker 1 And then out of nowhere, all these people that were supposed to pay us either had to cut budgets or were going out of business.

Speaker 1 And so we were then in a very difficult situation because I had to figure out how do I continue paying people the same amount that I was while paying them less, which is a conundrum in itself.

Speaker 1 And then secondly,

Speaker 1 you know, all of these gross stage funds, because, you know, the way that entrepreneurship works, right, is basically like, you know, know uh for for at least people that are going to take in capital it's like you get your seed round then you go to series a and then you go to series b and then you go into series c and once you start getting to series c level maybe you're going to exit it or you're maybe going to go to the next phase which is go public and at the time a lot of people were going public but all of these growth stage investors were super underwater like you know softbank and you know all the weworks uh the companies were in that late that stage and so i saw the writing on the wall which was like you know my company was doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue but we were not late stage enough and we weren't even in the portfolio of some of these guys.

Speaker 1 And they're so underwater that they're going to focus on the one or two companies that are going to win in their portfolio.

Speaker 1 And I just, and I, and then I saw that basically, you know, we started seeing the quantitative tightening starting to happen. It's like, you know, capital isn't cheap anymore.

Speaker 1 No one's going to eat 0% interest rates. And so this is like when you're a true entrepreneur, you kind of like, you know, have to kind of think, what are you good at? You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like for me, I've always been a consumer marketer. And I started thinking, I was like, well, how do I reward?

Speaker 1 how can I reward them so I was like well what if I gave my consumers shares in my business and then what if I started to get and I got into crowdfunding and started really learning a lot about it and that's kind of what got us here and so it took me one year to kind of actually execute on this because you had to get audited financials you have to do all this work that most people don't want to do you know is a lot of and they won't do it that's that's actually i think that's the different most marketers won't do it they just want to they want to start a funnel and go through i'm willing to go through the work of it but it's not trivial And then one year later, we did our first raise and in three months, we sold it out.

Speaker 1 You're maxed at $5 million for a Reg CF.

Speaker 1 And we ended up raising six. We had to refund about a million dollars almost.
And then we went through for this bigger raise, which now we're currently in. And

Speaker 1 it's going tremendously. I mean, we've raised just under $30 million

Speaker 1 in this raise.

Speaker 1 You can raise up to $75 in this capacity. So it's kind of getting us ready for this next phase.
We intend to take the company public in the next couple of years.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, so I think like the moral of the story is

Speaker 1 when you're in these kind of difficult situations, it completely changed the pattern of like what we were going to do. But then we found this really amazing opportunity.

Speaker 1 And honestly, the benefits that we've gotten not beyond capital raising

Speaker 1 is the fact that like, you know, you. one of their biggest channels is newsletters, right? So I actually think, you know, I think we got connected through a mutual friend, Travis.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, and I actually put his face one time on a morning brew ad. And he hit me up.
He's like, dude, why is my face on morning brew? And I was like, I was like, dude, I was running out of creative.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't accept my original creative. And then we had just done the podcast.
So I just threw your face on there. And so it was kind of a funny thing.

Speaker 1 But, you know, we started going on all these newsletters, whether it's morning brew or snacks. And, you know, we buy from 100 different sources.

Speaker 1 But now, you know, what we get is all this extra marketing that people also find out about our company. And for us, you know, we're really trying to create EarnPhone as a category.

Speaker 1 And you kind of have to educate people of what that even means. And so typically companies will just spend marketing dollars and burn it, incinerate it.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm actually spending marketing dollars. creating awareness from the business and bringing in capital at the same time.
It's like a very different thing.

Speaker 1 But my audience tends to be, the people that are using our product tend to be more budget conscious.

Speaker 1 So they're not necessarily like, you know, the people that are investing aren't necessarily my users of like, who's going to use my phone, but they are the people that are investing a couple thousand dollars or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 And so it's really interesting. And you're kind of like, you know, going through this much longer kind of life cycle of creating this amazing business into the future.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I think like for us, I always say like our goal is to be the first company with a million shareholders.

Speaker 1 And it's, you know, prior to going public. And, you know, today we have over, you know, well over 20,000,

Speaker 1 you know, 30,000, sorry, shareholders in the business, but we have a pending wait list of almost 300,000 because we broke the technology required by the broker dealer to get those people in there.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, we're well on our way, you know, so it's been definitely a crazy route, you know, to get to get there over the last few years.

