Sakina Arsiwala on Taki's next generation social network

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have sakina araswala co-founder of tacky sukina welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on today thank you for having me i'm excited to be here likewise let's dive into all things tacky building communities in blockchain getting people involved and directly

0:26working with one another let's just start off our conversation by hearing a little bit about what you and your team have been working on at tacky and the solutions that you're driving into the space and then we'll dive into all things in the app yeah so i think so just to give you a little bit of background taki was it is being you know worked on by myself as well

0:49as kevin chu who's like the you know working on super layer it's a venture studio the idea of taki is really more about like for me i come from a you know fairly social networking background in web 2 i've you know and consumer tech and this was my new experience to blockchain but all throughout i have always had this feeling that you know there's a better

1:12way that there's got to be a better way to kind of you know reward the true value creators on platform and i mean and taki is hopefully is my version of what i feel is going to solve that problem and so that's kind of what our team has been deliciously working on we've taken a very community driven approach which is so different from like the west world it's really

1:37You know at every stage of what we are launching how we are building we've got input from people we kind of test even if it's not perfect and we've shared our stats publicly so it's just been fun like developing something from scratch which we believe we truly believe will solve the need very cool sakina and thanks for that the background there now what would you

2:02say that is one of the main differences in social networks in web 3 as opposed to web 2 and what is that paradigm shift and how are you including that into tacky yeah i think the main shift is going to be platform around platform ownership right i mean there's a lot of talk there's a lot of really good talk and you see like you know elon musk is like

2:23talking about twitter and you know free speech and all of that and that's really important i mean you know i worked at youtube for a while and youtube was just very very young and you know it was a lot of stuff in terms of what ugc mean like future generate content mean guy kind of was you know paradigm defining at that point the i think for taki

2:44what's going to be really interesting in new social networks is it's going to be platform ownership and economic empowerment right so if you look at what and the way we can achieve that is through tokenization so right now all the value that's accrued by the user right on any platform is goes pretty much 100 you know through the through the platform and then that's the model it's

3:07like you know we hope it is good or bad but with blockchain with crypto we have the ability to finally transfer that to like every user right like so there's platform ownership and there's like you know you through your own merit and efforts can gain more of ownership there's more or less of ownership so it's really empowering for the users or whether

3:29you're a casual user or a creator and i think that's going to be a big shift going forward it's going to be more about you know really taking control of your economies for creators and my our vision for hockey is really like you know well generation wealth building for creatives like that's something we would like to eventually enable it may not

3:53happen in the next few months but hopefully in the long run that's kind of what we'd like to do definitely and you know having experience a lot in social networks and web 2 and working at youtube i feel like every social network whether it's facebook instagram or youtube they have something special you know i feel like youtube specifically is more

4:18there's a lot and a lot of content and there the creators of the content really aren't getting their fair share i think as well as a side note did you take a look at the problems in sort of each of these networks and come to a conclusion that you need to solve something specific or you need to base the social network off of some things that actually these web

4:45two social networks are doing good as well well how it definitely studied a lot of them worked a bunch of them and also re you know i in my previous of that i have also started a social company which was eventually acquired by groupon so i think really important for us to understand as we're developing a social network is like look at social networks where they started

5:09versus what they are today right and i think if you look at facebook youtube linkedin instagram i mean they have they had they were game changing when they started right like ability to connect with friends you've lost like facebook like the fact that you can get discovered by a record label even if you're sitting in new zealand right you know that's like youtube right

5:28and these are like really opened up this era of user generation legitimate content as well as connections online which didn't exist right i mean the fact that you could reach anybody for a business deal that's linkedin in beautiful photos that's instagram and i think they have what i what i what i at least my personal philosophy is like there's

5:50just a lot to learn from all of these like really really big big changes right like even if they had not become massive products they changed user behavior in a way that's geared to stay i think we are at the cusp of similar changes as far as social network and web 3 is concerned right like i think we are going to be looking at something that's going to be completely new and

6:13different one thing that is like you know really hard and this is something talking to creators and having worked with creators over like 15 years now is basically that as these networks have grown it's really really harder and harder to differentiate yourself and you know creators are constantly trying to you know work the algorithm they're trying to

6:38you know get some slice of pie from the advertising pool right so this is really hard for a lot of creators if you're a breakout success you know and you obviously can get like you know the head but if you're not and you're struggling it just takes a lot of effort to kind of keep the boat you know keep the engine running and i think with taki and with others

7:00social networks i mean not necessarily just starkey but and we could change some of those economic principles and i think you can build really really compelling user experiences and what user value propositions based on these you know tokens right where the tokens in turkey we have this concept of like every user anyone can create their own user term right which is just we

7:23have a network token which is taki but you could go and create an ashton token and if people like your content they can support you by buying your token on the platform and we are in the process of like you know where you can take that token anywhere you want like we are not above wall gardening everything inside the tarki ecosystem you know and so

7:42i think those kind of new things new models some will work some may not work we're learning and that's why we're in alpha and we'll we hope to kind of really empower users creators to take control of their economy that's kind of what we would like to do with khaki and those are the learnings from like all the i mean i have experienced social network

8:06microfinance experience and like games we have a very very solid team and we are very committed like there's no other like we just want this to work we want to figure solve this problem that's where we come great points there and you're right about i think it's experimental to be able to create your own creator tokens and talking about wealth generation and being able to

8:31monetize from the content i think is important and i've seen web3 social media networks trying to figure this out you know i don't think anyone's got it perfect in how can we make it so that creators can create content and be rewarded fairly and not have it confusing at the same time having all these different crypto tokens how can they actually pay their bills

