2941: LunarCrush - Is Social Media Data the Key to Crypto Success?

[00:00:00] Have you ever wondered how social media data could shape investment decisions in this rapidly evolving world of crypto and beyond? Well today I'm joined by Joe Vasani, the visionary co-founder of a company called LunarCrutch

[00:00:16] and they are a pioneering social media analytics firm making waves in the crypto space. And Joe's journey from finance and advertising to leading a company that aggregates social media data to provide invaluable insights for investors is nothing short of inspiring.

[00:00:36] So today I want to find out more about the origin story of LunarCrutch, explore their innovative platforms and also discuss any potential future trends that Joe sees on the horizon. So whether you are an investor or a tech enthusiast or just simply curious about the intersection

[00:00:53] of social media and finance, today's episode promises to offer a wealth of insights and inspiration. So buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to California where Joe's waiting to talk with us today. So a massive warm welcome to the show.

[00:01:13] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Hey Neil, thanks for having me. Yeah, my name is Joe Vasani. I'm the CEO and co-founder of LunarCrutch and we are a social media analytics firm in

[00:01:26] the crypto space is where we started, but we have expanded out to stocks and all the rest of the fun categories that we hold. But our mission is to create transparency on the internet.

[00:01:36] And so right now we're focused on social media and the kind of crazy world that is social media content and all the mentions. And we really try to make sense of that for investors.

[00:01:47] And so, you know, someone's out there mentioning, you know, Bitcoin a million times an hour. How are you supposed to understand what's happening in that world and what's moving the markets when, you know, you're just one person with one feed trying to ingest that.

[00:02:01] And so we aggregate all that data and try to make it simple for people and put it into digestible insights for them to understand the markets in better detail. It's incredibly cool what you're doing there.

[00:02:12] One of the things I always try and do with my guests is take them back in time. I'd love to find out more about your origin story. So can you share your journey that led to you co-founding Lunar Crush and ultimately

[00:02:26] what inspired you to venture into the Web3 space and go on this journey that you're on? Because I've got a feeling there's got to be a story there somewhere. Yeah, I think there's always a story with the entrepreneur that, you know, makes a leap.

[00:02:38] You know, mine started, you know, I came out of university in 2008 and I wanted to go work on Wall Street. That was, you know, my dad was a mortgage banker and I always kind of felt finance was the direction I was going to go.

[00:02:50] And, you know, like March of 2008, you know, I'm coming out of school trying to get a job on Wall Street and, you know, Lehman Brothers specifically is where I wanted to go work. And, you know, sure enough, that bank doesn't exist a couple of months after, you know,

[00:03:05] I come out of school. And so I end up, you know, trying a couple of different things and, you know, found actually, you know, advertising in the creative world. And, you know, as someone that was, you know, so heavily finance oriented, you know, I didn't

[00:03:19] want to take the job at first, right? And my dad was like, take anything. The sky is falling. And, you know, usually out of school, it was like, you know, if you go to New York City

[00:03:29] and you're an investment banker, you know, you can make six figures out of school, you can get a hundred grand a year. And I think, you know, the first job I had was like in the 30s, right?

[00:03:36] And so I was like, wake up call, like, you know, this is where the world is at. But ended up loving that industry. And, you know, but that was kind of my first taste of, you know, there's so much more out there that's out of your control.

[00:03:50] But at the end of the day, you are 100% in control in your future and your destiny and what you want to build. And it just kind of always stuck with me, this idea that, you know, I have a direction

[00:04:01] that I want to go and there's a vision and a future I see for myself. And because of these outside forces, you know, that I couldn't control, it kind of rugged me, you know, it came up and pulled the rug out from underneath me.