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Speaker 2 There's a lot to unpack. I really believe anyone who is looking up to you, looks up to me, looks up to anyone, influence, anyone who's done anything special in their life.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of people don't

Speaker 2 account for actually the headwinds, the challenges, the hurdles that we all go through, right? Different seasons, different financial markets, different economies, different

Speaker 2 things that we all do.

Speaker 2 And I made a post about this the other day. A lot of people don't focus on the stamina of what it takes to create longevity, right?

Speaker 2 They get hit in the face and they just stay down, but really it's the stamina to keep going in spite of the headwinds, in spite of the challenges, in spite of the software like breaking because you have 300,000 people that are ready to subscribe.

Speaker 2 Like that's a challenge and it sucks.

Speaker 2 And the thing that you kind of went through several years before and you're like, oh man, you know, the crypto world basically is a collapsed model right now and all these other you know banks and all these things are collapsing they were our biggest clients like what now and for you to have the stamina but the in the fortitude and ingenuity to like there's an answer i may not know at this second but there's an answer to this yeah i'm gonna find my way to it and it's so special to me to talk to people like you and host a podcast like this because I get to talk to people who really gone through it, who have really faced the challenges, but then also had had the stamina to continue to fight through it because they had the belief system that they were going to do something special.

Speaker 2 And for some of you, you may not have heard all that with what Dan just said, but I did.

Speaker 1 That's what I heard, right?

Speaker 2 Is I have the ingenuity, I have the creative function, but I have the endurance and the stamina to keep going, even when it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think that like,

Speaker 1 you know, I mean, this is a major reason why a lot of companies go out of business in like that first year or whatever.

Speaker 1 And, um, and I, and I, and like, it doesn't mean that you, um, you know, you start like, you don't necessarily always end where you start. Like, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like for us, like, I think the amount of pivots that we have had over the years

Speaker 1 has been, has been tremendous.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and each time you kind of learn a little thing, like, you know, for us, like the big takeaways, you know, I had in that 22 is yeah, a new way of capital was born into doing that.

Speaker 1 But I also learned, oh, like, you know, if you're not dumping marketing dollars, because, you know, at the time it was like growth at all costs, you know, and extend your payback period like, you six months, nine months.

Speaker 1 And the market now is like all about profitability. And so and then like the difference between recurring revenue and ad revenue.

Speaker 1 And like, you know, so there was just so much stuff that you learned that I learned in those periods. And dude, I'm not going to lie, like, honestly, there was about two or three months.

Speaker 1 It was dark, like a dark, dark time. It was summer.
It was summer, but it was dark for me. So

Speaker 1 I remember, and like, you know, then I, but then I developed all these really great habits at the time, too, because I was just like, dude, I can't continue living like this.

Speaker 1 You know, so after like three weeks, three days, sorry, of, of kind of just like, you know, being down, like, what am I going to do?

Speaker 1 Because you have to make a lot of rapid decisions, you know, like, unfortunately for us, like, we had to make significant cuts, like we had to reshape, like, you know, because our gross margin went from 75% to 37% like overnight, you know, and I just went from like the best month of business to like the worst in the matter of two or three months.

Speaker 1 Just like, this is insane. Yeah.
But, you know, the quicker you can make that happen. And also the going through these kind of like

Speaker 1 ups downs like the longer you can also uh withstand the higher likelihood your company is not gonna fail in the future it's kind of like you're almost future-proofing it and in itself and it doesn't mean that you know something can't happen in the future but the the amount of times that like we've almost KO'd is like so many you know that at this point I'm like well you know I feel like good about where we're at because you know you you're kind of it's pattern matching and you're like okay what do i need to start thinking about now or what's happening in today's environment or what's happening even in the economy economy today that in the past I may have just kind of like, you know, not even paid attention to that, you know, would pay huge repercussions if you don't address it now.

Speaker 1 So we're always trying to like think about that. So I'm super thankful for those times.

Speaker 1 And I think it's the only way to look at it, you know, as opposed to just commiserate around it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like you said, I mean, the thing about it is because you've been able to make through it before, you build a certain sense of confidence that you can continue to make through it again.

Speaker 2 So even if you do get, you know, knocked down again, you know, you have the endurance and the ability and strength to get back up and to keep going and have the ingenuity to look around the corner.

