Zach Burks on Mintable's NFT marketplace growth and Series A funding

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have zach burks the ceo of mintable zack welcome to the show and it is great to see you again yeah thanks ashley i appreciate it man it's been it's been a while but i'm glad to be back yeah so much has happened especially

0:23throughout 2021 has just seen an explosion in nfts and i'm really excited to dive into mintable's latest updates and some of the collections you're working on are really interesting i would love for you to kick it off for those who need to get up to speed in the world of nfts with just an overview of mintable and the platform that your team has created

0:45yeah yeah these are you know digital items in the blockchain and when you have digital items you need to have a marketplace to create or trade or buy and sell these digital items and so that's what mintable does is we provide this very easy familiar marketplace experience that's you know we look at ebay we look at amazon we look at etsy we say how can we replicate this for

1:06nfts so that's what mintable does but on the other end is the most flexible way for you to make an nft so if you're an artist if you're a youtuber if you're a musician if you know even if you have like documents or you know audiobooks or you name it you can make it as an ftm interview it's very very easy to do so and so that's kind of the bread and

1:28butter of what we do is we make it very accessible so that even you know my mom can come on and make an nft and get involved with blockchain and crypto without having to know all the complicated stuff definitely and i think that's going to be super important as more people become aware of their ability to create nfts easily on their own and not just

1:50something that you know they have to stand on the sidelines and purchase nfts from major companies anybody really has access to this and it's democratized access to creating your own non-fungible tokens and as you mentioned it's not just art and collectibles but there's many different forms that you can create inside nfts and we'll dive into that in a little bit

2:09here but i want to talk about since last time we spoke mental has grown so much nfts have grown a lot but i feel like mintable has grown even more and it's become one of the major marketplaces and i wanted to know you know out of this sea of nft marketplaces and trading that's going on throughout all these different platforms how you really stood out to become one

2:32of these notable platforms is it some competitive advantage or something unique that really has excelled the growth of mintable throughout the last year and more yeah yeah thank you we've been growing insane i mean it's just been absolutely insane that we have hundreds of thousands of users we get millions and millions of page requests and visits on the site

2:55We've got you know i think around 700 000 items been made on our platform so far that are listed for sale you know i think the key to the success here is it comes down to like three things one that it's a familiar easy experience when i mentioned my mom that wasn't just like a side joke we really built things for my mom right my mom is just a normal person she can barely

3:18use facebook you know she's in the older generations and she's not a crypto user so if we can get her to use our platform just like she can use amazon or she can shop on etsy then that's the goal right that allows for mass adoption so we really strive to build a platform that everyone can use and access one of these things is like we accept credit card

3:42so on mintable you can go take any nft and sell it on mintable but then anyone can come along and buy it with a credit card so even if the person doesn't have blockchain experience and never got a wallet before they've never bought ether they can buy your nft and you get crypto they can get the fft right so that's really powerful so from

4:09the creating standpoint of being able to come along and create an nft to be able to buy an nft it's very easy smooth experience and then you know we have special drops where we work with really exclusive creators or brands to release nfts that are you know highly sought after and special and of course that's a really big marketing event a lot of people see it gets a lot of

4:29coverage so when you do you know these three things of having an easy familiar experience you know being really flexible and providing this technology that other people don't have for example with gases minting which is something that we created it allows for anyone to come on and make it nft on ethereum completely for free and there's no gas cost there's no transaction fees

4:56there's no layer twos involved there's no downside right and that's huge because last year when you wanted to make an nft you had to pay 25.50 75 in a transaction fee and so if you are looking to make 100 nfts that's like 5 000 and that's a lot of money that you know if you're new you're not going to spend because you don't know if any of these are going

5:22to sell so with gases minting it's completely free to make a hundred nfts a thousand nf tvs however many nfts you wanna make right most people will make one or two or maybe five right because they're just diving into it but without an upfront cost and without the requirement of having crypto it means that you can go to your neighbor they can open up mintable and they can

5:44make an nft within two minutes whereas every other platform to go to your neighbor they've got to go to coinbase first they've got to deposit money they've got to buy crypto then they've got to transfer it over blah blah blah it takes days and days and those people never do it right and so this is these are important things that we look at we say let's address these and let's fix

6:06these so that again my mom your neighbor your brother your cousin the guy you met on the street all of these people can use nfts and that's really our goal that's incredible and i think it's a great way you know there's a lot of people that really have gotten into nfts that weren't even in crypto before and i think it's really opening the door

6:28for them to get into cryptocurrency and understanding how the blockchain works you know regardless of if they were interested in bitcoin the financial systems before this is like a whole new door opening so i think mintable's done a really good job and as you mentioned there's already hundreds of thousands that have been minted because of this