[00:04:13] And so I, you know, said I want to live in a world where that, you know, can't happen again. And so just, you know, over the course of my early career, you know, I wanted to work

[00:04:22] at, you know, some bigger companies and understand the way that the corporate world worked, you know, being, you know, 22 and coming out of school, you know, I always kind of said, you know, I wish they would have taught more classes, you know, on how to like use like

[00:04:34] a copy machine and like Xerox 101, you know, it's like you're just doing like nothing in those early days except for just kind of figuring out the ropes. And I always tell young people coming out of school that, you know, it's like, hey,

[00:04:44] like pump the brakes a little bit, like figure out what you like, figure out what you're good at if you don't know exactly what you want to do. You know, there's everyone thinks they're going to come out of school and it's just, you know,

[00:04:53] they're Mark Zuckerberg or someone that just knows exactly what they want out of life. But like no one has any idea and most of us don't, we just kind of figure it out as we float through.

[00:05:01] But you stay passionate, you stay curious, you know, so for me it was always, you know, even if I was at an organization, I was always curious and, you know, I ask a lot of questions,

[00:05:10] hey, what do they do over there in that creative department that I have no idea what they do over there? They're like, oh, they're making, you know, television spots or radio or billboards at

[00:05:18] the time or, you know, which was out of home and, you know, so for me, I was like, oh, yeah, I think I want to figure out how to get to like the, you know, the revenue portion

[00:05:27] of a business, you know, versus why I was in like the proverbial like mail room. And so just kind of figured some stuff out there and kept that going throughout my early career, you know, did a stint at, you know, a company called Owens Corning.

[00:05:39] That was, I did sales, you know, channel management. I was selling commercial and industrial insulation, which is an amazing job. I learned so much about pricing and different verticals and selling and what a fortune 500 company did and how they worked.

[00:05:53] And then, you know, eventually joined another startup called Lifeline Response and it was a personal safety application. So it was kind of like a dead man switch on your phone and spent a couple years there,

[00:06:05] did a X-Stars program and really that opened my eyes up to the world of startup. And, you know, the minute I kind of stepped in the room with the other 10 companies that were there, I knew instantly I was like, oh, this is, these are my people.

[00:06:20] Like, this is what I'm meant to do is to just kind of get in this arena here and just like punch my way out of it and figure out how I'm supposed to work in this world.

[00:06:28] And it was not so much about, I think, technology and software as much as it was just the spirit of building something brand new and a bunch of people taking some pretty serious risks in their lives and their family lives.

[00:06:41] And, you know, people of all different ages, you know, kids out of school, but then also up to kids that had, you know, kids in high school. It's like, hey, how do you tell your wife when you've got, you know, a mortgage and

[00:06:50] two kids and saving for college that, you know, hey, I'm going to go start this thing over here. We're not going to have benefits for like a year and a half, you know? So that was also a cool thing to see people doing that.

[00:06:59] And then, you know, eventually ended up at an ad agency again. And this time, you know, doing a lot more on the digital and UX side, user experience, you know, having built now an app and working in software for a while, you know, got a lot

[00:07:15] passion for design. And, you know, you find yourself, I always tell young kids, it's like, hey, if you're going to start something new, you know, don't worry about what happens afterwards because

[00:07:24] even if you fail, you're going to be years ahead of the people at your age of what they're working on. And so, I kind of found myself in that scenario of, oh, I passed a lot of people by here.

[00:07:32] I learned a lot, you know, I'm going to excel here. But then it was, you know, probably halfway into that role. My co-founder at the time was also working there, John.

[00:07:43] And he came up to me one day and he's like, hey man, he's like, you got any Bitcoin? And this was like January of 2015. And so, you know, we read the Bitcoin white paper and we just talked about crypto and Bitcoin for like the next couple of years.

[00:07:55] And that's all we could talk about. It got obsessed with like this solving of the double spend problem with Bitcoin and realized this, you know, once you kind of really internalize that and you have that aha moment, you really,

[00:08:07] that bug bites you and you can never go back, right? Especially as someone that was, loved software, loved finance. It was like the intersection of these two things kind of happening in economics and like macroeconomics all at once. And so, I became obsessed.

