The Exchanges

Q You guys have had tremendous unlock in the last couple months, probably last year. What exactly was that? Cause I remember in the beginning you guys were shoes, right?

A Yeah. So we started with software that facilitate people to buy sneakers, um, or clothing or any of those goods. So like I said, we kind of grew up on the internet. I started in high school selling sneakers and clothing and hoverboards and headphones and all these things online. In order to get a lot of these items that are hard to get, you need to use something called a sneaker bot. So during COVID, when everyone was trying to get a PS five, because everyone was home and quarantined, They were selling out instantly and they were selling out because people were using these same sneaker bots to sell them. So we found a discord forum of people buying and selling software license keys as if like you were buying a Microsoft word license key and someone sold it to you. Very discombobulated forum. People were scamming each other. It was Venmo and it was cash app. It was PayPal. So we were like, okay, this is not good. This is a very discombobulated market. Let's quickly build a quick website. So we built a, Airbnb likes website where you can buy and sell and actually rent out software for a duration of time, and in our first month we processed, I believe it was like 14,000 dollars, um, just simply moving that form over to our website. Month two we did about 50,000 dollars, and from there we just kept, kept building everything that people kind of wanted.

AI assessment note: “we built a, Airbnb likes website where you can buy and sell”

Q I want to talk about the technical sides of this. You are the CTO. I'm sure there's like incredible engineering challenges, but you're also scaling incredibly fast and maybe breaking a lot of things. So like, what are, what's the process for you and how have you started to scale up the product suite?

A Yeah. So that's a great question. So building these products is no joke. Like we have many, many startups within WAP almost. Like our live streaming feature is a feature, yet you have platforms like Twitch and Kik that are built off their Instagram Live. We have chat, which is a feature, but you see platforms like Discord and Telegram and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, whatever. Um, we have other things like our notifications, like We send out over forty million notifications a day sometimes. So, these are no joke systems, and we've started to really realize the difficulty And honestly, the awesomeness, like we love solving problems in scaling some of these problems. So payments, I would say is the first major challenge we did. How can we make it so people can come on, they can drop their link to a Twitter following of a 100,000 plus and the website not go down. That was a challenge. The website has gone down several, several times. Um, but we've been able to kind of progress that and now we can handle flash drops of over a million, uh, or two million even at one point. I would say over the last year, we've gone into some crazy technical challenges with how to build chat. We've built chat four times now. Um, we've built our notification system three times now. We've built our real-time feed where we serve you content three times now. We're starting a new one next week. Um, th…

AI assessment note: “We've built chat four times now. Um, we've built our notification system three times”

Q That's fantastic. As we wrap, I'll have two more sections, two more questions. One, what are you most looking forward to this year?

A So I'm not going to give away our trade secrets, but I'll tell you some of the things I am most excited about. We're going way deeper into payments, making it so you can get paid in or paid out anywhere across the world, either in fiat or crypto, offering more solutions for our creators to get access to capital or even spend their capital. We want to go way deeper on our consumer features, our discover. We should drive all the distribution you ever need. You should never need to go outside our platform to get customers. We're going way deeper on that. We're going to simplify our products so much that You can understand it when you come on, um, building things like real-time feeds and efficient notifications and going deeper on live streaming. A lot of these really awesome consumer features. And then I would say the cherry on top that I am personally most excited for right now is we're going heavy on our developer platform. It's easier than ever to create software, especially with all these different AI tools. What's still hard though, is how do you get paid for it? How do you get your customers in? How do you distribute it? How do you, um, Keep retaining value for it. We've solved all these problems. Now we can easily do it for developers. Now you can easily spin up an AI agent, an AI agent and have it integrated to the WAP platform to buy and sell and receive payments. So you …

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you some of the things I am most excited about. We're going”

Q It kind of bleeds a little bit into your brand. Like, your brand is Really strong. So how do you think about branding?

A So we didn't do any marketing until December of 2024, six months ago. Like we had no marketing team. It was It was one of our worst qualities of the company. We didn't know how to market. Um, we brought on a marketing team. We brought on this guy named Brett, who's incredible, and he basically helped us build out our brand, and we're not taking an approach that most companies are taking. Like, we're not taking our features and our product and putting it on our Twitter, like, from the WAP brand to Twitter, or on our YouTube, being like, here's how you start a thing. Like, That's not what works. People want to see, they want to, they want to feel something. They want to know the lifestyle behind WAP. Who are the people that are using it? So if you watch our YouTube channel, which is killing it, it's killing it. I think it's at probably over 75,000 subscribers now. Austin and Nick are two of the most talented people I've ever met. And they're not trying to like show WAP to people. They're just trying to show the behind the scenes of the most, some of the most successful creators, entrepreneurs in the world. Like this is what they go through. This is the real life struggle. Like, this is how they got here. It wasn't all Lamborghinis and rainbows. Like, they were, and that story is so powerful, and why our brand's working is because we're not trying to just put a WAP logo in your fa…

AI assessment note: “why our brand's working is because we're not trying to just put a WAP logo”

Q So you mentioned that you originally started as a sneaker bot, went to a marketplace. Now it's its own platform. Could you break down the entirety of the different products you're offering?

A Yeah. I think to break down the products we offer, it's very, the best way to do it is to explain how we got here. So like I said, back in February of, we started building this platform to buy and sell software. That's essentially what it was. So you can come on, you can Pay 30 dollars a month. And once you bought, you get access to a downloadable zip file and a license key. And that was it. And then everyone was selling the software that we called sneaker bots, but no one knew how to use a sneaker bot. It's like, what is it? It says some software made by some 16 year old developer in their basement making a hundred grand a month, but like they're not, they don't know how to use it. So what they did is they sold alongside their software, a discord community, a community of all their members, Where people would share success stories and how to tutorials and they can ask questions with tickets and all this stuff. So our creators, the software creators will come to us. We're like, we're like, hello, can you please allow us to sell discord? We're like, okay, fine. So we built a quick discord integration. When you pay to go out of the discord server, when you stop paying, you got removed and so on. And from there, that really opened up our market to non developers. Now people that were selling just like information or a fitness community or teaching people how to flip sports cards o…

AI assessment note: “the best way to do it is to explain how we got here”

Q Wow. So what does that mean in terms of org structure going forward? Like what percentage of the engineering team do you think will be AI?

A Uh, that's a funny question. I want to keep our team lean. Like, I think we can, 10 X our volume, go up to, I don't know, ten billion plus GMV run rate with 10 to 20 people. Like, I don't think you need many more people at this stage. I think the days of tech companies scaling to thousands of engineers are behind us because what I've found is a smaller, more compact team of very talented people that understand how to break down problems And naturally use AI to go faster. They won't need, they won't need that much help. So like I'm pretty bullish on a very lean, very smart staff plus level team of like engineers that have solved these problems at scale that want to do it again and really keeping that team small. So, um, that's kind of how we operate internally. I wish we could do, we always want to do more with less. Um, and especially in a modern day with the modern day tools we have.

AI assessment note: “a smaller, more compact team of very talented people that understand how to break down problems And naturally use AI”