Speaker 2 I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that listen to this or watch this. The one thing they're missing is to try to look around the corner a little bit more, right?

Speaker 2 They just keep going straight. And so when the

Speaker 2 right haymaker comes and they don't see it because they're only looking straight, they weren't prepared.

Speaker 2 Where now yourself, myself, and others who have been around for quite some time, we start to try to look around that corner. So they don't have to get hit quite as hard.

Speaker 2 That storm might still come, but it doesn't mean you have to be directly in the center of it either. And so that's a big thing that a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand.

Speaker 2 Now, let's talk about mode mobile. Let's talk about earned phones.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about really what you built here because, you know, you changed your model in a way that, frankly, it's funny you're saying it. So

Speaker 2 in the education space, I did a very similar thing. I went from very high revenue, very high numbers into realizing there's a change in the, this is where the experience came into play for me.

Speaker 2 There's a change in the economy. There's a change in the financials.
There's change. And so I need to be able to pivot alongside of that.

Speaker 2 And so I actually am more in the same vein that you're in, where I'm actually doing more deals with people and bringing them in as equity partners versus borrowing money from lenders.

Speaker 2 And has changed my game completely over the last five or six months because typically I would borrow money right from lenders and I would do deals 100% my own and I wouldn't have anything else.

Speaker 2 Now they actually come into the space and actually gain equity into the ownership of the assets as a real estate investor rather than just being a lender. And I'm speaking in real estate terms, right?

Speaker 2 And buying apartment complexes and giving them ownership of it and still being able to refinance some of their money back out so they can get their capital back out and stay in for the ownership, for the income, for the tax write-off, for the upside and sell-off.

Speaker 1 You're doing something very similar in the tech space yeah and and i think that um i i mean i know actually a lot of people that do the reg a model which is basically the format at which we raise capital for real estate you know and they've raised 75 million dollars to via these various syndicates and you get equity ownership in it and it's worked very well and you have that power of that community in there um but yeah i mean i think like anytime that you can also align and have upside you know is it's there's a lot of power that comes from that you know what i mean people like you know what i always think about is like

Speaker 1 a big component of all this is uh if you look at like stocks like the the public market stocks and like and whether it's like tesla or even something as stupid as like game stop right what are the two things that really matter uh generally that you need for that a very high multiple right and it's generally like you have to have baseline good financials um but you have to have like a followership or a cult almost like you know so look at why like tesla even though it's gotten hammered over the last like week just like everything else um it trades trades at like a 90 cent and multiple and ford trades at like a six and then when you like look at uh you know game stop or these other companies like dude these guys are sitting on like six billion dollars in cash because of that meme craze right and they sold into it and so if you can actually have um a great company or a great you know asset or a great apartment or whatever it might be And then you could have like people in there that are bought into it, right?

Speaker 1 And this is the thesis as to why tech companies give all their employees like options and stock options into the company is so everyone's aligned but if you can do that for a million people right that are your consumers as well um you create an army right you create a lot of people that can advocate you know we can send one email out and drive like 10 000 people to go put like the mode ticker symbol on any website and then suddenly now you're getting like additional reach and all that stuff so i kind of think about it in that way too is like how do you harness the power of those individuals that are bought into that mission and then want to kind of see it grow I always think about even like, you know, if Apple suddenly changed the way it thought about its business, where it's like, hey, if you invest $100,000 in Apple, you get our products first, two months before everyone else.

Speaker 1 If you invest $1 million in Apple, you get to go to the worldwide developer conference.

Speaker 1 And if you invest $10 million, you get to come to our Cupertino and meet Tim Cook along with 100 other big Apple industries.

Speaker 1 I bet you there would be a lot more people.

Speaker 1 Not that Apple necessarily needs it because they're a $3 trillion company, but I assure you, there would be a lot more people that would look into that threshold.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of similar to what happened in the Web3 market with NFTs and Board Ape and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 But if you think about that from a business perspective of the power of community in your company, it could be very, very powerful.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, anyone that's starting a new business, like, you know, this has been a part of like country clubs and membership clubs in a long time, right?

Speaker 1 It's kind of like before they even open the club, it's like, oh, you can be a founder member, you know, of this club and then you're forever a founder member, right?

Speaker 1 But now, what are they using with that your membership that you paid? They're essentially using that money to build the space, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And so it's not like a new concept, but I think that people can apply it in many different ways.