[00:08:20] And then, you know, it was probably 2017, you know, when Ethereum came out and this proliferation of tokens, we were like, wow, this is going to be maybe like the tokenization of everything. And, you know, sure, probably most of the tokens that exist today will not exist into

[00:08:34] the future, but there's going to be many more in the future than exist today. And so, when we're out there on places like Twitter trying to figure out, you know, what are people talking about?

[00:08:44] There's just like millions of mentions of at the time, like Vertcoin and Litecoin was big then and like all these other crazy things. And how do you delineate, you know, project number market cap 150 versus 25, you know, maybe project 150 has more social activity than number 70 right now.

[00:08:59] And does that create some sort of social arbitrage for people to potentially invest in something else? And so, we started aggregating that data, brought in, you know, our other co-founder Dan and we're like, hey man, can you get this data? Can we figure this out?

[00:09:12] And then started to kind of create a product out of that. And, you know, that was five years ago now launching into the industry. So, now I've been kind of owning and operating a business in the crypto space for half a

[00:09:21] decade and it went by like a flash in some regards and the others, it felt like a lifetime. RICK Incredibly cool. And I'm getting flashbacks from some of them old coins that you were mentioning there. And of course, here we are. DAN It's a bit more private.

[00:09:33] RICK Yeah. DAN Got burned. RICK And obviously, fast forward to present day, you're one of the top 200 website and a rapidly growing SaaS company. Well, of course, it's not all been plain sailing. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've faced in scaling Lunacrush?

[00:09:54] And how did you overcome them? Because I would imagine there's quite a few stories there. There's been a lot of big changes, haven't they, over the last five years? DAN Yeah, the industry's changed a lot.

[00:10:04] I think it was probably around COVID when everyone started to become kind of an investor at home and like the Robinhood kind of investor really started to grow. That was tailwinds in a way for us too, just people looking for that information and trying

[00:10:18] to understand more about cryptocurrencies. And so, we started to see a lot of traction then and you just kind of take it in stride. You kind of listen to your customer, you listen to the market. What do people want to see?

[00:10:31] We just started with cryptocurrencies on the site and just it's probably a couple thousand. Now we have tens of thousands and we have stocks and we have NFTs and we have 29 other categories with sports and luxury brands and automotive where we track everything that's happening on social media.

[00:10:50] And so, you just kind of scale with your audience. We went through a couple of like major massive periods of growth in 21 and 22 when things were really rolling and there was one moment where AWS called us and there was something along

[00:11:06] the lines of like, hey, your bill was like 1500 bucks a month for the last six months. Your bill's going to be like $150,000 a month unless we do something here just because of scale and traffic that was happening.

[00:11:17] And then Dan on our side basically just goes into a hole and puts his headphones on and codes his life away for 24 hours. And suddenly Amazon's like, hey, you fixed this before. We didn't even have a meeting scheduled yet and how did you fix that?

[00:11:32] Do you have a team of like 100 over there? And we're like, no, it's just like one person or startup. They probably just didn't eat for a day. But as a founder, you just got to push through.

[00:11:44] And I always kind of tell people startups sometimes like the best day of your life and worst day of your life over and over and over again. And if you're not kind of willing to exist in that world, then you're going to have a

[00:11:55] much harder time being successful depending on kind of the idea, the project and the product that you're working on. And so, yeah, you just kind of being a second time founder here, I'd say I've kind of

[00:12:07] smoothed out the bumps a little bit as I've gotten a little bit older just because of the way that you take news as you get older like, oh, we can fix this.

[00:12:14] But you do have to be, I think you have to be an optimist to potentially be pretty successful just because things go wrong constantly. And if you're internalizing those and saying these things are like your fault and you could

[00:12:30] have a hack on a bridge somewhere in crypto, which is something that recently happened and has nothing to do with you personally, but like people are affected. And so, you just have to go into action to fix it and triage that and move forward and

[00:12:43] constantly keep pushing and innovating and not let that disrupt the underlying plans. It's a bunch of battles, but you're fighting a war. And your latest platform, Lunar Crush Earn is aiming to connect brands and creators in the creator economy.