8:55you know by generating content and you also mentioned there about advertising networks and most people know that with these social media networks facebook almost all of their revenue is from advertising but i feel like if to have successful advertising the reason that they're making so much money is because everyone is on the network already

9:19and they have a network effect where it's like hey we can we can advertise to this many millions of people because they're already on the platform and that's the reason that people will pay advertising to advertise on there right so i feel like it's a it's great to have that mechanism for advertising but i feel like you also need to ensure that you

9:42have people on the platform which is tough you know there's been a lot of different platforms that are it's hard to get millions of people there i feel like there's a paradigm shift happening where people don't want to use facebook or web to social medias anymore and they're looking for alternatives but i don't think we're at that turning point where

10:05tens of millions of people are going to a specific platform and there's enough content and network effect there that people feel like home you're right i mean you know we're at the you know crossing the chasm phase right we're really at the very early adopter phase of social media early adopter phase of web 3 right and the speed of web 3 is really really fast

10:30and you i mean we believe we can definitely get to like you know millions and millions of users you made a few points here which are so relevant one is like you know in the advertising it's all about statistics right like the creators are used to a number right which is like or the creator count is reduced to a number whereas or whereas if in and you're constantly

10:53trying to kind of increase your user count increase your you know your follower count whatever it is depending on the network and that's really exhausting and i think over these new tools and new systems with web3 and italki is one of them we wanted users to consider taki as a tool in their arsenal not necessarily b you know and all because

11:21i think that there is going to be there is a lot of debate and if you go to taki dot app statistics you will see we have over 700 000 users on our wait list and that is in two months and we basically and we slowly let people into the platform because we're in alpha we're not ready for like you know lots of people to come in yet and it's we have about like 70 000

11:48users and like we have daily rewards and it's just it's a very very active community already and that's just in a few months it's not even we actually started pushing for growth and weightless growth like i don't i don't mean that the exact date but it's like it's like in the ballpark of two months which is pretty amazing like our invites like you know we started with

12:11five invites per user and users would like all of them were using the you know invites and i was i remember telling our team that you know i would have like died if these were the numbers i saw anywhere else because i would be like oh my god i've gone to heaven you know so it's just like so cool to see these numbers and so what that tells me is that there is demand and i

12:35think what also we just need to be able to build the right product experience to fulfill that demand and that's kind of where that's my opinion at least definitely well it sounds like great progress so far for the waitlist and the alpha users and i would love to hear more on your plan timeline for the team and what the you know what it looks like for the

12:59beta does a lot of work need to be done or what are the next steps for tacky yeah so i think we are taking a very measured approach in terms of how we are approaching our development we want to make sure that you know we are user experiences primary right economics making sure that economics work for creators as well as casual users is really really important

13:22with any social product like you know you want to make sure that the abuse vectors are kind of taken care of so we are we're constantly testing and evaluating how to make our entire system more efficient as well as like more useful and so there's a bunch of like and i can go into all details product spec but it's probably not very interesting to most people and

13:45we have it on our discord you know so i think we are gearing up for a beta in the summer and you know we're hoping that at that point we will be able to launch get more people into the product we'll still be invite only because it's just helps us get the more enthusiastic people in sooner and so that's kind of our strategy so far but we will be able to

14:14You know slowly open up the invites more great looking forward to that and now i had another question about you mention the tacky network token and you know generating content for to build wealth i'm curious on how deep the web 3 interaction is with wallets and cryptocurrency and that balance between making it not too

14:41technical but also integrating web 3 in a way that people can earn money through this kind of technology yeah absolutely so i think this has been a real really important user experience thing for us right because when you look at we want to make sure that you know we become the place which enables the next 10 million people into crypto so

15:05for that it has to be really easy and the way we've designed the tarki wallet is right now all you need is your email and just a password to kind of sign up for an account right and you start earning your rewards and everything as soon as you do that and we have integration with you know our token is listed on ok x and a bunch of other you know exchanges we

15:28have integrated with phantom where you can take your wallet in and out we are built on solana and so a lot of our interactions and all of that is actually on chain we record it all our chain but it does the wallet experience we want to make it really really easy so if you've never heard of crypto you've never really you're like you've heard of it but you

15:48don't really like understand how to go and you know now get a metamask wallet or a phantom wallet you can just start using taki and we believe that is going to make it really you know it's going to be like the solitaire for pcs or like tetris right where people are like start getting a little bit comfortable because they understand posting a photo they

16:08understand like liking something they understand commenting and then you know and we've also built in web free constructs and all of these actions where you know you start earning you start earning talking token as soon as you sign up you can start deploying some of it by buying user coins by doing some daily tasks which is like you know basic stuff like liking commenting all

16:27of that so i think we are very focused on the on-ramp right being very low fraction that's kind of our goal right now great and you mentioned that the waitlist is growing and that the beta will also be sort of waitlisted and access only but i'm guessing that you're also releasing information in the discord as you mentioned and the other socials

16:54what is the best way for people to learn more about tacky and get access to that wait list to try and start using the platform so i think our waitlist is linked off our homepage tapi.app we're also very active on twitter at taki app and our discord you know so i think all these three are good channels where all of us like the team is fairly

17:18engaged with users you know we've we've gotten you know we engage in terms of like getting people on the waitlist as well as like off the waitlist into the product and any issues people are facing we address them as quickly as possible on these three are good channels for us okay sounds great sakina and i will leave those links in the description box

17:39below to make it easy for the viewers i appreciate you taking the time to come on to speak about tacky all the best with the move towards the beta and the next versions of the network and let's follow up in the near future great thank you so much for having me actually really enjoyed this conversation you