6:45gasless minting making it so easy so thank you so much for doing that zach it really is a great part of the industry and i think it's helping move all of blockchain forward and you touched on a couple other points there you saw in the recent news as you continue to grow your team recently closed a series a round of 13 million i believe it was congratulations on that it's just

7:07another attestment to the growth of mintable making huge partnerships raising capital to continue growing can you talk about closing that and the next steps for growing even more with that in the bag yeah i think closing a series a is a really pivotal moment for any startup and the investors that we brought on board

7:34is just a powerhouse of investors you know from founders and ceos of publicly traded companies to c-level executives of some of the largest tech giants in the world family offices that were you know kind of specializing in certain categories that we want to focus in to blockchain you know powerhouses like ripple and you know obviously animoka so we

8:03have animoka brands we have ripple we have spark digital we have sky vision and these are all crypto blockchain focused funds or investors that bring a specific set of skills and then we have other investors that are more traditional that bring a whole nother set of skills in terms of you know what we're trying to achieve with our mission and

8:25you know we did raise 13 million dollars and the question is for what right what it what are we going to use that for and that is to achieve that mission that we're trying to get to what i talked about earlier where you can go to someone introduce them to nfts and they can use mintable immediately just like you know i don't think anyone ever needed to be introduced to amazon

8:45right you just kind of realized what it was like okay i want to buy this put in my card info i'm using amazon right and that's our goal we want people to realize that they just go on and they buy this nft there's no friction there right one of the things is obviously expanding our team we have we went from a small team to a i mean we're a little bit larger

9:06but we're still a small team right we have about 15 employees and we want to get to about 35 by the end of the year which is coming up very quickly but it shows that the reason we have 35 is because there's specific tasks positions we need divisions internally within interval we have a lot of exciting things that are coming out that you can look at as i'll give you

9:31an example multiple plus so we're releasing multiple plus very soon and i can't talk about what it is just yet but it is mintable plus so something better than mintable right or i guess different it's not you know it's not gonna replacement by any means and then we have a lot of really exciting features that we're adding just you know by the time this interview is probably

9:54out we will have a really big update that changes the entire way that our whole system works for stores and items and automatically getting these items off the blockchain here in three six months will probably be on the you know the xrp ledger as well so you'll be able to utilize ethereum xrp silica we have layer twos that we're working on as well

10:22That we're working to integrate from polygon to immutable x so we've got a lot of moving parts and there's a lot of things going on that we want to you know execute properly and it's really critical to be able to go and have an experienced investor that was the founder of a publicly traded company you know during the dot com era all the way up until now it's still a

10:46very highly successful company and be able to talk to them and rely on them and say hey what are your thoughts on this how would you do this or you know how can we work together how can you help us out here this is very important and this is one of the benefits of i think the all-stars that we got for investors right from metacobin who you know bought

11:05the people 70 million dollar nft who's obviously an expert within the crypto and nft space and the crypto fund so we have better experts within the crypto space but then the more traditional players that are experts in scaling a tech company or a tech startup and so we're extremely excited and i think that there's just the party is just starting right

11:29there's just so much that's gonna come from into ball i just you know i can't wait yeah it sounds like your team has a lot on its plate and i'm sure you're gonna need those extra employees to be able to manage this all but it does sound super exciting especially for mintable plus i'm excited to see what that is i know you're leaving us on the edge of

11:50our seats here so zach thank you so much for coming on and talking about all of these amazing updates it sounds like your team's full steam aheads and i'm sure 2021 has been the most exciting year for your team and it probably will get even more exciting so we definitely need to follow up in the near future when you do come up with more of these updates and i

12:11want to hear how it's progressing for the viewers that are looking to follow along with that stanley drop with mindable plus getting involved in the community learning more about creating nfts and just using the platform what's the best way for them to learn more and get involved in the community yeah so you know you just go to mintable.com we have both we'll actually rebrand to

12:35dot com soon but you know the mutable dot app you can check out the site you can get involved with nfts right away you can start making nfts the stanley drop is mutable.app stanley legacy all one word but if you just go to mintable's homepage you'll see it all over the place and if you google it you also just find it right off the bat so if you want to get involved with the

12:56community we're doing a lot of community engagement right now where we're doing meet and greets with artists and people that have been established in the nft space to kind of talk with the newer people we're working on a seller's university as well as a university course to walk you through so the best way to follow along is to follow us on twitter

13:14which is mintable underscore app and then also join our discord community which has i think 17 000 people in it right now so it's quite a large community there's a ton of people that are talking and chatting and hanging out and so that's always a good way to get up-to-date news with us but then also to kind of dive into the nft ecosystem to learn so yeah definitely follow us on

13:36twitter join the discord and then obviously just check out the site at vintable.app definitely zach thank you for that i will leave those links in the description box below all the best with all of these amazing updates your team is working on and let's follow up in the near future thanks i appreciate it you