Speaker 1 And you could really get a lot out of it if you can create a lot of value for your shareholders beyond just the service itself, beyond the returns.

Speaker 1 And so that's kind of how we think about it, of how we think about how to reward our shareholders and whatnot.

Speaker 2 You and I are in very much alignment. I think community above all else, right? So I went into 2025 thinking I want more

Speaker 2 connections and I want more community and I want more collaboration than the last 20 years of entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2 I wanted today, I want more in one 12 month than the last 20 years because of where the world is going. We all need it.
All of us, including Dan and Justin, right?

Speaker 2 We need that same type of community and collaboration. And so in the tech space, you are building something out that is going to be very, very special because of it.

Speaker 2 Because when you have a community that thinks alike, enjoys the similar things, can have great conversations, can connect and network and be a part of something bigger.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Tony Robbins will tell you, you know, the five hierarchy of needs and all the stuff, but part of that is the belonging, being a sport of something. It's somewhere in there.

Speaker 2 I couldn't tell you where. But like, it is a true, real,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 physical and mental and spiritual need for people.

Speaker 2 And to create that in a tech space like you guys are, I'm doing it very similarly in the real estate space where it's very independent. Real estate's very, I'm getting my deal.

Speaker 2 I'm going going to become rich and wealthy and fuck everyone else. That's kind of the real estate model, right?

Speaker 2 But I'm creating a complete platform for community and, you know, camaraderie and collaboration in the same way because I believe what you guys are already believing.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And I think like, and it's funny you mentioned the tony thing because, yeah, I'm a part of the platinum partners that they have there.

Speaker 1 And so I think that what they do is like, that model is quite interesting, right? Obviously, his business is content and his business is that, right?

Speaker 1 But I got pretty inspired when I was thinking, man, like, how do i take aspects of what that they're doing here and adding value in people's lives um because it's almost like you can feel sometimes i'm selling you but it's almost like i don't mind the way he's selling me because i'm like well i actually am looking for that you know to be honest with you and so um and it's like you know so how do you add that value um and and and also like mix it with your service and it doesn't necessarily be just because like my business is tech it's not really like if you really break down what we do i'm in the business of helping people earn and save money right that i'm doing that from the

Speaker 1 mechanism of like through this earn phone.

Speaker 1 But if you think about my shareholders, at least how I thought about my shareholders, especially the non-user ones, the ones that are coming in just through the crowdfund, I'm like, well, these are.

Speaker 1 wealthier individuals, but what do they really want? You know, they want to earn and save. They care about tax acts.
They care about like investing.

Speaker 1 They found about this in some capacity through a newsletter that they're reading. So like, how do you add more value in these other aspects of life

Speaker 1 really to the core mission, not necessarily of just, hey, your phone plan, but think broader.

Speaker 1 Think of like, you know, any business, like if you're a beautician and you start a salon, you're in the business of making people feel good, right? About their imagery.

Speaker 1 Like, so you got to really think down, what is the emotional? Cause emotions drive much more than anything else in our lives. Right.

Speaker 1 And so it's kind of like, how do you think about like, why is this person buying my service? Why is this person doing something?

Speaker 1 And there's usually a fundamental basic need, like the five that you're talking about, a sense of belonging, you know, of how you feel, how you feel, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And so I always try and think about to that level of of like how to add value back to, you know, the people that are backing this.

Speaker 2 So talk to us about Mode Mobile.

Speaker 1 What is Mode Mobile?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so Mode,

Speaker 1 so what we do in Mode essentially is we are focused on transforming the smartphone into what we call the earn phone, right? And basically, you know, think about the business model in the sense of

Speaker 1 it's very similar to what's happening with, you know, Roku, you know,

Speaker 1 and, you know, I can dive into that in a second, but at a baseline, like at the baseline, essentially is goes back to that hour example, right?

Speaker 1 When you really think about that you are spending about one-third to one-half of your life on a smartphone.

Speaker 1 And it's not because like you're an entrepreneur and I'm an entrepreneur, we spend more time on our phones.

Speaker 1 I'm talking like Gen Z, average person, you know, like inclusive of, you know, the older generation, like my parents included. I see my dad who never used a smartphone up until like five years ago.

Speaker 1 Now his guy, this guy's always on the smartphone. I'm like, dad, please put the smartphone down for dinner, you know, where we don't see each other that often.