[00:12:59] And just to bring to life some of the things we're talking about here, can you elaborate on how the platform works and the value that you're bringing to both brands and its creators? Sure.

[00:13:10] Yeah, I mean, so what we do really well at scale is we aggregate all the social data from places like X and TikTok and Reddit and YouTube. And so, we know how many interactions and upvotes and comments and likes that you're getting on your handles from these platforms.

[00:13:28] And so, we've used that data traditionally to help people understand the communities and the groundswell of community around different investments. And we've expanded that out to understanding more about all topics and any searchable topic on social media.

[00:13:44] And so, we think a pretty bullish use case for that data is this world of brands and creators and the creator economy and independent journalism that's out there. And that market's growing rapidly and news is broke on X, right?

[00:14:02] Like, if you look at watch CNN or Fox News or BBC or anything out there, there's news that's broke. All you're seeing is a subject matter expert or a leader and like the tweet next to them that they said, right?

[00:14:14] And so, it's like they're just repurposing the thing that was already said by that person that news already happened, right? And so, for us, we kind of go out there and crawl the internet in that same way to understand

[00:14:25] where those things are, how they're happening, but we know at what scale. And so, as these creators have gotten so much more, I would say, not control, but so much more influence, influencers, creators that they have on social media, we wanted to be

[00:14:40] able to reward those people for the audiences that they've built independently. And the brands are out there looking for creators that are like-minded for their brand and they think will represent their brand well, but traditionally, the way that that transaction

[00:14:54] worked was a brand would have to go out and hire a couple influencers and it was like an awareness campaign. It was like a billboard. Hey, we're going to hire Kim Kardashian, for example, and she's going to post about us

[00:15:06] and maybe we don't know the attribution or the lift that we're going to get because of that, but we just want to have alignment there. What we're doing is letting brands basically at scale, hire lots of people and micro-influencers

[00:15:18] across these different networks to post about the content that they want to be posted about and it's all public. And so, a brand will kind of create a campaign. If you're an influencer and you qualify for that and you think you can create really awesome

[00:15:32] content and you want to compete for that business, you can go out and you can just post on it. And so, what we do is we look at that post and we say, hey, Neil, I got 100 interactions

[00:15:43] out of 1000 for this campaign and that campaign was $1,000, you get 100 bucks. And so, it's pretty simple, but the gap that we're bridging here is the attribution level and layer of that process that traditionally is very hard to figure out for brands and influencers.

[00:16:01] And so, we just launched this a couple of weeks ago. We're out there in beta on it and it's invite only, but the brands are pretty bullish on it and the creators love it.

[00:16:11] And so, we're having a lot of fun just getting into kind of a little bit of a new market here and expanding what we're capable of doing. And listening to you there, I don't know how passionate you are about this.

[00:16:21] I think it's easy to see how Lunar Crush is increasingly being recognized for its cutting edge analysis of social media intelligence and indeed market insights. I'm curious, how do you see the role of social media data evolving in the cryptocurrency and indeed broader financial markets?

[00:16:38] It's becoming a lot more relevant and important. I would say almost to the point where when you're an investor or you're a hedge fund or a large business that's out there and you're trying to understand the impact and the cross section of financials and social media,

[00:16:56] once you step in that door, you can't step back out. It's a light that's kind of shown onto your relevance out there in the world. Even kind of public relations departments and investor relations departments at a company, look at what happened to Silicon Valley Bank.

[00:17:15] We published a report after Silicon Valley Bank went down and the negative sentiment that we saw upon the announcement of the capital issuance that they had, which for those people that don't know, Silicon Valley Bank issued some capital on the public markets.

