Aldrin CMO Joah Santos: DeFi has to be as easy to use as Apple

Ashton Addison: How did you get from mainstream marketing into blockchain and Aldrin?▶ 00:22

Joah Santos: I made a name for myself in marketing in the early 2000s, and I've helped companies like Domino's Pizza and Airbnb. My most recent success was for Corona and some of the other Mexican beer brands owned by Anheuser-Busch, helping make them top-10 beer brands in the world. During quarantine I started thinking about what I do. I'd collect my consulting fee, and the brands would go on to make billions. Anheuser-Busch added 13 billion dollars to its brand value. I've been a big crypto fan since 2012, and I decided it was time to use my own advice for my own projects. I was going to start my own, but then I found CCAI, and what they were trying to do matched what I was thinking. So I reached out and said I might be able to help.

Ashton: What is Aldrin, and what problem is it solving?▶ 01:59

Joah: In one sentence, we want to make DeFi easy to use. Right now it's very complicated. It's like needing to know what wiring is in your wall before you flip a light switch. We need to remove all that wiring. We're starting simple with the DEX, and soon we're launching a centralized exchange as well. One thing I'm proud of is the rebalancer we launched recently. Rebalancing a portfolio of ten tokens could take hours, but now you push a lever, hit go, and it does it for you. We also have smart tools for traders, and a TradingView integration is coming, so signals you've set up can generate a trade automatically. Apple never really invented anything, but they made it easy to use, and that's what made it cool. That's what we're going to do. The old CCAI name didn't represent that ambition. It was too technical, which is why we rebranded.

Ashton: Why do tools like the rebalancer matter beyond convenience?▶ 04:42

Joah: Say Solana has grown to 70 or 80 percent of your portfolio. You might not get around to rebalancing because it's hard. But that's probably too heavy a risk, and you should diversify. That's just smart financial management. So it's much more than making things easy to use. It helps people win more often, because they no longer skip tasks that take a lot of time even though they know they should do them. These tools matter not just because they're cool, but because they help people keep more of their money.

Ashton: Who are you targeting: newcomers to DeFi, or experienced traders?▶ 05:47

Joah: In the crypto world we assume we don't need to explain what a stablecoin is, because it's self-explanatory to us. Ask a waiter at a restaurant what a stablecoin is and they'll have no idea. That's your mass market. I see a curve of adoption similar to the computer world's. We're at a maturity level where we need to think about usability. Apple was used by top creative agencies and by the common person too, and that built the network. We're doing the same. Once we finish the smart tools in the next month or two, there's not a pro in the world who won't love us. But it will be done so simply that a novice doesn't need to touch the advanced features, and nothing looks scary. It has to be super strong and powerful, yet simple enough that a novice knows what to do. So, strangely for a marketer, we don't have a single target market. It's for traders of all skill levels, and the platform adapts to your skill level.

Ashton: Where is the platform now, and how is it growing?▶ 09:17

Joah: What convinced me about Aldrin, or CCAI at the time, was how fast the developers were. They get feedback from customers and implement it within a week. That's what you need if you're going to grow with the ambition we have. We're adding new features almost every two weeks. Priorities sometimes change based on what customers are doing. Our user numbers have gone way up. I think it's almost 10x from where we were in late July, and I think the price of our token is up 300 percent in the last 30 days. Last week we almost had too many people and needed to upgrade some things on our side. It's happening even quicker than we thought. I've never seen a business where the share of home-page visitors who convert into DEX users is this high. If it were an e-commerce site, it would be beating Amazon at the moment.

Ashton: What have you done to make onboarding so effective?▶ 11:19

Joah: We simplified a lot of the language, and we made everyone realize it's not about us. We're trying to help our customers. Our community is super engaged, and it's thanks to them. If I'm about to do something a week from now, I speak to them and say I'm thinking about doing this. If I start getting negative feedback, I'm probably not going to do it, unless I have really strong conviction or my experience tells me otherwise. So it's the way we involve the community in building this. We're not even listed on CoinMarketCap at the moment, so the company is still a bit of a secret. It's starting to get out, and people are getting excited because they see how fast we're building.

Ashton: What are you most excited about in Aldrin's next stages?▶ 12:30

Joah: I'm the marketing guy, and I did work on Wall Street earlier in my career. We're launching the centralized exchange, the automated market makers, staking and liquidity pools, the typical inside-the-box things. But we're also creating a marketing campaign that I think no other brand has done. A Mercedes is a lot more than a car. It's a status symbol, the first car many people buy when they start making decent money. I don't think any crypto brand has that kind of added value. They're made by tech people for tech people. It's time to ask how we add value to the whole community and the space, because people give us money to build a platform, and that also generates money we can use to change the community. If I ask who the leaders in crypto are, you might say Michael Saylor, the Winklevoss twins or Pomp, but no one names a brand, except maybe Bitcoin, and Bitcoin isn't run by anyone. When you think of computers you think of Apple, and of sneakers, Nike. There are brands that help change society, and there isn't one doing that in crypto yet. That's what I'm excited to get started on.

Ashton: How can readers get involved with Aldrin?▶ 15:37

Joah: Go to the Aldrin website, where we have all our social media links. Join our Telegram and our Discord. Someone from the team is almost always on there, and we have a really active community. And check out our DEX. I think you'll see the difference straight away.