Speaker 1 And so there's like, you know,

Speaker 1 a whole, and that's not going away, you know what I mean? Because it's not like AR and VR is like here yet, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And so I think like, you know, so the idea behind the business is really like, well, if you're going to spend this much time on your smartphones and these brands and these dad and these big tech companies are making trillions of dollars off of you,

Speaker 1 should you get rewarded for that? Right. And, and, and, you know, if you're buying a $2,000 iPhone, it's not really my target market of who we're focused on.
And so,

Speaker 1 but if you think about today, there's about 7 billion smartphones around the world. About 1 billion of them are iPhone and then 6 billion are everything else.
And of that 6 billion.

Speaker 1 90% of them are like under $150 devices, right? If you think about it in a worldwide capacity. And right now, we're facing one of the biggest kind of like crises in terms of like inflation.

Speaker 1 And, you know, people like we're at the highest amount of credit card debt that we've ever had. We're at the highest amount of defaults on car payments.

Speaker 1 You know, we have 6.8 billion people around the world that are earning less than $12,000 a year. And so you are, we're kind of, it's like this perfect storm.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, the device cost is going down. The service is getting faster.
And so it makes sense.

Speaker 1 Like, if you think about it, you know, the phone should be free and the data should be free or better. And we're the closest company to make that a reality.

Speaker 1 And so that's what essentially like Mo does. You know, we created the earn phone, we created the earn OS.
And we can basically take any smartphone.

Speaker 1 It's not just the ones that we have in stores um and turn it into a into that earned phone idea and you know that's the goal of the future is essentially to create earn phone as a category where you would see samsung earn phone motorola earn phone kind of what roku has been able to do in the smart tv space because that's the cost that's the reason that cut tvs went down from like two grand down to like a hundred bucks it's not just because manufacturing got better it's because All the money is being made on your data and your streaming.

Speaker 1 And that's why these companies are worth trillions of dollars is because, you know, they're targeting you in ads, you know, essentially. So walk us through it.

Speaker 2 Phone, obviously, have an iPhone. It's the expensive ones you're talking about.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Walk us through how does someone get paid from their phone?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So, I mean, an example of how it works essentially is, you know, think about like Candy Crush.
You know, you know, what, what does Candy Crush as an advertiser want, right?

Speaker 1 They want you to play their game and build a habit. And so they have a price that they're willing to pay for that within their own internal models.
And so they may pay us like seven bucks, right?

Speaker 1 For For someone. And what we'll do is we will reward you per day you play Candy Crush for a period of seven days.
And so it's a long enough period of time that you're getting rewarded.

Speaker 1 And it's not like you're making thousands of dollars to play Candy Crush, but it depends on the action, right? So that's a very simple one, like playing a game.

Speaker 1 We might reward you to read a news article, right?

Speaker 1 And so you were going to read something that you want to do or listening to a podcast or listening to a music stream and you're going to be paid per minute that you're doing that activity.

Speaker 2 So you're incentivizing people to take the action that you now, by the way, it's not you. It is the, your client, which would be Candy Crush.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Whoever the client is.

Speaker 2 And they're incentivizing us, the consumer, to take the actions they want to have more brain awareness for the thing. Use Candy Crush as the example.

Speaker 2 You say, hey, Justin, I'll pay you $2 if you use Candy Crush for seven hours this week.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Essentially.

Speaker 1 And we figure out what the, what we're doing is essentially is understanding, hey, what is the North Star goal for them that is going to be like their return on ad spend metric that that they're targeting?

Speaker 1 And then you find like, what is enough for the user that's going to, you know, make them happy. And then we basically take the middle of that, you know, of kind of like the margin in between it.

Speaker 1 And so that's essentially how the model works.

Speaker 1 And that's why it's kind of a complex model because, you know, you need to make sure that three people are essentially happy in this path in this platform.

Speaker 1 And it's very difficult to do and create value out of it. And that's why it's, you know, taken us a bit.

Speaker 1 By, you know, we are seeing a ton of success. We've had, you know, well over $350 million in earnings and savings given back to consumers through the platform.
And that's growing every single day.

Speaker 2 You've paid $350 million already.

Speaker 1 Yeah, between earnings and savings because the savings is kind of a unique metric because we enable a lot of things. Sometimes there's like unique situations.