[00:17:29] It was a surprise that led to a social media frenzy and craze that potentially led to the demise and ultimately the recapture of that bank and the support of that bank. They're pretty lucky that the government stepped in because otherwise three quarters of Silicon

[00:17:45] Valley and half the Bay Area and a bunch of companies would have been defunct and it would have been really, really bad. So we say, hey, what if we could have notified Silicon Valley Bank immediately upon the

[00:17:58] massive negative sentiment that they could have retracted maybe that issuance and they could have walked that back? What would that have been worth to them? Well, the bank was worth $25 billion, probably $25 billion. And so for us, that's a downside protection on social media because I think people don't...

[00:18:16] You can test all you want some sort of announcement, but you're not going to know until it gets out into the market. And how do you gauge quickly whether or not that announcement or that thing that's out there, that news in the market is affecting what's going on?

[00:18:29] And so it's a huge thing. I mean, we started before the whole Wall Street bets thing happened with AMC and GameStop that's coming back around right now in the stock market. And we kind of foresaw that retail could have a massive impact on financial markets and people

[00:18:46] didn't believe that, I think, until the whole GameStop and AMC craze, and particularly GameStop and bringing down of the hedge funds. And so for us, it's all about democratizing that opportunity for data where it's, yes,

[00:19:01] we have an API that anyone can buy and hedge funds use that and Coinbase uses that and big companies use it, but for under 30 bucks a month, you can also get access to all that

[00:19:12] data as a retail investor, which is a pretty cheap dollar amount where normally that would take you probably a half a million to a million dollars and a bunch of awesome developers, and you're still going to get maybe 5% of what we collect or less.

[00:19:25] And so it's really about democratizing opportunity and kind of bringing investors to an even playing field that all these big guys have been kind of playing with for the last 15 years. Richard Pena

[00:19:36] And speaking of that, before you came on the podcast, I was reading about how Luna Crush has shifted the business model to a subscription-based revenue stream. What were the key drivers behind that strategic shift and how has it impacted your growth and operations? What have you seen here?

[00:19:53] Jay Hayes Yeah, I mean, you're a startup and you're testing things, right? And you're trying to figure out what works and how it works. And the crypto market has gone through, we just came out of almost like

[00:20:03] a 700, over 700 day bear market, and so in startup land, it killed a lot of startups, right? And so for us, it was staying alive, figuring out what works for us. We had an ads-based model

[00:20:16] for a long time trying to kind of figure out like, hey, we have all this traffic, right? Tons of people are using this app and how do we monetize that? And as much as that was working,

[00:20:27] there was like this kind of internal thing also of like, no one likes ads, we don't like ads. And you go down that route to test things, but in all reality, it was like, we don't like this,

[00:20:35] we hate this actually. And so we said, we'd rather work with a smaller customer base that's really passionate about what we're doing and that way the people that come in and they do pay,

[00:20:48] it's a pretty nominal fee compared to what else is out there that gives them this data. We can listen to those folks and say, hey, we can start to build down a direction for

[00:20:56] those people versus when you have like a ton of users and they're looking at ads, it's a little bit tougher to kind of figure out your direction as a small company, I would say,

[00:21:06] where a big company can just monetize those numbers and they're kind of running down that path. And so for us, it was, hey, let's go to a subscription model and our audience and

[00:21:14] that customer base has been really receptive to that. And we've been growing pretty heavily in the last five months after we've started that and so it seems to be the right decision. And another thing I was reading about you guys is how innovation is at the core of

[00:21:31] one of the core values of everything you do at Lunar Crush. So on behalf of other founders listening, how do you foster an environment of innovation and development within your teams? And is there any advice that you would offer to somebody thinking of or trying to cultivate a

[00:21:46] similar culture because it's so much more than foosball tables and multicolored beanbags, isn't it? Foosball is fun though. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's much more than that. And for us, we're a remote first company. We do get together, we've got a decent amount of people collected