Speaker 1 So like Robin Hood, for example, who's been a client,

Speaker 1 they'll ask something where they're willing to pay, say, $100 for you to deposit $5 into a Brokerage account because they have their math as to why that works.

Speaker 1 but what we'll also sometimes do is be able to negotiate like a deal like um if you do this you also get twenty dollars of free stocks but we're not paying that stock you know that stock is coming out of something that they're doing um or if there's like you know uh sometimes we also enable like opportunities for people so you know Equifax had this huge and Facebook had this huge like leak of everyone's data and these class action came and all you need to do is sign up um for a like you didn't have to prove anything it's just like you sign up and you got like 400 bucks.

Speaker 1 You know, the jewel had one. If you ever had smoked the jewel, you can get 300 bucks.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And so, a lot of times, though, a lot of people don't know about these things because no one's out there to tell them, right? And it's like a law firm.

Speaker 1 It's not like they're going to do a ton of marketing on this, like, right? They're going to get their fee either way. Right.

Speaker 1 And so the point is, like, we'll enable a lot of these savings opportunities. And so that's kind of like how we track it between earnings and savings.

Speaker 2 Wow. That's, I mean, brother, that's really brilliant.
Right. Because I think there's enough financial pain in today's world that this is going to be needed for some time.

Speaker 2 And this kind of goes back to the point we brought up earlier is this economic model is very important in today's world.

Speaker 2 It probably wasn't nearly as important over the last decade, right? The last decade, the economy was booming, crypto was booming, everything was booming, everyone's rich, happy, fat, and whatever.

Speaker 2 And so people weren't as conscious of savings and wanting savings and having smaller earnings.

Speaker 2 And, you know, as someone who coaches other entrepreneurs, this is a model that like I could lean into, I could talk about.

Speaker 2 And the reason being is the same reason why I believe Uber to be the best invention in our lifetime.

Speaker 2 I know there's a lot of great inventions, but the reason why I love it so much is because as an entrepreneur, I can help other entrepreneurs really create their life by design.

Speaker 2 And when they get tight on money, all they got to do is go jump in their car, right? Like it's not, you know, so this is a very similar like, hey, you're a little account money.

Speaker 2 You need to save some money on bills or you need to make a couple bucks.

Speaker 1 Pick up the name thing you're staring at all day, anyways, right? Like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, so actually, it's interesting you bring that up because, yeah, it's like, um, so it's like, you know, what Uber did for cars or Airbnb did for homes, like we're doing that for smartphones.

Speaker 1 I guess like the difference is not everyone owns a car, you know, not everyone owns a home. And it's like a very, uh,

Speaker 1 I mean, the people that you're probably coaching are at a certain phase in their life that they can and removes that.

Speaker 1 Um, and it's not, but you know, and there's, you know, there's 7 billion smartphones.

Speaker 1 And whether you're like in some emerging market in the middle of like, you know, you know, Africa or you're sitting in your apartment in New York City, you have a smartphone, right?

Speaker 1 And so I think that that's like, you know, that's why we kind of see it as a new asset class that what's possible. And everyone is just spending so much time on this thing.

Speaker 1 It's like, why not get paid for it?

Speaker 2 I mean, that's, dude, it's growing. Like,

Speaker 2 you're, it's like saying, like, if you're breathing, you get paid.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's great.
I'll sign up for that.

Speaker 2 I i might even sign up yeah i'm in for that i'm here because it's it is obnoxious how much time and and i listen i post a ton but i don't i'm not one of those people that scroll i just don't because you and i have too much shit to do like i don't have time to scroll personally right and and it's funny because i was gonna make a comment um on my own personal uh social media about um

Speaker 2 uh Barstool Sports is a fun little thing that I'll watch because it's sports and funny and whatever. They They just had a post about some chick who quit OnlyFans

Speaker 2 and made some ridiculous, like $60 million in three years.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 I don't know who she is. I've never heard, I don't have OnlyFans.
I have no idea. And I very rarely even follow Barstool Sports.
But when I opened up Instagram, it was right there.

Speaker 2 The amount of comments about this chick.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm like, guys, do you just all scroll social media and OnlyPlans all the time are you all overweight divorced unhappy like how can there be that many people who know who this chick is right like she's from only fans it's not like she's brad pitt or like does that make sense like i'm just so yeah i think i think

Speaker 1 then on their phones which is why this is brilliant by the way i circled that all back to say why and is so genius is because dude this chick is only seen on people's phones whoever this chick was i don't even know her name they're like bro how much time are people spending on the phones well i think i think that's the thing is like you know if you if you look at um it's actually sometimes like i opened up a tv show like that the like maybe a couple months ago where it was like you know you know open up your settings of your phone and look into this and like people are generally shocked like you know uh on it and there's like now actually there's a whole other kind of counterculture that's happening where there's like apps that will basically tell you hey why are you opening this just so that you remember because sometimes like what we find is like you know we we have something on the lock screen of our devices that's like optional but it's basically like we see that the average person's opening up their phone like 70 times a day, right?

Speaker 1 But most of the time, they don't even know why they're opening their phone. Like, that's the thing.
It's like, you, you don't know, it's out of boredom or out of habit, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And so we are addicted, right, to that. And it's not like, I'm not necessarily against it.
It's not necessarily like,

Speaker 1 you know, I just think I'm just look.

Speaker 1 see the society like this is where we're at you know this is what people are going to do and a lot of cases the people that are using our services are people that don't really necessarily see what their options are in today's economy.

Speaker 1 They're like, you know, and so they need to go out, get a job or whatever it might be, or they need a little bit of extra money. And sometimes you don't exactly know where to go.

Speaker 1 But if there's an easy place to find like a hundred bucks a month, then at least it's something there, you know, and it gives an opportunity. It's a little wind, right?

Speaker 1 But little wins create like bigger movements, right? You know that from like, you know, the like why I was just talking to my little brother about this. It was like, you know, the reason that the U.S.

Speaker 1 Army is so meticulous about people making their beds at five in the morning and make it perfect. It's because it's something you can control.

Speaker 1 It's the first thing that you do every morning and you can control that. It's a win for the day.
And then wins and momentum starts as a snowball.

Speaker 1 A little snowball turns into a lot of bigger wins throughout the day. And that's why they make you do that, right? Is to start that.

Speaker 1 And so I kind of see in that very similar way where it's like, this is an easy win, easy something to do.

Speaker 1 And then it will create other opportunity for you because the phone is essentially your connectivity into this world. It's no longer really the desktop.

Speaker 1 You know, for most people, the phone is where they're getting their information and where they're spending most of their time.

Speaker 1 You know, so if you can turn that for good over time, then, you know, I think it's a win-win.

Speaker 2 Yeah, incremental progress. They talk about it all the time, right?

Speaker 2 If this little hundred dollars a month can help you move forward, pay your bills, do the little things, and that can create some more certainty, confidence to go out, do other things, then everyone's winning because they're focusing on the smaller, little incremental progresses along the way.

Speaker 2 Just like you mentioned, the military, right? Like that little win in the morning at 5 a.m. to tuck in your bed and make it all neat is a little win to start your day off, right?

Speaker 2 So that you can go win the rest of the day, right? And so

Speaker 2 people need to know about this. I'm so happy that you are on my podcast right now.
Where do they need to go? Who do they need to follow?

Speaker 2 Where should they all find Earn Mode Mobile and then Earn Phone and everything else?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I would encourage them to check out our website at invest.modemobile.com.

Speaker 1 That'll have kind of like the breakdown of everything I've gotten into along with a ton of infographics and interesting content that people can kind of look into.

Speaker 1 And yeah, people can just shoot me an email, danmomobile.com or invest atmomobile.com. I checked that one too, along with my investor relations and happy to answer any questions for people.

Speaker 2 That's awesome.

Speaker 2 Again, anyone out there, I think it's silly if you don't really consider something like that because, again, $100 a month is gas money.

Speaker 2 Whatever it may be to you, if you're already on your phone, you might as well get paid using your phone.

Speaker 2 And especially if you are out there struggling as a moment in time, then...

Speaker 2 then look into earn mobile follow up with dan dude i appreciate you being on this is i i'm gonna see you on the news somewhere. Something cool is gonna happen to our boy Dan.

Speaker 2 Man, this is a really cool invention, and you're gonna be changing the world. I appreciate you, dude.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 All right, y'all. If this was cool and you think a couple people need to know about Earn Mobile or I'm Mode Mobile and Earn Phone and Dan, make sure you share this to your friends.

Speaker 2 We'll see you on the next episode. Peace.