[00:22:03] here in Orange County, California, but we are remote first. And I would say this actually stems a lot from hiring and the culture that you begin with and then the people that you bring in

[00:22:13] will help you kind of continue that culture and amplify the innovation that's out there. Right now, it's 2024, it's a year into AI. If your team hasn't been tinkering and trying to figure out these different large language models and how AI is going to impact

[00:22:32] what's going on. And I would say kind of like readily already integrated many pieces of your business into AI, that would be a big red flag saying like, maybe I don't have the right culture

[00:22:42] of people that are out there kind of just like tinkerers and tinkering and trying to figure out the new technology and how it's going to make an impact because the optimization and the

[00:22:51] efficiency that you get from having a team that knows how to interact with those tools is unbelievable. And the optimization lift that we've gotten in the last year has been unbelievable for building, for creative, for design, marketing, copywriting, coding, our app and the things that we've built

[00:23:10] in. And so I'd say if you're building a company and you as a founder, especially in those early days, interview everyone for sure and make sure that it is a really good culture fit.

[00:23:21] And then ask those kind of hard questions like, what do you do on your free time? What are you kind of figuring out? And unfortunately, unfortunately for a startup, especially the first like 10 hires, I'd say like work-life balance is not the same as if you're

[00:23:36] working at a huge company. It just isn't at all. And so you definitely want to kind of find people that are really eager to learn. And my kind of thing is like, I want to hire someone that I know

[00:23:48] one day I'm going to have to like fight tooth and nail to keep them on because they're going to want to go start their own thing. And they're constantly trying to go do that as well. And I'm trying to

[00:23:57] hold on to that great talent and saying, you know, here's how do I challenge you? How do I keep you motivated? How do I let you work on the next big thing? And so like, that's the type of

[00:24:07] personality that I'm looking for. And then everything else from a culture perspective and innovation just stems from there. Mark And if we were having this interview five years ago, I would have asked you when thinking about the future, what's your roadmap?

[00:24:19] That seemed to be the bog standard question for anybody in the web three space, but with the ongoing advancements in web three and increasing importance of digital ecosystems, where do you see Lunar Crush in let's say five years from now? And I appreciate that's almost an impossible question

[00:24:35] with how much change has happened in the last 18 months to two years alone. But are there any other trends that you're excited about anything that you're chasing or watching with keen interest? Yeah. And that is a tough question. I do appreciate you understanding how hard it is,

[00:24:51] especially in our space, because we talk about this all the time, especially if you're in the corporate world, you might have like a five-year plan and crypto, there's no such thing as a five-year plan. I mean, even three months out your planning, you're like, well, that's scrap.

[00:25:03] No more of this layer one's gone. And so that's why you're reacting, I would say a lot. But I'd say for us at Lunar Crush and for the broader market, what I would really like to see in this

[00:25:16] next cycle in web three is a lot more utility and adoption of some of the apps that are out there, where people might not kind of realize that the underlying technology they're using

[00:25:27] is a blockchain. It's similar to web apps that are out there. And you might not realize that the app is sitting on top of Amazon Web Services Cloud or Google Cloud or Azure or whatever else

[00:25:40] is out there, SoftLayer, IBM. And so you might not really realize what it's sitting on, but you're interacting with it. And so I think that's up to our community and the product teams in there to

[00:25:52] build really kick-ass tools that people want to use that offer some sort of utility that a web two app couldn't offer. And how do you onboard people and kind of give them the sovereignty

[00:26:02] that they need once they understand how to use these wallets and how to interact with blockchain. And so for us, we've kind of always been expanding into different topics and different categories on

[00:26:13] Lunar Crush as far as the data. And so we've got some really cool categories like we have Premier League, we have the NFL, we've got the NBA, and we haven't married those up with market data yet.

[00:26:24] Market data for us is in cryptocurrencies is the price of cryptocurrencies or the price of stocks or the floor price of NFT. But market data for sports might be the scores of those games,

[00:26:36] or it might be the betting odds of those games that are out there. And so what we've kind of found is as you marry up the market data and the social data, it's one plus one equals three.

[00:26:48] And so we'll be looking very closely at how do we bring more of those people into our ecosystem. And naturally in our ecosystem, which is built on top of web three tools and tokens and access

[00:27:03] tokens and earning tokens, these people naturally kind of be brought into the industry that way and not feel like they were forced in but feel like, oh, this is just a better way to interact with this app. Matthew

[00:27:16] I love that. And we started the podcast talking about your origin story and it feels like we've come full circle now we're talking about the future. And of course, if I was to ask you to

[00:27:27] look back throughout your career, none of us were able to achieve any degree of success without a little help along the way. So is there a particular person that you're grateful towards or maybe they

[00:27:37] just spent a little time with you invested that time or helped you get you where you are? Who is that person? We'll give them a little shout out and a little thank you today. But who would it be and why? Jay

[00:27:48] I mean, man, there's a lot of people that I would give a shout out to. I mean, I like I obviously I've got a shout out. Like if I got a shout out one person,

[00:27:55] it's got to be the support of my wife and her ability to deal with some of those really late nights, especially with moments with young kids and being a team together. And I try to

[00:28:07] always communicate when I think time's going to get a little bit harder, a little bit rougher, if I can kind of see the future a little bit, which I think helps us prepare together for

[00:28:16] like the road and the battle ahead. And then there's so many other people that have helped along the way from different coaches to friends to colleagues that just kind of support you and

[00:28:27] they understand that you're on a really long journey. And it's up to a group of people, not just one. Matt What a perfect answer. Your bed is safe this evening. You won't get into any trouble there.

[00:28:40] But for anyone listening, you've got a very passionate community out there and anyone listening wants to join that community, find out more information, contact you or your team. What's the best starting point for all things Lunar Crush? Jay

[00:28:52] I mean, find us on on X on Twitter. And it's just at Lunar Crush. You know, we're posting 20, 30 times a day. And that's kind of the place where we go for our company announcements and

[00:29:02] tons of fun insights about the market that we're constantly posting out there to the world as well. So, if you want to learn a little bit more about social media and you know, the markets that move at the speed of social, find us at Lunar Crush. Matt

[00:29:16] Well, I love everything that you're doing here, especially how you transform the business model from this ads-based revenue stream to subscription-based model. And as a result, I was reading before you came on, catapulted the company to the top 10%

[00:29:29] of the fastest growing SaaS business. This is an incredible achievement on its own. But also with the Lunar Crush earned innovative platform designed to connect brands and creators, further expanding your company's reach. It feels like an incredibly exciting time for you. So,

[00:29:43] I'd love to stay in touch with you, maybe get you back on later in the year. As you said, this space moves so fast right now. So, it'd be great to see how things progress. But more than Thanks for sharing the story today. Joe Thanks so much, Neil.

[00:29:55] Matt So, as we wrap up the conversation with Joe, I think it's clear that Lunar Crush is at the forefront of transforming how we understand and interact with social media data in the financial world from surviving that prolonged crypto bear market to innovating with new platforms that

[00:30:13] connect brands with creators. I think Joe's journey underscores the importance of resilience, passion and forward thinking in the tech industry. And looking ahead, the potential for Web3 apps, seamless user experiences without the need for blockchain

[00:30:28] knowledge is something I find particularly exciting as well. But hey, what are your thoughts on the future of social media analytics and investment decisions? Whether that be in crypto or traditional finance, I'd love to hear your perspectives today. So please,

[00:30:45] email me techblogwriteratroot.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram at Neil C. Hughes. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks for joining us today as well and stay curious, keep exploring the possibilities of technology but more than anything, thank you for listening today. And until next time, don't be a stranger.